University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

A Critical Study Of Contemporary Aesthetic Theories And Precepts Contributing To An Aesthetic Of Oral Interpretation

(USC Thesis Other)

A Critical Study Of Contemporary Aesthetic Theories And Precepts Contributing To An Aesthetic Of Oral Interpretation

PDF

Download a page range

Download transcript

Copy asset link

Request this asset

Transcript (if available)

Content This dissertation has b a n microfilmed exactly as received 68-10,249 HOLOFF, Leland Harold, 1927- A CRITICAL STUDY OF CONTEMPORARY AESTHETIC THEORIES AND PRECEPTS CONTRIBUTING TO AN AESTHETIC OF ORAL INTERPRETATION. University of Southern California, Ph.D., 1968 Speech University Microfilms, Inc., Ann Arbor, Michigan C opyright (c) by LE LA N D HAROLD R O LO FF 1968 CRITICAL STUDY OF CONTEMPORARY AESTHETIC THEORIES AND PRECEPTS CONTRIBUTING TO AN AESTHETIC OF ORAL INTERPRETATION by Leland Harold Roloff A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (Speech) January 1968 UNIVERSITY O F S O U T H E R N CALIFORNIA THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY PARK LOS ANGELES. CALIFORNIA 9 0 0 0 7 This dissertation, written by ......... LELAHD..}^RQW>.RQiQFF.............. under the direction of h..%.?...Dissertation Com mittee, and approved by all its members, has been presented to and accepted by the Graduate School, in partial fulfillment of requirements for the degree of D O C T O R O F P H I L O S O P H Y ...... & Dean Date Jan u ary* 1968.. DIS&FR ION COMMITTEE ............ Chairman TABLE OP CONTENTS Chapter Page I. INTRODUCTION TO THE STUDY 1 Purpose of the Study Statement of the Problem Organization of the Study Significance of the Study Review of Aesthetic Speculations in the Literature of Oral Interpreta tion since 1921 II. AESTHETIC CONCEPTS RELEVANT TO ORAL Introduction Aesthetic Concepts in Historical Perspective The Background of Aesthetic Issues in Oral Interpretation Aesthetic Concepts Relevant to Oral Interpretation Summary III. THE AESTHETIC SYSTEMS OF CROCE, DEWEY, The Intuition-Expression Theory of Benedetto Croce The Experiential Theory of John Dewey The Symbolic Theory of Susanne Langer Conclusion INTERPRETATION 28 AND LANGER 190 ii Chapter Page IV. AESTHETIC CONCEPTS IN REPRESENTATIVE BOOKS OF ORAL INTERPRETATION .... Aesthetic, or Psychical, Distance Empathy Expression and Impression Form Imitation, Suggestiveness, and Ver is imilitude Suggestiveness (Suggestion) Universality The Contributions of Samuel Silas Curry, Cornelius Carman Cunningham, Wallace A. Bacon and Robert S. Breen V. AN AESTHETIC OF ORAL INTERPRETATION . . Oral Interpretation as an Art Form The Oral Interpreter as Creative Auxiliary Artist The Art of Oral Interpretation as Expression, Experience, and the Presentation of Symbols 280 403 BIBLIOGRAPHY 437 CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION TO THE STUDY Purpose of the Study The purpose of this study is to propose an aesthetic of oral interpretation. Such a purpose and proposal are not possible without recognizing the basic assumption that a relationship exists between the study of oral interpretation and the study of aesthetics. That an aesthetic of oral interpretation is at all feasible seems evident from several considerations. First, the oral interpretation of litera ture is regarded as an art form: it utilizes aesthetic principles applicable to literature as well as to artistic performance. Second, the texts in the teaching of oral interpretation utilize a number of contemporary aesthetic concepts in the training of the oral interpreter. Third, the oral interpretation of literature creates the modality of the artist, a medium, and an audience: a critical examination of contemporary aesthetic concepts and a system 1 of aesthetics might clarify issues inherent in such a modality. Eight aesthetic precepts have been recognized in the textbooks of oral interpretation: expression and impres- 5ion, lam* empathy. aesthetic (or psychical) distance, suggestiveness. verisimilitude, and universality. However, these concepts have not been used to establish an aesthetic of oral interpretation: they have been used to delineate the relative merits of literature. Concern with the art of literature has pre-empted concern with the art of interpre tation. The aesthetic exploration of these concepts may illuminate the art of oral interpretation as well as the art of literature, and may, in aesthetic terms, amplify the modality of the artist, his medium, and his audience. Certain writers have attempted to define and expli cate an art of interpretation. They have sought to put oral interpretation into a philosophical context, a design of its parts, its problems, and its values. Four such writers, Samuel Silas Curry, Cornelius Carman Cunningham, and Wallace A. Bacon and Robert S. Breen, sought to establish a purview from which all interpretative work was to originate. Though not aestheticians, they inevitably found that to divorce performance from the considerations of art was impossible. Art, whether it be the art of performance and/or the art of literature, is the major concern of each. Art as expression was developed by Curry, a comparative aesthetic linking the elements of literature to the oral performance was attempted by Cunningham, and a psychological aesthetic of the literary experience was suggested by Bacon and Breen. Curry's phi losophy, while implicative in its aesthetic foundations, lacked the insights drawn from later developments in aes thetics in the twentieth century; Cunningham's literature as a fine art is an aesthetic of literature and not an aes thetic of performance; Bacon and Breen's development of literature as experience is not developed into an aesthetic of performance. The purpose of this study is to suggest an aesthetic of oral interpretation which takes cognizance of current aesthetic speculations. Statement of the Problem The study assumed a relationship between the litera ture of oral interpretation and the literature of contem porary aesthetics. The study develops from this duality of disciplines, and seeks to answer the following questions: (1) What are the aesthetic precepts and systems most rele vant to the oral performance of literature? (2) Do the aesthetic precepts and systems in the literature of oral interpretation adhere to the literature of aesthetics? (3) What are the implications for an aesthetic of the oral interpretation of literature? Organization of the Study The organization of the study proceeds from the three questions posed in the Statement of the Problem. To answer the first question, "What are the aesthetic precepts and systems most relevant to the oral performance of litera ture?", the study begins with an examination of aesthesis, the aesthetic experience. From this examination of the nature of the aesthetic experience, concepts directly re lated to oral interpretation emerge: the creative act, expresgiqn, language as art. form, unitv and harmony. em pathy, psychical distance, and funding■ The nature of aesthesis and the specific problems derivative from such an examination are, however, only preliminary. The organization of principles and concepts into a system is necessary for a comprehensive aesthetic. Three philosophies of art have provided the bulk of aes thetic discussion in the twentieth century: the expression theory of Benedetto Croce, the experiential theory of John Dewey, and the symbolic theory of Susanne K. Langer. These systems are important not only for the influence they have exercised in the formal study of the creative arts, including literature, but also because their theories have great value in the study of the performing arts, including oral interpretation. After an examination of the field of aesthetics, the study then turns to the second question, "Do the aesthetic precepts and systems in the literature of oral interpreta tion adhere to the literature of aesthetics?" Here isolated concepts of expression, impression, form, empathy, aesthetic distance, suggestiveness, and universality in the commentary on oral interpretation are critically examined in the con text of aesthetic theory. The systems of the art of inter pretation as developed by Curry, Cunningham, Bacon and Breen, their appraisals of oral interpretation as expres sion, as a fine art, and as experience, respectively, are considered as contributing to a contemporary aesthetic of performance. The study concludes by attempting to answer the last question, "What are the implications for an aesthetic of the oral interpretation of literature?" From the critical examination of concepts and systems developed in aesthetics and in oral interpretation, a contemporary aesthetic of oral interpretation is proposed. Significance of the Study Descriptively, and from whatever philosophical stance, aesthetics is the examination of the responsiveness to art. Aestheticians ask, "What happens to a man con fronted with a creative process, be he the observer or the artist?" Oral interpreters are trained to ask, "How can the art object, the piece of literature, best be presented?" The history of aesthetics is the record of the protean changes in taste, sensibility, and insight into and about the artistic symbolic experience; the history of oral inter pretation is the seeking of a mode of communication, of asking what is artful, natural, or essential in expression. While aestheticians create a "Weltanschauung," those engaged in interpretation have largely sought a methodology. While the oral interpreter has been instructed in the purposes of literature, his pragmatic end has been to seek means of giving it expression and performance. Aestheticians func tion in the contemplative mode, pondering the purposes of art. Oral interpreters function in the active mode, in an active tense of creating experience from the substance of 7 another art, literature. Modes of oral performance measured by contemporary criteria of aesthetics are necessary to a viable aesthetic of interpretation. Such an aesthetic would attempt to define oral interpretation in artistic terms and to define the oral interpreter as an artist in his own right, not merely as an adjudicator of literature. It would attempt to determine what characterizes oral interpretation as an artistic medium. It would, finally, define the act of oral interpretation as an art form capable of promoting the aesthetic experience. Review of Aesthetic Speculations in the Literature of Oral Interpretation since 1921 The earliest interest in aesthetics in the field of oral interpretation was evoked by the concept of empathy. This first appeared in 1921 in an essay by Charles W. Wool- bert. Attracted by the "new doctrine of Empathy," he wrote: It is no exaggeration to say that a knowledge of its [aesthetic's] teachings has become a necessity to any person who desires to solve problems in Speech. . . . Surely nothing of interest will be written on the ground-work of such subjects as acting, interpre tation and impersonation, and public address that does not reckon on the facts that give this book its I background and foundation.± ^-Charles H. Woolbert, rev. of The Aesthetic Atti tude . by Herbert Sidney Langfeld, in The Quarterly Journal 8 Woolbert noted that the professional teacher of Speech would have to reckon with this "relatively new doctrine of Em- 2 pathy." Woolbert's article also marked the first time that the word "aesthetic" appeared in The Quarterly Journal of Speech Education. either in a title of an article or a book review. Woolbert thought that the aesthetic doctrine of empathy marked a sign-post in the field of speech education. All studies dealing with behavior must be concerned with Empathy; most particularly those arts that directly concern the human body; sculpture, paint ing, dancing, acting, and public speaking. To the teacher of Speech an understanding of this principle has become a prime necessity.3 Nineteen years later the word "aesthetic" appeared in a title of an article related to the field of oral inter- 4 pretation in that same journal. However, in the interven ing period, more indirectly than directly, aesthetic inter est continued to be shown, if somewhat unsystematically. Woolbert mentioned aesthetics in 1930 when he discussed "Psychology from the Standpoint of the Speech of Speech Education. VII (June, 1921), 299. 2Ibid.. p. 298. 3Ibid. ^Frank M. Rarig, "Some Elementary Contributions of Aesthetics to Interpretative Speech," The Quarterly Journal of Speech. XXVI (December, 1940), 527. Hereafter cited as Rarig, "Some Elementary Contributions." Teacher.” Stressing psychological monism of mind and body, he said that the speech teacher beyond doubt is the Academy's best borrower. Because communicative speech is one of man's most complicated and finished activities, the rhetor of today finds himself getting all the help he can from at least half a dozen sciences: physics, biology, anatomy, physiology, psychology, aesthetics, logic.6 Psychology was Woolbert's particular interest, but apart from the interest in empathy, what he would have included in ''borrowing” from aesthetics remained unstated. Also in 1930, Clarence Simon considered the implica tions of empathy, but developed his own rationale for under standing the concept by complementing its emotional intuit- ism to an intellectual factor. He wrote of the "stimulating 7 and necessary wine— appreciation of literature." By appreciation he apparently meant aesthetic appreciation, as he wrote, When the interpreter of literature looks at a printed page he sees there certain conventionalized symbols from which he receives meanings. He responds in some 5The Quarterly Journal of Speech. XVI (February, 1930), 9. Hereafter cited as Woolbert, "Speech Teacher." 6Ibid.. p. 10. 7"Appreciation in Reading," The Quarterly Journal of Speech. XVI (April, 1930), 185. 10 way to these symbols, and his response represents his appreciation of the intellectual and emotional content of the passage he is reading. But in spite of the frequency with which the word "appreciation" is used in our daily work, there seems to be no very clear idea of its meaning or nature. A dozen people would give nearly as many definitions. Yet the nature of appreciation is not so obscure. Ap preciation, in the aesthetic sense, is something which the individual experiences in the presence of a work of art? a painting, a symphony, or a poem. More specifically, it is the total reaction of the beholder to the work of art; in this discussion, literature.8 Simon explained his understanding of "appreciation" by distinguishing two forms, or tendencies. One he termed empathic responses: "... for the reaction to spread all 9 over the body, to involve all parts of the organism." And the other was the intellectual response: to localize itself in "the hands, face, or particularly the speech mechanism with its associated structures."^ When we see an individual responding to a stimulus with a widespread reaction we say that he is behav ing emotionally: when we see one who is restricting his activity to a limited area, we say that he is behaving intellectually. Neither type of reaction claims the organism exclusively, both exist at the same time in varying proportions. We may be pre dominantly emotional or predominantly intellectual in our reaction, but we are never completely either. . . . Consequently, our response to literature may be either wide-spread or localized. ^ 8Ibid. 9Ibid., p. 186. 10Ibid. 11Ibid. 11 For Simon, an aesthetic balance was necessary between the emotional and intellectual reactions in the performance of literature. He asserted that one big problem of any student of interpretation is to develop a sufficiently restricted appreciation to give control, balance, and proper restraint, and hence at the same time one which is sufficiently wide-spread throughout his body . . .I2 Other than empathic appreciation, Simon listed "associationa'l appreciation" and "sensory appreciation." The former achieved itself when "the more ideas associated with any selection, the more stimulations to response, the 13 more ways in which the whole may react." Sensory appre ciation resulted from an aesthetic appreciation which gave time and opportunity «to call up imagery.14 He concluded his discussion of aesthetic appreciation of literature with a final factor, abandonment. If the student wishes to develop and deepen his appreciation he must be willing to surrender him self to the reactions which are prompted. He must allow the response to sweep through him. There must be no undue holding back? there must be the forgetfulness of self. In his discussion of appreciation, Simon noted Langfeld as 12Ibid.. p. 188. 14Ibid.. p. 191. l3Ibid.. p. 190. l5Ifejfl-, P- 193. 12 contributing to his thoughts on empathy, and indicated an awareness of the aesthetic concept, "psychical distance." In a sense, Simon's article constituted an "aesthetic of performance" and should be considered as an astute attempt at an incorporation of early twentieth-century concepts of psychological aesthetics. It was not empathy, however, which became the sole factor in the aesthetic considerations of writers in oral interpretation. Instead, writers veered to a speculative "inclusive" search of the aesthetics which oral interpreta- 16 tion might promote. When Frank Rarig turned to aesthetics for some attempt to corroborate his intuitions on the rela tionship of aesthetics to the performance of literature, he began with Count Tolstoi's statement that the art impulse is the impulse to share with others. Tolstoi's notion of art 17 was that of shared experience, and Rarig seized the idea of sharing experience as the function of interpretative speech; that is, he saw oral interpretation as a bridge over 18 the gulf that opens between self and other persons. 16"some Elementary Contributions." l^See Monroe C. Beardsley, Aesthetics from Classical Greece to the Present (New York: Macmillan Co., 1966), p. 59. Hereafter cited as Beardsley, Classical Greece. IQ "Some Elementary Contributions," p. 528. 13 Oral reading then may be defined as the sharing with others of the reader's experience as he has recog nized it in stories, poems, plays, and informal es says. The reader, as we may assume, has exposed himself to a piece of imaginative writing. In a mood of poetic faith, credulous and suggestible, he has submitted himself to the stimulation of an imag inative writer's words. He has been at first pas sive, perceptive, and more or less expectant; but latent within him are the potential energies of his biological drives. He has done things to life, but life has done things to him . . . But underneath this surface appearance, the true reader is a seeker, an explorer. He is not content to remain an agglomeration of miscellaneous, un ordered experiences. With the spirit of borrowing rather than any ordered ap praisal of aesthetic thought, Rarig took his aesthetics where he found them: Tolstoi, Bullough, Greene and Dewey were the only aestheticians cited in his long appraisal of elementary contributions. He found literature, all imagina tive literature, "To incite transport or imaginative illu- 20 sion m an audience." Implicit in his discussion was the concept of empathic responses: he became more explicit in discussing Bullough's ideas on "psychical distance," and gave but a passing reference to Dewey's criticism of Tol stoi. Contrary to its title, Rarig's article did not survey elementary contributions of aesthetics to interpretative 20Ibid.. p. 5 32. 14 speech, and "some" in the title referred only to Tolstoi's definition of art and Bullough's concept of psychical dis tance. The significance of the study lay in the attempt to develop, however inchoately, a relationship between aes thetic theorizing and the oral performance of literature. For J. T. Marshman, the aesthetic elements of oral interpretation remained something of a mystery. The moment of oral interpretation created a moment of intangibles: appreciation, awakening, stimulation, and "the mysterious 21 function of the human mind that we call imagination." These mental and emotional states are apparently to be ascertained as an aesthetic enjoyment, though nowhere was Marshman explicit in his use of the word. . . . oral reading is a mystery in that it uses words to say what words cannot express. One of the abiding mysteries of this universe is the power of language to awake and charge the mind. It un covers insights, stimulates feelings, and calls to depths far below the surface of life. There are times when our minds and hearts are leaden and lifeless. Then we hear or read a great poem, a moving short story, or a striking novel, or a gripping one-act play, or perhaps we see acted or hear read a Shakespearean play. The intangible voice with its timbre, its inflections, its dy namics and its rhythms, a language in themselves, words charged with human tones, and lighted by pi J. T. Marshman, "The Mystery of Oral Interpreta tion," The Quarterly Journal of Speech. XXIV (December, 1938), 596. 15 human eyes? all these quicken the dead memory in us, and thought after thought, accompanied by its compan ionable emotion, darts through the brain and from the brain life sparks from an emery wheel.22 Ebullient in its prose, Marshman’s statement did little to clarify the mystery which so intrigued him. R. F. T. Hollister's purpose in writing on the oral presentation of literature was stated in this way: “1 should like to think a little about the nature of aesthetic experience, and then suggest some ideals springing out of these experiences, that may be used to evaluate oral presen- 23 tation." He went on to say, "I have no desire to go into the theories of aesthetics, or to set up a classification of 24 modes of oral presentation." Thus, in an article in which not one aesthetician is referred to or named, and in which there is an avowed eschewing of any discussion of aesthet ics, Hollister enunciated his own aesthetics of literature and the experience derived from the encounter. Beginning with, "It is safe to start with the statement that we are 25 all alive, more or less," he explored aesthetics as an 22Ibid., p. 602. 23"The Application of Aesthetic Criteria to the Oral Presentation of Literature," The Quarterly Journal of Speech. XXVII (April, 1941), 282. 24Ibid. 25Ibid. 16 aspect of consciousness. He concluded that there were aesthetic ideals that should be used to evaluate oral inter pretation . 1. The first aesthetic ideal, or test, of good oral interpretation is that it should ring true to the inner life experiences of both speaker and lis tener . . . . 2. A second aesthetic test of good oral interpreta tion is that it must be personal. . . . 3. [Another test of good oral interpretation] . . . is that there must be mental-emotional balance. 4. . . . there must be continuity and rhythmic ease. 5. . . . there should be simplicity, economy, and reserve power in_the use of energies and move ments of expression.26 These are, in short, rules, in short, which stem from the personal proclivities of one individual, but represent another early attempt to identify some aspects in oral in terpretation which could be described as "artful." Hollis ter raised more questions than he answered: What is sug gestiveness? What is expression? What is literature that is unworthy, unbalanced, inane, which the interpreter should avoid? When he concluded that the interpreter should in terpret the "right kind of literature" of "life's richer experiences," Hollister was not speaking of aesthetics but of personal taste, and a taste for which he did not give 26For a complete discussion, see ibid.. pp. 286-289. 17 27 systematic aesthetic guidelines. 28 Carl E. Burkland assumed, a priori, that the oral presentation of literature is an art. His thesis, simply stated, was that the interpreter is responsive to "aesthetic vitality." He found the cue for this concept inherent in literature itself? the function of literature is communica- 29 tion, he stated, and poetry is no exception. An aesthetic quality within poetry itself, formality, was, he argued, pertinent to a theory of oral reading. . . . poetry refines and strengthens all the implicit properties of language as used in conversation: it concentrates incidental emotion; intensifies image and symbol; orders casual rhythms into design; empha sizes the melody of word sounds; makes loose syntac tic relations strict; and often creates a distinguish ing framework of rhyme to make apparent a new verbal structure.^0 He derived the idea of "aesthetic vitality" from an observa tion that "poetry as an art expression ranges from what may 31 be called poetry of low voltage to that of high voltage." From this vitality level of poetry, the "aesthetic" of pQ 0,1 Hyacinths and Roses— or a Rationale for the Oral Reading of Poetry," The Quarterly Journal of Speech. XXXII (December, 1946), 469. 29H2id.., PP. 469-470. 30Ifcid., P. 470. p. 472. 18 performance was derived. How can we step up and tone down a reading of poetry to secure an agreeable ratio? It would seem that two factors join in determining the character of verse presentation: the psychological "set" of a reader, and what in spirit and form is given in the poem itself.32 As an additional, though intuitive, factor to his aesthetic, he concluded that after much listening, he was driven to the conclusion that the best presenta tion of verse— at least for me— was that which seemed not wholly conversation and not wholly art, but an inseparable fusion of the two. A subsequent analysis of the twofold nature of poetry, as joining the real and the ideal, confirmed an intuitive approach.33 Burkland continued to reflect an aesthetic based upon per sonal professional observation rather than an aesthetic based upon a disciplined rationale from the field of aesthetics. 34 In "The Oral Approach to the Study of Literature*" Geraldine Runchey did not state any particular aesthetic or aesthetician as providing a rationale for her concept of the oral reader "artist" in a unique social environment, but she did provide what is for her an aesthetic of performance. 32Ib_id., p. 473. 33Ibid.. p. 474. 34The Quarterly Journal of Speech. XVII (February, 1931), 89. 19 All great art creates a pattern, but art expressed in oral language has not merely a pattern; it has— immediate social competency. It is a social prod uct, created in a social atmosphere, with the artist functioning as a social unit. Whether the purpose of art is to thrill, inspire, or entertain, some thing happens between the artist and his audience. The artist functions in his environment: he is living, he speaks, he is opened out to the world. There is nothing to "escape" from, for his vitality is immediately acting on his environment. He ful fills himself. His vitality functions as an inte gral part of life; there is no need to "escape" from the actual world into a subjective world of fancy, hope, or revenge.33 Runchey's aesthetic, though non-systematic and based upon an intuitive appraisal of the interpretative mode of reader and audience, is suggestive of a "transactional" aesthetic. Hers is an aesthetic of "context" by which the interpreter and the audience create the environment of art. 36 Joseph G. Brenran reviewed contemporary aesthetic formulations of the role of emotion in the aesthetic experi ence and concluded, There is an indispensable cognitive element in aes thetic experience; art seeks to be intelligible. Yet the work of art is most surely reached by some thing closer to feeling than discursive knowledge. 35Ikia., p. 90. 36nThe Role of Emotions in Aesthetic Experience," The Quarterly Journal of Speech. XL (December, 1954), 422. 20 37 This feeling, however, is itself a kind of cognition. Though his article was helpful in introducing a number of contemporary trends in aesthetic thought, it did not attempt an application of aesthetic theories to performance of literature or suggest their relevance. He noted that "aes thetic experience cannot be defined in terms of emotional 38 discharge," but he did not resolve the paradox of "inter preting emotion in literature: without discharging it." He merely stated that if the principle of discharge entered an aesthetic, there would never be an explanation between good and bad art. When Brennan opened his article with the sentence, "Purely emotive theories of art are a little out 39 of fashion in formal aesthetics today," he not only made a historical misstatement but stated his own particular view of aesthetics. It would be an aesthetic argument of some precision to delineate how much emotion should be discharged and how much should be retained in an "art filled" experi ence. Brennan does little to reconcile the balance between cognitive and emotional aspects of interpretation, and con tributes little to reconcile the vexations inherent in the performance of art. 37Ibifl., P. 428. 38Ifrifl. 39Ibid.. p. 422. 21 Mary Margaret McCarthy defined interpretative read ing as a process of audible and visible suggestion by means of which a complex of intellectual, imaginative, and emotional meanings, under the dominance of the au thor's language and intention, is translated through the artistic behavior of the reader for the aesthetic enjoyment of an audience.40 Though providing no rationale for a systematic aesthetic, her implication was that the use of creative literature established, ipso facto, interpretative reading as an aesthetic discipline. 41 Kenneth Burns did not establish an aesthetic of performance; rather, he carefully compiled what would appear to be teaching practices in the oral performance of litera ture. He noted that writers in the field "prefer" certain modes of delivery, bodily action, and vocal aspects of presentation. He found fixed rules notably absent, but agreement concerning basic principles of interpretation, fundamental philosophy, and over-all methodology. 40"Interpretative Reading Behavior: A Study of Selected Factors" (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Univer sity of Wisconsin, 1950). 41"A Survey of the Contemporary Outlook Relative to the Basic Aspects of Oral Interpretation, as It Is Evidenced in Selected Writings in the Field, 1915-1950" (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Northwestern University, 1952). 22 . 4 2 In a similar study, Stanley Wemtraub drew sub stantially the same conclusion as Burns. He noted particu larly that contemporary trends as iefleeted in texts have developed practical and distinct techniques, that there has been an abandonment of complicated and artificial rules, and that the principles of impression and expression have been brought closer together. These latter terms, both aesthetic in implication, were not correlated to their use in aes thetics . 43 Richard J. Cohelo attempted an examination and reconciliation of the philosophical concept of "time- binding" and its application to oral interpretation. Limit ing himself to three books, George H. Mead's Mindf Selfr and Society. Susanne Langer's Philosophy in a New Key, and Kurt Lewin1s Principles of Topological Psychology. Cohelo applied the basic premise of each book to three approaches in oral interpretation: selection, impression, and expression. The 42"a Comparison of Textbooks in Oral Interpretation of Literature, 1760-1952, with Reference to Principles and Methods" (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia Univer sity, 1954. 43"Some Factors Contributing to the Integration and Time Binding Behavior of the Oral Interpreter Obtained by Means of an Investigation of the Theories of George H. Mead, Susanne Langer, and Kurt Lewin" (unpublished Ph.D. disserta tion, University of Denver, 1956). 23 concepts considered important for the interpreter from these books were Mead's concept of "gesture," Langer's concept of symbolic transformation, and Lewin1s idea of mutually de pendent psychological role demands. While it would not be inappropriate to suggest that Cohelo did advance an aes thetic of performance, it was an aesthetics derived from highly selected philosophical and psychological concepts; he did not draw from the broad field of aesthetics, nor even from Langer1s philosophy of art as formulated in her later writings . 44 In her doctoral dissertation, Mary Fredericks probed the relationship of an analytical technique, Kenneth Burke's dramatistic analysis of literature in terms of scene, role, and gesture, as such an analytical technique might influence an interpreter's responsibility to the audience and the literature. Her thesis was that the use of Burke's terms would better enable a student to re-create the symbolic action of imaginative literature through his own symbolic gestures. Her theory, while suggestive of a host of aesthetic problems, was not analyzed from the point 44"An Approach to the Teaching of Oral Interpreta tion in Terms of Dramatic Action" (unpublished Ph.D. diss ertation, University of Minnesota, 1962). 24 of view of aesthetics, per se, but rather as a critical tool for improved performance. In an experimental study of listener response to the oral presentation of three short stories, Keith Brooks a’ hd 45 Sr. I. Marie Wulftange attempted to assess the listener's aesthetic response, his degree of interest, his judgment of the quality of technique employed, and his comprehension of content. The aesthetic response scale was reported as measuring responses to the introduction, the emotions and the mood of the selection, the images of the selection, and the situation in its vividness. These aesthetic criteria appeared to be drawn from writers in the field of oral interpretation and not from any particular aesthetic or aesthetician's formulation of "aesthetic response." The technique scale was reported as measuring the responsiveness to facial expression, movements of other parts of the body, and vocal expression. The Interest scale was reported as being a continuum scale of a range from "extremely inter esting" to "uninteresting." Employing three methods of presentation (face-to-face, audio tape, television), the writers concluded that (1) the aesthetic response dimension 45"Listener Response to Oral Interpretation," Speech Monographs. XXXI (March, 1964), 73. 25 has components linked not only to the visual cues of per formance in the face-to-face situation but also to the con tent values of the stories, and (2) that the personality of the oral reader interacts with both the content of the story and the presence or absence of the visual cues of perform ance.^ These conclusions were drawn in answer to two hypotheses which were raised regarding aesthetic response: 1. Does the method of presentation . . . signifi cantly affect aesthetic response to the oral interpretation of a story? 2. Is there any significant difference in aesthetic response when the method of presentation is kept constant but content values of the short stories are unlike?47 The literature of oral interpretation reflective of an interest in aesthetics has been of limited value. Writ ers have sensed rightly that aesthetics is a vital element in the interpretative mode, but have not systematically turned to aesthetics itself for a rationale by which to implement the relationship. Or, in turning, writers have isolated single elements such as emotion and symbol, yet, curiously, have fallen short of extending the implications into a general aesthetic of performance. Because the field of oral interpretation has become so eclectic in its 46Ibid.. p. 79. 47Ibid.. p. 74. 26 borrowings from other disciplines, there is a growing con sciousness of the need to treat each borrowing in greater depth. In reviewing selected writings in the field of oral 48 interpretation, Joseph Marcoux concluded that a trend exists towards utilizing related disciplines such as psy chology, linguistics, communication theory, and aesthetics to implement the basic aspects of oral interpretation. Further, he stated that oral interpretation studies at the undergraduate and graduate levels will need to gain more depth in these fields, noting again aesthetics as a needed emphasis. The literature of oral interpretation has recognized the importance of contemporary aesthetics to its discipline, but nowhere has there been a systematic attempt to correlate the two fields of inquiry. The literature in the field of oral interpretation is fragmentary, lacking in purview the greater relevance of aesthetics. Writers have, in the main, stated personal theories of art and aesthetic pleasure. ^®"An Analysis of Current Trends Concerning Certain Basic Aspects of Oral Interpretation as Evidenced in Se lected Writings in the Field, 1950-1963, with Implications for Speech Education" (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Northwestern University, 1964). Aesthetic terras such as empathy, appreciation, imagination, aesthetic ideals, aesthetic vitality have been largely the records of aesthesis in a particular writer and have not reflected a vigorous examination of the field of aesthetics. Yet research continues to suggest that aesthetics is a major teaching concern of the field of oral interpretation. A more thorough and critical study of.the relationship between aesthetics and the oral performance of literature appears warranted. CHAPTER II AESTHETIC CONCEPTS RELEVANT TO ORAL INTERPRETATION Introduction This chapter proposes to answer the question, "What is important for the interpreter to know about aesthetics?" When this question is asked, other questions arise: What is the aesthetic experience? What is aesthetic perception? How does language as art complement the art of interpreta tion? What is form in art and what is its application to the art of interpretation? It is assumed that problems in aesthetics can be distinguished from a history nf aesthet ics, particularly as the problems relate to the interpre tative mode. Aesthetic precepts and theories to be dealt with in this study, however, are prefaced with a brief history of the concepts as they were viewed prior to the 28 29 twentieth century.^ Aesthetic Concepts in Historical Perspective Derivatively, the word aesthetic stems from two different words suggesting two different activities. Traced to the Greek aesthetikos. the word means perceptive and suggests the knowledge of the senses: sight, touch, hear ing, etc. When traced to another Greek word, aesthesis. the word connotes sensuousness and suggests feeling and the 2 arousal of the emotions. These derivations themselves identify the complexity of the aesthetic process. From one approach, the term suggests a physiological confrontation of the senses, the perceptors. From the other, the term is rooted within the reactive emotional life of the percipient. This duality remains in the literature to the present day. Neither as a science nor as a point of philosophical specu lation have these two facets, the physiological and the psychological, been sundered. The aesthetic inheritance of Plato and Aristotle is the concept of imitation. For the Greeks, imitation was ■^Beardsley, Classical Greece, p. 317. 2Ibid., p . 318. 30 conceived in broad terms to include dance, architecture, music, drama, painting, and sculpture. In art, it was rhythm and harmony which imitated the facets of moral char acter; the harmony of the inner and outer man being one, at one with the purposes of the universe and at one with the purposes of the gods, reflected a man's soul in rhythm to the purposes of life. It was Aristotle's observation that drama revealed the lack of harmony and a sundering of the rhythm which united a man to his world. When he wrote of the effect of drama, Aristotle did not discuss aesthetikos nor did he directly discuss aesthesis. His discussion of effect in the percipient at a drama, the effect of purga tion, modified the nature of imitation by including the irrational in behavior, the excess in human conduct, the nobility of the tragic. Yet, the concept of art as imita tion persisted in the other arts: sculpture, painting, dance, and architecture. This notion of art maintained that art is essentially imitation, either of the universal feature of reality, including human ex perience, or of the beautiful in nature. This doctrine, whose hegemony lasted some two thousand years and which was known as classicism, was un able to explain much of art, especially fantastic art ...3 ^Morris Weitz, Philosophy of the Arts (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1950), p. 134. 31 Because of its expressive foundation of art communicating feeling, aesthesis. Aristotle's notion of catharsis would rank among the earliest theories of affect, placing, as the theory does, the emphasis upon an observer's response, the value of which Aristotle argued with considerable insistence and influence. Classicism in art sought the beautiful, the sublime, and the explanation of what made it so. Like the rhetoricians' attempts to explain style by appropriateness and excellence, the description of the sublime explained, or at least revealed, excellence in form, in substance. Known by its presence, this attainment began with the ex ternal object and its form; methodology was skill in using form. This notion that art by its imitation reveals only the beautiful aspects of nature is usually attributed to 4 5 Longinus. Horace and Lucretius, venerable observers of literary excellence, wrote their treatises from the stance of this classical notion. Were these latter two to grant 4Cassius Longinus, On the Sublime, trans. by W. Rhys Roberts (Cambridge, Mass.: University Press, 1935). ^Titus Lucretius Carus, De Rerum Natura. ed. and trans. by Cyril Bailey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1947); Quintus Horatius Flaccus, Ars Poetica. ed. and trans. by Charles 0. Brink (Cambridge, England: University Press, 1963). 32 the notion of the sublime, it would be more appropriate to describe it in terms of aesthetikos. perception, rather than aesthesis. sensuous involvement. It must be made clear that the origin of the word aesthetics has very little to do with beauty, and it does not stem from any other earlier word for beauty or art.^ The concept of imitation and the concept of the sublime were the two bases for the Renaissance notion of beauty. As the upheaval of the Renaissance freed man to confront himself as a maker of things, imitation as a theory of art was not suitable to an artist who would find "beauty" in things which were not beautiful. If the artist were a creator, not an imitator, the value of art lay in its imagi native power. Art as imagination is the first shift away from art as imitation. The Renaissance valued the highly individualistic world of the imaginative creation. Art became a dream world, a world distinctly different from a world of reason. The aesthetic elements of this emphasis yielded unity and rhythm, variation and contrast, elements functioning within ^See Aschenbrenner and Holther's introduction to Alexander Baumgarten, Reflections on Poetry. trans. by Karl Aschenbrenner and William B. Holther (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1954), p. 4. 33 a little world of creation, sustained and held in tension by its own forces. Yet art as imagination, carried to its extreme, led artists to create for art's sake, divorced from the problems of actual life. The imitation of life stems from acceptance of universality; art as imagination, in excess, grows into the fictive world of construct. By the eighteenth century, an amalgam of both art as universal truth and art as individual imagination was syn thesized into the idea of art as expression. Here, the question was asked, "What is the language of art?" To per ceive art as a species of language demanded that different languages did exist and were used. It was in 1735 that the word aesthetics was first used, by Alexander Baumgarten, to make the discrimination between the language of art and the 7 language of information. Establishing aesthetics upon g eighteenth-century rationalism, he proposed that percep tion, particularly with regard to the art of poetry, was but another kind of cognition characterized as autonomous and possessing its own peculiar and appropriate laws. In this respect, it was akin to logic, "using the rationalist de- 9 ductive method, with formal definitions and derivations." 7Ibid. 8Ibid. ^Beardsley, Classical Greece, p. 157. 34 Baumgarten1s aesthetic was based upon the distinction be tween sense perception and intellection. Aesthetic percep tion was argued as a fusion of non-intellectual parts, a sensuous knowledge "confused" (i.e., fused together) through 10 a vivid knowledge. Observing that artists frequently know what is right and what is wrong in a work of art, and that they are at the same time unable to give any reason for such insight, Baumgarten reasoned that such knowing is "confused" though clear and vivid to the individual. From the eighteenth century to the present, the history of aesthetics has been a series of attempts to ex plain those myriad and diverse phases of the artistic ex perience. Stated in another way, "... different aesthet ics have dealt with different factors in the creative proc ess, or if one likes, different aspects of the creative situation."^ Whatever philosophical system is argued as the aesthetic, or the rationale of responsiveness, judgment, or creativity, the uniqueness of personal response to per ceived data must be accepted as that which has "quality" for the individual. 10Ibid. Hvictorino Tejera, Art and Human Intelligence (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1965), p. 17. 35 Aesthetic quality in its various forms can never be logically demonstrated but must be accepted as a primary datum which must be immediately apprehended to be known. Like life, consciousness, rationality, and moral goodness, aesthetic quality and its vari ants are ultimate and unique.12 The Background of Aesthetic Issues in Oral Interpretation Though the history of oral interpretation per se may be less easy to delineate than that of aesthetics, most authorities agree that its earliest demonstrable manifesta tion began in ancient Greece. Rhapsodists, preserving literature through an oral tradition, gathered on festival days to read not only their own works, but to share the legacy of Homer and Hesiod as well. "For both the poet and the seer, like the oracle, spoke in heightened language, in words that moved and dazzled, with an inexplicable magic „ 13 power. From the spoken literature of the rhapsodists, as well as from the literature of the theater through the actor and the musical imitation of feeling through the musician, questions about appearance and reality were raised. These l^Theodore M. Greene, The Arts and the Art of Criti cism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1940), p. 14. Hereafter cited as Greene, Art of Criticism. 13Beardsley, Classical Greece, p. 25. 36 questions sought the relationship between the image in the literature and that which it represented. With the litera ture on the one hand and the purveyor of that literature on the other, the emergent aesthetic problem was that of mime sis . "The term . . . and its cognates, which were to have such an important history, appeared in the fifth century, and were applied to musical imitation of other sounds, imi- 14 tations of peoples' voices and actions in drama ..." The problems of mimesis. aesthetic in origin, raised ques tions of morality and purpose in the minds of Plato and Aristotle, and their great differences of opinion over the artful uses of language have infected the dialectic of oral interpretation, to say nothing of public address, to the present day. It was Plato who articulated serious grievances over the moral purpose of mimesis. To the present day, aestheti- cians do not agree as to how this word should be translated, for apparently there is no English word which possesses the 15 unrestricted senses that the word connotes in Greek. Mimesis suggests at least three things: representation, . . . 16 imitation, and process. Mimesis is representative in the 14Ibid.. p. 24. 15Ibid.. p. 34. 16See jbjfl., Chapter II, and Tejera, Art and Human 37 sense of one thing's standing for another, as a picture represents an object, or the President represents the United States. Mimesis also connotes copying, as an actor copies human gestures to represent human types. However, Victorino Tejera also insisted that mimesis is a presentation or re production, "that is, not a copying, but an expressive mak- 17 ing." Thus early did the concern manifest itself over the aesthetic quandary of "imitation." In The Sophist. Plato felt that the "imitative art" gave rise to two sorts of things: (1) the imitator's pro ducing a genuine likeness, or (2) producing an apparent 18 likeness, or semblance. Plato adamantly felt that such imitation could lead to deceptiveness. For Plato, imitation was a falling away from divine perfection, encouraging cor ruptibility of the essences of goodness; for Aristotle, imitation was a special case of learning. In his Poetics. Aristotle observed that the imitative arts fell into two categories, but two categories somewhat different from Plato's. In the first place, an imitative act could be of intelligence, pp. 45ff. 17Tejera, p. 46. Plato, The Sophist, trans. by H. N. Fowler (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1921), p. 331. 38 visual appearances through color and drawing, and second, an imitative act could be that of human actions through verse, 19 song, and dance. In this latter case, Aristotle was de fending and analyzing the art of tragedy and the pleasure derived from the imitation of an action, not only in the theater audience, but derived from hearing a "poem" read or 20 told. He apparently felt that the emotional arousal is capable of greater achievement in tragedy than in the reci tation of epic poetry, but that in all cases it was pleasur able because it was an imitation, and an imitation of im- 21 portant and interesting things. Thus, as early as fifth century B.C. Athens, the morality of mimesis was considered, and Plato's and Aris totle's arguments were drawn according to the purposes and results perceived by the act. The morality of art, the morality of emotional arousal, is no longer a serious schismatic for the teacher of oral interpretation; it ex ists as an a priori assumption that creativity is a value in and of itself; however, among rhetoricians the arousal ^Aristotle, The Poetics, trans. by H. Fyfe (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1927), Chapter I. 20Ibid.. Chapter XIV. ? 1 cxBeardsley, Classical Greece, p. 59. 39 of emotion continues to remain contentious where value and purpose are concerned. For the field of oral interpreta tion, the act of representation has become an aesthetic issue of another kind; there are those who continue to argue the appropriateness or inappropriateness of semblance, rep resentation, likeness. The crucial and discretionary words become those of "appropriateness," "suggestiveness," "im personation ." The history of the oral performance of literature is distinguished by two theoretical and practical questions. The first, "What does the oral interpreter interpret?", is related to the aesthetic question, "What are the elements or particularities in a given artistic medium?" The second question of oral performance, "How should the oral inter preter interpret?", is related to two aesthetic questions. The first of these posits, "What method or methods shall be employed?", and the second queries, "What is the effect of the method or methods upon an observer?" So closely linked are the two questions of oral performance that the history of oral interpretation has been marked by the question, "Which is the first consideration, the literature or the interpreter?" "What-ness" and "how-ness" are questions, however, 40 that are deceptive. Such questions hold the promise of empirical bases of appraisal. It would be answered that the interpreter is mainly concerned with the literature: poems, dramas, novels, short stories, letters, biographies, and the like. Yet the content of the interpreter's act, literature, does not describe that he does with it; literature is the vehicle to his end. His end is that skill "in the integra tion of thought and expression through the use of artistic 22 speech." In oral interpretation, there has existed, however irrationally, a polarity between schools of delivery. Eighteenth-century "naturalism" versus "mechanical" delivery have been argued with some intensity, mechanical delivery being held as the bete noir of aesthetic pleasure. Yet when 23 24 both M. Leon Dodey and Alethea Mattingly turned their attention to a thorough analysis of "naturalistic" as ^Thorrel Fest and Martin T. Cobin, Speech and Theater (Washington, D. C.: The Center for Applied Research in Education, Inc., 1966), p. 21. 23"An Examination of the Theories and Methodologies of John Walker (1732-1807) with Emphasis upon Gesturing" (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Ohio State University, 1963) . 24 c^"The Mechanical School of Oral Reading in England, 1761-1821" (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Northwestern University, 1955). 41 opposed to "mechanical" methods, they found that approaches in both methods were quite similar concerning elocution, and that assumed or reported extremes of naturalistic and mech anical schools never in fact existed. The intensity of feeling over delivery has not been necessarily settled by scholarship, however. In the present century, the place of delivery has continued to vex. Rather than a philosophical debate on mimesis T the arguments have been over impersonation and interpretation and which of the two modes brings greater pleasure, is more appropriate, is more suitable to the "interpretative" mode. The history of aesthetics has been the search for an explanation of the beautiful and sublime, the act of ex pression as it can be distinguished from both, and to define the relationship between the artist and the work which he creates. The history of oral interpretation has been the search for form and methodology in the relationship of the artistic interpreter to his literature. Aesthetic problems of mimesis, suggestiveness, appropriateness in delivery, the relative importance of the literature to the interpreter in performance emerge as the central issues in the establish ment of an aesthetic of oral interpretation. 42 Aesthetic experience Can aesthetic and non-aesthetic properties be dis tinguished? Frank Sibley attempted to make such a distinc tion by isolating the essential features which the non- rational capacity of fusing into a response elicit. He noted four of these relationships: (i) Aesthetic qualities are dependent upon non- aesthetic ones for their existence. They could no more occur in isolation than there could be facial resemblances without fea tures, or grins without faces; the converse is not true. (ii) The non-aesthetic qualities of a thing deter mine its aesthetic qualities. Any aesthetic character a thing has depends upon the char acter of the non-aesthetic qualities it has or appears to have, and changes in its aes thetic character result from changes in its non-aesthetic qualities. Aesthetic qualities are "emergent." (iii) . . . we can state particular truths about individual objects, i.e., that these particu lar non-aesthetic qualities of this object . . . give it some aesthetic property rather than none, and that what they give it is, say, grace or balance. There are, however, two different relationships here that must be distinguished. First, the particular aes thetic character of something may be said to result from the totality of its relevant non- aesthetic characteristics . . . the relation of the total specific dependence. (iv) [The principle of notable specific depend ence] is selecting from a work those features which are notably or especially responsible for its character. Often in a work there are some features that strike us as making the most outstanding contribution, usually those in which a small alteration would work a 43 25 remarkable aesthetic change. Sibley emphasizes the delicate balance between aes thetic experience and perception. The aesthetic experience has been described as the fusion of sensory knowledge. Perception, however, without the "attending function" of synthesis, of sensing symbolic value, color, tone, harmony, etc., is non-aesthetic. Perception of "aesthetic quality" is an involving re-creative response in the attending per- 26 son. Iredell Jenkins describes "aesthetic quality" as the result of an impulse which first manifests itself as an awareness of particularity. This sensitivity to particu larity in art elicits a certain texture in consciousness, a texture which is not the moment of observation, but rather a moment of active creation in the percipient's mind. "The aesthetic impulse initiates art, and art consummates the 27 impulse." Art is process, the three stages of which are appreciation, expression, and creation. Art is spontaneity ^"Aesthetic and Non-aesthetic," The Philosophical Review. LXXIV (April, 1965), 137-139. Pfi Greene, Art of Criticism, p. 5. 27Iredell Jenkins, Art and the Human Enterprise (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958), p. 78. 44 rather than rational detachment. It is, in effect, non- intentional in that it permits the object to create its reality within the individual. An aesthetic attitude allows experience to crystallize into moments of appreciation. Yet from within and without, Jenkins continues, the individual meets resistance and obstacles; the aesthetic impulse be comes an expressive activity. In the case of the aesthetic process . . . appre ciation, expression, and creation are all present from the beginning. When man is first struck by the particularity of things, and takes pains to elucidate this to himself, he is already creating art. The aesthetic impulse, which is a drive to capture the intrinsic character of things, can only be satisfied by a work of art, which is an articulate statement of what was at first incho- What is most persuasive in Jenkins' discussion is her sug gestion of the "process" by which "aesthetic" can be under stood. It is Jenkins' opinion that once a man has begun to discriminate in his experience and has recognized particu larity as a character of things challenging his grasp, "then 29 he is fully launched upon the aesthetic quest." The aesthetic life has its own proper metabolism. Or, to vary the figure slightly, it proceeds by a recurrent diastole and systole. Every moving en counter with particularity anticipates and urges 28Ibid.. p. 83. 29Ibid., P. 85. 45 its consummation through a creative act. The natural course of aesthetic experience is one of expansion: a first acquaintance with things-as-particulars, being necessarily incomplete and shallow, impels us towards the larger and more intimate familiarity of expression and creation. Concurrently, every vivid embodiment of particularity invokes and summarizes the career that has brought it forth out of appreci ation. The ordained method of artistic creation is one of contraction: the effort to present things- as-entities . . . refers us continually backwards to the insights from which it issued and the suc cessive fusions these have undergone. Thus, for Jenkins, the aesthetic process moves in two alter nating and different rhythms, the diastole of openness to experience and the systole of the creative effort itself. The biological metaphor applied to the aesthetic experience is an attempt to suggest the intimate and reciprocal rela tionship of the work of art and its symbolic worth for the individual and the individual's attending capacities to Another writer, Viktor Lowenfeld, while admitting that aesthetic growth is essential for any reasonably well- organized thinking, feeling, and perceiving, and the ex pression of each, wondered about aesthetic effect upon the individual. For, to him, this growth did not start at any 30Ibid.. p. 122. 31Leo Stein, ABC of Aesthetics (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1927), p. 81. 46 particular or arbitrary line. "It may start at any level, conscious or subconscious, and anywhere, in life, in play, 32 . . . and in art." That is why, he argued, the entire personality is affected by aesthetic growth. And of partic ular importance to the later development of the aesthetics of interpretation, "it may differ in its expression as well as in its meaning from individual to individual and from 33 culture to culture." The aesthetic process begins with perception, an involvement of some magnitude of the individual with a sen sory engagement. Unless people perceive, an enjoyment, an 34 appreciation, and a judgment are beyond them. Sibley warned, "Merely to learn from others . . . is of little 35 aesthetic value; the crucial thing is to see, feel, hear." But it is not indiscriminate seeing, feeling, hearing of which Sibley was speaking; rather, aesthetic perception is the seeing of a grace or unity, the hearing of the plain tiveness or the frenzy, noticing the gaudiness, feeling the 32"The Meaning of Aesthetic Growth for Art Educa tion," The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. XIV (September, 1955), 123. 33Ibid. 3^Sibley, "Aesthetic and Non-aesthetic," p. 137. 35I feid. 47 36 power of the novel, its mood, its uncertainty of tone. This quality of perception is contrasted with what Sibley called "nonaesthetic" judgments and qualities and descrip tions, facets of perception which appear to be "looking," "noticing," or otherwise "perceiving," but which in fact are nonaesthetic; that is, the kind of perception which is re quired to see, or notice, or perceive that something is 37 large, circular, green, slow, monosyllabic. An aesthetic perception would attend to the same observations as grace ful, dainty, or garish, or that a work of art is balanced, 38 powerful, moving. Sibley avoided discussing a third kind of perceptual judgment which declares the goodness or bad ness of the perception, the excellence or poorness, the superior or inferior. Such judgments Sibley called ver- 39 diets. In an earlier writing, Sibley, in attempting to determine what distinguishes aesthetic from nonaesthetic perceptions, declared: We say that a novel has a great number of charac ters and deals with life in a manufacturing town; that a painting uses pale colors . , .; that the action of a play takes place in the span of one day and that there is a reconciliation scene in the fifth act. Such remarks may be made and such 36Ibid. 37Ibid.. p. 135. 38Ibid. 39Ibid.. p. 136. 48 features pointed out to anyone with normal eyes, ears, and intelligence. On the other hand, we also say that a poem is tightly-knit or deeply moving; that a picture lacks balance, or has a certain serenity or repose . . .; that the characters in a novel really never come to life, or that a certain episode strikes a false note. The making of such remarks as these requires the exercise of taste, perceptiveness, or sensitivity, of aesthetic dis crimination or appreciation. Accordingly, when a word or expression is such that taste or percep tiveness is required in order to apply it, I shall call it an aesthetic term or expression, and I shall, correspondingly, speak of aesthetic con cepts or taste concepts.40 In Art and the Social Order. D. W. Gotschalk defined the "taste," which Sibley articulates as aesthetic concepts, 41 as a mode of "telic perception." Telic perception, Got schalk argued, is more fundamental than mere mechanical perception, for it consists of those factors resident in the percipient— the cravings, needs, interests, purposes, 42 aims, drives, desires, conations, impulses, and strivings. Generally, in any given case, "some telic factor is central . . . But usually, this telic factor is a co-ordinator of 43 lesser telic factors." In the adult, quite naturally, the telic aspect is more fundamental than mechanical perception 40"Aesthetic Concepts," The Philosophical Review. LXVIII (October, 1959), 421. 4^(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1947), p.21. 42 Ibid. 43lfeid. 49 for two reasons. First, the telic aspect acts as a differ entiator in the total process of perception, "determining what type of perception it is— practical or scientific, 44 partisan or aesthetic." Gotschalk contended that the telic aspect "energizes" the entire perception, giving to it the strength of purpose. Second, the telic aspect acts as a point of contact between the object and the whole sys- 45 tern of interests possessed by the "self." Art operates by the "principle of differentiation," of invigorating the percipient as well as promoting an evaluation between the 46 individual and the contact point. Joseph Margolis insisted that if one is to speak of aesthetic perception, there must be provision for directions or instructions which will, in his opinion, facilitate the 47 required aesthetic perception of some given object. . . . thus we say, "Look at this," "Watch that move ment," "Read this," "Listen to this," Now do you see?" And the reply generally comes, "Yes, I see." We are led to examine things according to the direc tions given; we make the necessary behavioral ad justment that listening or watching or imagining, or reading, all in the hope that a suitable discovery 44Ifrifl., p. 22. 45Jbia., p. 23. 46Ibid. 47"Aesthetic Perception," The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. XIX (Winter, 1960), 210. will be forthcoming. But he warned that aesthetic perception is not clarified by such instructions and such testing. The same sort of in structions might just as well be given for the observation of non-aesthetic objects as for aesthetic. The concept of aesthetic perception functions "to mark out initial instruc tions and eventual testings as relevant to a certain inter est we are all aware we take at least to the works of fine 49 art." Any participation in perceiving results in critical remarks that will possess greater responsibility.^ Paul J. Olscamp listed nine aspects of aesthetic 51 perception and appreciation. First, he stated that there is no consciousness of a distinction between the perceiver and perceived. There exists a tension between the control ling force of the art act and the individual percipient "controlling" his own observation. Second, he felt that there are no discursive processes necessarily (italics his) associated with or involved with it. Which is to say, that an art object "exists" in its own totality and that 48Ifeid. 49Ibid. 5QIbid. 51"Some Remarks about the Nature of Aesthetic Per ception and Appreciation," The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. XXIV (Winter, 1965), 251. 51 apprehension is total. Third, he observed that there are no acts of will involved in the actual inauguration of per ception, although he did go on to argue that some form of voluntary suspension of belief or disbelief, in some cases, is a necessary condition for aesthetic enjoyment. Fourth, he believed that in aesthetic enjoyment and participation there is a cessation or a recession of normal impulses to action; there exists, so to speak, a time out of mindness. Fifth, he contended that aesthetic enjoyment is unlike any other emotion. Indeed, it would seem that to describe it as an emotion at all is hardly proper; and that if it be described as such, the word emotion in this context has a different connotation from its ordinary usage. Sixth, disinterestedness is characteristic of aesthetic perception and appreciation. Seventh, it is contemplative, and eighth, non-consumptive. Lastly, the enjoyment of the "sensed" quality or qualities in the aesthetic object is continually supplemented and augmented in aesthetic enjoyment. Olscamp also argued that prior to the act of con templation, the features of which have just been noted above, an attitude of anticipation exists in the percipient. Anticipation is an attitude towards some future events, persons, or situations. However, this atti tude has a certain characteristic in instrumental 52 perception which anticipation in an aesthetic percep tion does not have: in such anticipation there is a discarding or rejection of the object to which it is a response, that is to say, the means is treated as if it were of less value, less worth, than the ob ject which is anticipated. We might describe this relationship as a one-way reference. In aesthetic anticipation, the state of affairs is not relevant.5^ This notion has considerable importance for the interpreta tive artist. It is in the anticipatory moment prior to reading that the interpretative artist creates his ore-life of the literature. Such anticipation is most clearly marked in the concert hall and the theater. Yet, whereas the sort of anticipation found in in strumental perception either excludes or minimizes qualitative apperception of the object perceived as a means to an end, and whereas such anticipation is directed solely towards the end, or the realization of a consequence deemed more valuable than the means, this is not so in aesthetic perception. Indeed, the very concept of means-end seems foreign to the aes thetic experience. There is no "adjustment to a future situation" in aesthetic perception, which is appropriately described as "means-end situation," although there are such situations which occur as parts of certain aesthetic objects, such as a "play within a play" in Hamlet . . . [An ] extensive quali tative appreciation of the entire work is essential for its full appreciation.33 Of the qualitative appreciation of an entire work, which Olscamp felt is essential for a complete aesthetic response, Thomas Munro would argue that when "aesthetic 52Ifeid., P. 253. 53Ibid. 53 qualities cooperate, the observer is conscious of the total effect, but not (unless he is trained in form-analysis) of 54 how each individual quality helps to bring this about." In this means-end argument, Munro suggested that it merely seems that aesthetic qualities are the ends of a work of art, and the technological qualities merely means. Rather, he asserted that "all aesthetic qualities function as means and causal factors when the artist considers their effect on each other in producing the total aesthetic effect which is 55 desired." He sensed that there is a distinction between aesthetic perception on the one hand and aesthetic experi ence on the other. In perception, attention is directed toward three elements: (a) toward the directly perceptible aspects of an outer stimulus, such as colors, shapes in a picture, the rhythms and melodies in a piece of music; or (b) toward suggested images and meanings, as in a realistic picture or a set of printed words; or (c) toward both at once, or a l t e r n a t e l y .^6 Aesthetic experience is interpretative of meanings and in- stigative of imagination. Aesthetic experience may very 54The Arts and Their Interrelations (New York: The Liberal Arts Press, 1951), p. 260. 55Ibid. 56ibid., P. 98. 54 well alternate from meaning to imaginative play, but aes thetic experience is not, he insisted, akin to dreams or reveries. It may be a single, momentary response or a sus tained attitude . . . It may be a confirmed habit, as in the aesthetic type of personality [cf. with the practical and intellectual]. It often involves suspension and quiescence of motor-muscular activi ties, except those required in active perceiving. Selected perceptual and mental functions tend to be hyperactive; so it is incorrect to call aesthetic experience "passive" without qualification.^7 Eliseo Vivas argued that aesthetic perception is a 58 form of "transaction" between percipient and object. In this transaction, the perceptive act encounters the object as distinctive and unique. Further, it is possessed of an additional consequence: it possesses an untranslatable quality, that is, such a specific quality as loveliness, or 59 horror, or pathos. In artistic perception, Vivas noted the time factor as most important. For it is in the dura tion of the perception that two forms of meaning are yielded from the object, referential and immanent meaning. These two forms of meaning are clearly and definitely 57Ibid., p. 99. 58The Artistic Transaction (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1963), p. 50. 59lbid. 55 distinguished. In a referential sense, the object serves as a stimulus which calls forth an organized succession of patterns of response. "The stimulus evokes one pattern very 6 0 quickly, and this in turn evokes another." In the imma nent sense, an object or symbol calls forth a pattern, "but the pattern itself, instead of calling forth another, re mains available and in exclusive dominance of the facilities 61 — the nervous and motor system— which sustain it." This "immanent" domain of psychic activity is akin to the willing suspension of belief mentioned earlier; Vivas thought that there is a suspension of belief during the aesthetic exper ience because the object before the individual is "an organization of coherent and mutually self-sustaining imma- 62 nent meanings capable of being apprehended intuitively." This suspension precludes the possibility of comparison or the testing of values which exist in the "object" and those values which reside in the individual. Vivas went so far as to say that, in his opinion, an unbeliever, for example, could read religious poetry in high seriousness because of the interest, the intense interest, which the poetry would arouse, creating an isolation and autonomy of experience 60lMd., P. 38. 61Ibid. 62Ibid. . p. 61. 56 6 3 during the time it is taking place. In an earlier book, Vivas had already articulated "time" as the one factor wedging its way between the mind of 64 the percipient and the object. And yet paradoxically, despite his use of the term "transaction," it is the in transitive apprehension of immanent meanings and values which obliterates self-consciousness, and this, he felt, 65 excludes emotion as well. Emotion, to Vivas' mind, is a self conscious of itself; an artistic transaction is not a self conscious of itself. An emotion might follow an ar tistic experience, but certainly it is not present during. To bolster his argument, Vivas turned to the psychological studies which have isolated those factors which "control" in the transaction by the so-called "factors of advantage." They are not, as can be seen, emotional factors. A list of these factors of advantage in attention usually includes the following: change. strength, striking quality and definiteness of form. Now taking a representative list of generic traits discovered by aesthetic analysis: unity in varietyT theme, thematic variation, emphasis. and evolution 63Ibid. 64Creation and Discovery (New York: The Noonday Press, 1955), p. 95. 65lMd., P. 96. 66 according to a rhythmic pattern. 57 It is the beholding of objects for their own sake which in 6 7 Vivas' aesthetics is the basic aesthetic response. The beholding itself is the recognition of the presence of sym bols, symbols which represent "the basic furniture of the 6 8 world. Quite naturally, the symbolic activity is part and parcel of the common sense perception of the world, but it is when symbolic activity is refined and deliberately used that it becomes one of the totally indispensable ele- 69 ments of art. In a letter to one of his students, Vivas, in dis cussing poetry as a means of grasping reality, referred to the moment of aesthesis as "the quickening epiphany." . . . you cannot go to a poem empty-headed. You have to prepare yourself to read the poem, and the preparation involves organizing the poem in your mind and involves some amount of paraphrasing and some understanding of, not necessarily sympathy with, the values and meanings expressed. It's again a matter of degree, but repugnance of the substance is going to interfere with your intransitive act of aesthesis. But the preparation and the grasping are two different moments and for me, at least, the greatest value, the best reward, is the moment of 66Ibid.. p. 97. 67Vivas, The Artistic Transaction, p. 14. 68M d . 69M . 58 aesthesis, the quickening epiphany of showing forth what is there. However, preparation ought to be fun. If it isn't you'll never go to the end, to the great reward. But it is the moment of aesthesis, the show ing forth, that I aim at.7® The basic fact about the aesthetically equipped and perceptive artist, according to Louis A. Reid, is that he is different from all other highly developed beings. Reid argued that this is so because of the artist's unusual and 71 keen sensitivity to the material which he perceives. The material alone sets his imagination working. "The moralist may have a keen sense of moral values, the religious mystic of a Presence behind all Phenomena; but for the artist, who is the type of aesthetic person, it is values as embodied in 72 perceived stuff which matter." Yet Reid makes a clear distinction between the psychological sense of association in materials and the aesthetic sense. This difference is the difference between two types of fusion. Reid stated that psychological fusions originate from sources within the individual about which he possesses no explicit consciousness. They are assimilated associa- 70Ibid.. p. 91. 71A Study in Aesthetics (New York: Macmillan Co., 1931), p. 160. 59 tions from a lifetime of emotional reactions to the environ ment's impingements. The result is apperception. When, for example, the snow "looks" cold or soft, the associated cutaneous images of "cold" and "soft" are fused, in a process technically known sometimes as "complication," with the present visual experi ence of the snow. So that its coldness and its softness are perceived by common sense as charac terising the snow just as certainly as its "visual" quality of whiteness is perceived as characterising it . . . What we actually sense is a minute propor tion of what we apperceive.73 Aesthetic fusion, contrariwise, is something quite different. It is a fusion determined fundamentally by aes thetic needs, needs which are quite different from cognitive and intellectual ones. Reid was quick to point out that the cognitive and intellectual may be implied and contained in the aesthetic experience, but they are not primary to it. Aesthetic fusion is determined by a norm, the norm of aesthetic satisfaction, the norm of what objec tively we call beauty, and before an idea can be accepted in an aesthetic system, it must fit in with the system, it must not detract, it must be aesthetically harmonious, it must be truly rele vant .74 This fusion is achieved by a gestalt perception, though Reid himself did not use the term. Yet it must surely be what he meant when he wrote that "where the aesthetic focal point is 73Ibid., p. 98. 74Ibid. 60 to any degree complex, the total object becomes a unity, an 75 organization, a system, of embodied valuable meanings." The two types of fusions may or may not go together, or there might be a psychological fusion without an aesthetic, or vice versa. To illustrate this vacillation, he cited the case of poetry. The art of poetry, Reid wrote, is an expression in words; words, in turn, suggest any number of ideas or images with which they are associated. The two, he would suggest, must be aesthetically relevant. "They must form parts of a 76 single harmonious system." Though psychological fusion may or may not occur in an aesthetic object, aesthetic fusion must. The perception of this fusion, for Reid, makes aesthetic objects what they are, works of art. Thus far, an attempt has been made to put the aes thetic experience into a sequence of response. The preced ing section was devoted to the phenomenon of perception. the initial act of sensing an artistic production in the field of sensory awareness. The study will now turn to that result of perception, the aesthetic feeling. It should be made explicitly clear that the separation of perception and 75Ibid. 76Ibid. 61 feeling is an arbitrary one; the sensuous-cognitive act of perception knows no such division. Bernard Bosanquet stated that the aesthetic feeling has three elements: first, it is a stable feeling; second, it is a relevant feeling; and 77 third, it is a common feeling. As a stable feeling, it is not tied to pleasure per se. He thought that pleasure of itself passes into satiety, as eating and drinking so easily do. At a concert one may experience fatigue, but the fa tigue is not the result of hearing too much music; "it is 7 8 that our body and mind strike work." The aesthetic want is not akin to other wants, he felt, because it does not cease in proportion to the degree that it is gratified. When he described the second aspect of the feeling as "relevant," what Bosanquet meant was that it is annexed or attached to the quality (italics mine) of some art ob ject. "When I hear the dinner bell . . . that is not an aesthetic experience unless my feeling of pleasure is rele- 79 vant, attached to the actual sound as I hear it." What he meant is that a feeling within an individual possesses a "specialness" which has, in turn, been evoked by the 77Three Lectures on Aesthetic (London: Macmillan & Co., Ltd., 1923), p. 4. 78IkM. 79Ikid., P. 5. 62 special quality of the external source. Relevance means that the two, special feeling and special quality represent ing both the internal and the external, momentarily coexist as one. In describing the third quality of the common feel ing, he suggests universality. "You can appeal to others to share it," he writes, "and its value is not diminished by 80 being chared." Aesthetic pleasures are universal to Bosanquet, and the de qustibus non est disoutandum argument he could not disagree with more. Nothing is discussed more, he felt, than aesthetic pleasures, and, further, nothing repays discussion better. "To like and dislike rightly is 81 the goal of all culture worth its goal." If aesthetic feeling is one attribute of the aes thetic experience, for Bosanquet the aesthetic attitude was quite another. "The aesthetic attitude is that in which we have a feeling which is so embodied in an object that it will stand still to be looked at, and, in principle, to be 82 looked at by everybody." The aesthetic attitude is an affair of the mind, and as such will contain two new points. First, the mind's attitude is contemplative, and second, the 80Ifcifl. 81 Ibid. 82Ibid. . p. 6. 63 feeling is "organized" in that it becomes plastic, embodied, and/or "idealized," but he argued that these terms are easily misunderstood. In explicating "contemplative," he stated that it was only in the aesthetic attitude in which an individual looks at an object without attempting to change it or alter it. One is "totalized" by complete look- 83 ing and hearing. But important for Bosanquet in the char acter of the aesthetic feeling was the feeling as organized, plastic, or incarnate. . . . if you have the power to draw out or give imaginative shape to the object and material of your . . . experience, then it must undergo a transformation. The feeling is submitted to the laws of the object. It must take on a permanence, order, harmony, meaning, in short, value. It ceases to be mere self-absorption. Bosanquet insisted that a man is not civilized, aestheti cally, until he has had the transformation of valuing 85 semblance above reality. So doing, concluded Bosanquet, his aesthetic attitude would be as follows: . . . preoccupation with a pleasant feeling, embod ied in an object which can be contemplated, and so obedient to the laws of the object; and by an object is meant an appearance presented to us through per ception or imagination. Nothing which does not 83lMd., P. 7. 84Ifeis1., P. 8. 85Ibid.. p. 10. appear can count for the aesthetic attitude. 64 Bosanquet was vexed by the impossibility of separat ing the double process of creation and contemplation which, he felt, was implied by the aesthetic attitude. And it is the same question stated in other words, how a feeling can be got into an object. This is the central problem of the aesthetic attitude; and . . . the best material for solving it for us who are not great artists comes from any minor experi ence we may have at command in which we have been aware of the outgoing feeling into expression. We must not think merely of the picture in the gallery or the statue in the museum, but of the song and dance, the dramatic reading, the entering into music, or the feel of the material in the minor arts, or simply, the creative discovery of the right word.87 The aesthetic experience is the end product of understanding cooperation between two partners, the artist who creates art objects by application of his skill and imagination, and, on the other side, the connoisseur who 88 appreciates them. Indian aestheticians perceive the aes thetic moment with bhava and rasa; bhava is creation with a specific dominant emotional content? rasa is what the con noisseur recognizes, the subjective comprehension of this 86Ibid. 87Ibid.. p. 74. ®8h . Banerjee as quoted in Prabas Jiban Chaudhury, Studies in Aesthetics (Calcutta; Shri Dhirendra Debnath, 1964), p. vi. emotion, which in turn gives rise to the aesthetic experi- 89 ence. But it is essential in the minds of many aestheti- cians, including E. F. Carritt, an English aesthetician of the early part of this century, that the aesthetic experi ence is the finding of significant emotion, not merely any 90 arbitrary symbol for it. Being an expression of an emo tion in an individual mind, the aesthetic experience is not the expression of thought nor of communication of such ex pression, Carritt wrote. It is achieved by unusual tech niques which create an emotional communication of expres sion; it is the expression of this emotion that is the work of art, expression in the way that words can be expressive 91 of thoughts and feeling or a smile of affection. Carritt, it would appear, would place the emotion in the object ex pressing itself. Not all aestheticians agree, of course, and there are those who would place the emotion within the percipient, and those, whom we have noted, who would insist upon the tertium quid of both operating together. Curt J. Ducasse stated that the aesthetic experience 89Ibid. 90An Introduction to Aesthetics (London: Hutchin son's Universal Library, n.d.), p. 124. 91Ikid. 66 is an act of contemplation in which one listens with the 92 capacity for feeling. Reid carried this approach along by infusing it with a viability, a "growing life," as he put 93 it, which only reaches a degree of rest and satisfaction in an object "sufficiently complex to be interesting to a 94 vital mind-and-body, an object which is yet unified." But Reid called particular attention to the factor of "excite ment" in aesthetic emotions; "aesthetic emotion . . . in volves sufficient excitement to be called emotion-psycho- 95 sis." The excitement aspect of aesthetic emotions is different as a class from other emotions, in the same meas ure as aesthetic experience is different from non-aesthetic experience. Yet Reid also knew that this difference is not anything particularly remarkable, and wondered why so much stress had been laid upon emotional excitement, which, after 96 all, he observed, is but a symptom. In 1937, Kate Hevner attacked the aesthetic experi- i 97 ence from a psychological point of view. The approach was 92"The Aesthetic Attitude," in Problems of Aesthet ics, ed. by Eliseo Vivas and Murray Krieger (New York: Rinehart and Company, Inc., 1953), p. 362. 93Reid, A Study in Aesthetic?, p. 113. 94lfri.d. 95JL32ia., p. 135. 96Ibid. 9^"The Aesthetic Experience: A Psychological 67 not new; Freud's aesthetics of art had, approximately twenty-five years earlier, placed creativity and responsive ness to creativity within the subconscious needs and drives of the artist. But Hevner1s view is even more behavioris tic; she was interested in noting what happens during the aesthetic experience. First, the aesthetic experience is an active, an intensely active state of mind and body, not at all passive acquiescence which appearances sometimes seem to imply . . . Appreciation requires alertness of mind and body. Attention must be directed whole heartedly toward the objective stimulus and "atten tion" means a state of readiness of partial contrac tion is being maintained by the body, that eyes are turned toward the stimulus and actively focussed there, that the ears are catching every detail of sound, that the mind follows the senses to supple ment and interpret. It also means that the muscula ture is not occupied with any other activity, that it is free to respond to the movement and the rhythm of the stimulus, that it is actively seeking to follow every suggestion, to emphasize the experience of every point . . . Appreciation is muscle tonus, muscle coordination, it is activity, tensions, re sponses. It is awareness, alertness, animation, energy.9® This total bodily and emotional response prompted Hevner to suggest that the sensations of aesthetic attention claim much more of an available total attention than other atti- 99 tudes in life require. With eye movements and muscular Description," Psychological Review (May, 1937), 245. 98Ikid., pp. 248-249. "ibid., p. 250. 68 tension, by interpreting one sense by means of another, and by translating sound and sight into kinesthetic experiences, the observer is experiencing all stimuli not only with the proper sense organ, but with the entire body as well. Our insistence on the complexity of the aesthetic experience means that we conceive it as a composite of many different activities, occurring simulta neously. Some of them function automatically and subconsciously, others require effort and direction, and the attention is constantly shifting, therefore, from one to the other. As the attention shifts, the experience may seem at one time purely emotional, at another highly intellectual, or wholly sensuous.^^0 For Hevner, then, the aesthetic experience is a blend, a complex, a combination of many activities. The experi ence is characterized as that moment when the individual is 102 moved to feel or to say, "How beautiful this is." In her theory, there is not great concern placed upon the stimulus provoking or evoking the response; she specifies only that the beholder be affected by it to the extent that, sponta neously, he is moved to utter what an awareness of beauty means to him. It is usually an experience with a pleasant affective life, though not necessarily so, and it stands out a little from the general flow of mental activity with 100lMd., p. 248. 102Ibid.. p. 246. J-OJ-Ibid.. p. 247. 69 a certain dignity and unity so that one may recall it later as a definite experience. It sets itself apart from the more common attitudes of daily life so that as it passes away one turns back to them with a distinct feeling of having made a transition. Hevner likened the pleasure in art to the pleasure one can receive from language. As the sentence unfolds, she noted, one is aware of the trend being established by the ideas, and this sense of direction allows a certain degree of fore sight about the nature of the ending. "Then the conclusion will be important and fulfilling," she stated, "and it will be rich with satisfaction because it was wanted and need- 104 ed." It is the bodily and visceral responses which apparently give the aesthetic experience its poignancy, importance, brilliance, and emphasis. cumbered by any one certain philosophy of art and unre strained by his experimentalist orientation could describe the aesthetic experience by simpxy enumerating all the functions involved and finding among them those upon which Thus Hevner was convinced that a psychologist unen- attention focuses. 105 And for him, affective training could be accomplished. 1Q4Ibid.. p. 252. 105Ifrj.d., P. 256. 70 It will be furthered perhaps by an introspective attitude of conscious directing of the attention to the bodily tensions and pressures during any emotional or feeling states, so that they may be identified, and their effects on experience differ entiated. It involves consciously seeking new and different affective experiences and especially re calling and reliving past emotional experiences, putting them into words or postures or images so that the relation between the objective event and the bodily response is manifest. It means examin ing each art object for a suggestion of mood or feeling affect and assuming bodily postures as seem appropriate to the suggestion, forcing oneself to find some suggestion if it does not spontaneously occur. ^-06 This type of description, emphasizing as it does the emotional aspects of the percipient, seems incongruous when juxtaposed to another theory of the aesthetic experience. The "disinterested approach" is non-emotional, not unemo tional. The approach is a fused pointillism of emotion; at close range no configuration; at some distance, an un-forced yielding of configuration. The fineness of this distinction tests even linguistic distinctions. Let it be suggested this way: "disinterest" might be likened to a cleansing process, resulting in a point of emotional neutrality. 107 Hunter Mead described the situation as one of detached, 106i]2ia., p. 259. Introduction to Aesthetics (New York: The Ronald Press, 1952). 71 disinterested, and impersonal contemplation. When the mood is present, runs the argument, there is, at least for the moment, a release or a disconnection from the ordinary prac tical concerns of a daily life. The usually unbroken series of cause and effect relation, in which we move toward a desired goal through various steps to its attainment and then perhaps move on to a new goal with its necessary realizing steps, is interrupted by the aesthetic experience, if only briefly. The aesthetic mood represents a pause, as it were, during which we momentarily suspend this normal cause-and-effeet series (in so far as we are personally involved) by detaching ourselves from this end-and-means chain of events. The disinterestedness of this mood arises from the contemplative manner in which 1 f)Q we normally perceive aesthetic objects. ■ LUO Under this mood of "disinterestedness" there is, it is further advanced, no desire on the part of the observer to "possess" or use or exploit the perceived object for what ever personal reasons or selfish ends would normally prompt him to do so with non-aesthetic objects. Growing out of this disinterestedness, then, the aesthetic mood possesses a striking impersonal quality. Our personal desires, goals, hopes, and fears are temporarily suspended (or at least rendered largely impotent), while in more intense aesthetic experi ences we may become absorbed in the object to such a degree that we are "taken out of ourselves" or 108Ibid.. p. 13. 72 "carried away" and the self or ego is eliminated from consciousness.109 What emerges, then, from this discussion of the aesthetic experience is a bi-polarity. At one extreme is the psychological world of "inner" involvement and unique ness or response to the art object. At the other extreme, the external object is given the priority of value. Greene described these two attitudes, or stances, as the subjecti vist attitude and the objectivist attitude. He clarified both well. To begin with, the subjectivist argues that the sine qua non of the aesthetic experience is psychological, and that the psychological characteristic can be distinguished possession by an aesthetic object of an aesthetic charac teristic of its own. He explains the apparent objectivity of aesthetic quality by saying that we unconsciously project our aesthetic feelings into the object of our awareness, which the object from other types of responses. 110 What he denies is the 109Ibid. HOfjevner, Aesthetic Experience," p. 245. lllGreene, Art of Criticism, p. 4. 73 Aesthetic quality, as Greene described the subjectivist criticism of the objectivist viewpoint, proves to be an aesthetic evaluation. The subjectivist argument maintains that evaluation cannot be conceived to be the discovery of an objective quality in things. The objectivist believes that an aesthetic quality is "objective" in that the object awaits the discovery of it by an aesthetically sensitive percipient. The object itself, insists the objectivist, "coerces" and does so by the object's coercive order, thus satisfying the generic criterion of objectivity."^3 Aesthetic quality is apprehended by the aestheti cally minded observer as a quality which presents itself to him with compelling power; which charac terizes different objects in different degrees and in conformity with certain basic principles, which he can rediscover on different occasions and ex plore as he explores other objective qualities; and which aesthetically sensitive observers can also discover and evaluate . ^4 Gotschalk distinguished these two conflicting points of view 115 as "naive" and "disciplined." On the one hand, with great attenuation to the aesthetic object, the percipient declares, "My will be done!" On the other hand, the 113Ibid. ll4lbid. 115Art and the Social Order, pp. 160ff. 74 disciplined percipient, elaborating upon his perception, asserts, "Art's will be done!" Gotschalk, it will be recalled, advanced his notion of "telic perception," a perception which was based upon the needs residual within the individual. When assessing the aesthetic experience, he assumed that the inauguration of the experience begins with alert perception. But the ex perience begins when that perception is allowed what he has 116 termed "intrinsic scope." Five elements "play" them selves around the core of sensitive perception, broadening intrinsically the personal powers of apprehension. These five elements are intellect, feeling, imagination, sensa tion, and memory. The ambience of each upon the other opens for the individual the being and suggestiveness of the aes thetic object. Combining "mechanical" and "telic" aspects of per ception, Gotschalk contended that perception of the field 117 1S the end in aesthetic experience. Using the object of a vase, he explained his notion of the experience. First, through sensation, i.e., sight, the object is perceived; second, through intuition, the object is given a spatial 116I£isl., p. 20. 117Ibid. . p. 6. position, the arrangement of it is apprehended; and third, through intellect, the object is "interpreted," i.e., the color is identified as turquoise, the spatial pattern as Chinese, and the total object as an imitation of a Chinese 118 vase. But then he added, Ordinary alert perception of objects usually con tains . . . more than these minimum mechanical fac tors . The chief additional factors, I think, are feeling and imagination . Gotschalk attempted to reconcile how everyday attri butes of perception can be differentiated into an aesthetic experience. He advanced the idea that imagination in everyday life usually has a practical orientation and is 120 locked in a practical sequence. To a farmer, a storm cloud upon the horizon of perception may be seen as "ter rible," but the important point is that the perception is not freed from the practical; aesthetic perceptions are, and with them the role of imagination is alert and fertile. Earlier, Gotschalk's "aesthetic experience" was interpreted as suggesting a "play" by the powers of intellect, feeling, imagination, sensation, and memory. It would be more de scriptive to describe it as "apprehended exfoliation." 118ifeid., p. 18. 119Ibid. p. 19 76 Iredell Jenkins discriminated among kinds of aes thetic experiences, categorizing them by degrees of inten- 121 sity and significance. The first type of experience is immediately satisfying. It would be called "attractive," "charming," "lovely," etc. The one important characteristic of the first is that it is soon exhausted, that it is cas ual, gratifying, and temporary. Though it delights, and though its style may show aptness and facility in construc tion, immediate satisfaction neither deeply engages nor calls greatly upon an individual's resources. The second type of experience Jenkins labeled as "stimulating," "suggestive," "striking," or "provocative." Here the impact of the experience is slower; it culminates; there is often a feeling that much was derived from it, though a persistence within the individual insists that more should have been made of it than was. Of the third variety, terms such as "profound," "challenging," "moving," "power ful," "permanent" sweep through the individual because the feeling is that the impact is permanent and far-reaching. "It has changed us as persons because it has radically 122 altered the ways in which we view things." Here is a 121Art and the Human Enterprise, pp. 113-114. 122Ibid.. p. 114. 77 kind of truth, reality produced by a genius. Regardless of the degree of experience, Jenkins posited aesthetic experi ence as one major guise under which man makes the acquaint ance of things. Artistic creation is one of the refined employments of experience through which he presses the first acquaintance closer to the contours of things. Art is one of the issues of experience in which one man embodies his vision of the world, and so enriches and refines the vision of other men. Jenkins continues the "synthetic" approach of objectivist and subjectivist elements. Newton P. Stallknecht disagreed that a sense of aesthetic immediacy depends upon an evocation of emotion, but he did not argue the objectivist's insistence either. And, further, he did not satisfy himself with a simple syn thesis. He attempted to articulate a far more subtle thing, the concept of interpenetration leading to the apprehension 124 of compresence. Agreeing that the object of aesthetic vision is isolated in its environment in that it absorbs our full attention, he argued that it is at the same time meld- 125 ed: "it has no lacunae and no adjuncts." The percipient 123Ibid.., p. 77. 124»^wareness of Actuality in the Esthetic Experi ence," Journal of Philosophy. XXXIX (June 6, 1935), 323. 125Ikid., P. 324. 78 is aware within his consciousness of a "cohering and jumping together." This "belongingness" and "relationship-of-all- parts" is recognized not by logical faculties, but by what Stallknecht worded as "the irresistible prompting of our X26 consciousness." These perceived characteristics he calls the revelation of comoresence. In poetry, for instance, compresence is manifest in the fact that several simultaneous phases of the verbal expression, specifically the rhythmical and onomatopoetic connotations and the more conventional significance of the words, contribute to the effect of the whole. Here the phases of the expression share in one another's presence, just as the sensu ous qualities seem to cohere in perception.^7 Stallknecht admitted that compresence is really no more than the "unity in variety" element of aesthetics which the ro mantic critics articulated a century earlier; he felt he had 128 expanded the notion toward a "fuller precision." Vivas, as noted above, denied the transitive aspect to the aesthetic experience. To him the aesthetic experi ence is the act of a perceiving, an involving, concentrat ing, and total "activeness" whereby the art object elicits rapt attention, sustains the attention, and feeds the at- 129 tention intransitively. Vivas wrote that "we look at an 126Ibid. 12?Ibid. 128lbid.. p. 320. 129Vivas, Creation and Discovery, p. 121. 79 object in order to see it and have no other end in view, we listen in order to hear, touch it or taste it in order to feel."130 The aesthetic experience is an experience of rapt attention that involves the intransitive apprehen sion of an object's immanent meanings in their full presentational immediacy 3 ^ Three additional delineations of aesthetic experi ence, the psychological, existential, and semiotic, are worthy of attention before concluding this section. The psychological approach, while hinted at in the discussion of aesthetic feeling, has been more generally concerned with the creative process and its origins deep within the sub- 132 conscious levels of the artist's mind. A Freudian ap proach for creation of art objects is marked by wish- fulfillment, the Jungian by the archetypal symbol, and so on through the various schools. It is certainly fair to ob serve that aesthetic experience, per se, is regarded in very general terms, of which Anton Ehrenzweig's definition is typical; he wrote that the aesthetic feeling "may be part 130vivas, The Artistic Transaction, p. 30. 131ikifl. l^See e , M. Gombrich, "Freud's Aesthetics," En counter . XXVI (January, 1966), 30. 80 and parcel of any perception process in which several layers 133 of the mind participate." The psychological and psycho analytical schools stress the need satisfaction factor of the artist and the subconscious participation of the per cipient, a work of art being a type of alloy which binds together the aesthetic superstructure of style to the in articulate and often libidinous language of the mind's 134 hidden depths. The existential "aesthetic vision" originates in the existentialist's self-acceptance of the nothingness which vacuously yawns around existence. The aesthetic vision being in and not beyond the self affirms the wakefulness 135 necessary to the spontaneity of an original utterance. But, even further, Careful existential evaluation reveals that the art formation is indicative of profound, radical dis illusionment, not with respect to any particular outcome of the life of thought and action, but with all possible outcomes. Hence, the aesthetic disen gagement, and withdrawal from all mediating purpos ing— from purposing, that is, whose expression 133The Psvcho-analvsis of Artistic Vision and Hear ing (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, Ltd., 1953), p. 72. 134Ibid.. p. 71. ^33See Chapter IV, Arturo B. Fallico, Art and Exis tentialism (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1962). 81 requires the dualities "inner-outer," "subject- object," "means-ends," "past-future," "premise- conclusion," together with some mediating term in between. ^38 Because all art is contemporaneous, always existing in a now because of its totality of on-going presence, the existen tialist aesthetic fills time meaningfully, providing astrin gent antidotal reminders that life, if not beautiful, can be illuminating. In the semiotic or symbolic theory of aesthetics, the emphasis is placed upon the external symbol which, as interpreted by the aesthetic observer, correlates to the psychic model that is internal to the observer. Actually, the phrase which Lucius Garvin employed has far-reaching 137 implications for this study. The "aesthetic interpre ter," as he would call the observer, reflects from the psychic model within him the organization of the object external to him, "the total aesthetic process consisting in the construction in the percipient of feelings the form of 138 which he finds symbolized in the aesthetic object." 136U2id. 137"Emotivism, Expression and Symbolic Meaning," Journal of Philosophy. LV (January 20, 1958), 117. 138Ibid. 82 139 Olscamp referred to this variety of aesthetic experience as "instrumental." That is, an art symbol possesses 140 "transcendent reference to another object ..." as a signal or sign. What the perceiver has is consciousness of the reference, and further, "the present object of percep tion does not matter at all as object; its importance con sists solely in the fact that it is a means of achieving 141 some other end." Susanne K. Langer, about whom more will be said later, noted that an aesthetic experience from this philosophical stance makes a revelation of our inner life 142 because the work of art does something to or for us. Yet this revelation is not in the emotional and mood sense. Rather, from the semiotic approach, what occurs is a formu lation of our conceptions of feelings and our conceptions of 143 a sensory impinging world together. It gives us forms of imagination, and forms of feel ings - inseparably; that is to say, it clarifies and organizes intuition itself. That is why it has the force of revelation, and inspires a feeling of deep IS^Olscamp, "Some Remarks," p. 252. 140Ikia., P. 253. 141ifejg. 142Feelinq and Form, a Theory of Art Developed from a Philosophy in a New Key (New York; Charles Scribner's Sons, 1953), pp. 397, 399. 143Ifei&., P. 397. 83 intellectual satisfaction, though it elicits no conscious intellectual work. Aesthetic intuition seizes the greatest form, and therefore, the main import at once . . . In art, it is the impact of the whole, the immediate revelation of vital im port, that acts as the psychological lure to long contemplation.I44 This chapter began with the question, "What is im portant for the interpreter to know about aesthetics?" With regard to the aesthetic experience, the question can be partially answered as follows: the aesthetic experience is distinguished from the mere act of perception. In the aes thetic experience, the percipient is struck by the particu larity of things, a sense of an expansion of insight ob tained from an openness to experience. The aesthetic ex perience is "telic" perception, tied to the needs, inter ests, purposes, desires, impulses, and strivings of the individual? it transcends rationality. The aesthetic ex- perience is a form of apprehensive knowing rather than rational and logical comprehension, and as such, it is un like any other experience either emotional or rational. Aesthetic perception is a qualitative appreciation, an in terpretative act of ascertaining meaning in symbols and stimuli. It has been described as a transactional experi- 144IMd. 84 ence between percipient and art object, a psychological fusion from an attentive attitude to the art object. The aesthetic experience varies in its explanation from the objectivist1s insistence that the object is the source of "life" and vitality to the subjectivist's insistence that it is the individual which gives to the object the vital life of feeling and import. The explanation of the construct of the aesthetic experience remains speculative and theoreti cal, but even so, an artist should have articulated atti tudes and criteria about the aesthetic experience from which to build and to understand his own artistry. Aesthetic experience, educa tional worthP and the applica tion. jtothe teaching of oral interpretation Oral interpretation has a two-fold purpose: it extends the appreciation of literature into the lives of students and it exists to educate and to train in the artful expression of literature. The question can be raised whether it is "art education" or "aesthetic education." Art education is primarily interested in the effect art process es have on the individual by the possession of a particular organization of elements, while aesthetic education is in terest in the object itself, not in the effect it produces 85 in an individual. Another way of saying this, perhaps, would be to suggest that art education is cause-effect through space and time; aesthetic education stops with the object and discriminates the synaesthesia of the elements within it. The priority of aesthetic education over art education was stressed by Lowenfeld. He wrote, "Fundamental to any aesthetic education is the recognition that the aes thetic product is only a record of the degree to which the senses have developed and have been brought into harmonious 145 relationship with the external world." Through refine ment and cultivation the sense will be revealed in the aes thetic object. He insisted that impositions of rules re lating to harmony and rhythm, balance and proportion, etc., will ever move toward achieving a harmonious relationship of the senses. 146 Frederick H. Lund and Anna Anastasi found that the most valuable aspect of aesthetic education was the in fluence of habituation and practice, both of which bring the individual into greater harmony with the development of his 145"The Meaning of Aesthetic Growth for Art Educa tion," p. 125. ^®"An Interpretation of Aesthetic Experience," The American Journal of Psychology. XL (July, 1928), 434. 86 147 inner demands. When preparedness reaches a high level and where relatedness is a prominent feature, they noted increased satisfaction and keener enjoyment of the latter 148 part of a performance, as in music, drama, or fiction. 149 . Ralph G. Hallman, m assessing the role of aes thetic motivation in the creative arts, suggested that the process of acquiring an aesthetic drive must first begin 150 with a depressing of the logical categories. The crucial meaning of the aesthetic drive is that it is an integrative rather than a divisive process. The drive becomes operative as qualities come to be selected as a means of achieving ends which appear first as possibilities, as groups of qualities are chosen and combined as a way of continuing a partic ular experience, as structures of cues form to sug gest a way of carrying out a problematic situation. The aesthetic drive, as Hallman wrote of it, is divided into three component parts: energy thrust, emotionality, and qualitative response.152 All three are part of a single operation which is performed upon an environment. The 147I M s1., p. 448. l48Ibid. 149"Aesthetic Motivation in the Creative Arts," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. XXIII (Summer, 1965), 453. 158Ibid.. p. 458. 152Ibid. 87 important thing to note in Hallman's brief is that he made it abundantly clear the performance proceeds "in accordance with concomitant changes which occur within the individual's growth result from increased and sensitized qualitative reactions to shapes, colors, images, sounds, textures. In the aesthetic drive, the individual detaches these sensa tions from any kind of "anchorage in an ordered world." Unencumbered and "plastic" within the individual, he returns them to the world in some form, a form which is now aes- The qualitative response explains why the creative act consists in the operations of composing, model ing, arranging, expressing, combining, fusing. It explains why objects tend to lose their more prac tical meanings and to take on a plasticity of mean ings and possibilities which enables the creative person to combine them in the interest of the aesthetic need rather than a survival need. It explains why the content of creativeness must qualify first as irrelevancy. This means that as sensitivity to cues increases, the qualities of objects supersede their causal properties and their commodity values. ^4 This aesthetic drive, Hallman concluded, sensitizes the individual to the myriad cues within the environment by the application of "moderately strong motivation." internal psychological mechanism." 153 This change and thetic. 153Ibid. 88 Teachers in the arts are often dismayed that there are those who not only lack any aesthetic sensitivity, but even a capacity which might be suitably trained. Greene introduced his study of the arts and the art of criticism by discussing those who lack such sensibility. But he also, at the same time, reminded all of us that it would be very difficult to prove that such individuals do, in fact, exist. Rather, he challenged, it is more likely that everyone pos- 155 sesses some capacity for aesthetic response. James P. 156 Dougherty maintains that the art experience is so im pressive when it does impinge that there is a tendency not to forget it once it is over; "the art experience does not 157 occur in a dream." There must not be the kind of con tentment in the training of aesthetic enjoyment which would stop at the intellectual stage of analysis. The individual must be trained to analyze "Why the persistence?" and to translate memory into the "paraphrasable content"; the re membered attitudes and the paraphrasable content become a 158 part of the total human experience. 155Greene, Art of Criticism, p. 14. 156"The Aesthetic and the Intellectual Analyses of Literature," The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. XXII (Spring, 1964), 315. 157lkia., p. 318. 158Ibid. 89 In the education of aesthetic enjoyment, most writ ers would agree with Dougherty that the words which describe aesthetic experiences are different from the words employed in critical analysis. Persistent memory creates a simplis tic aesthetic assessment. This memory automatically en courages common words in a deeply personal statement (love- JLy, prettv. beautiful, dainty. graceful, elegant). words and 159 terms primarily or only used in an aesthetic sense. Other words, by a metaphorical transference, have become aesthetic terms (dynamic, melancholy. balanced, tightlv- knit) which are not normally aesthetic terms except in ar tistic and critical writing. About aesthetic terms, Sibley stated that they span a great range of types and could be grouped into various kinds and sub-species . . . Their al most endless variety is adequately displayed in the following list: unified, balanced, integrated, lifeleg?, serene, somber, dynamic, powerful, vivid. delicate, moving. trite. sentimental, tragic. The list, of course, is not limited to adjectives; ex pressions in artistic contexts like "telling con trast," "sets up tension," "conveys a sense of . . .," or "hold together" are equally good illus trations. It includes terms used by both layman and critic alike, as well as some which are mainly 159See Sibley, "Aesthetic Concepts," p. 421. His terminology and examples have been used throughout this section. 90 16 the property of professional critics and specialists. What one does train the percipient to realize is that the words apply because they are characteristic of non-aesthetic features like curving lines, speed of movement or sound, features which are visible and audible, "or otherwise dis- 161 cernible without any exercise of taste or sensibility." The important point, of course, is that the features are perceived and reacted to from the condition of increased sensibility, the sensibilities of aesthetic education. One further and important point on the development of aesthetic sensibility and criticism? aesthetic criteria 162 are intrinsic to the individual work. It may, therefore, be said that a creative work is governed by its own intrinsic aesthetic principles. If we would attempt to regiment harmonious rela tionships and organizations, we would arrive at dog matic laws. This has important implications for aesthetic growth in art education. It implies that all set rules rigidly applied to any creative ex pression are detrimental to aesthetic growth. Yet, in most schools— on all levels— such matters as proportions, balance, rhythm, are still regarded as separate extrinsic entities with no relationships to the intrinsic qualities of the individual aes thetic product or the intentions of the creator and 160Ibid. 161Ifeia., p. 424. 16^Lowenfeld, "The Meaning of Aesthetic Growth," pp. 123-214. 91 16 3 his developed sensibilities. There appears to be agreement among aestheticians that educating the sensibilities increases the potentiality for an aesthetic responsiveness and involvement. Increased sensory awareness, a greater openness and participation with the implicative reaches of an art work, the openness to the symbolic experience are inherent in an aesthetic education. An aesthetic education verifies the knowledge of emotions and the values of intuitive apprehension. These objectives can be a significant part of the training in the oral inter pretation of literature. Aesthetic Concepts Relevant to Oral Interpretation A number of specific aesthetic problems have been localized in the field of oral interpretation. Rather than formulating a general aesthetic, or comprehensive view of the art, writers in oral interpretation have addressed them selves to specific problems of the interpretative act. The purpose of this section is to build upon the nature of the aesthetic experience and the value of its educative poten tial by isolating eight concepts which clarify the two-fold 163Ifcia., p. 124. 92 nature of oral interpretation: the art of literature as object, and the mastery of the medium of performance. The eight concepts to be treated are the creative act, expres sion, language as art, form, harmony and unity, empathy, psychical distance, and funding. The creative act When aestheticians speak of creation, they are con cerned with a specific function which may be "to articulate man’s vague apprehensions of the particularity of things, and to embody and present these with great clarity and per- 164 suasion," or as the "miracle of creation or inspiration [which] consists in nothing but this, that an external ef- 16 5 feet should embody an inner intention," or in terms which would suggest that "to create something means to make it 166 non-technically, but yet consciously and voluntarily." Or yet another might describe the creative process as a kind of synapse, "... that stretch of mental and physical activity between the incept and the final touch— between 164jenkins, Art and the Human Enterprise, p. 116. 165George Santayana, Reason in Art (New York: Collier Books, 1962), p. 70. g . Collingwood, The Principles of Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1938), p. 128. 93 the thought 11 may on something here' and the thought 1 It 16 7 is finished.'" Whatever, there is an inauguration of an inceptive element, call it a germ, seed, cell, or nucleus of an idea of how something might be borne. From nucleus to creation, there are many gaps in knowledge. What has been widely accepted by researchers in this field of the creative process has been the four-stage se quence of preparation, incubation, illumination, and veri- 168 fication. Yet it must remain perfectly obvious that knowledge of a sequence does not insure creativity, nor necessarily promote it once the awareness of a process ex ists. It has been suggested that absence of creative in sight, or at least inhibition, can be attributed to a variety of ills, among them excessive ego-involvement, a conservatism which disallows a breaking with the "old," even the need of psychological security which a status-quo 169 -situation extenuates. Creativity apparently will occur where social approval of change is strongest, where there is 16^Monroe Beardsley, "On the Creation of Art," The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. XXIII (Spring, 1965), 292. 168oerhart Wiebe, "An Exploration into the Nature of Creativity," Public Opinion Quarterly. XXVI (Fall, 1962), 390. 3-69 Ibid. 94 a promotion of dissent, skepticism, unorthodoxy, and innova- 170 txon. The outcome of an act of creation is a work of art. This is quite distinct from the content of aesthetic ex perience . The work of art is a substantial reality, meaning ful, embodying an ideal, telling us something of the world beyond. An aesthetic experience is all surface, here and now. Its content is sheer qual ity, the immediate, the intuited, the felt aspect of things. Such experience is open to those who attend to works of art. Artists often have a ready appetite for it, but they rarely indulge this, at least in the fields of art where they spend most of their lives. Nor do they stress aesthetic experi ence when they confront nature. It is usually those who have less interest in producing art than the artist has, and more interest in enjoyment than the practical man has, who are most occupied with the aesthetic experience which nature affords.1^1 Paul Weiss contended that a work of art is quite different from an aesthetic experience in another respect. He held that aesthetic experiences can be imaginatively isolated in any object; "since any object in nature is, by being brought within the ambit of our concerns, at least partly converted 172 into an aesthetic object." But an art object has its 170Ik±ji. - * - 71Paul Weiss, The World of Art (Carbondale, 111. Southern Illinois University Press, 1961), p. 79. 172Ibid. 95 peculiar isolation created by the artist, and no one, he insisted, can appreciate a work of art without being aware 173 of it as an aesthetic object. "The act of creation has a characteristic objective, goes through a characteristic 174 course, and exhibits a characteristic rationale." Admitting that every activity has some degree of creativity, Weiss concluded that the activity of the artist is different from the creativity of others in degree and kind. The artist's creativity combines "in a better way a greater degree of spontaneity, inventiveness, urgency, per- 175 sistence and emotionality than other activities do." He said this is so because only the artist seems preoccupied with the attainment of excellence in sensuous form. Most important to Weiss is the role emotions play in artistic creativity. The artist is "emotionally stimulated, emo- 176 tionally guided, and emotionally satisfied." Living in an environment of total freedom, the artist approaches his problems with a knowledge that he will not have perfect control of his activities or material, or even possess a clear prospect of the end. 173Ibid. 175JU2i£., P. 82. ^ ^Ibid. 176Ibid.. p. 83. 96 Nor does he usually attain what he set out to pro duce. There are surprises at almost every moment; direction and aim constantly change. There can even be a courting of accidents. The accidents reveal the power and variety of nature, free one from com mon conventions, and make one aware of new and other wise neglected combinations and features.^77 Weiss1s point of view was that artistic creativity is an amalgam and an adventure of "relating, combining, altering, making, destroying material in an effort to articulate a prospect which is to be made sensuously evident through the 178 emotional use of transformed material." Ralph G. Hallman advanced the thesis that creativity is "qualitative symbolic behavior" rather than an adaptive or survival behavior as the creative individual responds to 179 his environment. The artistic and creative individual, said Hallman, possessing motives strong enough to allow a transformation of stimuli, encounters the world in qualita tive terms rather than pragmatic ones. He tends to function "aesthetically" and thereby connects his biological drives 180 with aesthetic order. Symbolic processes merge and meld into various emotive qualities, giving a subjective coloring 177Ib^d., P- 90. 178Ibid.. p. 91. I79"Aesthetic Motivation in the Creative Arts," p. 453. 180Ifeid., p. 457. 97 to the drives. The artist's emotions select and unify, continued Hallman, and are thus ready to serve creative * 4-' 181 functions. Iredell Jenkins interpreted creation as a kind of "vibration” between two poles, the one, internalization, and the other, externalization. Creation, she wrote, looks backward towards its source, seeking to attain a clearer apprehension of the particularity it is dealing with. At the same time, it looks forwards towards its product, seeking through this to make its vision more articulate and permanent. These two phases can be described as . . . insight and embodiment, or as contemplation and concretion. The important point is that these are phases in a cycle that is cohesive and recurrent. ^82 The product of creativity was described by Jenkins as an "embodied insight." It is the vision of the artist become concrete as the result of the creative cycle alternatingly internalized and externalized and eventually fused into a 4.-4. 183 single entity. The creative process, she warned, is not necessarily self-sustaining. It is continually dependent upon apprecia tion and expression: ". . .it must return at frequent ISllbid. 182Jenkins, Art and the Human Enterprise, p. 117. 1 p. 118. 98 intervals to . . . lower and more immediate levels of the aesthetic experience, to gather fresh materials, to check 184 its present bearings, and to plot its future course." And she warned as well, that because man has a tendency to complicate everything he touches, he must maintain his creative energy as a refining experience, not complicating it. When creativity dissipates its energies through elab oration and ornamentation of man's activities and artifacts, Jenkins noted that there comes a revolution in taste, 185 sweeping away the accumulated complexity. D. W. Gotschalk began, like Jenkins, with establish ing a rapport between the artist and his material. Because of internalized purposes, the creative artist seeks to shape the material in a peculiar way. The material, observed Gotschalk, is always resistant and becomes "plastic" only 186 through the efforts of the agent. The artist has unusual affinities for his materials; they are perceived as possess ing great intrinsic perceptual interest, so much so that in the case of the poet, for example, words are never flat stereotypes, but are capable of unusual transformations. ^84Ibid. . p. 115. 185Ibid.. p. 116. 188Art and the Social Order, p. 54. 99 Yet for Gotshalk, the artist has another peculiarity, and that is a keen interest and willingness to absorb the per ceptual world— the sounds, the colors, the motions, the 187 perceptible oddities of peoples. Using these percep tions, he shapes through the skein of his interests, powers, and satisfactions the work of art. The key terms of the creative process in the arts for Gotshalk are, then, a certain kind of agent and a certain type of material. In the training of the artist, Gotshalk made in dividual analysis of creativity different in concept from those discussed so far. From the beginning of his training, the artist is oriented toward "objective" creation. He is edu cated in the public materials and tools of his craft for production in terms of these tools and materials. The subjective phase is a mere step on the way, an inner spark for creating the public blaze. This projection in idea of such essentials or sketches is sufficient to release or reinvigorate the forces of objective production for fruitful effort and thus to discharge the incidental role in creation that the subjective phase usually pla/s.^®8 Sensitivity within the artist's inner consciousness is the point of contact; creative imagination is inward and secret to the artist. Gotshalk defined creative imagination as "the power to connect a multiplicity of assimilated items 187Jfrjfl., p. 55. 188ibifl., p. 69. 100 into a novel synthetical unity." 189 In this "psychic sym biosis," sensitivity reflects the subjective, symbolic phase of creation; imagination, the form, weaving "the symbols derived from sensitivity into designs of great suggestive- ..190 ness and power." the objective, material principle of creativity. And it is important to consider him carefully because he represents a theory of creativity not only appropriate in application to the study of oral interpretation, but also something of an antidote to the well-known and multitudinous studies of the subjective phase of creativity. These four elements of the material principle are based upon the assumption that every artistic material has its possibilities and limitations. Gotshalk conceded that the creative artist subjectively possesses antecedent knowledge of the peculiar possibilities and limitations of how the symbols might be represented materially; it is just as important to keep in mind, how ever, that artistic material has its own plastic and self- 191 determinate qualities. The importance of this fact. Gotshalk gave four reasons for the pre-eminence of 189Ibid.. p. 60. 191Ibid.. p. 69. 100 1.89 into a novel synthetical unity." In this "psychic sym biosis," sensitivity reflects the subjective, symbolic phase of creation? imagination, the form, weaving "the symbols derived from sensitivity into designs of great suggestive- ..190 ness and power." Gotshalk gave four reasons for the pre-eminence of the objective, material principle of creativity. And it is important to consider him carefully because he represents a theory of creativity not only appropriate in application to the study of oral interpretation, but also something of an antidote to the well-known and multitudinous studies of the subjective phase of creativity. These four elements of the material principle are based upon the assumption that every artistic material has its possibilities and limitations. Gotshalk conceded that the creative artist subjectively possesses antecedent knowledge of the peculiar possibilities and limitations of how the symbols might be represented materially? it is just as important to keep in mind, how ever, that artistic material has its own plastic and self- 191 determinate qualities. The importance of this fact, 189Ibid.. p. 60. 190Ibid.. p. 61. J - 9llbid.. p. 69. 101 Gotshalk enumerated. First, it accounts for the presence of certain mate rial, aesthetic properties in the creative process and product. Each artistic material . . . has its own nature, and as a result of this, each artistic material has its own intrinsic perceptual character istics. Even words . . . have peculiarities of physical appearance and sound and of feeling quality and sense, so that no one would mistake words [for another medium]. Second, the material principle of art accounts for the growth and use of technique in the creative proc ess. Since each material is different, different methods of handling it must be developed . . . Each material requires special technical processes. In the objective phase of creation, artistic technique might be described as the power to handle material in conformity with the inspiration of the artist and the functional aims of his work. Third, the material principle accounts for numerous changes in the course of the creative process from which emerge certain formal and expressive aesthetic qualities in the created project. [Fourth], the material principle is an important factor in the attainment by creation of many func tional aims and gains. Thus, the material principle is vitally instrumental in the attainment by the artist of certain private ends, e.g., the clarifica tion to himself by objectification of his inner aes thetic vision and the deep satisfaction, the thrill of mastery, the maturity of personality, the growth of technique, and the catharsis and other medicinal results which may also attend successful objectifi cation . 192 Gotshalk's principles of the objective phase of creation 192Ibid., pp. 70-75. 102 will be reflected later when the aesthetics of oral per formance are advanced. When Joseph Chiari, in writing of the "true" crea tive act, proposed that it "is an act of pure imagination taking place in a work in which all the materials used are 'recollected' in complete isolation from the perceptual 193 world," he was not only recalling the romantic movement of the nineteenth century, but he was, as well, taking a position directly opposite to that of Gotshalk. More strictly speaking, it represented the psychological ap proach, a theory of creativity which considers art as a kind of morphogenesis, lying somewhere on the boundary between conscious and subconscious faculties, voluntary and invol- 4. 1 9 4 ' untary acts. I have never been master of this work which proceeds from me. I did not select it; it imposed itself upon me. I do not add or curtail. All my labor con sists in giving it a body with the aid of materials at my disposal and the technique which I have learned. My mastery consists only in the use of these means. They subject me to necessities beyond the control of my will.195 193Reaiism an(j imagination (London: Barrie and Rockliff, 1960), p. 134. l94Lucien Rudrauf, "The Morphology of Art and the Psychology of the Artist," The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. XIII (September, 1954), 26. 195Ibid. 103 The psychological interpretation of creativity argues that any act of creativeness involves "the temporary paralysis of the surface functions and a longer or shorter reactivation 196 of more archaic and less differentiated functions." The source is the sub-conscious. . . . the sub-conscious is biography . . . the un conscious is biology. The contents of the sub conscious are acquired, but the structure of the un conscious is inherited. Thus in art, the subcon scious deals with only subject matter; whereas the unconscious, the instinct, can only deal with struc ture— Form. Art comes from this unspeakable level. Form is always king. The union between struc ture and subject matter can never be more than a morganatic affair.^-97 198 199 Arnold Hauser and E. M. Gombrich have sum marized, in the latter case perhaps definitively, the basic principles of the psychological-psychoanalytical theories of art. The well-known theory of the gratification of wishes and the tangible reality of illusions need no great expli cation here. Freud's concept of sublimation has been and l^Ehrenzweig, The Psycho-analysis of Artistic VAsa-pn and bearing, p. 18. 197Louis Danz, The Psychologist tooks at Art (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1937), p. 168. l98The Philosophy of Art- History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1959), p. 44. 199"Freud's Aesthetics," pp. 30ff. 104 continues to be one of the important additions to an under standing of the creative process. "Sensitivity and creative imagination are the basic powers of the subjective phase of creation. But twentieth-century approaches to the psy chology of art cover not merely the psycho-analytical and depth psychology schools. Thomas Munro cites fifteen dif ferent approaches alone in psychological research, including such diverse approaches as studies in creative imagination, semantics, cultural psychology, morphological and stylistic studies in the arts, Gestalt psychology, and theories of 201 personality, to mention but a few. What is of particular interest to aestheticians in the creative process and derivative of a psychological thrust is the personality of the artist and the role it plays in his creative efforts. What the artist creates is in a class by itself, quite unique to him in its combination of parts, a uniqueness which has been termed "the language 202 of the personality." In the subjective phase of 200Gotshalk, Art and the Social Order, p. 59. 201"The Psychology of Art: Past, Present, Future," The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. XXI (Spring, 1963), 263. 202Chaudhury, Studies in Aesthetics, p. vi. 105 203 creation, Gotshalk wrote that personality is the basic control factor, "modifying sensitivity and imagination, and 204 the symbolic material, the form and the expression." What the personality of the artist does, continued Gotshalk, is to affect profoundly the aesthetic "depth" of his crea tion. The personality is likened to the sound chamber or resonator in tone production: It serves as an amplifier or denudator of undertones and overtones of value. The result is an imaginative structure that is aesthetically subtle and rich or arid or commonplace05 Personality is particularly evident through the acquired sensitivity of symbolic material to such a degree "that certain material items in a work— tone clusters, lines, words, shapes, and so on--sometimes immediately and unmis- 2 06 takably signalize a particular artist." Another facet of psychological aesthetics is the psychological aspects of intent. An art object, reminds Augusto Centano, faces two ways: . . . towards its creator, thus becoming the 203Cf. with Gotshalk's "objective phase," supra. pp. 99-101. 204Art and the Social Order, p. 64. 205lbid.. p. 63. 206Ibid.. p. 62. 106 expression of one man's consciousness, intent; and toward innumerable possible spectators, all differing in individual, social, and historical qualities, extent.207 Centano then describes intent in terms of spiritual radia tion, energizing power, sensuous possessiveness: . . . it presupposes both separateness and non separation from real life; it accentuates livingness; it creates a sense of equilibrium between permanence and flux; it imparts a feeling of vicarious immor tality. The intent . . . subsumes both inspiration and conception.208 It is intent, believes Centano, which is the true sign of masterpieces; intent is so characterized because it arouses in the spectator a sense of wonder as to what was the full intent; thus, intent is the means by which two conscious nesses, two personalities meet. Artistic intent that cre ates the subtle, persuasive, and often on-going dialogue between artist and observer. Aestheticians appear to agree that the creative act is a process by which experience is taken in, held, evalu ated, and expressed. It is characterized by qualities of inventiveness, spontaneity, urgency, and emotionality. It 207Augusto Centano (ed.), The Intent of the Artist (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1941), p. 20. 208Ibld.. p. 21. 107 is a process which develops taste and judgment in the use of materials, but it is more significantly the capacity to respond to the inner consciousness. In these terms, crea tivity is subjective. Creativity is objective to the extent that it recognizes the plasticity and potentiality in ex ternal materials. Though the subjective attitude about creativity is generally regarded as the more important, the objective attitude emphasizes the responsibility on the part of the creative artist to respect his materials and their potentialities. The relevance of these two creative atti tudes for the study of oral interpretation can be appreci ated by the two-fold nature of the art of oral interpreta tion, the problems of the artist-interpreter and the art- literature to be performed. The interpreter's own subjec tive awareness of the creative intuitions, impressions, and apprehensions of his inner psychic life are in balance with the material and its expressiveness, form, style, and other aesthetic elements. The interpreter is at once both sub jective in the reaches of his emotional accessibilities and objective in the capacity he possesses to perceive the ele ments in the literature which give it its artistic and aesthetic merit. 108 Expression Expression is an act; an impression is the degree of response to the act by an observer. The literature ex presses; the interpreter has his impression of its import. The interpreter, in turn, expresses; the auditor gains his impression from the interpretive act. Thus, expression is a transaction between the artist and the observer; "expression [is] fundamental in both art creation and aesthetic contem- 209 plation." Tht; theory holds that the artist's feelings are revealed and expressed in the artistic creation; the creation itself is expressive in the sense that the observer experiences a certain "feel" to it. For instance, the theory would say that in a particular poem, there is ex pression; "emotion" is in the reader or listener to the poem. Theories of expression argue that the real work of art is an occurrence in experience, first in the expressive and creative acts of artists and secondly in the appreciative responses of audi ences. . . . [Works] of art are merely the inert mediators.210 Expression is creative . . . [but] the distinction between expression and creation lies not in different 209Garvin, "Emotivism, Expression and Symbolic Mean ing," p. 115. 210Jenkins, Art and the Human Enterprise, p. 104. 109 purposes that animate them, but in different inten sities of purposiveness with which they are carried on. Between expression and creation there is no radical change of intention, direction, or method. But there is a radical change in the seriousness with which we engage ourselves in the aesthetic quest and in the importance that we attach to the outcome. If we look for one quality to mark this transi tion it is perhaps most accurately located in the sense of responsibility and dedication that strongly characterizes creation and is largely absent from expression. This sense reaches in two directions: toward the subject matter that is being dealt with, and toward those who will be touched by the content that art conveys.211 The theory of expressionism attempts to distinguish between two things. On the one hand is the individual, the creator or the observer, who can say, "This is how I feel about such-and-such." On the other, there is the observa tion that can be made that "This is what such-and-such presents to a perceptive and conscientious human fee ling.1 1 Jenkins would argue that these two statements are signifi cantly different, and that the latter one is the correct 212 interpretation of expression. Recent theories of expression include a number of additional elements other than feeling itself. Among these would be the expression of the objectification of pleasure, of personality, of insight into reality, of portrayal of ^•^Ibid. . pp. 104-105. 212Ibid.. p. 100. 110 unadorned facts, and of a particular psycho-social 213 milieu. Whatever its proliferation, the doctrine arose in opposition to the theory of imitation. Not an imitation of reality, the intent of expressionism resides in psycho logical terms. Rather than an imitation of life, one could say that the artist, expressing his own emotion, feeling, and impressions, gives his audience intimations of life as seen uniquely by an artist. "Expression was conceived as an activity through which the person engaged in it took the originally chaotic and volatile flux of his experience and 214 rendered this articulate." Early proponents of the theory of expression were the Romantic poets; the theory itself was articulated by the French aesthetician Veron in his L'Estheticrue in 215 1878; it is found in Tolstoy's definition of art as the communication and expression of remembered emotion;^6 and the theory continues to enjoy a host of contemporary 213Qotshalk, Art and the Social Order. p. 39. 2l4Jenkins, Art and the Human Enterprise, p. 98. 215Munro, The Arts and Their Interrelations, p. 80. 216i,eo Tolstoy, What Is Art? and Other Essays on Art. trans. by Aylmer Maude (London: Oxford University Press, 1950). See Chapter I. 110 unadorned facts, and of a particular psycho-social 213 milieu. Whatever its proliferation, the doctrine arose in opposition to the theory of imitation. Not an imitation of reality, the intent of expressionism resides in psycho logical terms. Rather than an imitation of life, one could say that the artist, expressing his own emotion, feeling, and impressions, gives his audience intimations of life as seen uniquely by an artist. "Expression was conceived as an activity through which the person engaged in it took the originally chaotic and volatile flux of his experience and 214 rendered this articulate." Early proponents of the theory of expression were the Romantic poets; the theory itself was articulated by the French aesthetician Veron in his L*Esthetique in 215 1878? it is found m Tolstoy's definition of art as the communication and expression of remembered emotion?216 and the theory continues to enjoy a host of contemporary 213Qotshalk, Art and the Social Order, p. 39. 214Jenkins, Art and the Human Enterprise, p. 98. 215j4unro, The Arts and Their Interrelations, p. 80. 216Leo Tolstoy, What Is Art? and Other Essavs on Art. trans. by Aylmer Maude (London: Oxford University Press, 1950). See Chapter I. Ill proponents, the most influential of whom is probably Bene detto Croce, who will be examined in the following chapter. Croce's proposition is that "intuition-expression" has had an influence on contemporary aesthetics. Among those con sidered most in debt to Croce are R. G. Collingwood, E. F. 217 Carrrtt, and T. M. Greene, among others. Collingwood distinguished between the expression of an emotion and a description of it, and insisted, further, that they are not the same thing. To say "I am angry" is to describe one's emotion, not to express it. The words in which it is ex pressed need not contain any reference to anger as such at all. Indeed, so far as they simply and solely express it, they cannot contain any such reference.218 Expression individualizes and clarifies. The characteristic mark of expression proper is lucidity or intelligibility; a person who expresses something thereby becomes conscious of what it is that he is expressing, and enables others to become conscious of it in himself and in them. Turning pale and stammering is a natural accompaniment of fear, but a person who in addition to being afraid also turns pale and stammers does not thereby be come conscious of the precise quality of his emo tion. 2 19 217Beardsley, Classical Greece, p. 324. 218collingwood, Principles of Art. pp. 111-112. 219lkia., p. 121. 112 Confusion about expressionism leads, thought Collingwood, to false critical estimates as well as to a false aesthetic theory, and he supported his position with an example of an interpretative artist, in this case an actress. It is sometimes thought a merit in an actress that when she is acting a pathetic scene she can work herself up to such an extent to weep real tears. There may be some ground for that opinion if acting is not an art but a craft, and if the actress's ob ject in that scene is to produce grief in her audi ence; and even then the conclusion would follow only if it were true that grief cannot be produced in the audience unless symptoms of grief are exhibited by the performer. And no doubt this is how most people think of an actor's work. But if his business is not amusement but art, the object at which he is aiming is not to produce a preconceived emotional effect on his audience but bv means of a system of expressions, or language, composed partly of speech and partly of gesture, to explore his own emotions? to discover emotions in himself of which he is un aware. and bv permitting the audience to witness the discovery about themselves. In that case it is not her ability to weep real tears that would mark out a good actress? it is her ability to make it clear to herself and her audience what the tears are about.220 Expressionism, thus described, is an infection, or an in- fectional communication. When Collingwood asked, "Since the artist proper has something to do with emotion, and what 221 he does with it is not to arouse it, what is it he does?" 220Ibid. (italics mine). 221Ikid., P. 109. 113 he answered in terms of process and spontaneity of that process. A person arousing emotion sets out to affect his audience in a way in which he himself is not neces sarily affected. He and his audience stand in quite different relations to the act, very much as physi cian and patient stand in quite different 'relations towards a drug administered by the one and taken by the other. A person expressing emotion, on the con trary, is treating himself and his audience in the same kind of way? he is making his emotions clear to his audience, and that is what he is doing to himself.222 From this analysis Collingwood concluded that the expression of an emotion, simply as an expression, is not addressed to any particular audience. "It is addressed primarily to the speaker himself, and secondarily to anyone who can under- 223 stand." 224 E. F. Carritt first noted that a distinction should be made between imagination or inspiration and craft or technique. Craft, though brilliant, without imagination or inspiration is imitation; imagination without articula- 225 tion remains mute. Like Collingwood, Carritt found it difficult to express the processive nature of expression. 222Ibid.. p. 110. 223Ibid. 224An Introduction to Aesthetics. 225Ibid.. p. 62. 114 This difficulty arose, he thought, because the word is usu ally employed to denote expression to another person. How can expression be communicated in a reflexive sense?: ". . . there is no other single word in our language to de- 226 note what merely occurs, expression to oneself." In effect Carritt asked, "Why is it that few people can create artistically on a large scale without externalization?" And here we are returned to the first distinction made in this paragraph, namely that there must be a distinction between a "sense of artistic creation" and craft or technique. A great composer might be a poor executant, and before writing was invented a great poet who was a poor reciter would have been no better off. The distinction is usually drawn that whereas the mere craftsman works to a pattern or specification . . ., the creative artist does not know how his creation will turn out till it is completed but then sees that it is good. He may know that he wants to ex press a feeling, but until he has expressed to him self he only feels it, he does not, so to speak, appreciate it or discriminate it . . . Yet it re mains a fact that artistic creation discovers its aim only, if ever, in the achievement, which may or may not require the aid of some materials upon which to experiment and record . . . But once this internal expression has been perfected, its commu nication, however difficult or impossible, would be a matter of craft; we should know already what it is required to do.227 Carritt has special interest for the interpretative artist 226IM£., P. 61. 227IMd., p. 62. 115 because as an aesthetician, he is interested in the expres sive qualities of the human voice. In the voice's timbre, pitch, accent, and language, it is the touch of genius that makes the voice expressive, not wholly lacking, perhaps, to any man who is capable both of deep feeling and of reflection, which devi ates, if only by intonation, alike from mere groans and growls and from the stereotyped formulas of rage or sorrow into expression.228 Carritt believed that if the term expression is used with reluctance, it is due to the confusion of expres sion with three other things: symptom or sign, symbol, and 229 stimulus or argument. Expression cannot be a rigid sys tem of formulae, and to test rigidity, Carritt suggested that we ask ourselves three questions. (1) Do all men use the same signs of emotion, express the same symptoms? (2) Do all men respond alike to the same symbols? (3) How can men respond artistically to "expressive" propaganda? Nothing, Carritt emphasized, is so poisonous to the inten sity and purity of the aesthetic experience "as the feeling 230 that an artist has palpable designs upon us." 228Ibid.. p. 57. 230I32id., p . 5>. 229Ibid.. p. 56. 116 231 Theodore M. Greene, who admitted his indebtedness to Croce's "eloquent insistence on the preeminent importance 232 of expression," argued that a wholly expressive work of art is a contradiction in terms. Even the craftsmanship, dichotomized by Collingwood and Greene from expression, may, in Greene's opinion, possess redeemable aesthetic satisfac tions, though the delight will be in technical proficiency 233 and "mean" nothing. Aesthetic content is expressed con tent and deals with "man's emotive connotative response to 234 the natural things around him." In literature, for example, expression is what we commonly associate with "lyrical," whether in prose or verse. The lyrical element is present in proportion to two things: (i) as it deals primarily with the feelings and emo tions of either a single individual or a group of individuals who are united by common sentiments and ideals, and (ii) as these feelings and emotions are dealt with chiefly for their own sake and expressed with unusual vividness. . . . The lyrical emphasis, however, falls less on what has occasioned the emo tions than on the emotions themselves,235 Gotshalk argued that there are instrumental values to the theory of expression in three respects: to the 231Art of Criticism. 232lMfiL, p. 125. 233Hiid. 234Ibid.. p. 183. 235Ibid.. p. 181. 117 materials, to the form, and to the function of the work of 236 art. For example, the value of expression to the mate rials is revealed by the interpretative artist, such as an actor, who can take words that upon a casual reading may appear ordinary and undistinguished and interpret them with vibrancy and vitality. In respect to form, Gotshalk turned to opera and noted that "the expression of massive desire in a passage of Wagnerian love music may make more intelli- 237 gible and more endurable its lengthy labyrinthine form." And as to function, the expressiveness of the artist helps a work to carry out its function, its purpose. Gotshalk sais these values of expression revealed the "intrinsic forms," or what in the field of oral interpretation is called the intrinsic values. In a piece of music, the abstract expressiveness: the complex moods and movements, the aspirations and shades of feeling; or, in a drama, the wealth of concrete expressiveness: the particular ten sions and emotions, the individual characters and insights, as well as the haunting overtones of meaning that may be brought by suggestion to the attention of the percipient.238 There was to Gotshalk's thinking a range of expression. 236cotshalk, Art and the Social Order. pp. 145-146. 237Ibid.. p. 146. 238Ibid.. p. 82. 118 At the outermost point of expression are universal abstrac tions, suggestions of general properties and attributes which lead somewhat inexplicably from sensory qualities to philosophical considerations. For example, in dance he noted the properties of weight and lightness, thrust, rising and falling, etc.; in music, gaiety, yearning, power, etc.; in painting, terror, bleakness, loneliness, etc.; in archi tecture, dignity, power, caprice, etc. As well as express ing universal abstractions, an artist might give expression to an age, a social milieu. And then, of course, the ex pression of the artist's personal discoveries of feeling could be communicated. Whatever the range, expression in art awakens the imagination and gives a content to art 239 beyond what is merely sensed or intuited. There are certain types of works of art which must be interpreted in order to express the feelings embodied in them. A poem has to be read, silently or orally; a musical composition has to be played; a play has to be produced. Hence, it would be true that the performance or interpretation of a work, or the conditions under which it is seen or heard, can be said to be expressive or inexpressive, i.e., to be or not to be conducive to the expression by the 239ibid.. p. 139. 119 work of the artist's feeling or emotions. The work as interpreted can also be said to be expressive or 240 xnexpressive. Haig Khatchadourian would have one keep in mind, however, that there are several reservations about the ex pression theory, reservations that bear directly upon the problems of the interpretative artist. First, he would ask, does a feeling remain unchanged through a creative process? It may be true, he argued, that an artist may create under the stress of an emotion, but do all artists? Are all artists romantic? A work, too, may change its feeling as the artist progresses. Under that condition of flux, what is expressed? Consider, second, he suggested, the problem of intention. What a work reveals about the artist’s in tention is only inferrable from it and is seldom set forth 241 explicitly. George Santayana once remarked that ex pressiveness is a most accidental matter: "What a line suggests at one reading, it may never suggest again, even 242 to the same person." 240naig Khatchadourian, "The Expression Theory of Art: A Critical Evaluation," The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. XXIII (Spring, 1965). 241Ibid. See pp. 340-352 for a detailed criticism of expression theory. 242Reason in Art. p. 67. 120 Expression individualizes and clarifies by intima tion what emotional life is; this intimation is not an imi tation. Expression is lucid and intelligible; it is not vague and lacking in control. The theory of expression is sometimes identified as "romantic" because of the primacy it places upon emotional life. Those aestheticians sympathetic with the theory of expression link it closely with intui tion. Expression remains free of any attempt to categorize it into expressive systems of gestures, rigid systems of expressive symbols. Expressionism stresses the individual ity of each artist's personal discoveries of feeling. To the oral interpretation of literature, the theory of ex pression is valuable to the degree that the individual in terpreter trusts himself to be expressive without affecting cliched symbols of emotion through tone of voice, gesture, stance. The theory of expression is a valuable critical tool for assessing originality of emotional articulation in literature. Language ag art (posses) Poesis is the use of language for artistic purposes. Traditionally, the term is akin to the adjective "poetic," describing a quality of statement. In an equational sense, 121 poesis is literature; in an aesthetic sense, the use of language for aesthetic purposes, for the creation and ex pression of feeling. It suggests the qualitative use of language, the creative selection of words, the expressive content of thought. 243 Arnold Isenberg isolated the peculiar paradox of language as an object for aesthetic contemplation. He argued that if the "aesthetic object" is purely sensuous, language cannot be an aesthetic object, because language is not purely sensuous. However, he reminded us, and as it has been developed to this point in this study, an aesthetic object is purely sensuous. A non-sensuous object, he re iterated, cannot be directly perceived and enjoyed; and what is not directly perceived and enjoyed is not aesthetic. Yet we live with the knowledge and we live with the fact that 244 language is, or can be, an aesthetic object. The struc ture of the mind, not the logic of the language, resolves the paradox. Isenberg argued that the aesthetic attitude is indifferent to an arbitrary distinction between imagination 243mThe Esthetic Function of Language," The Journal of Philosophy. XLVI (January 6, 1949), 5. 244isenberg1s argument has been followed here vir tually verbatim. See ibid.. p. 5. 122 and sensation; this is borne out by the fact that an in dividual is able to hold before his direct attention images, theories, systems, even worlds which are structures often so complex, so elaborate in depth and gestalt, that a sense 245 perception, in and of itself, could not comprehend them. What is aesthetic in language is the feeling-response the individual obtains from it, literally what he holds in his mind as a construct from the engagement with the literature. Though language itself is not sensuous like other aesthetic materials, it is evocative because of its imagery, however 246 eccentric and however fragmentary that imagery may be. There is yet another distinctive aesthetic function of language, and it has to do with meaning. It is in the nature of language, Isenberg suggested, to stimulate the percipient to contemplate on suggestive "half truths." Of these "half truths," he stated, You may admit that in many cases they are demon strably false; you may admit that they frequently contradict one another, but when you are asked how in that case they can be one and all accepted as valuable, you will be tempted to reply that they are contributions— that they contain or suggest valuable truths— and to conceive their authors as collaborating on the single structure of knowledge 245Ibid.. p. 8. 246Ibid.. p. 12. 123 247 and wisdom. Language has two aesthetic elements, according to Santayana. Music, or euphony, constitutes one; poetry, or "playful expression," constitutes the other. Euphony and laws of phonetics "are principles governing language without any reference to its meaning; here speech is still a sort of 248 music." Santayana also pointed out that in language where "absolutely nothing is rhetorical and speech is de nuded of every feature not indispensable to its symbolic 249 role," one is confronted with a kind of "ultimate prose," the kind of prose one expects in mathematical reasoning or a clipped telegraphic style. Between these two extremes lies the broad field of poetry, or rather the imaginative or playful expres sion, where the verbal medium is a medium, indeed, having a certain transparency, a certain reference to independent facts, but at the same time elabo rates the fact expressing it. . . .250 Even the structure of the sentence, indeed of the language, moves, in Santayana's opinion, toward an intimation of the structure of things. 247Ibid.. p. 16. 248Santayana, Reason in Art. pp. 57-65. 249Ibid., P. 57. g50Ibid. 124 We distinguish the parts of speech, for instance, in subservience to distinctions we make in ideas. The feeling or quality represented by an adjective, the relation indicated by a verb, the substance or con cretion of qualities designated by a noun, are diver sities growing up in experience, by no means attrib utable to the mere play of sound. The parts of speech are therefore representative. Their inflection is representative, too, since tense marks important practical differences in the distribution of the events described, and cases express the respective roles played by objects in the operation.251 The "art" in language, according to Santayana, is language's spontaneousness. Language does not reflect upon emotion; it becomes emotion perhaps even before it has adequately ad justed to things external, or before it has been reduced "to 252 its own echo rebounding from a refractory world." The literary quality of language derives in part from its resi due in music; this medium of language and its intrinsic 253 spontaneous development make the essence of art. For Santayana the importance of language is the median it can establish between the barest symbolism and the most florid expansion, the mastery and control of which remain with the artist. Language is the aesthetic of sound and sense. 254 In Art and the Artist. Otto Rank noted that not g5^Ibid.. p. 59. ^5^Ibid.. p. 65. g53Ibid.. p. 61. New York: Tudor Publishing Company, 1932. 125 only was language the probable beginning of artistic crea tion, but has remained, perhaps, its finest achievement and 255 highest peak of artistic extension and symbolization. Rank argued that language is that form of art known as imi tation because it can only be endowed with the same intent as other forms of imitation, that intent being to identify 2 56 itself with what it imitates. Because all art aims at a substitution, and not a duplication of what it imitates, language achieves through its artistic usage an independent existence. By creating, man makes himself independent of that which exists, or at least he makes a very consider able effort to do soy so far as speech is concerned we can see in it name-magic.2^7 "Name-magic," Rank asserted, is rooted in the metaphor, which from a theoretical point of view is the basis of lan guage and its formulation. He argued, too, that there exists the possibility that language was originally gesture and therefore soundless. Gestural or vocal, whatever the genesis, his argument for the aesthetic of language is that the development of it is rooted in the element of imitation 255Ibid.. p. 255. 257Ibid. 256Ibid.. p. 240. being used for explanation. 126 [The] spoken word seems to be influenced by the hand and the language of gesture, far more deeply than one imagines, and the study of primitive language and its social milieu in particular is convincing as to all language-formation being derived in part from the hand and its expressive movements . . . [in] any case the mouth in itself originally pos sessed only a physioplastic expressiveness, whereas probably all genuine naming and certainly all verbal description of activity derive from the sphere of the hand.259 R. P. Blackmur made his argument for "language as gesture" from much the same theoretical base. "Gesture in language," he stated, "is the outward and dramatic play of 26 0 inward and imaged meaning." Gesture is the language manifested; not clarified, not equated, but a synthesized fusion of communication. Gesture is "what moves the words 26 X and what moves us." Language conceived as such a psycho- physiological entity "constitutes the revelation of the sum or product of all the meanings possible within the focus of 262 the words played upon. ..." With the gestural imita tion of words and the verbal imitation of gesture, there but 258Ibid■. pp. 236-237. 259Ibid.. p. 249. 288Languacre as Gesture (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1952), p. 6. 261Ibifl. 262Ibid.. p. 19. 127 remains the "great gesture" of what we ourselves are. The significance of poetry lies in the attempt by the artist to laden words with the distillate meaningfulness of the dual psycho-physical resourcefulness of language. John M. Thorburn, from yet another approach, argued 26 3 that language is the form of consciousness, that is, if we think of language as the manner in which we give sub stance to intellectual and practical powers. Even so, Thorburn observed, most of us tend to feel that poetry, as one form, tends to nullify those same intellectual and practical faculties. And then he concluded, Sometimes in poetry we are bound to say, the intel lect is subservient to a non-intellectual intention; and if this subservience be a real quality of poetry anywhere, must it not be everywhere?^4 What the language of poetry evokes is an image; using an image within the mind of the percipient results in phantasy. "Our cue as to the nature of images lies in the fact of their being, in some sense, or to some extent, of the 265 past." Imagination and its emotional concomitants direct the individual toward the future. For example, Thorburn 263ftrt and the Unconscious (London: Kegan, Paul, French, and Truener & Co , Ltd., 1925). 264Sfrid., p. 17. 265Ibid.. p. 47. 128 cited the musician, who "in his images of sounds tends rather towards the imagination of sounds that he would like to hear than towards those which merely repeat his musical that the imagination moves itself, and it is this unusual capacity of the imagination that makes of it a wider term than image. Language is image-bearing? imagination is image-amplifying. The artist's creation of the image has, from the psycho-analytical aesthetic, a particular inter pretation for Thorburn. He declared that where perception takes place freely and without hindrance there is no need for images. "Images arise when we cannot perceive or cannot 267 effect an immediate sensational contact." The dream, for example, reaching us from the depths of subconsciousness, "would be that image or combination of images that lay 268 furthest from the reality of sense." Art, then, becomes a struggle for expression, for articulation, and language in literature is the image-bearing means to that end. As Thorburn suggested the forward, anticipatory thrust of the image through words, J. M. Greene argued for experience of the past." 266 It is towards "possibilities" 287Ibid.. p. 54. 268Ibid.. p. 55. 129 the reality orientation which images impose. The reproductive imagination . . . revives in memory our immediate, coercive sense-perceptions of the concrete objects themselves in all *-heir concrete individuality. Hence, words which arouse sensuous images in our minds bring us back to physical reality with unrivalled directness and immediacy.269 His analysis is developed thus: images, he stated, are the echoes of the first-hand contacts which an individual has with the outer world. They do not tend to be "conceptual" because conceptualization is an intellectual attempt to render definitions such as found in dictionaries; they could be "rmagistic" in meaning, that is, visual or auditory or tactile and immediately apprehended; they could be, too, "emotive-conative" in meaning, for this variety of meaning is the kind weighted with overtones which arouse emotions 270 and attitudes within the percipient. Greene reiterated that the primary medium of litera ture is words in meaningful relation to one another. They have, on the one hand, a sensuous aspect, for they are the audible sounds to which are assigned visible symbols in all civilized languages. But these sounds (and visible signs) also have idea tional meanings. These meanings, in turn, are in essence conceptual, but they may also be, in 269(3reene^ Art of Criticism, p. 106. 27QIbid. , p. 103. 130 addition, imagistic, emotional, and conative. The relation of sensory symbol and ideational meaning are arbitrary (save in the case of onomatopoeia), since meanings become attached to signs by fiat or convention. The meaning of the verbal symbol must therefore be learned, and only through translation does such a symbol become intelligible.27^ The power of words in literature is such, Greene insisted, that the verbal medium is much more extensive and varied 272 than that of any of the other arts. He stated that lit erature can convey every type of human experience and com municate every type of object. He admitted that it has expressive as well as representational limitations. But what language cannot represent literally, it possesses the power to conjure for the imagination, "and what it cannot directly evoke by sound alone it can evoke by its own meth- 273 ods of indirection." Because literature possesses such a complex primary medium, Greene noted that its secondary medium of affect is far richer than any of the other ^ 274 arts . Greene also had pertinent observations about the verbal tonality of language; he noted the aesthetic sig nificance of the spoken word. 271lbid.. P- 37. 272Ibid.. p. 38. 273ibid. 274Ibid. 131 Words as uttered, whether vocally or sub-vocally, and whether singly or in combination, are sensuous patterns of sound whose timbre, pitch, intensity, and duration constitute, in conjunction with inter vening pauses, the basis of metrical rhythm and make possible that "musical quality" of the spoken word which is so essential to all genuine literary excellence. It is to be noted that, even in common speech, this factor contributes in two ways to inter-subjective communication: first, as directly expressive of emotive and conative meaning (as in ejaculations of joy, and anger, and pain); and secondly, by clarifying the symbolic meaning of the words. Words spoken in a monotone without inflec tion or cadence are much harder to understand than words spoken rhythmically, with suitable variations of pitch, etc.275 276 Louis Reid in his A Study in Aesthetics developed at some length the aesthetic expressiveness of words. Un like other arts where the focus of attention is on the per ceived object, poetry calls attention to the meanings of words, their images, etc. By calling attention to meanings and images, words fall into a background, or form a comple- 277 ment of sound. In his opinion, the aesthetic expressive ness of words can be derived in two ways, directly and in directly . Examples of direct sensuous apprehension are of 275Ibid.. p. 107. 27^New York: Macmillan Company, 1939. 277Ibid.. p. 108. 132 words in which the percipient takes delight in sounds and forms of sounds. It is certain that the aesthetic value of words is never merely their sound value, but these values can be sufficiently striking to enable us to put in a separate class words in which intrinsic forms and sound-values are marked. In this class would come words, spoken expressively, like Acroceraun- iaa, Chorasmian. Kubla Khan, plangent. tinsel- slipper1d. feet, amaranth. The purest— but not necessarily the most striking— examples would prob ably be those taken from some unknown foreign lan guage, for there conventional associations would be at a minimum.278 The first method of indirection, the sensuous and formal qualities of words, whether or not they are com pletely psychologically fused, stems from the relevant associations given to words by their sounds and forms. "One invariable value associated with the spoken word is the 279 value of the human voice," he stated. He stressed the voice's capacity to embody and suggest the complexity of personality, character, elan. The music of the orchestra may have more variety of resource; the organic thrill which it produces is probably greater; but the speaking voice may move us in a way in which the orchestra cannot do. And, in this respect, too, the spoken word may have an advantage even over song.288 278Ibid.. p. 109. 279Ibid. 133 Reid argued that the direct musical values of song must be placed over the music of words, but he also noted that what is often gained in musical value is lost in human expres siveness. He gave the example of "0 my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! Would God I had died for thee, 0 Absalom, my son, my son!" Here the aesthetic value lies very largely in the associative expressiveness of the depths of human experience through the human voice. Anguish, sor row, vengeance, inspired contempt— all can be im pressed into the music almost of monotone. Nothing can be more poignant in this way than the spoken word.281 He pointed out, too, that the sounds of words by their association can impart the values of the things which the sounds suggest. The phrase "The unplumb'd, salt, estranging sea" suggests in the very resonance and length and full ness and contrasts of its sounds— as distinct from the conventional meanings of the words— the quali ties of mystery and distance and depth and estrange ment.^8^ Reid contended that the associations given to words by com mon agreement and convention make them, as words, per se, relatively unimportant. He perceived words in this denota- tional capacity as "pointers" of fused meaning, sound, and 28^Ibid. . p. 110. ^82Ibid.. p. 111. 134 feeling. Where the expressive use of words is most typical is in poetry. Words are the fundamental medium of poetry, and even though images may sometimes occupy the focus of our attention, the word-sounds, with all their expressive ness, must at least be harmonized with the images. It is impossible to think of any single instance of description in poetry where beauty is wholly due to the objects described. If the image is beautiful, the poet, it would seem, naturally tends to use fit ting words.^ When Reid defined the aesthetic experience as a "process of growing life which only reaches rest and satisfaction in an object sufficiently complex to be interesting to a vital 284 mind-and-body, an object which is yet unified," he found considerable instrumentality for this experience through the aesthetic medium of language, a medium which, augmented by the human voice, carries the expressiveness of experience. Poesis is the act of using words in time, and often audible time, in the same way sculpting is the act of chiseling or shaping raw materials, or painting the act of taking solidified colors and applying them to a surface of some kind. Poesis, from an aesthetic consideration, is the use of a very precise medium, language, to affect a sensa tion of sensations, Jacques Maritain called the act of 283Ibid.. p. 112. 284Ibid.. p. 113. 135 poesis "poetic experience" and would have it known as "a brooding repose which takes place in the center of the soul and in which the world and subjectivity are obscurely known 285 together in a non-conceptual manner." Eliseo Vivas maintained that the function of poesis is organizational in that it utilizes the primary data of experience that can be illuminated in and through words. What poetry uniquely does is to reveal a world which is self-sufficient. It does not communicate in the ordinary sense of the term, nor does it imitate or designate existent or imaginary things which can be apprehended independently of the poem. By means of the self-sufficient world that poetry reveals we are able to grasp, as the poem lingers in memory as redo lence, the actual world in which we live. Without the aid of poetry our ambient world remains an in choate, unstructured chaos.288 He clarified this view by maintaining that poetry is not, to use his word, "ostensive." That is, Vivas continued, the "object" poetry reveals yields no discernible existential status independent of that language which reveals it, and, 287 further, it has no status in space and time. This point of view will be in marked contrast, it should be noted, to 285The Responsibility of the Artist (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1960), p. 101. 286creation and Discovery, p. 73. 287Ibid.. p. 134. 136 the thesis that it is precisely "time" which literature does take as a medium, but it would be safe to suggest that Vivas' abolition of time and space was his way to establish ing poesis as independent of the reader's time and space, or, the other way around, suggesting that poesis contains itself uniquely. This uniqueness, he argued, is evident in any attempt to paraphrase which might be called "poetic content" into prose. "What is a poem about?" is not only an intelligible question but one to which a partial answer can be given. We can supply a paraphrase of the poem. The paraphrase is not the object and cannot exhaustively point to it, it is merely a means by which a reader can be helped to find the object. 8 Vivas expanded his definition of poesis by suggest ing that poetry says what it means by something quite dif ferent from the language of science and practical communica tion. "What poetry says or means," he wrote, "it says in 289 and through its language." Through language it refers to an object that can also be referred to by means of a more or less carefully contrived paraphrase. In its language the poem says something by means of the linguistic aspect of the language as such, and not of those aspects of the language which the reigning theory recognized as carrying the semantic and pragmatic dimension of meaning.298 288Ibid. 289Ibid.. p. 80. 137 Vivas stressed the "in-ness" of language, the inherent, the irreducibles, the sense or meaning of words in which the poetic meaning has its locus in the language itself, self- 291 contained. This concept constituted Vivas' argument for the communication of a poem by what he called intransitiv ity. Give the animal the ability to constitute the world by means of language and release him for a minute only from the urgency of animal needs that demand peremptory satisfaction, and he discovers the world an object worthy of intransitive attention, even if all he is able to look at is the maple that turned red last night or the leaping deer whose jump is effortless. Let him play with this new ability of his, and he will discover that in the intrinsic resources of the language as language, in its musi cal quality, in its rhythms and cadences, there is no less power of revelation than in the language's function merely to denote, and through metaphor, in the usual sense of this term, to enrich that which it denotes. Let a man reject the symbol and he rejects the world. This is what I mean when I say that poetry gives us the world in and through its linguistic means.292 293 "The language sought," Vivas said, "must fit the object." But, on the other hand, he argued, the object is not dis covered until the language is found, and this he simply called "fitness." "... the relation to which the word 291Ibid. 293Ibid.. p. 135. 292Ibid.. p. 83. 138 refers is as readily evident to the trained reader as it is 294 to the poet." The perception of fitness is what he called "aesthetic grasp." An aesthetic grasp is a grasp of informed substance. It is the manner in which the grasp is achieved that makes it aesthetic, not what is grasped.^95 The value of poetry for the intransitive moment of appre hension culminates in what Vivas termed the epiphany, an illumination through consent to the linguistic apperception of the knowledge of the poem, not the knowledge the reader knows of a reality. Vivas began with the word as key. Chiari pointed out that experience is the "unicity" of art, and the essential meaning for him of poesis is 296 . . fluidity and variability. In its unicity, art excludes those logical and rational meanings attached to words, and appeals, rather, to apprehensive universalities peculiar to people belonging to the same civilization. Pushing his argument to a value judgment, Chiari maintained that poetic truth is not only more readily apprehensible, it is more complete than rational truth. 294Ibid. 295vivas, The Artistic Transaction, p. 88. 296Chiari, Realism and Imagination, p. 126. 139 It is more apprehensible because it is based on particulars and on perceptual phenomena more ac cessible to the average individual sensibility; and it is more complete because it has not been processed by analyses and conceptualizations in order to be distilled into rational language; it is given, not as data intended to fit within the existing categories of the mind, but as a concrete radio-active entity whose reactions have the power to cause transformations and to bring life new elements and new experiences. The funda mental aspect of poetic truth, which is above all the apprehension of the essential relations of things, is not altered by time.297 Chiari put emotion rather than sentiment as fundamental to poesis. Sentiment, he argued, makes only ditties and sen timental songs; sentiments, to become poetic, have to be transmuted by imagination, "and that means that they have to be fully integrated by an individuating sensibility in- 298 eluding, of course, reason . . ." He meant the power of intellection to shape, to give form, to emotion. Paul Weiss, in developing what is unique for him in the artful use of language, noted the use of time. A musical composition creates a new time by imposing order on an emotionally sustained common time. A story creates a new time by supplementing a mixture of common times with a time produced by the interplay of incident and character. A poem, in contrast with both, creates a new time in a new created language.299 297Ibid.. p. 125. 298Ibid.. p. 62. 299Nine Basic Arts (Carbondale, 111.; Southern Illinois University Press, 1961), p. 149. 140 The point of view he developed differs from some of the viewpoints examined thus far, and in other ways synthesizes others. He differed with Vivas on the poetic concept of time; poesis is inevitably linked to time, he reasoned, by its use of words, grammar, and silences, all three of which, but the last particularly, are matters of time. He argued that common time is replaced by poetic time with only "resonances" left of commonly perceived time.^^ The poet uses the two times as contrasts, one against the other. The poe-*- is aware of common time as a counter move ment inside his created work . . . He must never allow common time of daily language to have any but a minor role; but also he must never try to eradi cate it completely. If the first occurs, his poem is banal; if the second, he fails to communicate.301 In the reading of a poem there is a revitalization of the 302 "vivid time which the poet created," and this idea sug gests that the reader should begin near where the poet did in time, and move with him. Time, Weiss continued, is not linear; it exists in varying "thicknesses." These thick nesses are likened to dips and swells and are manifested in the poem by form and its accoutrements of accent and rhyme, 300Ibid. 302Ibid.. p. 151. 3Q1Ibid.. p. 150. 141 303 B ta n z a and s t r o p h e . "D id tim e m e r e ly f lo w , had x t no breaks, it could not be enjoyed. One would be swept along 304 by it, at sea, disoriented and discommoded." The un broken line of the poem's continuity is its meter, because, he reasoned, "Metre promotes a purchase on the poem, for without breaking the poem's continuity it spaces it and 305 thereby paces it." Further, the txme of daily life possesses an external past, but though the poem was created, it exists in the present, affecting the future of the reader or perceiver. But perhaps most importantly, poesis is a time created by man, and the purpose of the creation is to convey the quality of that time, its dullness, smoothness, 3 06 its "grain" in quality, structure, pace, and beat. "Un read, the poem is sheer structure, a formal time; read, it 307 has the urgency and boundaries of a unitary event." A poem is a substantial mass of words and silences, terms and connectives, movements and rests, the lyrical and prosaic. It is opaque time, a created time embodied in a newly created language. It is a solid, completed whole of time, with a distinctive grain, rhythm, and pace. Nevertheless, like every other work of art, the poem is revelatory primarily of some dimension of existence, and secondarily of the poet, his ideas and ideals, the prevailing myths, 303Ibid.. p. 158. 306ibid.. p. 159. 3Q4Ibid. 305Ibid. 307Ibid.. p. 158. and the social goods at which these point. Weiss agreed with Vivas in the linguistic importance of every word, the meanings of which are created by the poet. "The daily language is a condition which is allowed to reverberate in the new language which that daily language has made possible. Every poem tells a lie, for it changes the form, meaning, and role of the words which we use when we speak truthfully in ordinary life. In a deeper sense, every poem tells more truth than daily dis course permits, since even when it sings of routine things, it reveals what existence is in itself, for the poet, and what it promises all of us. Wisps of old meanings cling to the poet's words. Depending on the side of existence to which they were attached or with what dark or light words they were associ ated, the words in a poem are themselves light or dark.310 Weiss concurred in the universal view that the language of the poet is primarily emotional, but he considered that the intuitions latent in the ideas expressed are subordinated time factors which color time with emotions. He advanced that for the poet, each focal term in his poem has intertwined roles supplementing its emotionally charged meanings. Each term has a role in daily language, and each 3Q8Ibid.. p. 149. 310Ibid.. p. 152. 3Q9Ibid.. p. 150. 143 acts to relate us to existence. Critics are in clined to attend mainly to meanings; paraphrasers note the daily values of the words; sentimentalists lose themselves in the relation. But all belong together. The meanings, daily values, and the re lation are not isolatable in the poem; a poem is not a set of meanings or a report. It becomes whatever it conveys to anyone who is sensitive and experienced, and knows how to read a poem.3^ He concluded by warning that we lose the value of a poem and the value it has for us "if we refuse to accept it on its own terms, and thus if we forget that the time of the 312 poem is real time verbally displayed." The art of using language is the art of poesis. As a literary act, it employs language. How language functions in this manner is a point of wide speculation among various aestheticians. It has been argued that language is a feel ing response symbolized differently from other art forms in that it has no tangibility; it does not exist as an external object. Other aestheticians have called attention to lan guage's euphony and expressive elements, often latent with gestural elements, or signifying or symbolizing expressive gestures of human communication. Still others have argued that the construct of art in language, poesis, is the imagination, and the images expressed in language express 311Ibid.. p. 157. 312Ibid.. p. 167. 144 limitless possibilities of the inner man, amplifying and clarifying feeling and intuition. These images are emotive- connotative in value and not rational explications of thought. Language and its evocative images are, thus, pointers or indicators fusing meaning, sound, and feeling. Poesis, from an aesthetic position, is apprehensive know ledge, an indication of the "reverberations" of experience as felt in the inner life of writers. It would appear that aestheticians would justify the oral interpretation of literature, for from the considerations listed above, it would be the interpreter extending sound and euphony, ges ture, emotive states, and presenting the fusion of meaning, sound and feeling which would complete the basic purpose of poesis. JVorm Form, in the study of the oral interpretation of literature, is usually studied as the "form of the litera ture." That is, form is literary form: a ballad, a sonnet, a short story, a drama, etc. The question remains from an aesthetic point of view that if oral interpretation is an art, does it have its own form? The answer is yes. Most writers of texts in oral interpretation suggest this 145 themselves when writing of delivery. Rather than employing the term "form," however, they write of stvle in delivery. Style, in contemporary oral interpretation texts, is sug gestiveness rather than impersonation, the condition of inner and active mimetic appreciation rather than a display of outward imitative behavior. From an aesthetic point of view these distinctions are matters of taste and not matters of form, except, naturally, if form be used to mean "proper behavior." The purpose of this section is to determine if aesthetics can help clarify the matter of form in the art of oral interpretation. Bernard Bosanquet attempted to establish general principles of form that would apply to any art. He noted that form suggests by its semantic usage outline, shape, or a general and guiding rule, such as rules for putting an argument or sentence together. Or, he continued, form can suggest the metre in poetry, or the type of poem, sonnet, ballad, etc. But when you push home your insight into the order and connection of parts, not leaving out the way in which this affects the parts themselves, then you find that the form becomes . . . "very mate rial"; not merely outlines and shapes, but all the sets of gradations and variations and connections that make anything what it is— the life, soul, and movement of the object. And more than this, every form, which you might be inclined to contrast with 146 matter, has behind it a further form in the matter itself? for this determines, as we say, "what you can do with it," . . . the order and connection of the parts of these stuffs are a form which deter mines the more artificial shape you can give them, say, in the works of art.3- * - 3 Bosanquet's point is simply that in any art, be it the art of sculpture or literature, there exist myriad levels of elements which are knit together in a very complex way, "until the feeling which they demand is such as to occupy the whole powers of the greatest mind, and more than these 314 if they were to be had." These elements constitute the "education" in art, i.e., those separate elements which constitute the form? however, the knowledge of parts does not necessarily create the artist, as is universally con ceded. Reid suggested that form in art has three identi fiable meanings, among many that could be enumerated. The first which he identified is "body," the "what" that is given a sensory substance or suggestion. The second con struing of form is exemplified by those elements known as the "formal elements." In literature, this is the rhythm 3^ - 3Bosanquet, Three Lectures on Aesthetics. pp. 15- 16. 314Ibid., p. 19. 147 of the language, or the meter, as opposed to the sound values or the suggestivenesses connotated by the language. And finally, form may imply generalized elements which col lectively constitute a class for forms. He cites the iambic or trochaic feet as smaller generalized elements, and the 315 epic and sonnet as classes of the work. They imply a general anatomy of which this or that work is the living embodiment, varying in every case from standard. The standard guides the artist, and it guides the attention of the appreciating mind. But, beyond that, the individual imagination must do its work freely. Expression is the primary notion, not Form.3 As will be recalled in the discussion of expression, Reid placed particular emphasis upon the connotative and evoca tive value of the elements, that which they convey by their unique expressiveness. For Reid, expression gave "expres sive form" first, and only secondarily is the percipient aware of the general form of the work. The true aesthetic form . . . is expressive form, and conversely, form is the structured content, but imaginatively apprehended content-in-a-body. I£ can never be stressed too much that neither body nor meaning is our main concern in aesthetics, but embodied meaning. This is the aesthetic object, and the unity of the whole is just the complete 3^Reid, A Study in Aesthetics, p. 195. 316Ibid.. p. 197. 148 self-containedness, not of a physical . . . "poem" for the organism, nor yet of a set of disembodied contents? but of the contents-embodied, or the embodiment-of-content. And this, which lives before imaginative perception only, is the greatest perfec tion which man knows.317 Greene attacked the problem of form by isolating two factors. On the one hand is the problem of artistic form, the vehicle, as it were, for the artist's self- expression. In this respect, Greene agreed that Reid's classifications of vehicles as those "forms" like sonnet, epic, and the lesser formal elements, iambic feet, etc., are the means which the artist uses "to the end of significant 318 expression." But Greene also suggested "aesthetic form," the quality of which only the expert can competently detect and evaluate. He assented to the idea that aesthetic "rightness" can never be defined adequately in the abstract, but argued that in any given activity of concern, competent 319 perceivers are entitled to value judgments. "Aesthetic form . . . is not the product of mere technical craftsman- 320 ship, for it exhibits a distinctive aesthetic quality." He classified literary expression as "dramatic" in form in 3-*-7lbid. (italics mine). 318creene, Art of Criticism, p. 125. 319Ibid.. p. 128. 320Ibid. 149 the degree to which it fulfills two propositions: (i) as it deals with human will in inner and outer "action" normally as revealed in moments of crisis, and (ii) as it depicts such voluntary action, and whatever dynamic conflict may ensue with unusual ■501 vividness and power. Aesthetic form is then a dynamic relationship be tween two factors; on the one hand exists the possibility of a "construct" of elements, i.e., blank verse with iambic pentameter, etc., and on the other the artist's intelligent and activating creativity which shapes and directs either a given "construct" or creates a new. In either, it is the "shape" which the artist gives to his personal vision. Gotshalk wrote, "Fine art at its best . . . is a selection, refinement, and vivification for intrinsic attention of perceptible material aspects of nature and the social 322 world." Gotshalk stated that all art is a space-time system of some kind. "In the dynamic arts of music, the dance, 323 and literature the time is intricately organized." And he further added that in addition to the patterning of space 321Ibid.T p. 183. 322Art and the Social Order, p . 108. 323Ibid. 150 and time in these art forms, there exist in works of art like the novel, short story, drama, opera, two additional factors; causality and teleology. Constituting "universal forms," these genre seek to depict the causal and purposeful actions within the medium, selecting, ordering, and se quencing these to their finest advantage; thus, a fine art. Further, Gotshalk maintained that form and the need for it are deeply rooted within the human constitution, serving bio-physical, psychological, teleological and as- sociational needs, needs which are linked to all men's past, 324 giving to the life process a sense of purpose and shape. What is perceived in form, according to Gotshalk, is "quali tative individuality," and it is this identifiable charac teristic of the object which the perceiver finds affective 325 in its satisfaction and value. Gotshalk cited four elements of form which can be analyzed and are derivative of the artistic experience, the fourth of which is especially related to literary genres. The four principles are: (1) harmony; (2) balance and 326 rhythm; (3) centrality; and (4) development. 324Ibid.. p. 135. 325Ibid. 32^See ibid., pp. 109-114 for greater amplification of these principles. 151 Gotshalk identified harmony as the "principle of existential unity." It is a principle which lays stress upon the coherence and probability of "echoing" items which in their relationship to each other, echo or relate to each other partly or wholly. This co-relating of items is se cured by one of two methods or both. The first is the repe tition of or reoccurrence of "complete similars," items which inhere with the same values and intensities. The second is that of partial similarity. For example, in the first category there would be complementary rapprochement between what an individual is in a play and the language which is given to him? the second "partial similarity" is a reductive process of suggestibility. The principle of balance and rhythm enhances exis tential unity, and Gotshalk maintained, this effect is secured in two ways: either through the balance of simi lars, symmetry, or through the balance of opposites or dis- similars, asymmetry. These balances are obtained by items which oppose or exist in a state of equilibrium with each other. There is felt in the presence of balance and rhythm a neutralizing of tensions, a neutralization resulting in complete and stable unity. The principle of centrality is a matter of focus and 152 the maintenance of focus. It is employed "when an ensemble of items is so connected that one item or group is given aesthetic dominance over the others which remain important 327 but sub-ordinate to it." The principle of development is a rationale for the successful achievement of obvious artistic merit in which there is neither a high point nor a balance or recurrence of similars. What it reveals, progressively and without obvious points of emphasis, is character, dilemma, mood or 328 situation. This principle is often based on what Got shalk labeled "novelty," a method by which the percipient is advanced partially or completely to the non-familiar. This movement is achieved by two directions or methods. Either the arrangement is devised in such a way that elements exist in a prior and posterior relationship, as opposed to the principle of centrality where they would be arranged in a superior and inferior relationship, or they are simply se quenced without ranking. Most aestheticians would agree with the opinion of Louis Danz that it is impossible to learn form. Any attempt to do so, he concurred, leads to construction. 327Ibid.. pp. 112-113. 328Ibid., p. 113. 153 Constructions are coldly calculated; they are life less, without emotive demand. Constructions are merely manipulated, tedious mechanical designs. Form, on the other hand, is an emotive structure, a living unity which speaks in a wordless language, creating inside you the pictureless, nameless, and objectless.329 Form, Danz concluded, is that kind of organization to which little or nothing can be added and from which it is impos- 330 sxble to take anything. Herbert Read reminded the student of aesthetics that it is the artist's condensation of human experience into some form of crystallization which must remain at the base of all art. Read remarked, "Art has never been an attempt to grasp reality as a whole— that is beyond our human capa city; it was never an attempt to represent the totality of ,,331 appearances. . . . The specifically aesthetic act is to take possession of a revealed segment of the real, to establish its dimensions, and to define its form. Reality is what we thus articulate, and what we articulate is commu nicable only in virtue of its aesthetic form.332 329The Psychologist Looks at Art. p. 169. 330Ibid.. p. 80. 331Icon and Idea (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Uni versity Press, 1955), p. 18. 332Ibid.. p. 20. 154 Aestheticians appear to stress qualitative elements rather than quantitative in delineating form. Form in art is an emotive structure, marked by qualitative individual ity. Form is the capacity of an artist to embody action, conflict, perception into an experience whereby it appears harmonious in all of its parts, maintains a focus of its elements, and suggests a progressive development. Thus, in oral interpretation, artistic form is the communication of literature by a creative activity which would strive to hold the elements of the literature in a kind of tension, active ly keeping the parts or elements of the selection "echoing" for the percipient. The form of an oral interpretation would be what an audience would accept as suitable action and creative activity on the interpreter's part. Because form in oral interpretation would be the revelation of the emotive structure of literature as well as its formal ele ments of rhythm, euphony, etc., instruction would proceed in the delicate area of value judgment, of, in short, taste. While this is the most difficult element in the instruction of the arts, the goal would be that kind of pattern in the interpretation to which little could be added and from which it is impossible to take anything. 155 Harmony and unitv Obviously, form and harmony are inseparable. They proceed from one to the other. In the texts of oral inter pretation, it has been harmony and unity which have been more commonly discussed than the larger consideration of form. Because unity and harmony have figured importantly in the literature of oral interpretation, it would seem appro priate to consider how it has been developed in aesthetics. Aristotle suggested three elements of unity in his Poetics. and though not an aesthetician in the formal sense of the word, he established, through his sensitive percep tion, observations and precepts which have, in turn, in fluenced aesthetic philosophy to this day. In the Poetics. he stated that the presence of unity of time, place, and 333 action contribute to the greatest impact of tragedy. Establishing as they do a harmony and unity among the parts, characters, and plot of the tragedy, the Aristotelian con cept of unity and harmony shifted from a perceiver's analy sis to a virtual law of tragic writing until the time of the Renaissance. When Weiss stated that unity is "experienced 333see Aristotle, The Poetics. Chapter I. 156 334 pluralities into harmonious totalities," he was not veer ing from the course set by Aristotle, save in the precise ness of the pluralities, action, time, and place. It is characteristic of contemporary aesthetics not to prescribe the elements for unity? rather, aestheticians note merely that good art has a unity and ask merely what in any par ticular art form are those constituent elements contributing to it. Too, the inextricability of the terms, unity and harmony, must be noted. It is virtually axiomatic that a "harmonious relation of parts" creates a kind of unity, and it is precisely this premise that leads to Weiss's view of a work of art: A work of art is self-contained, significant, and structured? it has unity, a texture and rationale, and it makes possible both the enjoyment of the quality of existence and an awareness of existence's import for man. No work of art answers to this description perfectly? all answer to it more or less completely, for all offer more or less perfect instances of works at once beautiful and revelatory.333 This view seems more compatible with the thinking of twentieth-century aesthetics than the proposal of Aris totle. The argument against the rigidity of the unities, 334Weiss, Nine Basic Arts, p. 224. 333Weiss, World of Art. p. 115. 157 as well as a recognition of what virtue they suggest, Weiss attempted to explain: The three traditional unities have value if taken as warnings of the areas where irrelevancies tend to creep in. Arbitrary jumps in distance, condi- tion, and aim, the introduction, without prepara tion or purpose, of new rhythms and themes, sudden radical changes in direction are risky. The unity of a work of art is the result of an act of crea- tive unification. Unity, observed Weiss, suggests closure, and a self- determined one by the parts which make up the work. Closure related to the parts of the work in inter relationship, emphasizing the points taken as a beginning and ending. Cutting across closure is a unity dictated by the prospect exemplified in the work.337 The "artistic transaction" so important to the aes thetics of Vivas, argues, too, for the harmony of parts leading to the larger unification of the whole. Harmony is the responses aroused by any one element [that] do not interfere with those aroused by the rest, but that all of them, each gaining in amplitude by co operation with the others, successfully exclude stimuli coming from outside the object and would call forth interfering responses.338 Unity of the work is that which allows a work to be 336Ibid.. p. 117. 337Ibid. 338Vivas, The Artistic Transaction, p. 51. 158 perceived in that "intransitive mood" of perception, the contemplative attitude which Vivas described as the percip ient's mode of rapport with art. . . . unity is the unity of a very large number of elements, and this variety is no less essential to the amplitude and prolongation of the experience than is the unity, for attention would soon lapse into indifference without the renewal of variety. Vivas then explained the reason for the symbiosis of "atten tion" and "unity." He stated that as perception successive ly attends one after the other to the elements present, per ception itself is refreshed, and interest in the work of art 340 is renewed by the changes. There are interferences, how ever, to a successful transaction between creator and per cipient and the apprehension cf unity. These disruptive elements fall into subjective and objective factors. The subjective factors impeding apprehension of unity are physiological and psychological. Of the physio logical, Vivas said that disgust, revulsion, and an absence of "ironic detachment" inhibit the percipient's ability to observe. He is not "intransitive" and open to the experi ence. Of the psychological, Vivas stated that the individu al has to be free of anxiety and of the captive state of a 339Ibi.d. 340ibid. 159 rigid morality? in other words, free to have cultivated within him the habit of concentration. The objective inter ferences reside within the object of perception. If it be dulled by stereotypicality and lacking in freshness and liveliness, then there is little to observe. It is unity, he repeated, which controls intransitivity, which "fastens attention and retains it within boundaries, temporally and spatially." Aesthetic unity is achieved by a tight relationship, an intimate going-together which binds the parts into a single, self-contained object of experience in which every part carries its own meaning, a mean ing which is homogeneous with the whole and is lit erally an inextricable part of it . . . When skill has been spent in construction, the embodied mean ing achieves an intense vividness and specificity which objects of recognition cannot possibly elicit.34^ Reid wedded the motion of expressiveness to all phases of his aesthetics, including the concept of unity. In the end, he states, unity is the perfection of working out expressiveness, "so that expressiveness becomes per fectly organized and self-contained, and without ragged 343 edges." But even more important for Reid is the absolute necessity to tie unity and unity-of-variety to the larger 341Ifelfl., P. 42. 342Ibid.. p. 50. 343Reid, A Study in Aesthetics, p. 188. 160 aesthetic unity, the unity which is only apprehended by an appreciation of the "expressive" nature of art in general. "We cannot differentiate the aesthetic object merely by saying it possesses unity of variety, for other things do 344 that." Unity is one of the most important of intrinsic values we know, and the aesthetic object gets much of its importance from its embodiment of unity. This is all true. But it is also true that the unity of the aesthetic object is aesthetic unity, and that its irreducibly aesthetic character must be recognized.345 The principle of unity is not a legislator for works of arts, argued P. AE. Hutchins, but is an important ingred- 346 ient in the spirit of an inquirer. The principle has its practical function "in making us attend to the interrela tionships and role of the parts of the artifact before us ..347 One undertakes to show (a) that every part has a function in the whole, and (b) that the present function of each part is such as to diminish the prima-facie plausibility of the suggestion that, in general or in particular, some parts might be substituted for others.34® 344Ibifl. 345Ifciii., p. 189. 346*<organic Unity Revindicated," The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. XXIII (Spring, 1965), 323. 347Ibid■■ p. 327. 348Ibid.■ p. 326. 161 Thorburn extended unity beyond the unity of the poem itself to psychological ramifications. He suggested that unity is inevitably tied to a "conscious idea" of the poet external to the poem in the sense that it belongs to the poet, not as poet, but as man? and is believed by him as a matter of personal conviction, or is elaborated in his mind as a matter of personal ur gency . 349 Unity, from this perspective, includes not only all the elements of the perceived poem, but of the unity of con trolling idea inferred from the poem or creative effort of the artist. The chief reason for isolating harmony and unity from the discussion of form is for the value it holds in reminding the artist of his responsibility to his audience. Unity is perceptual; it is an appreciation on the part of a percipient of the self-contained and transacting parts of an art work or performance. When the creative interpreter is attending to the intrinsic values of his literature, he is, from an aesthetic point of view, urging attention to be paid to his effort. Harmony and unity suggest a closure of parts, a synchronicity of elements. One senses that every part has a function. 349Thorburn, Art and the Unconscious, p. 25. 162 Empathy Empathy means "feeling into," in a broad and general sense. Diction requires a precise differentiation between empathy and sympathy, the latter denoting "mutual or recip rocal susceptibility," and the former "an imaginative pro- 350 jection of one's own consciousness into another being." The general usages of these words are not directly relevant to the aesthetic uses of them, particularly the use of em pathy . In aesthetics, empathy refers directly to the theory of Einfuhluna which was applied first by the German aes- thetician Vischer, in 1873, and later by Theodore Lipps to 351 the field of psychology in 1903. The use of the word in English was coined by the English psychologist, Edward Titchener, in his book Experimental Psychology of the Thought Processes. an English translation of Einftihlung. 352 which literally translated means "feeling into." The 350Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary (6th ed.? Springfield, Mass.: G. and C. Merriam Publishing Co., 1959), pp. 860 and 269. 35-^Reid, A Study in Aesthetics, p. 85. 352j4elvin Rader (ed.), A Modern Book of Aesthetics (3rd ed.y New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1960), p. 367. 163 aesthetic theory of empathy, or Einfuhluna. possesses con siderable relevance to the field of art and the art of oral interpretation, though the theory itself is not regarded by all aestheticians and psychologists as necessarily valid. The theory of empathy begins with the act of per ception, particularly the motor-processes of perception, 353 and originally applied to motor and tactile images. A stone or an elephant looks heavy. This fact is due partly to a revival of past motor experience, partly to actual present motor attitudes, and partly to the images of ourselves acting. Again, size is apprehended by movements of the eye, by incipient movements of hand, finger, leg, or whole body? or by various images of these. In appre hending rhythm we tend to beat time, in watching the acrobat sway, we sway ourselves, in the ex citement of watching a football game match we may clutch, kick our inoffensive neighbor. In general excited perception involves as a rule both motor imagery and actual movements, or at least, if not overt movement, dispositions to move, shiftings of muscular tensions, and so on. That our motor atti tudes do vary in varying circumstances can be sub stantiated by self-observation of the different attitudes we take up before different pictures, when we move about a picture gallery from picture to picture. Or we may compare our attitudes during different items in a concern, or as we suddenly shift our attention, say, from classical to baroque architecture.^54 The facts upon which the theory of empathy rest state that 353Reid, A Study in Aesthetics. 354iM 4 . , pp. 85-86 (italics mine). 164 activities of a percipient before a work of art tend to be merged or "felt into" the perceived qualities in the work. When we look at a column and it appears to "stand up straight," "to raise itself," to remain self-contained in erect tension, this is really a projection of my own muscular experiences of upstanding.^55 And if we turn to the articulate exponent of empathy, Theo dore Lipps, we find that Reid's interpretation is apparently faithful to Lipps's intent. Lipps stated that empathy means "not a sensation in one's own body, but feeling something, namely, oneself, into 3 56 the aesthetic object." Where Vivas earlier put the en joyment of the artistic transaction on the full perception of the art object, the aesthetic theory of empathy somewhat reverses this. Aesthetic pleasure, from the point of view of Einfiihlunq. is not the enjoyment of the art object, rather it is the enjoyment of the self. Lipps stated his position as follows: The specific characteristic of esthetic pleasure has now been defined. It consists in this: that it is the enjoyment of an object, which, however, so far as it is the object of enjoyment, is not an object, but myself. Or, it is the enjoyment of the ego, 355I*4fl. 356"Empathy, Inner Imitation, and Sense Feeling," in Rader, AJdodern Book of Aesthetics, p. 381. 165 which, however, so far as it is esthetically enjoyed, is not myself but objective . . . Empathy is the fact here established that the object is myself and by the very same token this self of mine is the object. Empathy is the fact that the antithesis between my self and the object disappears, or rather does not -j c 7 yet exist. J' Melvin Rader, in attempting to clarify this paradoxical state, broke the empathic moment into two phases. First, there is an inner activity . . .; second, there is the external sensuous content as bare physical stimulus. The esthetic object springs into existence as a result of the fusion of these two factors. 338 Paradoxically, empathy is the presence of a disappearance: the two ingredients of the perceptive act, the observer and the object, disappear, as it were, for the apprehension within one of the aesthetic object. The aesthetic object, in short, is a psychic state; "the ego unconsciously sup poses itself at one with the object, and there is no longer 359 any duality." There exists in the aesthetic moment an interpenetration of the two elements, percipient and object. Lipps stated this interpenetration in somewhat dif ferent terms. 357Lipps, in ibid.. p. 376. 358Rader, ibid.. p. 369. 359Ibid. 166 . . . only the sensuous appearance of the esthetic object . . . of the work of art is attended to in esthetic contemplation. It "alone" is the "object" of my esthetic enjoyment; it is the only thing that stands "opposite" me as something distinct from my self and with which I, and my feeling of pleasure, enter into some "relationship." It is through this relationship that I am joyous or pleased, in short, enjoying myself . . . [The ] cause of the esthetic enjoyment is myself, or the ego; exactly the same ego that feels joyous or pleased "in view" of the object or "opposite it."3®0 Lipps stated that one has to begin by presupposing that there exists complete clarity between the "content" or object of feeling on the one hand, and the intuitional capacities, attitudes, or feelings of the percipient on the other. There is first, he continued, a "consciousness of inner imitation." This consciousness is derived solely from the act of contemplation of a perceived movement. And second, he stated that the object of the percipient's activity is not his own, but only the activity which is beheld. Feeling myself active in the observed human figure, I feel also in it free, facile, proud. This is the esthetic imitation and this imitation is at the same time esthetic empathy.3^1 As he related empathy to the viewing of sculpture, Lipps paid particular attention to bodily kinesthesia: 360Lipps, in ibid.. pp. 374-375. 361Ibid. 167 muscle tension, friction of the joints, etc. Kinesthesia is but another striving of the individual, Lipps stated, toward esthetic imitation, but again, the act of kinesthesia is unconscious. In esthetic imitation I become progressively less and less aware of muscular tensions or of sense- feelings in general the more I surrender in contem plation to the esthetic object. All such preoccu pations disappear entirely from my consciousness. I am completely and wholly carried away from this sphere of my experience. As Reid stated, "When we become aware of ourselves having motor or allied experiences, or when we discern any process 36 3 of projection, we have ceased to empathise." There are some who feel that the capacity of a work of art to elicit empathy is an indication of the work's universality. "The genius of empathy," Robert M. Ogden stated, "consists in recreating the artist's impulse, which 364 then becomes the impulse of the witness." Writing from the psychological view of art, Ogden called the capacity to empathise the recreation of that art. It is through the 362Ibid.. p. 180. 363a Study in Aesthetics, p. 87. 364The Psychology of Art (New York: Charles Scrib ner's Sons, 1938), p. 102. 168 multiple "choices" of putting into art "whatever one wishes" that makes of a work of art something beyond the individual property of the artist. The work is universalized by its capacity to awaken in others, not only the artist's own impulse, but also such other partial patterns of posture and aim as may enrich and elaborate this impulse when it has become the impulse of the hearer and spectator.388 There are some aestheticians who would distinguish between empathy and abstraction. Under such a dichotomy, empathy remains as it has been discussed, "the transferrence 36 7 of vital feelings from the subject into the object." Abstraction, on the other hand, "involves the withdrawal of 36 8 subjective feelings from the object." With this dis tinction, abstraction is a process of viewing or perceiving the formal qualities of a work, its abstractional geometric forms, lines, surfaces, etc., without the imputation of emotion in them by the percipient. Whether this distinction can be applied to literature is open to some debate, but it is a distinction perhaps consonant with the problems of the interpretative artist as they will be examined in a later 365Ibid. 366Ibid. 367Rader, A Modern Book of Aesthetics. p. 370. 368Ibid. 169 chapter. It is interesting to note that Gotshalk did sug gest that empathy is an "imaginative and affective apprecia tion of the content . . . apprehending most vividly what is 369 there for intrinsic perception.1 1 Under such analysis, those abstractive elements would, in the main, be the famil iar extrinsic factors in a work of art. Empathy . . . brings into prominence another charac teristic of the full-scaled aesthetic response . . . viz.. object centrality. This is basic in empathy. It is also basic in aesthetic experience. In the aesthetic experience the great concern is to let all that is present in the object appear to the self in the fullest and most vivid manner. The object con sequently becomes the guide, and the self submits to its lead, allowing his powers to run into all the grooves of the object to their fullest capacity. This submissive union of the self with the object, the aesthetic unison, is undertaken, however, for the sake of a more intimate and lively perceptual appreciation of the actualities and suggestions, not for the sake of distorting the object by impo sition of subjective fancy. Transformation by the object, not transformation of the object, is the chief thing.3^0 If there be criticism of the theory of empathy, it is that Lipps and others were too narrow in their applica tion merely to the sensuous and kinesthetic reactions. Anything appropriate to the aesthetic whole can be imputed, associated images of any kind, ideas, 369Art and the Social Order, p. 1^ (italics mine). 370l i i i . 170 meanings— things which far transcend bodily or mental states. Again, "feeling into" is a muddled concep tion, whereas "thinking into" is certainly very much less so. "Feeling into" suggests that only our states can be imputed, which is an unjustified assumption. Again, how can we "feel into"? I cannot really "feel" a movement or anything else into a mountain or a vase, though I can quite well think it there when it is not, and that is what is meant by "thinking into."371 Theories of empathy suggest an excited perception and an enjoyment of the self when confronting a work of art. It has been described as an aesthetic movement of interpene tration and inner imitation on the part of the viewer as he loses himself in an art work. However empathy is achieved, and however it is modified by proponents of one approach or another, it exists as an important theoretical construct in aesthetics describing the unison by which the self trans forms itself in terms of the object it is contemplating. If the theory is to be applied to the interpretative artist, an approach was suggested by Dominick Barbara when he wrote that effective listening "presupposes a certain state or feeling of 'communicative listening.' It is the merging of one personality with another until some degree of identifi- 372 cation has been achieved." ■371 Reid, A Study m Aesthetics. p. 91. 372"Listening to the Essence of Things," The South ern Speech Journal. XXV (Winter, 1959), 140. 171 Psychical distance In the ancient text on Indian acting, The Mirror of Gesture. there appears the following passage: The perfect actor has the same complete and calm com mand of gesture that the puppet showman has over the movements of his puppets; the exhibition of his art is altogether independent of his own emotional con dition? if he is moved bv what he represents, he is moved aa a s g e . g . t a t f f i c » , - a n f l not a s . an actor.373 The ancient observer of the art of acting, Nandik^svara, presaged the sophisticated discussion of "psychical dis tance" by hundreds of years? his discussion of gesture is virtually the precise definition of "psychical distance" that Edward Bullough stated as a factor in art, as well as an aesthetic principle, in 1912 in The British Journal of 374 Psychology. Bullough's theory is one of "aesthetic conscious ness," a form of psychological awareness within the individ ual which distances the perceiver from an art object by a 373Nandikesvara, The Mirror of Gesture. trans. by Ananda Coomaraswamy and Duggirala Gopala Krishnayya (New York: E. Weyhe, 1936), p. 18. Italics mine. 374The original publication appeared in The British Journal of Psychology. V, 87-118. The text used in this study appears in the collected writings of Edward Bullough, Aesthetics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1957). All citations are drawn from this latter source. 172 process which will be described a bit further on in this section. What is important, aside from the theory itself, is that it has been accepted in one way or another by almost all contemporary aestheticians who talk about the aesthetic experience or attitude. Psychical distance as conceived by Bullough is a particular kind of psychological event which must occur as a precondition to having an aesthetic experience of some kind.37^ The theory, simplified and paraphrased, states that the act of distancing an object of perception is the act of putting it "out of gear" with the practical interest of the per cipient and the percipient's self interests. Bullough initiated his description and argument for psychical distance by observing that there are three types of distance in which art exists. There is, first, the actual distance of the object from the percipient which the percipient can alter at will (Bullough discussed his theory largely from the consideration of painting and sculpture, though he did at one point discuss drama and its method of achieving psychical distance). Second, an art object exists 37^George Dickie, "Is Psychology Relevant to Aes thetics?" The Philosophical Review. DXXI (July, 1962), 297. 376Ibid. 173 with a temporal distance, that is, the remoteness which the object has to us in point of time. This was first noticed by Aristotle already in his Poetics? the second has played a great part in the history of painting in the form of perspective.377 The third is psychical distance itself. This Distance appears to lie between our own self and its affections, using the latter term in its broadest sense as anything which affects our being, bodily or spiritually, e.g., as sensation, percep tion, emotional state or idea. Usually, though not always, it amounts to the same thing to say that the Distance lies between our own self and such objects as are the sources or vehicles of such affections.378 Bullough suggested that such distancing is much like the psychological condition of an individual under great stress when suddenly in the direst extremity "our practical inter est snaps like a wire from sheer over-tension, and we watch the consummation of some impending catastrophe with the 379 marvelling unconcern of a mere spectator." Psychical distance is a view of things that is not, and cannot be, the normal outlook of the percipient, to paraphrase Bullough, for it is this sudden view of things 377Bullough, Aesthetics. p. 93. 378Ibid.. p. 94. 379Ibid. 174 from an unnoticed perspective which comes upon us as a revelation. Experiencing art is experiencing the dis tancing which elicits the "sudden revelation." "In this 381 most general sense, Distance is a factor in all Art." It is also, stated Bullough, an aesthetic principle, and it is a principle from which four philosophical results accrue. The four results of aesthetic distancing as they enhance a philosophy of art are: (1) aesthetic distancing yields a resolution of the tensions found in art, e.g., objectivity versus subjectivity, idealistic art versus realistic, sensuality versus spirituality, and individual istic art versus stereotypic; (2) aesthetic distancing pro vides a criterion for the beautiful; (3) aesthetic distanc ing clarifies the creative process of the artist, particu larly in describing the "artistic temperament"; and (4) aesthetic distancing provides one of the necessary ration- 382 ales of the "aesthetic consciousness." The act of dis tancing for the percipient and creative artist and Bul- lough's defense of it have occupied most discussions of the act as well as criticism of it. Bullough made it abundantly clear that distancing 380Ibid.. p. 95. 381Ibid. 382Ibid.. p. 96. 175 383 is an emotional state and not a purely intellectual one. It is an emotional state of a peculiar quality, however. Its peculiarity lies in that the personal character of the relation has been, so to speak, filtered. It has been cleared of the practical, concrete na ture of its appeal, without, however, thereby losing its original constitution. One of the best-known examples is to be found in our attitude towards the events and characters of the drama: they appeal to us like persons and incidents of normal experience, except that that side of their appeal, which would usually affect us in a directly personal manner, is held in abeyance. This difference, so well known as to be almost trivial, is generally explained by reference to the knowledge that the characters and situations are "unreal," imaginary.38^ This personal and distanced relation at one and the same time established what Bullough called one of the fundamental paradoxes of art: "the antinomy of Distance." Bullough linked the "antinomy of Distance" to what he called "the principle of concordance." The latter prin ciple simply states that any given piece of art possesses a greater chance of appeal within us if it finds a "con cordance" or a readiness for its appeal within us. Thus the paradox: art is experienced by a distancing at the same time that it comes close to us, concording to our inner state. Concordance accounts for our personal tastes in art 383Ibid.. p. 97. 176 which can be highly personal and lacking any distancing and perception of it as Art. Distancing accounts for the "aes thetic pleasure" and uniqueness of art, the ability to ex perience the art form on its own terms with as little, or minimum, concordance of our own involvements. From this paradox Bullough stated that what is most desirable is "the 335 utmost decrease of Distance without its disappearance." Closely related, in fact a presupposition to the "antinomy," is the variability of Distance. Herein especially lies the advantage of Distance compared with such terms as "objectivity" and "detachment." Neither of them implies a personal relation— indeed both actually preclude it? and the mere inflexibility and exclusiveness of their opposites render their application generally meaningless. There exist, therefore, two different sets of con ditions affecting the degree of Distance in any given case: those offered by the object and those realized by the subject. In their interplay they afford one of the most extensive explanations for varieties of aesthetic experience, since the less of Distance, whether due to the one or the other, means less of aesthetic appreciation.386 Distance can be lost in one of two ways, either to under- distancing or over-distancing. The former Bullough attrib uted to a failing of the subject, and the latter to a fail ing of the art itself. The ultimate under-distancing, of 385Ibid.. p. 100. 386Ibid. 177 course, is total indiscriminate emotional involvement; the failure in over-distancing occurs when art is pretentious, as in didactic art, allegory, etc. Distance is facilitated by the work of art itself when the creative artist, main taining his own psychical distance to his personal vision, endows the work of art with what Bullough termed "the uni- 387 fication of presentment." By unification of presentment are meant such quali ties as symmetry, opposition, proportion, balance, rhythmical distribution of parts, light arrangements, in fact all so-called "formal" features, "composi tion" in the widest sense. Unquestionably, Distance is not the only, nor even the principal function of composition; it serves to render our grasp of the presentation easier and to increase its intelligi bility.388 The "distanced artist" is the artist who can stand between his own conception of what he wants to accomplish and what he is as a man; "artistic production is the indirect formu- 389 lation of a distanced mental content." Bullough1s de scription of the "distanced artist" was his refutation of Crocean aesthetics stressing "self-expression" of the per sonality of the artist. However, it is important to note that Bullough applied the principle of distancing to the creative artist as a prerequisite of creativity itself. To 387Ibid., p. 114. 388Ibid. 389Ibid.. p. 126. 178 state it another way, "aesthetic consciousness" for Bullough is the act of distancing for the percipient and creator, and it leads "in its most pregnant and most fully developed 390 form, both appreciatively and productively, to Art." As Theodore M. Greene noted, Bullough1s "distanced artist" reflects Proust's central thesis of creativity, namely, that life is comprehended only when re-lived in 391 recollection. The attitude of artistic contemplation is akin to that of aesthetic distancing, for as Greene inter preted contemplation, the artist's imagination not only supplements his first hand experience; it gives him an insight into human experience superior to that afforded by first-hand participation, however vivid and intense the latter may be. ^2 Greene interpreted the creative imagination, at its best, as informed and disciplined. These latter qualities particu larly give to an artist an objectivity like, but not iden tical with, scientific objectivity. Because [the artist's] approach to life is primarily imaginative, he escapes the blinding effect of im mediate participation and commitment. And because 390Ibid.. p. 130. 393Art of Criticism, p. 239. 39^Ibid. 179 it is imaginative and human, and not merely ratio- cinative and impersonal, he apprehends what the scientist as such can never apprehend; he escapes the frigidity of conceptual abstraction and imper sonal calculation. 393 There are critics who take exception to Bullough1s description of appreciation and creation as a form of dis- 394 tancing. George Dickie argued that Bullough is not de scribing a psychological experience at all. The spectator who "distances" an object is merely following a rule of the art game; namely, "Watch, listen, and so on, but do not try to participate in the work of art." This tacit rule is connected with the demand that a work of art be complete. If the work of art is complete, then it is point less or worse for a spectator to try to add to the work by joining the dance or play.395 Dickie also argued that the words "distance" and "detached" are very misleading. "How," he asks, "can we be both in tensely interested in a work of art and detached (disinter- 396 ested) from it at the same time?" It is not that we are detached or distanced from a work of art, we are barred from the work of art by the rules of the art game. [Stage frames are such devices which cause a particular kind of barring.] The devices serve (along with other purposes) merely 393Jbid., p. 240. 394"is Psychology Relevant to Aesthetics?" p. 298. 395Ibid. 396Ibid.. p. 299. 180 as a signal (if any are needed) that certain rules are to be obeyed. It would be better to speak of aesthetic barrier than of psychical distance.397 Another critic of Bullough, Gotshalk, attacked the premise that it is possible to "put out of gear" the per ceived phenomenon with our actual self. He stated that this is not true in every sense. For example, in viewing a work of fine art aesthet ically, it is simply not true in numerous cases that elements of our practical, actual self do not operate, or even that they do not act on the phe nomenon . One turns a painting to the source of light, one walks around a statue or a building, one changes the volume of music coming from a radio or phonograph, one reads a poem aloud. In a sense the phenomena remain decidedly in gear with our active actual self, and overt muscular behavior of many types comes into play during the experience. An experience of a phenomenon is aesthetic . . . not by virtue of the inhibition of all action and the consequent separation of the actual self from the phenomenon . . ., but by virtue of the control and subordination of action to the amplification of intrinsic perception, which actually does take place.39® What Gotshalk argued for is the superiority of the distance senses over the contact senses, sight and hearing over taste and touch. He sensed that physical distance is more favor able than psychical distance, the latter he termed "a 397ibid. 39®Gotshalk, Art and the Social Order. p. 5. negative condition of the aesthetic response." 181 Physical distance between subject and object ordi narily makes it possible for the subject to detach attention from action and to let attention explore the object for its intrinsic appeal with less prac tical danger and more perceptual latitude. A habit of aesthetic response therefore can be more easily He concluded his argument by saying that hearing and sight are capable of superior perceptual organization and sys tematization . making men perceive how aesthetic objects are different from the things of ordinary life. But Weiss argued against Bul- lough's insistence on "aesthetic objects" as "works of art." The former, Weiss said, are "objects which are to be enjoyed for their texture and design, which are to be lived 402 with for a while apart from the world." The appreciation of works of art requires something more. It demands the enjoyment of meaningful, reve latory substances, something richer, more illuminat ing and transformative than merely aesthetic objects can be.^^3 Citing Bullough's one example of the theater, where built up.4®0 Weiss noted that Bullough did a great service in 399Ibid.. p. 88. 40%ine Basic Arts, pp. 114-115. 40^Ibid.. p. 115. 182 concordance was to be minimized and distance kept at a mini mum, Weiss stated that the theater did not demand decrease in the distance between daily feelings and appreciative feeling. The theater "asks us to abandon our daily feelings 404 to participate freely in what is taking place." But, in addition, Weiss enjoined two more arguments, or points of contention, with the theory of psychical, or aesthetic, distance. Weiss took exception to Bullough's concept of the real or normative world. "Because he took reality to be identical with what was encountered every day, he spoke as if the positive activity of holding a work apart were a 405 purely negative, withdrawing act." In this, Weiss ar gued, Bullough was mistaken. "The feelings which wc ex press every day, and which must be inhibited in order for us to be able to enter the world of art, are positively 406 manifested inside that world." Another exception to Bullough's position which Weiss took concerns the distance decrease between one's dialy feelings and those appropriate to a work of art. While Bullough argued for the decrease of daily feelings, 404Ibid. 4Q5Ibid.. p. 114. 406Ibid. 183 Weiss argued not for a decrease of distance, but rather a decrease in the distance between spectator and painting, "through an emotional participation of the spectator in the 407 painting." In short, Weiss struck out for vital partici pation between percipient and object, while Bullough at tempted to seek some kind of "apprehensive control" system. To Weiss the theory created "aesthetic objects" for con templation, not works of art in which one takes pleasure in immediately sensed qualities. Funding An aesthetic concept which possesses relevance for the field of oral interpretation is that of "funding." Associated most closely with the works of John Dewey and 408 , Stephen C. Pepper, the concept, stated simply, suggests that earlier perceptions and experiences of a percipient fuse into later ones in a continuous perceptual experience 409 of a work of art. A perceptual event, as Pepper ex plained it, is fugitive, passing, elusive. 407Ibid. 4^®See particularly Pepper, The Work of Art (Bloom ington: Indiana University Press, 1955). 4^Pepper, "The Work of Art Described from a Double Dispositional Base," The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. XXIII (Summer, 1965), 423. 184 But the content of one perceptual event can be re vived by another through processes of memory and recall. In the gathering together of the perceptual content of a work of art towards a total perceptual grasp, the process consists of a sort of amalgama tion of the content of earlier perceptions into a new one. This has appropriately been called fund ing. 410 Originated by John Dewey, to whom Pepper gave generous praise, funding is a peculiar kind of "active” aesthetic connecting process with all the individual has experienced in the process of alert and aware perceiving. Citing the example of a single, simple melody, Pepper noted that there must be a synthetic incorporation of past meanings into a present content . . . The ear lier perceptions of melody are thus funded into the later ones, and thence arises our capacity for get ting the integral sense of a melody from a series of short-span perceptual immediacies.4^ He found that there is no work of art that does not in some degree or other require the funding process for the mere perception of the work itself. And the very least that can be said for funding is that it is linked to earlier sensuous 412 experiences and responses. Funding, Pepper continued, is the necessary adjunct 41QIbid. 4Hpepper, The Work of Art. p. 21. 412Ibid. 185 of criticism, for it is from the "fully funded perception" of all relevant and stimulated details that the work of art is apprehended and comprehended; it is the recall of these details which often initiates "sensible" artistic criticism. In other words, an appreciative experience is accretional rather than spontaneous in its perception, and Pepper con tended that this is so for two reasons. First, any total perceptual experience cannot "totally" be taken in "within a single deeply funded specious present." And second, per ceptual experiences are not always consistent ones, that is, the art object "sways" or "nuances" with ambiguity or ambi guities, and it is the funding experience of the individual 413 which resolves, or acts in resolving, these ambiguities. [Funding] includes another‘concept, also rather new in aesthetic descriptions, the concept of fusion. As . . . pointed out, funding is a fusion of memory elements into a present perception. We call memories funding when they give a tone or atmosphere to the content of direct sensuous stimulation. It is not funding if no memory elements are present in percep tion. It is not funding if the memory is separately distinguishable from the direct sensuous material . . . Funding is something between the two. It is the fusion of memory with sensuous immediacy so as to give the effect of an enriched immediacy.414 4^see Pepper, "The Work of Art Described from a Double Dispositional Base," pp. 423ff. 4- * - 4Pepper, The Work of Art. p. 21. 186 "Fusion" describes the memory or the elements of the memory coming out of the past, whereas funding is the "tone" which memory gives to the perceived work? in short, funding is the single total quality perceived and felt. Thus one can say of fusion, "A new poem is created by every one who reads 415 poetically." Pepper listed six characteristics of fusion. 1. There is no actual difference between "fusion" and the single quality that results from it The process is not one thing occurring at one time and the result later. The process of fusion is. the quality fused. 2, The elements fused have all sorts of refer ences— to the present, past, future, and the unconscious. The elements fused may come from "fringe" areas and from the outside of what can be brought to conscious attention. 3. The elements fused are themselves qualitative. 4. The quality of fusion is an object of immedi acy, and it can only be felt. 5. Qualitative fusion is a process which always has some denotation and may spread over an extended period. In an aesthetic experience it is likely to begin in a seizure not readily articulated. Fusion resides in the purposive act, as in the artist's creation and in a spectator's act of critical appreciation. 415Pepper quoting John Dewey, ibid.. p. 165. 187 6. Fusion controls an event, situation, process, and defines its boundaries.416 In summary, funding is the aesthetic present moment of perception; fusion is the well of past experiences "play ing" at the moment. Aesthetically and critically, it would appear that the terms are useful in describing what Pepper called "the describably perceivable." Pepper's interest in these terms is to show how a present perception can enfold and have telescoped into it a great quantity of previous per ceptions of the same object. We are interested in a certain cumulative effect of fusion towards the comprehension of a single stimulating object towards a total funded perception of a single work of art.4^7 Summary The nature of the aesthetic experience is a matter of theoretical speculation and development. In the attempt to describe what the art experience is, aestheticians have sought explanation in defining it as imitation, imagina tion, expression. For the ancients, art was imitation, and later this imitative mode was more narrowly applied to the 416rj<his constitutes a condensation of Pepper's six characteristics. For a complete discussion of them see ibid.. pp. 155-158. 417Ibid.. p. 26. 188 imitation of the sublime. For the Renaissance, art was imagination, a term which allowed the artistic reign of the individual divorced from any necessity to maintain the sub lime as an end in art. Contemporary aesthetic thought has shifted the emphasis to the nature of expression, the act of expression, and the psychological-philosophical explanations of man expressing himself. The aesthetics of oral interpre tation seem rooted in the concept of mimesis, the capacity to re-create the sounds and actions of life. Very early, the morality of this mode was questioned. The inheritance of mimesis in contemporary studies of delivery has been that of "appropriateness” and suitability in projecting feeling. The educational worth in studying aesthetics is in proportion to the value which teaching gives to the educa tion of feeling and sensibility. Of the aesthetic experi ence itself, there is diversity of opinion and explanation. The student is left with many theories from which to choose, from subjectivist to objectivist standards of art, but any choice of an aesthetic theory demands an articulation on the purpose of art and the value of art in human activity. Theoreticians of oral interpretation have borrowed selectively from writings in aesthetics. Within any general attitude about aesthetics are specific problems of 189 creativity, expression, language as art, form, harmony and unity, empathy, psychical distance, and funding. If the educative value of aesthetics is granted, and because these terms do frequently appear within the literature of oral interpretation, the aesthetic understanding of them, and the restoration of them to the field of aesthetics, is crucial and necessary. Here a problem arises. The generally accepted no tion that oral interpretation is an art form demands, it would seem, a larger system by which to analyze it. Dis tinct, separate, and isolated aesthetic problems are not enough. As in the field of aesthetics wherein individuals have attempted to provide a comprehensive philosophy of art, the need for such a system in aesthetic terms is needed for oral interpretation. CHAPTER III THE AESTHETIC SYSTEMS OF CROCE, DEWEY, AND LANGER As helpful and insightful as individual aesthetic concepts may be, they are most relevant when integrated into a unified philosophy of aesthetics. There is a tendency when aesthetic concepts are wrenched from an aesthetic philosophy to parcel art into isolated generalizations. It has not been the intent thus far to do violation to any single aesthetic? rather, the intent has been to isolate rather deliberately those aesthetic concepts which can, through application and incorporation, prove useful in assisting the oral interpreter, in establishing what it is he does, in ascertaining what happens when he does it, and in assessing what and how the effect can best be explained. There are three systems of aesthetics which, not only from their total aesthetic construct, but from the influence of their viewpoint, deserve isolated treatment: 190 191 the expression theory of Benedetto Croce, the experiential theory of John Dewey, and the semiotic theory of Susanne Danger. Croce insists that creativity is the symbiosis of intellect and emotion transmuted into intuition and mani festing itself in expression? Dewey's aesthetic conviction is that art cannot be divorced from experience, that experi ence is profoundly meaningful activity, and that profoundly meaningful activity is art? and finally, it is Susanne Danger's argument that art is not emotion, but the symboli zation of that emotion, that the meaningful aspects of the symbolic act are perceived through their semblances of emo tion, that the semblances themselves create a reality of their own, and that when this latter state is achieved, we encounter art. Croce states that intuition is expression? Dewey, that art is experience, existential experience in a present tense freed from past and future? Danger, that art is a presentational form of symbolization. Each view de serves examination. The Intuition-Expression Theory of Benedetto Croce "Twentieth century aesthetic discussion may be said to have been opened by Benedetto Croce (1866-1952), un questionably the most influential aesthetician of our 192 time."'*' Croce expressed his aesthetic theories from an idealistic point of view, "yet in a manner so concrete, so down to earth, and so close to the actual works of art, that many of his conclusions could readily be translated into 2 naturalistic terms." All aspects of his aesthetic may be translated into one central formula: intuition equals ex pression. Developing this basic thesis in what one critic has called an unfolding growth of insight, the intuition- expression formula yields to insights through a relatively simplistic approach. "For Croce the activity of the mind takes two basic forms: cognition and volition or theory and practice; knowing what the world is like or taking action to 3 introduce an alteration in it." The former is the logical process which grasps the universal, the latter a conscious sphere of activity to which the rules do not apply. This sphere can only be formulated on its own terms. These terms are emotion, feeling, passion, impulse, effort, volition, decision, choice, aim, goal, etc.; all that leads up to action and is connected with Beardsley, Classical Greece, pp. 318-319. 2Ibid.. p. 319. ^Gian N. G. Orsini, Benedetto Croce. Philosopher of Art and Literary Critic (Carbondale, 111.: Southern Illi nois University Press, 1961), p. 19. Hereafter cited as Orsini, Croce. 193 it. Feeling is not for Croce . . . a third form of mental activity, distinct from thought and action, but is included wholly in the sphere of the "prac tical."4 Art and beauty become successful action in a Crocean aes thetic, and how this concept is explained is of relevance for a performance aesthetic. Croce's aesthetic system begins with the questions: What is it the artist perceives? What is it he produces? What is it others see in his production? Croce contended that all creative literature, as well as all art, is the creation of an image. An image for Croce is a mental picture of something concrete and specific, of a particular object or an individual person. Its material is drawn either from what are called "sense data" or from "inner experience."5 These images are drawn into a process of production, re production, and evaluation, and, as Croce stated, "the whole g is that which determines the quality of the parts." A work of art may be full of philosophical concepts; it may contain them in greater abundance and they 4Ifeii., p. 20. 5Ibid.. p. 24. ^Benedetto Croce, Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistics, trans. by Douglas Ainslie (2nd. ed.; London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd., 1929), p. 2. Here after cited as Croce, Aesthetic. 194 may there be even more profound than in a philosoph ical dissertation, which in its turn may be rich to overflowing with descriptions and intuitions. But notwithstanding all these concepts the total effect of the work of art is an intuition? and notwith standing all these intuitions, the total effect of the philosophical dissertation is a concept.7 By this Croce meant that his "dissertation" on art is con ceptual, but the works of art which have drawn him to an awareness of them are intuitive, full of images, the stuff and substance of poetry. Poetry, in Crocean terms, includes all literature, for it is the purpose of literature to present "images" in presentational form. The characters of fictions and of drama are individ uals: their presentation is an image. The idea we form of Clytemnestra or of Othello, of Francesca da Rimini or Madame Bovary, of Uncle Toby or Mr. Pick wick, is for Croce a poetic image just as much as a vivid metaphor in a poem. But also the whole work in which the character appears is an image, for it is a single, unified and individual presentation.® Longer works can be characterized as possessing "tissues of images," but they are unified into the wholeness of the work. The faculty by which these images are produced Croce called the imagination, and it is the imaginative expres- 7Ibid.. pp. 2-3. 80rsini, Croce. p. 25. 195 sions of intuition which Croce labeled as the science of expression. Opposed to the science of expression are those natural and physical sciences; the science of expression verifies the spiritual unity of man's capacity to act upon his environment, to verify the world of his insubstantial self into substantial form, or artistic form, of some kind. . . . there is a sure method of distinguishing true intuition, true representation, from that which is inferior to it: the spiritual fact from the mechan ical, passive, natural fact. Every true intuition or representation is also expression. That which does not objectify itself in expression is not in tuition or representation, but sensation and mere natural fact. The spirit only intuits in making, forming, expressing. He who separates intuition from expression never succeeds in reuniting them.9 As Dodds summarized the Crocean view, "Art is the expression and not the suffering or experiencing of emotion."^ And, as Croce himself explained, intuitive knowledge is expressive knowledge. Inde pendent and autonomous in respect to intellectual function; indifferent to later empirical discrimina tions, to reality and to unreality, to formations and apperceptions of space and time, which are also later: intuition or representation is distinguished as form from what is felt and suffered, from the 9Croce, Aesthetic, p. 8. . r . Dodds, The Romantic Theory of Poetryr an Examination in the Light of Croce1s Aesthetics (New York: Russell and Russell, 1962), p. 27. Hereafter cited as Dodds, Romantic Theory. 196 flux or wave of sensation, or from psychic mattery and this form, this taking possession, is expres sion. To intuit is to expressy and nothing else (nothing more, but nothing less) than to express.^ How can expression be identified and explained in terms of intuition? The key word is identificationy the aesthetic image exists as it is identified with expression. A fully formed poetic image is a verbalized image, set out in its appropriate words in their appropri ate order, neither the words nor the order being determinable in advance. In a poem or a novel mul tiple impressions are unified in a single concrete image— and an image is not concrete until it is expressed in words (or in colors, lines, masses or tones). In Croce's terms, the particular is not only the object of an act of cognitions it is also, and at the same time, the object of an act of ex pression, and the two acts are one.^ Croce distinguished between two kinds of expression, expres sion in an aesthetic sense, and expression in a naturalistic sense. By this distinction, he differentiated between a man who is the prey of anger with all its natural manifestations and another man who expresses aes thetically y between the appearance, the cries and contortions of some one grieving at the loss of a dear one and the words or song with which the same individual portrays the suffering at another time.^3 l-J-Croce, Aesthetic, p. 11. 120rsini, Croce, p. 42. l^croce, Aesthetic, p. 95. 197 He noted the difference between the grimace of an emotion and the gesture of an actor. The process by which expres sion evolves from the intuition is four-fold, or as Croce 14 stated, "can be symbolized in four stages." These four stages are as follows: (1) impressions? (2) expression or spiritual aesthetic synthesis; (3) a pleasurable accompani ment, an aesthetic accompaniment; (4) the translation of the aesthetic fact into some form of physical phenomena, i.e., sounds, movements, combinations of lines and colors, words, etc.15 The expressive process is exhausted when these four stages have been passed through. It begins again with new impression, a new aesthetic synthesis, and the accompaniments that belong to it.^° Important to Croce's formula, intuition equals ex pression, is the notion of the individuality of expressive ness; one artist's expressiveness is not like or identical to another's. It is important to keep in mind that Croce develops his aesthetic almost entirely from a discussion of poetry, that is, of art in language. For this reason, his aesthetic is of particular interest and application to the oral study and presentation of literature. Croce categor- 14Ibid.. p. 96. 15Ibid. 16Ibid. 198 ically identified that expression is intuition. Poetry, from the Crocean point of view, is not made with words or 17 ideas, but with poetry itself. What is meant here is that poetry is concomitantly two things: an imaginative creation which at the same time is living speech. Gian N. G. Orsini, Croce's foremost interpreter, explained the concomitancy of creation and living speech by noting that Croce distinguished between the symbolic use of language in prose, that is, expository prose, and poetic expression. For Croce maintained that there was no true and logical sense of a word; meaning is conferred by the person forming the concept, and this happens anew each time the 18 word is used. Because intuition is a universal activity, Croce would argue that given the same matter, the same ex pression, the result would be the same intuition, or perception, which the creative artist possessed. "The phys ical stimulus created by the artist is the link between him and his public, furnishing the critic with the impressions, 19 or matter, which the universal intuition is to shape." An aesthetic fault is an incomplete expression, and beauty 170rsini, Croce, p. 76. 18Ibid.. p. 77. l^Dodds, Romantic Theory, p. 241. 199 is a successful expression, about which there are no de grees . The inwardness of the artistic moment, the percep tion of intuitive knowledge "expressed" in language, is in Crocean aesthetics the expression of emotion, of feeling, of that state of mind which is always "lyrical" in that it is 20 . . expressive of an author's emotion. Lyricism expresses the "soul" or inner life of the poet, not his biography, or the sum total of the facts of his life, but the poet's "soul," his self. When art is identified as having a "personality," it is the personality and lyrical intuitivism of the creator which is apprehended. Failure in artistic expression is incoherence, a disjointing and conflicting series of person alities Inartistic expression is for Croce the intrusion of a deliberate personality of the artist, an intrusion which vitiates the spontaneous and ideal personality which 21 is the subject of the work of art. . . bad art consists in a mechanical combination of several images not animated by any feeling. It may even consist of a single image, which however is felt to be "frigid" even though carefully worked out. The ultimate justification of the pure image in the total life of the mind appears then to be its expressive function. Through poetry we become acquainted with new states of mind, unfamiliar ways 200rsini, Croce. p. 47 21Ibid.. p. 48. 200 of feeling, rare and subtle and deep moods, crys tallized in perfectly fashioned images. Indeed, this is the cognitive value of art in all its forms, according to Croce.22 Because of the indissolubility of feeling and ex pression in Croce's aesthetic, his explanation of artistic unity has particular relevance. Since Art is the expression of individuality, the unity of the work of art is the counterpart of the unity of the individual. The work of art expresses the state of mind of one man at one moment: not the multitudinous impressions which beset the individual, but the mood which arises in him as a result of these.23 Croce expresses unity as that peculiar indivisibility of the 24 work of art. Every expression is a single expression. Activity is a fusion of the impressions in an organic whole. A desire to express this has always prompted the affirmation that the work of art should have unity. or, what amounts to the same thing, unitv in variety. Expression is a synthesis of the various, or multiple, in the one. The fact that we divide a work of art into parts, a poem into scenes, episodes, similes, sentences, or a picture into single figures and objects, background, foreground, etc., may seem opposed to this affirma tion. But such division annihilates the work, as dividing the organism into heart, brain, nerves, 22Ibid.. p. 55. 23oodds, Romantic Theory, p. 25. 2^Croce, Aesthetic, p. 20. 201 muscles and so on, turns the living being into a corpse. It is true that there exist organisms in which division gives rise to other living beings, but in such a case, we must conclude, maintaining the analogy between the organism and the work of art, that in the latter case too there are numer ous germs of life each ready to grow, in a moment, into a single complete expression. By elaborating his impressions, man frees himself from them. By objectifying them, he removes them from him and makes himself their superior. The liberating and purifying function of art is another aspect and another formula of its character as ac tivity. Activity is the deliverer, just because it drives away passivity.^5 In the Crocean aesthetic, there remain two addi tional meanings of the term "expression" other than aes thetic expression. One, already mentioned, is "naturalistic expression," that expression which designates the outward signs of emotion. This type of emotion Croce considered as symptomatic of the actual situation, and not expressive of it. "Naturalistic expressions" are removed from the domain of art. The second type of expression Croce called "prose expression," or the expression of reflective concepts and thoughts. In this case, "prose expression" is the extension of meaning by signs, and signs in the Crocean aesthetic are not expressions but symbolizations, the image converted to 25Ibid.. pp. 20-21. 202 26 the uses of thought. Prose expression is the language of science, and not the prose form of literature, for Croce made no distinction between or among artistic forms. In the conventional use of the term "prose fiction," for exam ple, one would by Crocean terminology simply refer to it as art in language, poesis. The distinction between poetry and prose . . . can not be justified, save as that between art and sci ence. . . . Poetry is the language of feeling, prose of the intellect; but since the intellect is also feeling, in its concreteness and reality, all prose has its poetical side.27 Pertaining to the aesthetic concept of form, Croce stated, "The aesthetic fact . . . is form, and nothing but 28 form." What does he mean? In his Aesthetic. he noted that the relation between matter and form, between content and form, is one of the most disputed questions in aes- 29 thetics. Does the aesthetic fact consist of content alone, or of form alone, or of both together? In answering this question, Croce wrote: . . . when these words are taken as signifying what we have . . . defined, and matter is understood as 280rsini, Croce, pp. 264-265. 27Croce, Aesthetic, pp. 25-26. 28Ibid.. p. 16. 29Ibid.. p. 15. 203 emotionality not aesthetically elaborated, or im pressions, and form as intellectual activity and expression, then our view cannot be in doubt. We must, that is to say, reject both the thesis that makes the aesthetic fact to consist of the content alone (that is, the simple impressions), and the thesis which makes it to consist of a junction be tween form and content, that is, of impressions plus expressions. In the aesthetic fact, expressive activity is not added to the fact of impressions, but these latter are formed and elaborated by it. The impressions reappear as it were in expression, like water put into a filter, which reappears the same and yet different on the other side. The aes thetic fact, therefore, is form, and nothing but Form and unity are perceived as the cohesive elements within literature; it is not the form in the literary sense which promotes cohesiveness. Croce argued against recognizing "formal elements" in literature, i.e., classifications of poetry into lyric, narrative, descriptive, sonnet, ballad, etc. Croce labeled the theory of literary kinds as "the 31 greatest triumph of the intellectualist error." Tradi tional attention to literary kind, or form (lyric, narra tive, descriptive, sonnet, ballad, etc.), is an exercise in quantitative analysis rather than qualitative assessment, and as Croce stated, "the individual expressive fact from 3QIbid.. pp. 15-16. 31Ibid.. p. 35 204 32 which we started has been abandoned." From aesthetes that we were, we have changed into logicians; from contemplators of expression, into reasoners. Certainly no objection can be made to such a process, In what other way could science arise, which, if it have aesthetic expressions pre supposed in it, must yet go beyond them in order to fulfill its function? The logical or scientific form, as such, excludes the aesthetic form. He who begins to think scientifically has already ceased to contemplate aesthetically; although his thought assumes of necessity in its turn an aesthetic form, as has already been said, and as it would be super fluous to repeat.33 To paraphrase Croce, it is impossible to isolate the form; expression is the form. "In aesthetic analysis it is im possible to separate subjective from objective, lyric from 34 epic, the image of feeling from that of things." Poets and painters, writers and sculptors do not express the de tails of the practical and mundane world external to them; they give form to the states of mind within them. Intuition equals expression in form; form expression. To quote John Crowe Ransome, "Poetry is a discourse which achieves determinate meaning only when it achieves determinate ^ .«35 sound. 32Ibid. 33Ibid.. pp. 35-36. 34Ibid., p. 36. 33John Crowe Ransome, as quoted in Orsini, Croce. p . 44. 205 Croce eschewed the term "technique" when it was applied to the arts. He did this because his philosophical position on the mind-body relationship demanded it. Croce was completely monistic. "The mind is the body and the body is the mind."^ So for Croce every spiritual act has its physical side, or, to be more precise, "can be physically constructed." Every act of expression, even if it is "purely mental," has its counterpart in bodily movements. But these movements are essentially transient, so if one wants to preserve an expres sion, a way must be found to record these movements. And of course many methods have been found for this purpose. The sound waves of speech can be recorded in a number of ways which is increasing, and the physical movements which go along with other expres sions can also be preserved— by the laying of pig ment on canvas, or by the fashioning of clay or some other material. These processes are called "tech nique" by a general usage which Croce accepts, while defining their function as that of preservation or "externalization." In the case of poetry, "exter- nalization" consists in the articulation of the vocal organs, or speech. Writing is an ulterior process which sets down symbols to remind us of the articulations required to produce sounds, so it is externalization at the second remove. In any case, externalization for Croce is a practical action and therefore does not belong to art. It has no aes thetic value.37 This important statement has particular relevance to the study of oral interpretation, for it states precisely and clearly where the aesthetic "object" resides: in the 36Ibid.. p. 90. 37Ibid. 206 expressive, sounding moment of the interpretation. The "moment" is the aesthetic object, and that moment is filled with sight, sound, gesture, and myriad subtle interrelation ships which separately possess no aesthetic value. In Crocean terms, a technique of aesthetic expression is im- 38 possible. Training in the arts is not in the training of techniques, but rather in the training of integration. In quoting Croce from an untranslated paper, Gian N. G. Orsini concludes, "Technique, conceived as something mechanical, is never to be found in the work of genius, genius being ar- 39 tistic creation." Croce maintained that language is the invention of the one who uses it, and therefore it is useless to attempt the classifications usually associated with it. He wrote, Languages have no reality beyond the propositions and complexes of propositions really written and pronounced by given peoples at definite periods; that is to say, they have no existence outside the works of art (whether little or great, oral or writ ten, soon forgotten or long remembered, does not matter) in which they exist concretely. And what is the art of a given people but the whole of its artistic products?48 To him the parts of speech are identical with the artistic 38Ibid.. p. 91. 39Ibid.. p. 94. 40Croce, Aesthetic, p. 147. 207 and literary kinds already mentioned. It is false to say that the verb and noun are ex pressed in definite words, truly distinguishable from others. Expression is an indivisible whole. Noun and verb do not exist in it, but are abstrac tions made by us, destroying the sole linguistic reality, which is the sentence. This last is to be understood, not in the way common to grammars, but as an organism expressive of a complete mean ing, which includes alike the simplest exclamation and a great poem. This sounds paradoxical, but is nevertheless the simplest truth.4^ Language for Croce is perpetual creation. What is once expressed is not repeated, except in the reproduction of something already produced. Continually new and ever- changing expressions are the result of the continuous changes in sound and meaning. "Everyone speaks and should speak according to the echoes which rhings arouse in his 42 soul, that is, according to his impressions." Croce attacks the problem of reproduction of ex pression with his customary vigor, for here the philosophi cal aspects of expression are "critical." That is, repro duction of the expression is essential to the critical judgment of the encountered experience. Croce's point is, again, simple: aesthetic judgment is totally dependent upon an identity with aesthetic reproduction. 41Ibid., P. 146. 42Ibid.. p. 150. 208 When the entire aesthetic and externalizing process has been completed, when a beautiful expression has been produced and it has been fixed in a definite physical material, what is meant by judging it? To reproduce it in oneself, answer the critics of art, almost with one voice. Very good. Let us try thor oughly to understand this fact, and with that object in view, let us represent it schematically.^3 In the Aesthetic. Croce gave substantially the following process of aesthetic re-creation: an artist has expressed an intuition and left a record of it in some form. The perceiver, in order to decide whether it is beautiful or ugly, places himself at the artist's point of view, and goes through the entire process again with the help of signs given to him by the artist. The perceiver goes through this process for two reasons: first, a given problem of expres sion can be solved in only one manner or way; and second, the activity which reproduces the expression is the same 44 that produced it. The first reason, according to Orsini, is main tained by all doctrines of aesthetics that take art seri ous ly. For it affirms that art is not a matter of arbitrary choice or caprice, but of severe calculation and direction. Art has a logic of its own, an inner necessity, which does not admit of approximations or 43Ibid.. p. 118. 44Ibid.. p. 120. 209 45 makeshifts. As Orsini concluded, "Le mot juste has always been singular? 46 there is only one right word or phrase for each thought." production, has its historical antecedents in the aesthetic problem of taste. "It is not a critical judgment, for it does not judge, but simply feels; it can give no reason for the process of expression repeated again in the mind of another person, or even in the mind of the creator, after a change in point of view from that which he maintained at the work1s inception. taste and criticism. In an untranslated paper, Croce stated that when an expression is reproduced, we have only the process of taste, but not yet art criticism or literary criticism. The work of art is then re-created, but one is not yet able to nudge it. For judgment something is lacking, which may seem small but is of great im portance, may seem nothing and is everything. It is necessary that the aesthetic fact, reproduced in the imagination, be characterized. that is to The second reason, the sameness of reproduction and its pleasure, but simply enjoys." 47 In Crocean terms, it is From here, it is possible to differentiate between 450rsini, Croce, p. 127. 46Ibid. 210 say, conceived as an aesthetic fact? that from being contemplation it becomes a logical act (subject, predicate, and copula). In this very simple act of adding a predicate to the subject of contemplation consists literary criticism.'*® What is literary criticism? It is, first, a responsible exercise of judgment, a judgment which seeks to know through re-creation of the art experience the confronted object is "a poem," that is, an original act of expression. Second, literary criticism, in the Crocean sense, seeks a classifi cation of the expression, but not in the traditional terms of genre. Rather, the classification is the discrimination of those elements in the poem which make it individual. Such elements could be psychological, sociological, even political. Croce considered these last three factors em pirical, because they can be determined. "Literary criti cism has no . . . operational concerns and is content to take human nature in all its unresolved complexities and 49 with the innumerable varieties of individual character." All poetry, for Croce, is untranslatable, and because it is the critic should not attempt to become the poet nor should he attempt to duplicate the work of art in intellectual or 48Croce, as quoted in ibid., p. 130. 49Ifeia., p. 152. 211 imaginative terms, i.e., comparing a poem to a painting or a symphony, or any other evocative device.^ This type of comparison Croce has called the fallacy of "aesthetic" criticism. Croce rejected all attempts to incorporate into literary criticism source-hunting, philology, history of genres, of evolutionary schemes, or resolving poetry into trends and conventions. As Croce stated, "Criticism ad- 51 heres to the individual quality of the work." Thus, the key words in the Crocean aesthetic remain the same throughout— the process of creation, perception, and criticism. Intuition, expression and imagination de scribe not only the creative act but the aesthetic experi ence . The aesthetic activity, then, the activity which gives us the artistic aspect of reality, which pre sents reality to us as a single, immediate, individ ual thing, free as yet from every logical or concep tual element, is a faculty of imagination. We imag ine reality and we think reality, and thinking de pends upon imagination. . . . The aesthetic activity is an actual creative activity, it gives expression to the pure intuitions of the mind, and this ex pression is the image. 5033>i<3- ^^Croce, as quoted in ibid.. p. 254. 52H. Wilden Carr, The Philosophy of Benedetto Croce (London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd., 1927), pp. 54-55. 212 From a theoretical viewpoint, the real work of art lies in the artist's mind, and the externalization of it in whatever 53 form it takes facilitates its being shared or recalled. Art for Croce was the most immediate form of knowledge. "It apprehends activity, not passivity, the internal, not the 54 external, mind, not matter." The pervasive influence of Croce's aesthetic, intentional or unintentional, cannot help but be noticed in the theoretical writing of the oral in terpretation of literature, particularly in the early dec ades of this century. It is interesting to speculate wheth er Samuel Silas Curry's "think the thought" is not closer to Croce's aesthetic reproduction in its implications than to any other aesthetic system. These speculations will be returned to in Chapter V, but for the present suffice it to observe that Croce's contribution to aesthetics is his in sistence on the role of "feeling" as the essential character 55 of art. From a contemporary psychological point of view, art is often regarded as the expression of repressions? in 56 Crocean aesthetics art is the expression of impressions. ^Beardsley, Classical Greece, p. 323. 54Carr, Philosophy of Benedetto Croce, p. 49. 55Dodds, Romantic Theory, p. 17. ^George Boas, The Heaven of Invention (Baltimore: 213 Criticized as unrealistic, Croce has been challenged for omitting the physical, psychological, and social factors in the creation of art, factors "which are of the greatest importance for an accurate understanding of the process as 57 it actually occurs in innumerable cases." His supporters maintain, in his defense, that a work of art remains some thing in the experience of the artist or spectator and therefore cannot be defined in terms of physical object, 58 causes, biography. Croce must be seriously studied for the development of an aesthetic or oral interpretation, providing, as he does, provocative and stimulating insights into the nature of artistic creation, appreciation, and criticism. The Experiential Theory of John Dewev There is widespread agreement that the most valuable work on aesthetics written in the twentieth century in Eng- 59 lish is John Dewey's (1859-1952) Art as Experience. The Johns Hopkins Press, 1962), p. 322. 57Gotshalk, Art. and the Social Order, p. 57. 58Irving Singer, "The Language of Aesthetics," Hud son Review. IX (Summer, 1956), 236. ^8New York: Minton, Balch and Co., 1934. 214 Critics have described the work as possessing "an air of spontaneity and new discovery, freshness of vision, enormous richness of suggestion, and a special Deweyan eloquence, with his characteristically oblique but steady and inexor- 6 0 able advance of argument." Dewey's perspective on art and his aesthetic views were derived from what he called the "consummatory" experience, an experience which is marked by unusual sensitivity and attention. In the creative act, for example, Dewey observed that the individual makes himself when and as he molds his material. Using the energies which he would normally employ in his daily life he brings himself, material, and prospect together. This is difficult, tiring "work." The result has its own rationale and values. But the work of art is not the end which the artist seeks to achieve? it is but the residuum of a process involving a self-purging, a purifying of experienced content, and a transforma tion of confronted prospects. The heart of the art ist's life is in the process of making, not in pos sessing the outcome of that making. The outcome, the work of art, serves sometimes to remind or provoke, but it can be used to make it possible for the spec tator to have something like the artist's experience and to achieve a somewhat similar grasp of ultimate reality.61 Experience is continuous? the shaping of experience out of our life's continuity constitutes a refinement and an 66Beardsley, Classical Greece, p. 332. 61Ibid. 215 intensification of it. Thus, for Dewey, art, experience, and life cannot be separated either by caprice or philo sophical argument. In a primitive society, the objects of daily use are "artistic" because they are shaped to the experience, not set aside, not displayed for objective peru- 62 sal, as in a museum. In an early lecture on "The Psy chology of Drawing," Dewey began, "Drawing should be at first a means of reinforcing or dwelling upon some inter- 6 3 esting life experience of the child." He continued that all art is imaginative, in that the impetus for art is the image in the mind of the object, not the object itself. "The use of the object is therefore simply to help the con- 64 struction of the image." The art experience, deriving as it does from the encounter with and of life's experiences, is an elevation of experience, a celebration of experience. But the celebrating is not one at the end of the day's work, not one necessarily marking the "re solved problem," the moment of rest between stren uous exertions. It can also celebrate defeat, ^Weiss, The World of Art. p. 88. ^3"The Psychology of Drawing, Imagination, and Ex pression? Culture and Industry in Education," Teachers Col lege Bulletin. 10th series, X (March 1, 1919), 3. 64Ibid, 216 madness, even death itself. Commemorative glow comes upon concrete experience, whatever its ordinary im port, which fills up time, flooding the world with unique, personal meaning. This is the mood under which we feel that the moment of love, for example, could yield the whole meaning of life, beyond which there can be only the living memory of what was. This is the mood also under which the moment of liv ing becomes "unutterable" in the ordinary ways of speech, on account of its unbearable and overflowing richness of subjective meaning.65 Dewey called this "unutterability" aesthetic ex pressiveness; it is the clarification of turbid emotion. Expression is the clarification of turbid emotion; our appetites know themselves when they are re flected in the mirror of art, and as they know themselves they are transfigured. Emotion that is distinctively aesthetic takes place. It is not a form of sentiment that exists independently from the outset. It is an emotion induced by material that is expressive, and because it is evoked by and attached to this material it consists of natu ral emotions that have been transformed. Natural objects, landscapes, for example, induce it. But they do so only because when they are similar to that which the painter or poet effects in convert ing the immediate scene into the matter of an act that expresses the values of what is seen.66 Dewey distinguished between an expression and a statement. Science, he asserted, states meanings; art 67 expresses inner spontaneity. Where the intent is 65Fallico, Art and Existentialism, p. 84. 66Dewey, Art as Experience, p. 77. 67lbid.. p. 84. 217 different, so will be the clarification of the experience, and the purposes for which it will be used. There is a distinction, too, between the prosaic and the poetic. The prosaic is like the scientific in that both are statements which examine intent? art is intent. Art expresses intent and experience; the prosaic and scientific statement ex- 68 amines intent. The act of expression is not something which super venes upon an inspiration already complete. It is the carrying forward to completion of an inspiration by means of the objective material of perception and imagery The beginnings of expression, artistic expression, start with what Dewey termed an "impulsion." I say "impulsion" rather than "impulse." An impulse is specialized and particular; it is even what is instinctive, simply a part of the mechanism involved in a more complete adaptation with the environment. "Impulsion" designates a movement outward and forward of the whole organism to which special impulses are auxiliary. It is the craving of the living creature for food as distinct from the reactions of the tongue and lips that are involved in swallowing? the turning toward light of the body as a whole, like the helio- tropism of plants, as distinct from the following of a particular light by the eyes.78 It is impulsion which is the initial stage of any complete 68Ibid.. p. 85. 7QIbid.. p. 58. 69Ibid. 218 experience. The impulsion proceeds from a need which can be satisfied, Dewey argued, only from an active relation, an active interaction with the environment. The impulsions react, or are the reactions to, the obstacles encountered. Dewey stressed that an energized impulsion yields an ex citement. Yet, what is evoked is not just quantitative, or just more energy, but is qualitative, a transforma tion of energy into thoughtful action, through the assimilation of meanings from the background of past experiences. The junction of the old and new is not a mere composition of forces, but is a re-creation in which the present impulsion gets form and soli darity while the old, the "stored," material is literally revived, given new life and soul through having to meet a new situation. "Impulsion" is similar to the "funding process" discussed in the previous chapter, the process by which the totality of experience is released from its "storage" within the individual as he encounters the art experience. Under what conditions does the impulsion lead to expression? Dewey answered that an impulsion cannot lead to expression except when it is thrown into commotion and turmoil. Further, "unless there is a com-pression nothing is ex-pressed." 7- * -Ibid. . p. 66. 219 The turmoil marks the place where inner impulse and contact with the environment, in fact or in idea, meet and create a ferment. . . . To generate the in dispensable excitement there must be something at stake, something momentous and un-certain— like the outcome of a battle or the prospects of a harvest. A sure thing does not arouse us emotionally. Hence it is not mere excitement that is expressed but excitement-about-something; hence, also, it is that even mere excitement, short of complete panic, will utilize channels of action that have been worn by prior activities that dealt with objects. Thus, like the movements of an actor who goes through his part automatically, it simulates expression. Even an undefined uneasiness seeks an outlet in song or pantomime, striving to become articulate.72 This striving to become articulate marks the quality of the oral interpretation of literature. The com-pression leading to ex-pression constitutes a sound aesthetic for the inter preter . Dewey based the foundations of this aesthetic theory on the function of energy in art? energy is the most sig nifying mark of com-pression. Theory can be based only upon an understanding of the central role of energy within and without, and of that interaction of energies which institutes opposition in company with accumulation, conserva tion, suspense and interval, and cooperative movement toward fulfillment in an ordered, or rhythmical ex perience. Then inward energy finds release in ex pression and the outward embodiment of energy in matter takes on form.73 72Ibid. 73Ibid.. pp. 159-160. 220 This "cooperative movement," Dewey explained, established the relation between the doing, so important in Deweyan aesthetics as well as educational philosophy, and the con tact of the individual with his environment. The product, Dewey argued, is experience. "The rhythm peculiar to dif ferent relations between doing and undergoing is the source of the distribution and apportionment of elements that con- 74 duces to directness and unity of perception." Any confu sion simply blocks the singleness of perception. Art ex cites and composes, and this excitement and tranquillity stem from the relationship to the art object. The complete rapport of experience between percipient and art object 75 accumulates energy for a "further discharge of activity." What results, Dewey concluded, was a perception ordered and clear and at the same time emotionally charged or toned. Dewey continued his "experience-compression-expres- sion" aesthetic by noting that aesthetic objects themselves are amalgams of antagonistic systems, systems which are perceived by a progressively involving and enacting experi ence which "holds" them together in a balance or symmetry, despite their variety and scope of opposing elements. 74Ibid.. p. 160. 75Ibid. 221 The connection of balance with stress of weights is inherent. Work in any sphere is performed only by the inter-working of opposed forces— as by the an tagonistic systems of the muscular frame. Hence everything depends in a work of art upon the scale attempted— that is the reason it is but a step from the sublime to the ridiculous. There is no such thing as a strong force or weak, great or petty, in itself. . . . To say that one part of a painting, drama, or novel is too weak, means that some related part is too strong— and vice versa. Absolutely speaking, nothing is too strong or weak; it is the way it works and is worked upon.76 Dewey stressed the connection of aesthetic effect with the qualities of all experience insofar as any experience is unified. However, to Dewey's mind, another argument presented itself. If, he reasoned, art and experience are unified, how can art be expressive and yet not be imitative and slavishly representative? He answered, If art is in any sense reproductive, and yet repro duces neither details nor generic features, it neces sarily follows that art operates by selecting those potencies in things by which an experience— any ex perience— has significance and value. Elimination gets rid of forces that confuse, distract, and dead en. Order, rhythm and balance, simply means that energies significant for experience are acting at their best.'7 What is important is the consideration of the energies in 76ibid.. p. 180. 77ibid.. p. 185. 222 art, for it is they which give vitality and life to the experience, representing the potencies of the experience as it is experienced. It is the present tense in which art is created; it is the fusion of the "various" elements into the "singular" experience of the aesthetic moment. As Dewey himself admitted, his is the oldest formula for beauty: 78 unity in variety. However, Everything depends upon how complex the preposition "in" is understood. There may be many articles in a box, many figures in a single painting, many coins in one pocket, and many documents in a safe. The unity is extraneous and the many are unrelated. The significant point is that unity and manyness are al ways of this sort or approximate it when the unity of the object or scene is morphological and static. The formula has meaning only when its terms are understood to concern a relation of energies. There is no fullness, no many parts, without distinctive differentiations. But they have esthetic quality, as in the richness of a musical phrase, only when the distinctions depend upon reciprocal resistances. There is unity only when the resistances create a suspense that is resolved through the cooperative interaction of the opposed energies. The "one" of the formula is the realization through interacting parts of their respective energies.79 What the artist achieves by this marshalling of energies is the emergence of the raw materials into some type of selec tive arrangement. This arrangement, according to Dewey, is the "form" we speak of in art. 78lbid.. p. 161. 79Ibid. 223 Dewey defined form as the "rendering an experience 80 unified in movement to its intrinsic fulfillment." And he further concluded that there could not be, save in the most reflective argument, any distinction between form and sub stance, so closely is the work "matter formed into aesthetic substance."^ This is what it is to have form. It marks a way of envisaging, of feeling, and of presenting experienced matter so that it most readily and effectively be comes material for the construction of adequate ex perience on the part of those less gifted than the original creator.8^ All aesthetic creations and all the functions and charac teristics of any art production remain true to the central theme of Dewey's aesthetics, namely, that "the purpose of aesthetic art is the enhancement of direct experience it- 83 self." It is appropriate, then, to turn the art form which utilizes language as the materials to express experi ence, poetry and literature. Dewey established a distinction betwuen prose and poetry, what was referred to earlier as the prosaic and the poetic. He admitted that the difference cannot be defined 8QIbid.. p. 147. 81Ibid.. p. 109. 82Ibid. 88Pepper, The Work of Art. p. 157. 224 precisely, that there is no one point at which one could say, "Here is poetry, here is prose." He did see, however, a "gulf" between the prosaic and poetic; he saw them as 84 "extreme limiting terms of tendencies in experience." The difference between them is the means; one exists by means of extension, the other by intension. The prosaic is an affair of description and narra tion, of details accumulated and relations elabo rated. It spreads as it goes like a legal document or catalogue. The poetic reverses the process. It condenses and abbreviates, thus giving words an energy of expansion that is almost explosive. A poem presents material so that it becomes a universe in itself, one which, even when it is a miniature whole, is not embryonic any more than it is labored through argumentation. There is something self- enclosed and self-limiting in a poem, and this self- sufficiency is the reason, as well as the harmony and rhythm of sounds, why poetry is, next to music, the most hypnotic of the arts.8^ What words create in poesis is literature, and literature Dewey defined as the "intensification of the idealizing 86 office performed by words in ordinary speech." All words are imaginative, but in prose there exists, as Dewey stated it, a rubbing down by attrition, as if words are to be used as mere counters. "For a word," he wrote, "when it is not purely emotional, refers to something absent for which it ®4uewey, Art as Experience, p. 241. 85Ibid. 86Ibid.. p. 242. 225 87 stands." Obviously, he reasoned, when things are present, it is enough to point to them, to use them, to utilize them in the act of communication. Words express possibilities, not the present actuality. Poetic art is that verbal art which, using words and images, creates the fanciful and utopian, "the possibility," he argued, "that is impos sible."88 Dewey's- aesthetic included the notion that there is a distinction that can be drawn between the subject of the poetry and the substance. He said the difference was be tween matter for and matter i£. artistic production. The subject or "matter for" is capable of being in dicated and described in other fashion than that of the art-product itself. The "matter in," the actual substance, is. the art object itself and hence cannot be expressed in any other way.®^ The words are the medium, and it is their inexhaustibility which allows for the uniqueness of poetic expression. Dewey catalogued the functions of words as: Nouns, verbs, adjectives express generalized condi tions— that is to say character. Even a proper name can but denote character in its limitation to an individual exemplification. Words attempt to convey the nature of things and events. Indeed, it is through language that these have a nature 87Ibid. 88ibid. 89ibid.. p. 110. 226 over and above a brute flux of existence. That they convey character, nature, not in abstract conceptual form, but as exhibited and operating in individuals is made evident in the novel and drama, whose busi ness it is to exploit this particular function of language. . . . For all we know of any situation is what it does to and with us: that is its nature.90 Whenever situations are left vague, and whenever the poetic utterance is inchoate and wavering, Dewey would argue that the experience itself would be found to be vague and in definite— "something to be guessed at, not embodied, in 91 short . . ., uncharacterized." Technique in the use of a medium is secondary in a Deweyan aesthetic to the primary function of expression. Expression and technique possess a relationship as content and form, as material to be conveyed or delivered, and as 92 a mode of conveyance, as what and as how. If one is thoroughly interested in the idea as something to be expressed he must also be inter ested in the mode of expression. A lack of inter est in the form or process always marks something crude, hazy, or unreal in the grasp of the idea or content. We must be interested in the expres sion just in proportion to the intensity, the con trolling character of our interest in the idea. But on the other hand this interest in the idea, in the story to be told, the thought to be real ized, is the true basis for an artistic interest 90Ibid.. p. 243. 91Ibid. 9^Dewey, "Imagination and Expression," p. 6. 227 in the technique. A mode of expression separated from something to express is empty and artificial, is barren and benumbing.93 Technique is the first part of a psychology of expression. Dewey noted that there is a natural tendency for every image to pass into movement of some kind, into an expression of some kind. "[An] image which does not tend to manifest it- 94 self through the medium of action is a non-existence." We cannot speak of an idea and its expression. The expression is more than a mode of conveying an al ready formed idea, it is a part and a half of its formation. The so-called mechanical action in the world is necessary to the production and formation of the spiritual. 3 There are not, concluded Dewey, two sides to expression nor two sides to a man: an image and its expression. He wrote, "The image is only its expression, the expression is only 96 the image moving, vitalizing itself." But he warned that it is the whole which must be imaged, and not the mere de tail. Under these conditions, technique manifests itself rather effortlessly if. the image is effortlessly manifesting itself; technique is secondary in its impact in effortless ness, primary, and thus unsatisfactory and inartistic, in 93lbid. 94lbid.. p. 8. 95Ibid. 96Ibid.. p. 9. 228 effortfulness. The act of producing that is directed by intent to produce something that is enjoyed in the immediate experience of perceiving has qualities that a spon taneous or uncontrolled activity does not have. The artist embodies in himself the attitude of perceiver while he work s." Craftsmanship to be artistic in the final sense must be "loving"; it must care deeply for the subject matter upon which skill is exercised. . . . To be truly artistic, a work must be also esthetic— that is, framed for enjoyed receptive perception. Con stant observation is, of course, necessary for the maker while he is producing. But if his perception is not also esthetic in nature, it is a colourless and cold recognition of what has been done, used as a stimulus to the next step in a process that is essentially mechanical." What is the effect of the lack of artistry? What is the characteristic of the artificial? Dewey answered that the difference lies on the surface. With the artifice of 99 craftsmanship, the intent is "that of gaining favor." Whenever this split between what is done and its purpose exists, there is insincerity, a trick, a simulation of an act that intrinsically has another effect. When the natural and cultivated blend into one, acts of social intercourse are works of art. The animating impulsion of genial friendship and the deed performed completely coincide without in trusion of ulterior purpose. Awkwardness may pre vent adequacy of expression. But the skillful counterfeit, however skilled, goes through the "Dewey, Art as Experience, p. 48. "ibid. . pp. 47-48. " ibid. . p. 63. 229 form of expression; it does not have the form of friendship and abide in it. The substance of friend ship is untouched.100 Art, then, in the realization of the Deweyan aes thetic, denotes that process of doing and making, the ex tending of something outside the human body, the doing of something visible, audible, or tangible. It is receptive and perceptive. Art is the renewal of spontaneity. The Symbolic Theory of Susanne Lancer The writings of Susanne K. Langer are important to assess, for she is the most articulate spokesman for the semiotic theory of art and aesthetics. She has pursued the implications of the semiotic approach by applying its principles to the arts of music, dance, and theater. Her philosophy has been developed in four books and one impor- 102 tant article, Philosophy in a New Kev. Feeling and IQOlbid. lOlpor a general introduction to Langer, see Beardsley, Classical Greece, pp. 351-353. Harvard University Press, 1942. Also in a Mentor Book, New American Library, New York, 1948. All citations in this study are from this latter edition. 230 Form.103 Problems of Art.104 Philosophical Sketches.105 and 106 "Abstraction in Art." What particularly recommends Langer's approach is its blending of several approaches to the study of art and expression. Of importance to a per forming artist, Langer has employed what Arthur Berndtson 107 has identified as the "studio approach." That is, Langer attempted to develop her aesthetic formulations in a sensi tive involvement with particular art expressions, resulting in a discussion of the individual arts that "is not mainly an examination of internal techniques and praise of external 108 values." Throughout, Langer suggests as much en rapport with the many problems of the artist as she does with the art form or finished product. The aesthetics of the semiotic approach to art began for Langer in her book, Philosophy in a New Kev. The 103jjew York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1953. 104New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1957. 105Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1962. 1Q6The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. XXII (Slimmer, 1964), 379. 107"Semblance, Symbol, and Expression in the Aes thetics of Susanne Langer," The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. XIV (June, 1956), 489. 108 Ibid.. 231 purpose of the book is Langer's proposal that man's symbolic function was the "new key" in philosophy. As Berndtson succinctly stated her theory, She distinguished at length between signals and sym bols; between "discursive" and "presentational" forms of symbolism; and between language as a discursive form and ritual, myth, and art as presentational forms of symbolism.^09 In her book, art was but one of many topics considered, and the theory of art as a symbol was limited to music. In Feeling and Form. Langer extended her new "tonality" to include all of the arts, and introduced the theory of sem blance. In her other writings, she has amplified and ex panded upon the concepts introduced in these two books. Traditional aesthetic, Langer concluded, have been bound by a series of "traditional" discussions of taste, emotion, form, representation, immediacy, illusions, and the like. "Each of them is a strong Leitmotiv in philosophy of art, yet the theories grounded on them respectively, have a peculiar way of either openly clashing with one another, or leaving at least one topic out of the consideration."'1 '^ She pursued a unified theory of art which would incorporate 1 Q9 m < a . 110Langer, Feeling and Form, p. 13. 232 these elements naturally by an extension of the foundations of the aesthetic theory itself. What she established was the symbolic theory of aesthetics. Lucius Garvin defined this theory as follows: The symbolic theory sets symbol (object) and deno tatum (feeling) off as correlative elements within the field of attention . . . [the symbol is the external counterpart of the psychic model that is internal to the aesthetic interpreter.] This psy chic model reflects the organization of the object which symbolizes it, the total aesthetic process consisting in the construction in the percipient of feelings the form of which he finds symbolized in the aesthetic object. The aesthetic experience is a revelation of inner life, of what an emotion is. But doing more, "it shapes our imagi nation of external reality, reality according to the rhyth mic forms of life and sentience, and so impregnates the 112 world with aesthetic values." A community with aesthetic values and awarenesses is, by Langer's definition, a cul- 113 ture, an objective record of developed feeling. Langer's position is that the depth of human men tality is commensurate with the depth to which the aesthetic lll"Emotivism, Expression, and Symbolic Meaning," p. 117. lip J -J ' < = Langer, Feeling and Form, p. 399. ^-l^Langer, Philosophical Sketches, p. 92. 233 experience goes. A work of art . . .may truly be said to "do some thing to us," though not in the usual sense which aestheticians rightly deny— giving us emotions and moods. What it does to us is to formulate our con ceptions of feelings and our conceptions of visual, factual, and audible reality together. It gives us forms of imagination and forms of feelings insepar ably; that is to say, it clarifies and organizes intuition itself. That is why it has the force of revelation, and inspires a feeling of deep intellec tual satisfaction, though it elicits no conscious intellectual work. Aesthetic intuition seizes the greatest form, and therefore the main import, at once . . . [in] Art, it is the impact of the whole, the immediate revelation of vital import, that acts as the psychological lure to long contemplation. H-4 What the percipient engages is the art work itself, its sen tience, a symbolism of life's emotional content. The view ing, reading, or hearing of an art work from the audience standpoint constitutes a direct relationship with the work, not with the artist. The response is that which would be felt in the presence of a natural symbol, finding and re sponding to the "feeling of it." "This 'feeling' is not communicated . . . but revealed; the created form 'has' it, so that perception of the virtual object . . . is at once the perception of its amazingly integrated and intense feel ing."115 There is imposed upon the art object a standard of H 4Langer, Feeling and Form, p. 397. 115Ibid.. p. 394. 234 complete objectivity. "It has to be entirely given; what is „ 116 left to the imagination being implied, not missing. Langer's opinion was that an artist who constantly concerns himself with the audience that will see him, hear him, or read him is making a great mistake. He works for an ideal audience . . . A work directed ad hominem is as flimsy and unworthy as a philosophi cal argument ad hominem . . . The ideal beholder is the measure of a work's objectivity; he may come into actual existence only after many years of its career. It is important to bear in mind, once again, the origins of the word aesthetic in attempting to reckon with Langer's aesthetic and definition of art, for she placed a refined and distinct definition on the role of "feeling" in art and artistic perception. The link of aesthesis to feel ing is in Langer's philosophy an objectification of feeling. "Art," she wrote, "objectified the sentience and desire, self-consciousness, emotions and moods, that are generally regarded as irrational because words cannot give us a clear 118 idea of them." Art gives us a conception of what vital ity and emotion feel like. Art is not irrational; it simply employs forms that are quite different from those of dis 116Ibid. . p. 392. - 1 -17Ibid. 118Langer, Philosophical Sketches, p. 81. 235 course. Art is unsystematic from a logical point of view, and art gives us not discursive abstractions but presenta tional abstractions. The terms "discursive thought" and "presentational abstractions" constitute the keys of philosophy and art respectively. "Discursive thought is a passage from one intuition, or act of understanding, to another. If, at any point, intuition fails, we use equivalent symbols to present 119 the desired meaning until insight occurs." But discur sive thought has its limitations, limitations of verbal con ceptions for feeling, and these limitations alone suffice, in Langer1s opinion, to be the raison d'etre of artistic expression. She classed artistic expressions as "presenta tional abstractions" because they can be made only by means 120 of presentational symbols. "The artist's most elementary problem is the symbolic transformation of subjectively known realities into objective semblances that are immediately recognized as their expression in sensory appearances."1^1 The artist's creation is the symbolic expression, the - 1 - - * - 9Langer, Problems of Art. p. 68. ^°Langer, "Abstraction in Art," pp. 379-380. 121Ibid.. p. 380. 236 symbolic transformation of the subjective autogenic world into a projection of feeling, a projection which Langer 122 identified as "vital, sensory, and emotive." In this act the artist's creation becomes a symbol. Because art is a symbolic expression, every aspect of life which it can render has to be transformed in terms of its complex abstract presentation; any mode of abstraction that the human brain has evolved, therefore, may be drawn into the processes of our self-comprehension. Even the discursive mode is not necessarily excluded, though its misuse is such a constant danger that its unhappy employment as an artistic device bespeaks a very sure expressive aim. The sort of conception that guides the primitive art impulse is versatile and unfettered, and finds sym bolic possibilities in practically all aspects of actual experience. Just as the simplest given ele ment sets up tensions in its surroundings, so every thing that enters into a work has some physiognomy, or at least the seed of physiognomic value, not only the gestalt that emerges in acts of perception but simpler elements, recognizable colors, sounds, tan gible surfaces, heat, warmth, coolness, iciness, light, and darkness. There is a reflection of in ward feeling in the most typically outward, objec tive data of sensation; their subjectification is practically started with their very impingement on the specialized organ that receives them. Their character is never as fixed and simple as the ex trapolations our conventional store of qualifying adjectives has made from them.123 Art, in its simplest terms, is a projection and an abstrac tion of feeling. The feeling has many extensions and many forms of l22Ibid.. p. 386. 123Ibid. 237 symbolizations. Images, gestures, sensory memories, and mental phenomena of all kinds crowd the human brain for expression. They either lose a vitality or directness through discursive symbols, the language of "logic," or are entirely inappropriate for it. The characteristic quality of discursive treatment is expansion; the characteristic of presentational abstractions is condensation, the elimination of extraneous stimuli. The emotive act ... is really an act of emphasiz ing the exciting features, and is an act that is felt, even if only as awareness of them; it may en hance the original simplification or make a new one, even several new ones by turns, and yield the well- known phenomena of changing gestalt. In this process the irrelevant material is not filtered out, but eclipsed by the intensification . . .124 Langer speculated that when forms of perception coincide with forms of emotion, the percepts themselves become emo- 125 tive symbols. The act of creating perceptible forms of 126 human feelings is the practice of art. Art, thus, as an intrinsically expressive act, pos sesses four relevant facts. The relevant facts are (1) that a picture, a statue, a building, a poem or novel or play, or a musical l24Langer, Philosophical Sketches, p. 71. 125Ibid. 126Ibid.. p. 76. 238 composition, is a single symbol of complex vital and emotive import; (2) that there are no conventional meaningful units which compose that symbol, and build up its import stepwise for the percipient; (3) that artistic perception, therefore, always starts with an intuition of total import, and increases by contemplation as the expressive articulations of the form become apparent; (4) that the import of an art symbol cannot be paraphrased in discourse.^-27 Unity and perception begin with an intuition of the total import. The ability to perceive unity is a responsiveness to art, a responsiveness which is sensitive to compositional tensions and resolutions, balance and unbalance, rhythmic 128 coherence. But, above all, art is a unit of unity. "Analysis reveals elements in it, and can go on indefinite ly, yielding more and more understanding; but it will never 129 reveal a recipe." What, then, are the principles of construction? From Langer's position, there is a distinction between prin ciples of construction and principles of art. The use of symbols in art, for example, is a principle of construction, and principles of construction, in addition to the use of symbols, are many. As she stated, ^27Langer, Problems of Art. p. 68. 128Ibid.. p. 8. 129Langer, Feeling and Form, p. 105. 239 [The] most important have furnished our basic de vices, and given rise to the Great Traditions of art. Representation in painting, diatonic harmony in music, versification in poetry are examples of such major devices of composition. Principles of composition are exemplified in thousands of works? they are not, however, indispensable. "Painting can eschew representation, music can be atonal, poetry can be 131 poetry without any metrical scaffold." New devices in construction, new ways of "doing," are often based in pro test against established ways of doing, and constitute the "artistic revolutions" from decade to decade, century to century. Art in our own day is full of revolutionary prin ciples. Symbols, crowding metaphorical images, indirect subject-matter, dream elements instead of sights or events of waking life, often the one presented through the other, have furnished us lately with a new treasure-trove of motifs that command their own treatments, and the result is a new dawning day in art.13^ Langer's principles of art are few; her list in cludes: (1) the creation of what she has termed an "appari tion"? (2) the achievement of a sense of organic unity and "livingness"? and (3) the articulation of feeling. "These ^■3^Langer, Problems of Art. p. 137. ^■3^Ibid. ^3^Ibid. . p. 138. 240 principles of art are wholly exemplified in every work that merits the name of 'art' at all, even though it be not great 133 or in the current sense 'original' ..." From these principles of art Langer derived her aesthetic of symbolic form? the principles of construction are the means and tools of a specific genre. The height of technique, from a Langer aesthetic, is the articulation of feeling, not the stimula tion of feeling or the catharsis of feeling? "the height of technique is simply the highest power of this sensuous reve- 134 lation and wordless abstraction." When art embodies the principles of art and con struction, it points toward the "virtual experience," which, in Langer's aesthetic, are those experiences available to us through perception, as a mirror mirrors the "virtual image" of the thing it reflects. The forces we seem to perceive most directly and con vincingly are created for our perception? and they exist only for it. Anything that exists only for perception, and plays no ordinary, passive part in nature as common objects do, is a virtual entity. ^-33 The confrontation is real, there is no dreaming or imagining that it exists. 133Ibid.. p. 137. 134Ibid. . p. 107. 135Ibid.. p. 5. 241 Expressiveness has endless degrees. Complete artis tic success would be complete articulation of an idea, and the effect would be perfect livingness of the work. "Dead spots" are simply inexpressive spots. From beginning to end, every stroke is composition; where that is attained, there is truly "significant form."136 The attainment of virtuality, the perception of significant form, was discussed in terms of the dance, but it would appear that the implications are significant for any per forming art. The stuff of the dance, the apparition itself, con sist of . . . non-physical forces, drawing and driv ing, holding and shaping its life. The actual, phys ical forces that underlie it disappear. As soon as the beholder sees gymnastics and arrangements, the work of art breaks, the creation fails.!3? The principles of art take precedence over the principles of construction; principles are united, not separated; they are organically related, not dichotomized. The elements in a work of art are merely factors in the symbolic semblance, and as such, they are virtual images themselves, direct 138 components of the total form. Art creates the illusion of artistic vision through imagination. !36Langer, Feeling and Form, p. 79. !37Langer, Problems of Art. p. 10. !3®Langer, Feeling and Form? see Chapter V, "Virtual Space." 242 "The first ingredients of art are usually accidental forms found in the cultural environment," Langer wrote, "which appeal to the imagination as usable artistic ele- 139 ments." Art utilizes the imaginative forces of the sen sitive individual in a two-way artistic transaction: the imagination of the artist stimulating the imagination of the percipient. In each case, imagination is a form of intui tion . The point I want to stress is that the same sort of intuition that enters into ordinary understanding, and forms the basis of discursive reason, functions as artistic perception when we are confronted with a work of art that has import for us. The great dif ference between rational insight and artistic insight lies in the ways intuition is elicited. We need not postulate any mysterious factor in the mind or in the world to admit that artistic perception is directly intuitive, incommunicable, yet rational: it is one of the major forms of "natural light." I40 Langer identified imagination as the primitive human power that "engenders the arts and is in turn directly affected by 141 their products." It is older than discursive reason and has its sources in the primal human activities of dream, religion, and the primitive's mysterious confrontation with 139Ibid.. p. 179. ^ ■ 49Langer, Problems of Art. p. 70. 141Langer, Philosophical Sketches, p. 81. 243 reality. Langer linked the imagination with intuition, and for a very important reason. She asked, "How can the import of an art symbol be known to anyone but its creator?" Langer answered: "By 142 the basic intellectual act of intuition." Here Langer disagreed fundamentally and distinctly with Croce. It will be recalled that intuition was considered by Croce a non- rational and non-intellectual process, freeing intuition from any suggestion of intellectualism. By contrast, Langer's notion is that intuition is an intellectual act. It is defined by what it is not. . . . I do not believe that artistic perception is a kind of reasoning performed, as people say, "through feeling," as though one could use feeling in place of thought to vindicate a belief. It does not involve belief, nor lead to the acceptance of any proposition at all. But neither is it irra tional, a special talent for making a mystical, un negotiated contact with reality. I submit that it is an act of understanding, mediated by a single symbol, which is the created visual, poetic, musi cal, or other aesthetic impression— the apparition that results from the artist's work.^43 What, then, did Langer mean by intuition? "It is . . . some super-sensible . . . awareness of . . . 'individual 142Langer, Feeling and Form, p. 374. I43Langer, Problems of Art. p. 61. 244 particulars'— things, facts, or what not, but always con- 144 crete entities." Intuiting is the fundamental intellec tual activity establishing and producing a logical and semantic understanding of sentient life. It comprises all acts of insight or recognition of formal properties, of relations, or significance, and of abstraction and exemplification. It is more primitive than belief, which is true or false. In tuition is not true or false, but simply present. We may construct true or false propositions involv ing its deliverances, just as direct sensory experi ences may be involved in true or false propositions.^5 An artist expresses intuitions and leads into Langer's con cept of expressiveness. When an artist expresses intuitions, and therefore his "inner knowings," he is taking an amorphous and chaotic reality and objectifying it in a subjective realm. What he expresses is, therefore, not his own actual feelings, but what he knows about human feeling. Once he is in possession of a rich symbolism, that knowledge may actually exceed his entire personal experience. A work of art expresses a conception of life, emotion, inward reality. But it is neither a confessional nor a frozen tantrum; it is a devel oped metaphor, a non-discursive symbol that articu lates what is verbally ineffable— the logic of con sciousness itself.I46 144Ibid.. p. 62. 146Ibid.. p. 26. l45ibid.. p. 66. 245 The point of Langer1s "new key" is that symbols function as the mode of expression, and they function as articulating and presenting concepts. "A symbol is understood when we 147 conceive the idea it presents." A work of art is often a spontaneous expression of feeling, i.e., a symptom of the artist's state of mind. If it represents human beings it is probably also a rendering of some sort of facial expression which suggests the feelings those beings are sup posed to have. ^48 Even further, Langer insisted that all artistic conventions are devices for the creation of forms which express vitality and emotion. Any element in a work of art may contribute to the illusionary dimension in which such forms are pre sented, or to their appearance, their harmonization, their organic unity and clarity; it may serve such aims at once. Everything, therefore, that belongs to a work is expressive? and all artifice is func tional . I49 Expression, as Langer reviewed the use of the word, can suggest two concepts: self-expression, giving vent to feelings? and expressive presentation of an idea, giving articulation to an idea by the proper and apt use of a medium. Self-expression is symptomatic? expressive Langer, Feeling and Form, p. 26. 148Ibid.. p. 25. 149Ibid.. p. 280. 246 presentation is symbolic. Discussing expressive presenta tion in linguistic terms, she wrote, A sentence, which is a special combination of words, expresses the idea of some state of affairs, real or imagined. Sentences are complicated symbols. Lan guage will formulate new ideas as well as communicate old ones, so that people know a lot of things that they have merely heard or read about. Symbolic ex pression, therefore, extends our knowledge beyond the scope of our actual experience. Expressing ideas, however, is quite a different thing from expressing feelings. "You do not say of a man in a rage that his anger is well expressed. The symptoms just are what they are; there is no critical standard for symp toms." The presentation of constructed, made, created symbols, done in the temporal sequence of words, sentences, and stylistic patternings, is the giving of a "form." Langer used the word, "form," in a rather simplistic and common use of the term. She did not mean the stylistic patterning as in the "sonnet form." As suggested above, the constructed and created symbol may utilize the patterning of the sonnet form, but what is perceived is not that artifice, but rather the content of that artifice. 150Langer, Philosophical Sketches, p. 78. 151Ibid. 247 I am using the word in a simpler sense, which it has when you say, on a foggy night, that you see dimly moving forms in the mist; one of them emerges clear ly, and is the form of a man. The trees are gigantic forms; the rills of rain trace sinuous forms on the windowpane. The rills are not fixed things; they are forms of motion. When you watch gnats weaving in the air, or flocks of birds wheeling overhead, you see dynamic forms— forms made by motion. It is in this sense of an apparition given to our perception that a work of art is a form. It may be a permanent form like a building or a vase or a pic ture, or a transient, dynamic form like a melody or a dance, or even a form given to imagination, like the passage of purely imaginary, apparent events that constitutes a literary work. But it is always a per ceptible, self-identical whole; like a natural being, it has a character of organic unity, self-sufficiency, individual reality.152 Expression in a work of art does not point beyond itself as genuine symbols do. Langer's use of symbol and its relation to feeling is a special one: the feeling and the symbol— the expression contained in the symbol— are not separable from each other. We speak of the feeling of, or the feeling in, a work of art, not the feeling it means, and we speak truly; a work of art presents something like a di rect vision of vitality, emotion, subjective real ity. 153 Expression in language is something that has to be learned by example and practice; and curiously enough, the fundamental technique of expression is language. Langer - * - 52Ibid. . p. 79. 153Ibid.. p. 80. 248 pointed out that expression is abetted by either conscious or unconscious training. People whose speech training has been very casual are less sensitive to what is exact and fitting for the expression of an idea than those of cultivated habit; not only with regard to arbitrary rules of usage, but in respect of logical rightness and necessity of expression, i.e., saying what they mean and not something else.154 Langer's thought, however, that language as an expressive medium has difficulties in articulating the realm of "inner experience." The paradox of language in this respect is quite intriguing. As a prime instrument of conceptual ex pression, language remains the most important human charac teristic. "The things we can say are in effect the things we can think.1 1 Yet, Langer wrote, the artifice of lan guage seems inappropriate for the subjective experiences, because of the form of language itself. [The ] . . . form of language does not reflect the natural form of feeling, so that we cannot shape any extensive concepts of feeling with the help of ordinary, discursive language. Therefore the words whereby we refer to feeling only name very general kinds of inner experience— excitement, calm, joy, sorrow, love, hate, and so on. But there is no lan guage to describe just how one differs, sometimes l54Langer, Feeling and Form, p. 39. See also Chap ter V, "Language," in Philosophy in a New Kev. ■ 1 - 55Langer, Philosophical Sketches, p. 79. 249 radically, from another. The real nature of feeling is something language as such— as discursive symbol ism— cannot render. This point, of course, is crucial to an understanding of Langer1s concept of expressiveness. Language is an expres sion of feeling in that it formalizes a symbol fif. feeling, formulating ideas of the inward experience. "A work of art presents something like a direct vision of vitality, emo- 157 tion, subjective reality." The process of imagination is the particularizing of our sensory experience, making real ity conceivable. Primitive conception is imaginative; civilized, discursive. "Language and imagination grow up JL58 together in a reciprocal tutelage." Thus the attempt to articulate feeling in language is the idea of educating feeling, and educating feeling, Langer thought, is at the 159 very heart of personal education. An articulate personal education evokes the symbols of that education, the images by which personal sentience can be connoted. What is expressed in a dance is an idea of the way feelings, emotions, and all other subjective experi ences come and go— their rise and growth, their ^•5^lbid. ^-57Ibid. . p. 80 (italics mine). IS^Langer, Problems of Art. p. 71. 159Ibid-, P- 72. 250 intricate synthesis that gives our inner life unity and personal identity. What we call a person's inner life is the inside story of his own history; the way living in the world feels to him . . .160 What is true of the dance as an art form can be extended to all creative artists from the Langeran perspective. If art is a record of inner life, the results are not an emotion itself, but rather the record of that emo tion, a symbol of feeling. Langer noted that the idea of "virtual" experience in art has a structure as well. It is a structure that can be conceptually known, reflected on, 161 imagined and symbolically expressed in detail. "Only it is not our usual medium, discourse— communication by lan guage— that serves to express what we know of the life of feeling," she observed. The important fact is that what language does not readily do— present the nature and patterns of sen sitive and emotional life— is done by works of art. Such works are expressive forms, and what they ex press is the nature of human feeling.162 In the lexicon of Langer's aesthetic, "feeling" does not mean "pleasure or displeasure," in the sense in which it is used by psychologists. It is used to designate anything 160ibid.. p. 7. ^^•Ibid. • * ~ 62Ibid. 251 163 that mav be felt. In this sense it includes both sensation and emotion— the felt responses of our sense organs to environ ment, of our proprioceptive mechanisms to internal changes, and of the organism as a whole to its situa tion as a whole, the so-called "emotive feelings." We feel warmth, pinprick, ache, effort, and relaxa tion; vision is the ways the optic nerve feels the impingement of light, and hearing is the way the auditory structures feel sound waves; we feel bodily weakness or high tonus, and we feel expectation, frustration, yearning, fear, satisfaction. All these ways of feeling have characteristic forms, and a closer study of their forms shows a striking resem blance between them and the forms of growth, motion, development, and decline familiar to the biologist, the typical forms of vital process. This suggests a more intimate relation between such process and the phenomenon of sentience than their traditional treatment as categorically separate sets of "data" would ever suggest.164 Whatever the relationship, Langer insisted that the only psychological fact worth noting is that the organism feels something, that the process was an activity of the human mechanism, and that it could not be considered a product. "It is something that goes on in an organism, but not neces sarily an isolable event over and above those which we are gradually and indirectly observing, the actions of the brain and its dependencies."^^ 163Langer, Philosophical Sketches, p. 16. 164Ibid. 165Ibid.. p. 17. 252 Langer divided the activity of feeling into two general categories, sensibility and emotivity. We experience as objective whatever is felt as im pact, and as subjective what is felt as action. The use of these definitions invites one to recognize many intriguing, usually overlooked phenomena, such as the dialectical interplay between subjective and objective elements in human experience, the lability of these characteristics themselves, the points of their disappearance or possibly even their reversal? one is led to problems of objectification, which are crucial in the psychology of art and indeed of all symbolic behavior.166 Sensibility is the objective impact of felt experience? emotivity the subjective. Sensibility is the self-perpetu ating activity of continuously feeling our own inward action as a texture of subjectivity. When objectively felt events impinge as perceptions, subjectivity, that is concerted thoughts and distinct emotions, reveals them as articulated forms. Subjectivity is some point for any given individual on a psychical continuum of self-awareness. Objective, felt sensibility is a mental and physical act of incorporating external impacts? subjective, emotive sensitivity is an intracerebral event giving rise to feeling. This latter feeling could be rational or irrational, healthy or patho logical. "[When] . . . it is broken, as in some pathologi- 166IfeM., P. 20. 253 cal states, no amount of objective evidence can convince the patient that his subjectively 'lost' hand, foot, or even 167 half of his body is his own." This theory of feeling becomes crucial for the "semiotic" impact, the felt relation between symbol and sense. As . . . subjective experience is intensified and integrated into a self, [the] objective experience is symbolically unified into a world; the interplay of these two mental constructs governs . . . life, which is therefore really a "life of the mind."-*-68 Instead of saying "converted into thought," Langer says of the objective impact of phenomena, "felt as thought." Langer explained that in this distinction the investigation of mental function is shifted from the realm of mysterious transubstantiation to that of physiological processes where we face problems of complexity and degree, which are difficult, but not unassailable in principle. On the basis that the purpose of art is to objectify the life of feeling, Langer hypothesized, It may be through a manipulation of his created ele ments that [the artist] discovers new possibilities for feeling, strange moods, perhaps greater concen tration of passion than his own temperament could ever produce, or than his own fortunes have yet called forth. For although a work of art reveals 167Ifcl:fl-, P. 27. 169Ibid.. p. 18. 168Ibid.. p. 28. 254 the character of subjectivity, it is itself objec tive . . . As an abstracted form, it can be handled quite apart from its sources and yield dynamic pat terns that surprise even the artist. All alien in fluences on his work are such contributions to his human knowledge.^7® Because of the power of the symbol and its sensibility, she concluded that even the artist does not need to experience 171 in his life every emotion that he can express. Langer argued that feeling is projected in patterns of tension, in patterns of appearances and semblances. Music and poetry are, in fact. only disturbances of the air, or, unplayed or unsaid, remain trails of ink. These projec tions of feeling are symbolic presentations, not copies of feeling. As she wrote, "[There] can be as much knowledge of feeling projected into the timeless articulated form of painting, or a stained-glass window, or a subtly propor tioned Greek temple, as into the flowing forms of music, 172 dance, recitation." Feeling is projected as memory, imagination, anti cipation . Pure sensation of pain or pleasure has no unity, Langer argued. "It is sensation remembered and anticipated, feared or sought, or even imagined and eschewed that is l70Langer, Feeling and Form, p. 374. 171Ibid. 17^Ibid.. p. 373. 255 important in human life." 173 Perception shaped by imagina tion, emotional reactions systematized by continuity of thought, attitudes concomitant with feeling— these set the scope for an individual's passions. "In other words; by virtue of our thought and imagination we have not only greater aesthetic import for the study of the arts than theories of impression. The dominant ideas occur in both types of theory, but they look different when viewed from such dif ferent standpoints. This circumstance adds to the apparent confusion of aesthetic notions. What, in the impressionist perspective, appears as taste, i.e., a pleasant or unpleasant reaction to sensory stimulation, appears from the opposite angle as the principle of selection, the so-called "ideal of beauty" which is supposed to guide an artist in his choice of words, colors, tones, etc. Emotion may be taken either as effect of the work on the be holder, or as the source from which its author's conception arose, and the resultant theories will appear to treat the whole subject differently. One will tend to the sort of laboratory psychology that seeks aesthetic reactions in tabulated results . . . the other to a psychoanalytic study of the artist. The contemplation of form from the standpoint of impression yields notions as Universal Law, Dynamic Symmetry, Significant Form; from that of expression it involves us in the problems of abstractions.I75 feelings, but a life of feelings." 174 Langer stressed that theories of expression have •^^Ibid. t p. 372. 175Ibid. . p. 14. 256 Langer argued that it is foolish to ask, "Shall we judge a work of art as an utterance giving vent to its author's feeling, or as a stimulus, producing sentiments in the 176 spectator?" Since art can and does do both, Langer, with a quiet exasperation, rhetorically urged, If self-expression is the aim of art, then only the artist can judge the value of his products. If its purpose is to excite emotion, he should study his audience and let his psychological findings guide his work.^77 Langer1s position is that art is something subtler than either catharsis or incitement. In fact, the most expert critics tend to discount both these subjective elements, and treat the emo tive aspect of a work of art as something integral to it, something as objective as the physical form, color, sound pattern of the verbal text itself.I78 Criticism of works of art cannot be discursively treated, and by this statement, Langer did not mean to sug gest that they cannot be criticized. Appreciation— being impressed or left cold comes first? but the recognition of how the illusion was made and organized and how the sense of import is immediately given by a strong piece, even though the critic himself may be non-plussed by its strange feeling— that recognition is a product of analysis, reached by discursive reasoning about the work and 176Ibid.. p. 18. 177Ibid. 178Ibid. 257 179 xts effects. Langer insisted that such findings are not criteria of ex cellence? they are explanations of the art work or perform ance . In the case, for instance, of a poem that mediates no intuition, i.e., a bad poem, a little study may trace its lack of "livingness" to the use of ready made phrases, where their presence as familiar phrases serves no artistic purpose. The poem sug gests other poems, it does not incorporate them? it is synthetic, it has no body— no organic struc ture— of its own . . . What is truly significant in art can be attested by its virtual results, by the artist's success or failure, which, by a Langer aesthetic, is intuitively known or not at n 181 all. Immediately, of course, "creation," "creativity," and "created-ness" become the focal points of criticism and productivity of art. Not only must a sensitive criticism be built upon the sensitivity to "felt emotion" and the "sen tience" of the presented symbol, but an explanation of the creative process? what is meant when the word "created" is used, becomes somewhat crucial. Langer, in answering these 179IMfl-, P. 406. 18QIbid, 18lIbid.. p. 407. 258 queries, stated the viable demands of a philosophy of crea tion . [it] requires something of reorientation among famil iar ideas of art criticism and philosophy. It de mands a stricter treatment of the term "expression," and gives a single and unmysterious meaning to "in tuition." Above all, it entails a special formula tion of almost every major problem concerning art, notably that of the unity of the several arts, in the face of the often denied, yet patent fact of their actual division; the paradox of abstraction in a mode supposed to be characterized by concrete ness; the significance of style, the power of tech nique . Once you answer the question: "What does art create?" all further questions of how and why, of personality, talent, and genius, etc., seem to emerge in a new light from the central thesis.^8^ Creativity means "to make an outward image of [the] inward process, for oneself and others to see; that is, to give the subjective events an objective symbol. Every work of art is 183 such an image." What is created is objective, a pure appearance, a created apparition; it is charged with feeling because its form expresses the nature of that feeling. It is, therefore, also "the objectification of subjective life . . ."184 182Ibia., P. 10. 183Langer, Problems of Art. p. 9. 184Ibid. 259 Anything an artist can envisage is "like" his own subjectivity, or is at least connected with the ways of feeling. Such connections normally occur for him through widening knowledge of other people's art; that is, by symbolic revelation. The appreciation of new art is a development of one's own emotive possibilities; and that, of course, is an expansion of native powers, not an intellectual acceptance of novelty in a tolerant spirit.^-85 Langer insisted that the "fundamental laws of imagi nation" cannot be divorced from the essence of creativity. These laws, the forms of visible space, audible time, living forces, and experience itself, are steeped in tradition and have remained the laws of artistic combination through all phases of artistic production. They were recognized long ago by poets, who praised them as the wisdom of the heart (much superior to that of the head), and by the mystics who believed them to be the laws of "reality." But, like the laws of literal language, they are really just can ons of symbolization; and the first systematic study of them was first undertaken by Freud.^88 The Freudian principle to which Langer referred is that which he called Darstellbarkeit. literally, "that which can be exhibited," or, as Langer translated it, "exhibitable." Every product of the imagination— be it intelligently organized work of an artist, or the spontaneous 185Langer, Feeling and Form, p. 391. 186Ibid.. p. 241. 260 fabrication of a dreamer— comes to the percipient as an experience, a qualitative datum. And any emotional import conveyed by it is perceived just as directly? that is why poetic presentation is often said to have an "emotional quality."187 Can creativity be trained? Can sensitivity in an artist be developed so that full sentient awareness is ac cessible to him? Are there criteria which could be enun ciated as "characteristic" of artists and talents? Talent is essentially the native ability to handle such ideas as one has, to achieve desired effects. It seems to be closely linked with body-feeling, sensitivity, muscular control, verbal or tonal mem ory, as well as the one great mental requirement: aesthetic responsiveness . , . What is known as an "average talent" for an art can be developed to a considerable extent by giving it exercise.188 Genius, however, is something quite different from talent. Langer would not call it "superlative talent." What is genius? "[The] power to conceive invisible realities— sentience, vitality, emotion— in a new symbolic projection that reveals something of their nature for the first time 189 . . ." Genius admits of degrees; small amounts are not rare. "Whatever its scope, it is the mark of the true art ist? and though he be a craftsman by profession, it sets 187Ibid. 189Ibid.. p. 409. 188Ibid.. , P- 407. 261 him above the pure craftsman, the copyist, the exploiter, 190 in the realm of art." In Langer's development of symbolic presentation as the important "tonality" in her aesthetics, three main con siderations emerge. First, art is a process and a way of making feeling apparent and objective so that it may be reflected upon and understood. Second, practice and famil iarity in any art provide the forms which the feeling can and will take. And finally, art educates the senses, and such an education allows and permits the artist to perceive 191 and articulate life and nature xn an expressxve form. In addition to the general aesthetic outlined above, Langer's breadth and range of concerns impinged upon factors in the arts which might significantly contribute to the com plex art of the oral presentation of literature. To this end, it is useful to begin with Langer's suggested classi fication of arts. It is useful, first, to dispense the general classi fication of art forms into genre, i.e., music, dance, 190Ibid. 191These points of summation are paraphrased from a discussion of art and culture and their mutual dependencies. They seemed a particularly suitable summary for all of Langer1s aesthetic. See Problems of Art. pp. 73-74. literature, sculpture, painting, etc. And, second, dispens ing with the notion that various arts could be, and often are, classified as "arts of time" and "arts of space," Langer suggested that the arts might better be conceived as arts which differ between "plasticity" and "occurrency." Music, for example, which is an art of time, is so in an intimate and important way: it creates a new time, "an audible passage filled with motion that is just as illusory 192 as it is measuring." But the art of time is also ap plicable to literature, drama, and dance in that all these art forms require a definite time of perception. Drama and dance are traditionally thought of and regarded as perform ing arts; this is not true of literature, because silent reading cannot be said to be "performed." But the sense of art occurs, the encounter occurs, and it is in this sense that literature could join dance and drama as an "occurrent art." Architecture, painting, sculpture, and allied forms are, quite obviously, plastic arts. An occurrent art exists in time, flowing time, ex perienced time. Langer noted four distinct types of time, each revealing a different sense of passage and measurement Langer, Feeling and Form, p. 120. 263 of that passage. First, the time of pure duration is that form of time seemingly independent of the external world. It is, Langer suggested, the attribute of our deepest con- 193 . . . . sciousness. Second, psychological time is an impression of time. It is received and experienced according to the events of a life's moment or duration. In psychological time minutes may seem like centuries, hours like seconds. Occurrent arts of drama and dance exist in both pure dura tion and psychological time units. There is, third, time as measured bv some mathematical means, i.e., the earth's time, units, time in space, time in the universe. Though it in trigues artists, it is conceptual and discursive. And fourth, Langer isolated musical time, or auditory time. which is "without doubt that which approaches most closely 194 pure duration." The elements of music are moving forms of sound? but in their motion nothing is removed. The realm in which tonal entities move is a realm of pure dura tion . Like its elements, however, this duration is not an actual phenomenon. It is not a period— ten minutes or a half hour, some fraction of a day— but is sometimes radically different from the time in which our public and practical life proceeds. It is completely incommensurable with the progress of common affairs. Musician duration is an image of what might be termed "lived" or "experienced" time 193Ibid.. p. 116. l^Ibid. 264 — the passage of life that we feel as expectations become "now," and "now" turns into unalterable fact. Such passage is measurable only in terms of sensi bilities, tensions, and emotions? and it has not merely a different measure, but an altogether dif ferent structure from practical or scientific time. It could be argued that this passage precisely describes the experience of time in the best of oral readings. This point is even more fully revealed where in a later passage, Langer amplified this notion of musical time. [Our] direct experience of time is the passage of vital functions and lived events, felt inwardly as tensions— somatic, emotional, and mental tensions, which have a characteristic pattern. They grow from a beginning to a point of highest intensity, mounting either steadily or with varying accelera tion to a climax, then dissolving, or letting it go abruptly in sudden deflation, or merging with the rise or fall of some other, encroaching ten- In an occurrent art form, time is filled with its own characteristics, just as in the plastic art, a space is filled with materials. In each case, time and materials allow the observation? there would be no art without them. The basic commodity of time is tension, as Langer noted above. Physical, emotional, and intellectual tensions with their resolutions provide the variety within the art form 195Ibid.. p. 109 Langer, Problems of Art. pp. 37-38. 265 of an occurrent art as well as in a plastic art. If we could experience only single, successive or ganic strains, perhaps subjective time would be one dimensional like the time clacked off by clocks. But life is always a dense fabric of concurrent ten sions, and each of them is a measure of time, the measurements themselves do not coincide. This causes our temporal experience to fall apart into incommen surate elements which cannot be all perceived to gether as clear focus . 197 Art focuses the rising and falling of felt experience's concurrent tensions in time. Closely allied to the experience of time is rhythm, the rising and falling which occurs within the duration. Langer sets rhythm apart from time by defining rhythm as "the preparation of a new event by the ending of a previous A person who moves rhythmically need not repeat a single motion exactly. His movements, however, must be complete gestures, so that one can sense a be ginning, intent, and consummation, and see in the last stage of one the condition and indeed the rise of another. Rhythm is the setting-up of new ten sions by the resolutions of former o n e s .199 Rhythm is vital activity, Langer wrote. It is the illusion of an indivisible whole. "All life is rhythmic; under l97Langer, Feeling and Form, p. 112. 198lbid.. p. 126. 199Ibid. 266 difficult circumstances, its rhythms may become very com plex, but when they are really lost, life cannot endure any longer."200 The function of rhythm is the organization of life into a viable and biological design. Words can be rhythmical, but the same also can be said of gesture and voice. Langer observed that gesture may either be self expressive or logically expressive, or both. It may indicate demands and intentions, as when people signal to each other, or it may be conventionally symbolic, . . . but at the same time the manner in which a gesture is performed usually indicates the performer's state of mind? it is nervous or calm, violent or gentle, etc. Or it may be purely self- expressive, as speech may be pure exclamation.201 Consistently developing her argument of art as virtual ex perience, Langer pointed out that gesture, too, may create the semblance of self-expression. To keep virtual elements and actual materials sepa rate is not easy for anyone without philosophical training, and is hardest, perhaps, for artists, to whom the created world is more immediately real and important than the factual world. It takes precision of thought not to confuse an imagined feeling, or precisely conceived emotion that is formulated in a perceptible symbol, with a feeling or emotion actu ally experienced in response to real events.2^2 2Q0Ibid. 202Ibid.. p. 181. 201Ibid.. p. 180. 267 What Langer is distinguishing here is that actual life ges tures and symbolic gestures differ in intent. In actual life gestures function as signals or symp toms of our ideas, intentions, expectations, demands, and feelings. Because they can be consciously con trolled, they may also be elaborated, just like vo cal sounds, into a system of assigned and combinable symbols.203 Gesticulation in actual life is not an art. It remains vital movement. Only when gesticulation is imagined does it become an artistic element, becoming then a symbolic form expressing the ideas of emotion, awareness, and premonition. Langer identified the voice as the prime avenue of self-expression. The human voice is associated with the quality of impassioned utterance. The voice, which func tions for the human in biological and artistic dimensions of experience, has the oxymoric capacities of being crude and fine, deep or casual, strident and pleasant. Each 204 facet is reflected "in its spontaneous variable tone." It is the prime avenue of self-expression, and in this demonstrative capacity, not really a musical instrument at all . . . Throughout its career as a bearer of musical ideas, the voice keeps its readi ness for pathos, its association with actual feel ing— what a German would call its LebensnShe.205 2°3lbid.. p. 174. 204Ibid.. p. 141. 205Ibid. 268 Congruent with the general philosophy of the symbolic act and what it represents, both gesture and voice, or what may be termed total gestural responsiveness, remain integral to the development of an aesthetic of performance. Turning to Langer1s aesthetic of poesis. what is found is an articulate and expanded explanation of the sen tient and vital symbol. Langer defined literature as fol lows: Literature projects the image of life in the mode of virtual memory; language is its essential material; the sound and meaning of words, their familiar or unusual use and order, even their presentation on the printed page, create the illusion of life as a realm of events— completed, lived, as words formu late them— events that compose a P a s t . 2 ^ 6 Three considerations must be pointed out here. First, the purpose of literature is to share what the emotion was, what it represented, what its results were, what it yielded. Second, the time of literature is in the past, it happened, it is being recollected through the skein of sensitive re creation. And third, the means by which the past emotional vitality is recreated is through language and its devices; poesis is not the artful use of devices. The significance of any piece of literature must 206Ibid.. p. 306. 269 lie, supposedly, in what the author says? yet every critic who is worth his salt has enough literary intuition to know that the wav of saving things is somehow all-important. This is especially obvious on 7 in poetry.^^' But Langer also made it abundantly clear that despite the importance of the manner in which something is accomplished in language, this by no means indicates that the judgment of excellence can be attributed to the piece's virtues of word music, imagery, sensuousness, emotional intensity, economy, irony. [Such] "values" are not the stuff of literature at all, but devices for making true elements that con stitute the poetic illusion. Their use is properly relative to the poet's creative purpose . . . The cardinal principle is that every artifice employed must be employed to a poetic purpose, not because it is fun, or the fashion, or a new experiment to use it.2®8 Langer stated that the purpose of poetic expression is the creation of a primary illusion of life. The word "life" is used in two distinct general senses, ignoring the many esoteric or special sens es it may have besides: the biological sense, in which "life" is the characteristic functioning of organisms, and is opposed to "death"? and the so cial sense, in which "life" is what happens, what the organism (or if you will, the soul) encounters and has to contend with. In the first sense, all art has the character of life, because every work 207Ibid.. p. 208. 208Ibid.. p. 282. 4 270 of art must have organic character, and it usually makes sense to speak of its "fundamental rhythm." But "life" in the second sense belongs peculiarly to poetic art, namely, as its primary illusion. The semblance of experienced events, the illusion of life, is established with the opening line; the reader is confronted at once with a virtual order of experiences, which have immediately apparent values, without any demonstrable reasons for good or evil, importance or triviality, even the natural or supernatural characters they seem to have.^*"^ In literature, illusion has no core of actuality that per mits many aspects to appear at once, Langer thought. Liter ature possesses only such aspects as are given in the tell ing; and she concluded, "[They] are as terrible, as wonder- 210 ful, as homely, or as moving as they 'sound.'" The sound of language, autistic or non-autistic, is an important ad junct of the literary purpose. Langer distinguished prose from poetry in terms of differences in devices and their aggregate effect. Both prose and poetry set up a literary illusion, creating the literary past in which experience occurred. "The illusion is effected by the use of words, whether that use be the devious weaving of lines found in a Horatian ode, or the 211 rapid even colloquial sentences of prose narrative ..." 209Ibid.. p. 213. 211Ibid.. p. 299. 210Ibid.. p. 214. 271 Though Croce adamantly refused to consider any "technique" in the discussion of literature, Langer did so to the extent of considering the palette which the writer uses. Langer stated that literature is by definition supple, elastic, expansive, taking its motifs from all aspects of life and from all places where man has been. [Literature] creates places and happenings, thoughts, actions, persons. The novel centers on the develop ment of persons? to such an extent, indeed, that people often lose sight of every other element in it, and will praise as great art any work that presents an interesting character. But a novel to be vital needs more than character study; it requires an illu sion of the world, of history perceived and felt.212 "Poetry exhibits, like nothing else in the world, the formulative use of language? it is the paradigm of 213 creative speech." The creation of a virtual history is the principle of all literature, and is the fundamental 214 principle of poesis. What is actual is transformed by the poetic imagination into something purely experiential. Langer stated that poetry is not "genuine discourse," but rather is the creation of illusory experience with language 212Ibid. 2!3Langerj Problems of Art. p. 151. 214Langer, Feeling and Form, p. 252. 272 215 which is particularly useful for the purposes of art. The fullest exploitation of language sound and rhythm, assonance and sensuous associations, is made in lyric poetry . . . [it] is the literary form that depends most directly on pure verbal resources— the sound and evocative power of words, meter, alliteration, rhyme, and other rhythmic devices, associated images, repe titions, archaisms, and grammatical twists. It is the most obviously linguistic creation, and therefore the readiest instance of poesis.2^ What perhaps makes the lyric form most appealing for Langer as the prime example of poesis is that is more satisfac torily fulfills the requirements of the "true" distinguish ing mark of poetry: simplification of the events in life, but at the same time, a fuller perception and evaluation of them. A poem is the creation of a world as an artistic 217 image given as an object to look at, not to live m . Thus, T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land is the succinct statement of the world lived in as looked at. Jumbled in its scenes, as life is jumbled in its, The Waste Land succeeds as poetry because it creates the virtual life. ordered through the orchestration of motifs and techniques. The power of poesis lies in its power of transforma tion. The transformation is accomplished by the metaphoric 215Ibid- 217Ibid.. p. 228. 216Ibid.. p. 258. 273 use of language, metaphorical expression being the natural instrument of "our greatest mental achievement— abstract 4-u- i • ..2 1 8 thxnking.' The power of words is really astounding . . . Their very sound can influence one's feelings about what they are known to mean. The relation between the length of rhythmic phrases and the length of chains of thought makes thinking easy or difficult, and may make the ideas involved seem more or less pro found. The vocal stress that rhythmicizes some languages, the length of vowels in others, or the tonal pitch, at which words are spoken in Chinese and some unknown tongues, may make one way of word ing a proposition seem gayer or sadder than another. This rhythm of language is a mysterious trait that probably bespeaks biological unities of thought and feeling which are entirely unexplored as yet.2^ - 8 What makes poetry particularly vexing to the dis cursively minded is that although it is a creation of per ceptible human experience, it remains, nevertheless, illu sory. "Poetic statements are no more actual statements than the peaches visible in a still life are an actual des- The real question is what the poet makes, and that, of course, depends on how he goes about it. The task of poetic criticism, then, is not to learn from any and all available records what was the poet's o 1 o Langer, Problems of Art. p. 104. ^^Langer, Feeling and Form, p. 258. ppn Langer, Problems of Art. p. 152. 274 philosophy, morality, life history, or psychosis, and to find the revelation of his own experiences in his words; it is to evaluate his fiction, the appearance of thought and feeling or outward events that he creates.22 Langer wrote that only two questions are essential in poetic criticism. They are, "What is the poet trying to say?" and 222 "What is the poet trying to make us feel?" An examina tion of "how" the poet achieves his effect is a secondary consideration, important as it is. There is a holding power to the poetic illusion that transcends technique; every word written by the poet develops an image of reality that 223 has been suggested by his emotional life. The only condition is that materials from any source whatever must be put to completely artistic uses, entirely transformed, so that they do not lead away from the work, but give it, instead, the air of being "reality."224 The principle of Langer's aesthetic of poesis thus remains the transformation by the imagination into a "something" of pure experiential intensity. The laws of creation pertain to all literary craft, not the laws of discourse. The for mer creates the virtual experience of art; the latter render 221I£M. 222Langer, Feeling and Form, p. 209. 223Ibid.. p. 245. 224Ibid. 275 life in actuality. The poet uses discourse to create an illusion, a pure appearance, which is non-discursive symbolic form. The feeling expressed by this form is neither his, nor his hero's, nor ours. It is the meaning of the symbol. It may take us some time to perceive it, but the symbol expresses it at all times, and in this sense the poem "exists" objectively whenever it is presented to us, instead of coming into being only when somebody makes certain "integrated responses" to what a poem is saying. We glance at a page and say to ourselves almost immediately, "Here's a good poem'." . . . For the poem is essentially something to be perceived, and perceptions are strong experi ences that normally cut across the "momentary trem bling in our minds" resulting from assorted stimu li 225 J- ^ • • • This awareness of something belonging to life. not the poem. avoids what Langer called the interpretation fallacy, the "crisscross of interpretations and opinions . . . confusing 226 what the poet creates with what he represents." "It is the fallacy of looking, not for the artistic function of everything he represents and the way he represents it, but for something that his representations are supposed to 227 illustrate or suggest— something that belongs to life." Keeping the semblance of life necessitates a re quirement on the percipient's part of not identifying the 225Ibid., p. 211. 227Ibid. 226H?ifl., P. 360. 276 events, experiences, or perhaps the central character with himself. I say the poet's business is to keep us from bring ing in our dreams, so that we may see his poetic abstraction— essential forms of history— composed into transparent symbols of feeling itself.22® The percipient, too, needs to keep the distinction in mind between devices in poesis by which a writer attains life likeness and means that keep art and life separate. The latter means are the simplification and manipulation of life's images which make them different from their proto types. The simplification and manipulation of symbols, those natural symbols of life and sentient being, yield the "most powerful principle governing the uses of 'natural sym bols,'" namely, the principle of condensation. [The principle] is essentially a fusion of the forms themselves by intersection, contraction, elision, suppression, and many other devices. The effect is usually to intensify the created image, heighten the "emotional climate"; often^g make one aware of com plexities of feeling . . . Susanne K. Langer's aesthetics is one of the most fully 230 worked out in recent years. It is an aesthetic concerned 228Ibid.. p. 243. 229Ibid.. p. 244. 230fieardsley, Classical Greece, p. 356. 277 with the education of feeling. As Langer pointed out, 231 traditional education is the education of thought. In education of feeling, man is connected to the symbolic key of his own being; this is Langer's purpose of art. Conclusion Benedetto Croce, John Dewey, and Susanne K. Langer have given to the artist, percipient, and critic distinct approaches to art. Their systems of intuitive apprehension, expressive experience, symbolic semblance of feeling are richly implicative for a development of an aesthetic of oral interpretation. Croce's emphasis upon the role of feeling in artis tic expressiveness is, for him, the process of creation. Art is the production of images from the inner experience and sense data of the artist. An art work is a unified whole, and the intuitive grasp of this wholeness determines the quality of its parts. The presentational form of liter ature is the manner in which images have been presented by the intuition in making, forming, expressing. The aesthetic image exists as it is identified with expression. All lit erary forms must be subsumed under the expressive form; 231Langer, Feeling and Form, p. 401. 278 Croce argued against recognizing the "formal elements" in literature as more important. Dewey's recognition of the continuity of experience suggested the shaping of experience: an intensification and refinement of it. This shaping is art. The artistic ex perience derives from life's experiences and acts in such a way as to elevate and celebrate the process of life. Art clarifies emotion and is induced by material that is itself expressive. Artistic expression starts from an "impulsion" which is determined by an individual's needs and active interaction with the environment. Impulsion does not lead to expression until it is corn-pressed and generated into articulation. Energy is the most signifying mark of com pression? art excites and composes, stimulates and tran- quilizes. "Experience-compression-expression" form the progressive elements of artistic creation. Langer's aesthetic experience is the revelation of the inner life from the encounter with symbols of feeling. Symbols in art are not emotions, but are, rather, the record of what an emotional experience is. A symbol is a corollary of feeling. Langer equates human mentality with the depth to which the aesthetic experience goes. In the aesthetic experience, feeling is not communicated, but revealed. 279 There is imposed upon the art object a standard of complete objectivity. Art, in its simplest terms, is a projection and an abstraction of feeling. Art achieves a creation of an "apparition," a sense of organic life, and an articula tion of feeling. The height of artistic technique is the power of sensuous revelation and wordless abstraction. Any principles of construction must be subordinated to the illu sion of the artistic vision. Artistic symbols are perceived by the act of intuition, the intellectual activity of pro ducing a logical understanding of sentient life. The funda mental technique of expression in human life is language, though language itself is often inappropriate for subjective experiences; hence the amplification of language occurs in tone, gesture, inflection. Langer insisted that theories of expression have greater aesthetic import than theories of impression. Creativity means to make an outward image of the inward process. Croce, Dewey, and Langer developed their systems of aesthetics from appraisals of the literary genre or mode of art and must be taken as significant contemporary aesthetic formulations to any creation of an aesthetic of oral inter pretation . CHAPTER IV AESTHETIC CONCEPTS IN REPRESENTATIVE ORAL INTERPRETATION TEXTBOOKS Writers in the field of oral interpretation have approached their discipline from two directions, with de grees of emphasis placed upon one direction or the other. To develop the reader as a sentient person capable of re sponding and reacting aesthetically to the literature for interpretation, training him in the techniques of vocal and bodily communication, is the first approach; the other direction has been to expand the critical skills available to him for intellectual analysis of the literature, acquir ing the techniques for textual analysis, appreciation of form, etc. Developing resources of literary criticism is not devoid of aesthetic problems. Because the interpreter does not create the art form, but rather presents a form of literature, the training of sensibilities has inherent with in it various aspects of the aesthetic experience. The 280 281 aesthetic matters of performance and the performance of aesthetic materials are two distinct problems. This dis tinction is pointed out as a means of facilitating the par ticular problems which the writers in oral interpretation have faced. The purpose of this chapter is to examine how aesthetics have been applied by the writers of oral inter pretation . When Algernon Tassin wrote of the oral interpreta tion of literature, "The reading will secure all the results contemplated by elocution; the analysis will secure a study of structure and style . . . The two-fold work should result in a habit of accurate apprehension of the printed page . . . he summarized what the essence of the oral interpre tative moment is: the apprehension of art and the communi cation of its felt experience. Apprehension, the result of experiential confrontation with art, promotes the aesthesis. The oral interpretation of literature is an act of creation. An auditor, in turn, experiences the literature, apprehends and experiences his aesthesis from what is made available to him through the interpreter. The uniqueness of oral inter pretation of literature lies in the two-fold results of ^ - The Oral Study of Literature (5th ed.; New York: F. S. Crofts & Co., 1939), p. 1. 282 aesthesis: the interpreter's depth of aesthetic apprecia tion of the literature he is communicating, and the audi tor's appreciation of the experience of hearing literature read aloud to him. The training of the interpreter and his sensibilities to literary art involves the study of struc ture and style. The training in projecting sensibilities, the act of delivery, includes the study of mind, voice, and body engaged in a creative activity. The study of the art of performance has been characterized by considerable polem ics and major differences of opinion. Paramount among the purposes of literature is that literature gives the reader keys, leads, insights, observa tions into and about the human experience. Theorists and writers in oral interpretation of literature have tradi tionally written and promoted the idea that the oralizina process introduces a dimension of appreciation greater than the appreciation gained from autistic reading and criticism. Though this has not been empirically proven, this article of faith, this grand assumption, is in fact the principal reason for the existence of the study of oral interpretation in American colleges and universities, and has been the one idea to which virtually all writers appear to have given their assent. One recent writer has gone as far as 283 suggesting that the oral reading of literature is not given to an audience in the traditional sense of the word, but is 2 read aloud to the "audience part" of himself. In hearing himself, the reader is given the insight of voice, of speaker, which, the writer contends, is one of the inheren- cies found in literature. The suggestion of the involuted self-audience is a departure in locus away from the notion that an audience is a group of auditors external to the interpreter. This shift in the notion of audience not only can suggest the range of how teachers approach oral inter pretation, but is symptomatic of the complex aesthetic for mulations pertinent to the concept of performance. If a profound application of or interest in aes thetics has been absent in the professional journals of speech, this absence is not characteristic of interpreta tion texts. From the early writings of Samuel Silas Curry in the first part of this century to the scholarly survey of aesthetic and psychological concepts by Wallace A. Bacon and Robert S. Breen, the problems of the "art" in oral interpretation have been assayed and argued well. Several ^See Paul N. Campbell, The Speaking and the Speakers of Literature (Belmont, Calif.s Dickenson Publishing Co., Inc., 1967), 284 attempts have been made to make the art of literature and the art of performance correlative one to the other. Eight aesthetic concepts have been seriously and extendedly considered in oral interpretation textbooks. They are the following: the problem of aesthetic, or psy chical. distance: the nature of empathy? understanding of expression and impression: the element of suggest!veness in art and the role of verisimi1itude: matters pertinent to form (imagery, balance and proportion, unity and harmony, variety and contrast); and universality in art. The ques tion, "What is art?" has not concerned the profession as much as has "What is oral interpretation?" As far as can be ascertained, no single writer in oral interpretation has based an entire theory of the discipline upon the aesthetics of any single aesthetician, though numerous references can be found to suggest familiarity with the work of Benedetto Croce, John Dewey, and Susanne Langer. What has influenced the profession has been developments within schools and movements of literary criticism, and though this latter in fluence falls beyond the scope of the present study, it has perhaps influenced incidentally and indirectly matters of aesthetic purport, particularly in literary analysis of form and content. 285 This chapter will examine how these terms have been brought to bear upon the art of oral interpretation by two approaches. First, the use, employment, and application to oral interpretation of the eight aesthetic concepts will be surveyed in representative texts. Second, an analysis of four writers, Samuel Silas Curry, Cornelius Carman Cunning ham, and the dual authorship of Wallace A. Bacon and Robert S. Breen, will be made to reveal how their books reflect a more detailed and systematic attempt to develop an aesthetic of oral interpretation. Aesthetic, or Psychical. Distance Of the textbooks surveyed in this study, only one mentioned the name of Edward Bullough, founder and innovator 3 of the term psychical distance. So common has the term become, perhaps, that its originator has been all but for gotten. It is often misleadingly ascribed in texts to Herbert Sidney Langfeld, in whose book the term is given 4 considerable amplification and treatment. Although, as 3Wilma H. Grimes and Alethea Smith Mattingly, Inter pretation; Writer. Reader. Audience (San Francisco; Wads worth Publishing Company, Inc., 1961), p. 317. Hereafter cited as Grimes and Mattingly, Interpretation. 4The Aesthetic Attitude (New York; Harcourt, Brace, and Co., 1920). 286 noted elsewhere in this study,^ the term aesthetic distance was created to describe what happens to the observer in the act of perceiving art, it has been extended in the field of oral interpretation to include what an interpreter must dfi and do consciously in his performance of literature. Wayland Parrish suggested that in "executing" aes thetic distance, the interpreter eliminates "what is trivi- g al, accidental, and non-significant" from his oral reading. He must exercise a rigorous censorship over [intona tion and gesture] to see that only those are permitted which have significance, which are meaningful and necessary in communicating character, feeling, and incident. He must avoid the vague watery movement characteristic of real life.7 For Parrish, aesthetic distance is a factor of the artist's indiviuality, an individuality which must be submerged by the interpreter for the personality of the author. In poetry, Parrish suggested meter as one of the elements in herent within the form that creates this aesthetic distance and allows the configuration of the poem itself to possess 5Supra. Chapter III, "Particular Aesthetic Terms Relevant to Oral Interpretation," s.v. Psychical Distance. ^Reading Aloud (rev. ed.; New York: The Ronald Press, 1941), p. 392. 7Ibid. 287 its form, its reality. Sara Lowrey and Gertrude Johnson wrote that aes thetic distance is achieved when the reader thinks of his material as being off-stage rather than on-stage? the thought alone distances the material both from the reader and for the audience, allowing the latter to create the 8 material anew within its own minds. The notion that aesthetic distance is an active process of the interpreter was again reiterated by Charlotte Lee when she wrote, The principle of controlled intensity is sometimes referred to as "aesthetic distance." It means, in the words of an old theater axiom, keeping a cool head over a warm heart. It is a matter of increased control, not of lessened intensity. Emotional in tensity must be strong when the material demands it, if the interpreter is to draw a suitable response from his audience. Yet this intensity must be kept under firm control, so that the audience will re spond to the emotional impact of the material, not to the performer's extreme sensibility.^ Because the term originally referred to the aesthetic per ception of painting, the extension to a performing art as an active control of the interpreter to produce. to induce. 8Interpretative Reading; Techniques and Selections (New York: D. Appleton-Century Co., 1942), p. 177. 90ral Interpretation (3rd ed.y Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1965), p. 314. 288 and to maintain an aesthetic detachment to his material, consciously employing such control, is an extension of the concept not originally intended by Bullough. For Otis J. Aggert and Elbert R. Bowen, the term had similar connotations of actively participating in the pro duction and "allowing" for aesthetic distance. Here, in Aggert and Bowen, the term was tied to the concept of im personation . Impersonation, they suggested, is pretty much a matter of how far the spectator, or hearer, is, literally, from the interpreter. The interpretative reader . . . usually finds him self in an intimate situation reading to a small audience in a small room. (At times he will even be reading directly to the eyes of specific indi viduals .) He is essentially a member of his own audience, who, for practical purposes, holds the book and reads aloud . . . Lacking all the actor's exterior means of creating a make-believe world, he can never pretend to be another person? the audience accepts him only as himself . . . Whereas the theatre audience will accept the actor's scene of high emotionalism as a genuine aspect of a fic tional event, the reader's audience, being psycho logically closer to him and therefore more aware of his techniques, prefers to imagine the scene for itself, if he will only provide the necessary stim uli . Chloe Armstrong and Paul D. Brandes defined 1QCommunicative Reading (2nd ed.? New York: The Macmillan Company, 1963), p. 10. 289 aesthetic distance as a ratio of the amount of self- centeredness to the amount of empathy an interpreter pos sesses. Replacing empathy in reading by a reader's self- centeredness results in a loss of aesthetic distance. The goal, according to Armstrong and Brandes, is detachment from self. "Aesthetic distance may be defined as that suspension from self-centeredness which occurs when empathy is operat ing to a desired goal."^ They stated that it is a matter of mechanics; aesthetic stimulation is lost when the audi ence is conscious of the mechanics of the interpreter. "A reader may break his successfully created aesthetic distance in any number of ways, including any focusing of attention 12 on himself or the mechanics of his reading." For Robert Beloof, the matter of aesthetic distance was directly related to the material for oral reading. Suggesting that the "audience" of any particular piece of literature varies from an unseen audience to an implied intimate audience, a factor which is derivative from the tone of the literature, Beloof argued for "distance" to be present or absent in terms of the literature first. reader ^The Oral Interpretation of Literature (New Yorks McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc., 1963), p. 171. •l^Ibid. 290 second. The degree to which an audience is included or ex cluded from the work and the degree to which it is treated distantly or intimately are related, but not identical, problems. If an audience is ex cluded, then obviously it is simply not there, to be treated intimately or otherwise. But if the audience is a presence in the work, then all shades and degrees of intimacy can be registered, whether that presence is prominent or merely suggested.^ Here, in a more organic sense of the term, aesthetic dis tance is derivative of the distance in the literature it self, a concept of aesthetic distance closer to the intent of Bullough. Beloof's concept of aesthetic distance demands a high degree of discrimination on the part of the inter preter to ascertain correctly the tone and voice of the literature, but significantly turns the concept away from "behavior" on the interpreter's part to the behavioral viability of the created art form, in this case, the liter ary selection being interpreted. Jer£ Veilleux concluded that the "perfect reading" is an amalgam of several factors, one of which is aesthetic distance. For Veilleux, aesthetic distance could only be described in terms of empathy. Like Armstrong and Brandes, 1 ^ XJThe Performing Voice in Literature (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1966), p. 125. 291 this writer tied empathy and "distance" to the quality of the performance, giving to the term a quality of skill in reading. How . . . can the interpreter successfully achieve the right combination of empathy and distance? He must be able to identify the climax in each selec tion, whether it comes almost at the end . . . or at the very beginning . . . or in the approximate middle . . . He needs to plan his reading so that the wave that leads up to the climax becomes an increasingly empathic one and the wave that leads downward from the climax becomes an increasingly reflective one. Although the successful interpre ter attempts to maintain his own control, an ideal balance of empathy and distance, the audience must at times become lost in the story and must at other times be completely in possession of their critical faculties. It is the interpreter's control of the waves of the particular work that results in the successful balance of empathy and distance for his audience.^ Veilleux stressed that reflection is the nature of properly attained aesthetic distance. By this, Veilleux appeared to mean that an audience must be far enough away from the material presented to it so that it can always be allowed to reflect upon what the material means. Of the interpreter, [He] too must not remain so close to the manuscript that he loses control of his technique. He must always be involved with his material, but he must maintain enough distance so that he has technical control and thus can allow his audience time for ^Oral Interpretation: The Re-Creation of Litera ture (New York: Harper and Row, 1967), pp. 118-119. 292 critical reflection. For both audience and inter preter, once rapport has been achieved, empathy and distance are constant companions, the former reflecting their deep mutual involvement in the literature and the latter reflecting their capa city as intelligent human beings to control their emotions and reflect upon ideas. Wilma H. Grimes and Alethea Smith Mattingly, the only writers who directly quote Edward Bullough to define aesthetic distance, coupled the effective auditory experi ence of literature with the interpreter's capacity to bal ance empathy and aesthetic distance; "A balance of empathy and aesthetic distance characterizes an artistic interpre- 16 tation performance." Establishing the equation that "[the] dimension of the performance must be equal to that of the thoughts and feelings denoted and connoted by the 17 words," the authors maintained that this is accomplished by the degree of disinterestedness which both the audience and the reader maintain simultaneously. While this is approximate to the definition of aesthetic distance as Bullough defined it, these authors and others have raised a curious question of aesthetics. How is the interpreter 15Ib±d., p. 59. ^Grimes and Mattingly, Interpretation. p. 318. 17Ibid.. p. 316. 293 able, and indeed should he be able, to maintain distance to a work while performing it? How can the emotions be par celed off into a state of disinterest and detachment? It was in answer to the above questions that Don Geiger took exception to the concept of aesthetic distance on the part of the performer. Wrote Geiger, Now it is a commendable thing to observe accurately that in a number of successful oral interpretations there is an element of emotional detachment. But it does not automatically follow that therefore an oral interpreter ought to be somewhat detached when he reads sentences aloud. Yet, this is a conclusion frequently recommended to us. Oral interpreters who favor this conclusion term the mystery of emotional detachment "aesthetic distance," and doubtless the phrase has a certain sonority. However, the phrase offers to the actor who is not hypnotized by it a sinister opportunity. He may suggest, on hearing an oral interpreter ad vised to maintain "aesthetic distance" from his material, that when you read a sentence as if you mean it, you are an actor; but when you read it as if you mean some of it, you are an oral interpreter. We may fear that, as presently used, the term's usual value is to poor readers who maintain that the dullness of their readings is merely the result of their having aesthetically forced the literary work to keep its distance. Like Beloof, Geiger would allow the material itself to sug gest the amount of "distance" needed between the interpreter and audience. He felt that there would indeed be times ^ The Sound. Sense, and Performance of Literature (Chicago: Scott, Foresman and Company, 1963), p. 80. 294 when the logical and extended behavior expected of the interpreter who was responding to the literature would be to become an "actor," while there would be others when dis tancing would be appropriate to the material. Suppression could violate the emotion within the materials; and should this be the case, the presence of "detachment" is far from aesthetic, and far from the demands of the art form itself. "When the piece is good, when the interpreter intensely understands and vividly impresses it on the minds of his auditors, we may say that his art of communication serves 19 literature well." While Bullough thought of aesthetic distance as the degree of detachment the observer holds in relationship to a given piece of art, holding attention and self in equi poise to the intensity of emotion within the work, most writers in oral interpretation have carried the notion of the aesthetic distance to the performer himself, suggesting that aesthetic distance is an active process of the inter pretative mode. Other writers in interpretation have taken a different view, suggesting that aesthetic distance does indeed reside in the art work, and that it varies in its 19Ibid.. p. 91. 295 own detachment from piece to piece. Under these latter conditions, the interpreter is encouraged to let the tone of the selection determine the "amount" of detachment. Empathy As noted above, there have been those writers in oral interpretation who have closely associated the two concepts of aesthetic distance and empathy. They have stressed that the ability to project, to allow the self to identify with the emotional tone of the literature, is a concomitant of the "distancing" to the literature. The processes function simultaneously. It is true that there have been major aestheticians, such as Theodore Lipps, Robert Vischer, and Vernon Lee, who have explored empathy as a clue for the interpretation of aesthetic enjoyment; but in a sense it has been the writers in interpretation who have created something of their own aesthetics by link ing the two. As noted, Grimes and Mattingly coupled aesthetic distance and empathy together, characterizing the inter pretative mode as a balance between the two. For them, empathy was a seeming sense of being convinced of the emo tions in literature; that is, empathy was an artistic 296 illusion created by the interpreter which induces "the lis tener to believe the words spoken and infecting him with a 20 specific quality of feeling." The expression, in body and voice, must be an effect equal to the thought and feelings symbolized by the writer's words, which serve as cause. This is an other way of saying that the interpreter must em pathize before he speaks. As Langer says, "Verbal utterance is the overt issue of a greater emotional, mental, and bodily response, and its preparation in feeling and awareness or in the mounting intensity of thought is implicit in the words spoken. Speech is like a quintessence of action." The utterance is the end process, and the interpreter must create an illusion of the inward activity which issues in speech.21 What Grimes and Mattingly stressed was the balance of not so losing oneself in the literature through empathy that the capacity to perceive it as art is lost. They did not show how this can be done, how one disciplines himself to such a state. If there be emotional identification, the authors did not amplify how to train an aesthetic "cauterizing" which allows a distancing. It would be analogous to sug gesting to the interpreter, "Once more with feeling, but not too feelingfully." Geiger took exception to this awkward "balance" of 2®Grimes and Mattingly, Interpretation. p. 316. 21Ibid. 297 distance and feeling. In his essay, "Oral Interpretation as an Art of Communication," Geiger noted the various roles which are incumbent upon the interpreter. By the nature of the conventions, interpretation requires roles of the inter preter. The interpreter is, Geiger cited, public speaker, 22 critic, and a sympathetic sharer. It is not necessarily the case that the interpreter strikes a particular stance for the interpretative experience, a stance which is care fully controlled and attitudinal from beginning to end. If the interpreter has to express the totality of helpless horror and appalling vision, to cite Geiger's examples, he should do so. It is the role of the interpreter which de mands it. But because of the multiplicity of roles, it is they which assist in allowing auditors to experience vary ing degrees of accessibility to and rapport with the inter preter . We may, if we wish, continue to speak of "aesthetic distance," but we will now understand it more clear ly as a necessity of the interpreter's total situa tion, having different causes, and, as a result, ordinarily obtaining to the reading of various pas sages in a variety of quality and degree.23 22Geiger, Sound. Sense, and Performance, p. 87. 23Ibid. 298 Geiger held that empathy was no trick of the inter preter's trade. Empathy, he insisted, is totally necessary, inherent in the meaning which the literary structure itself yields. Literature, and the oral interpretation of that literature, is "an experience which can literally only be 24 understood when it is vicariously shared." Empathy is a means by which the interpreter shares the text of litera ture. "To put it in the widest terms, he translates or 'reproduces' the linguistic activity of the written scene 25 into bodily activity." Geiger suggested that the presence of empathy is revealed in three ways: in facial, vocal, and bodily behavior? in development of attitudes which are only implicit in the action; and in "behavioral synecdoches." These signs of empathy suggest that the interpreter is re sponding to the emotional life of the text, but he is, as well, able to reveal the sub-scriptual elements. The fa cial, vocal, and bodily responses are the responses most commonly associated with empathy: the grimace at perceiv ing pain, the gasp at the unexpected, etc. The second of attitudes suggests the psychological responses to situa tion, personality, voice of the poet, etc. They are the 24Ibid.. p. 100. 25Ibid. 299 extension of the intellectual-emotional perceptions in the literature— the inner voice of literature. And the third of behavioral synecdoches is an elaboration, of "word as gesture." This last is a way of "summarizing" gesture, of giving completion to personality, if that be the case of the literature, of giving the metaphor of nervousness, love, ill-at-easeness, etc. Geiger wrote of these responses, "Whether expressions like these are planned or are simply sensitive responses would seem to be an irrelevant matter. Probably most summary gestures, at least, are a combination of both."^ Beloof suggested that the oral interpreter's lack of empathy is "almost always lack of understanding in his own physical being of the flex and flow of the work's pas sionate movement as it works out the fate of its central 27 passionate concern." Because it was Beloof's opinion that the most common cause for lack of proper empathic response and direction is "the reader's simple lack of understanding, or his misunderstanding, of the work's true depth and direc- 28 tion," Beloof introduced a distinction of particular 26Ibid., p. 105. 2?Beloof, The Performing Voice in Literature, p. 111. 28Ibid.. p. 113. 300 importance to the interpreter: the difference between the empathy created by the reader and empathy felt by an audi ence . A skillful reader, building from the empathy of the sympathetic faces of the audience, can gradually, through them, establish a sympathetic climate gen erally. Further, by carefully watching his audience to make sure he is getting an appropriate response, by keeping calm and concentrating on the passionate core of his work in the face of any disturbingly noisy or inattentive members, he usually can con vince such disturbing elements of his faith in the importance of the piece he is reading and of his own unselfish interest in the act of communicating the work of art.^9 If an appropriate empathy exists between reader and inter preter, the interpreter can intensify the emotional direc tion of the literature, "the audience following the read er's emotion and the reader intensifying his own at- oneness with the work by his sense that the audience is with 30 him." People want empathy, Beloof observed, because it is an antidote to boredom. Thus, for Beloof, empathy exists in two dimensions in the oral interpretation of literature: in the literature of performance and in the performance of literature. No major writer in oral interpretation ignores the ^9Ibid.. p. 112. 30Ibid.. pp. 112-113. 301 aesthetic and psychological implications of empathy. Those selected as representatively treating the subject have done so with considerable insight and pertinency. Expression and Impression For reasons that are perhaps obvious, these two aesthetic terms have been linked together for discussion. Intimately bound together, they refer to the flow of the literature as expressed by the interpreter and to its im pression within the mind of the auditor. However, a similar process occurs when the interpreter first confronts the literature and gains from it those impressions which his heightened and trained sensibilities perceive and react to. What is it the oral interpreter can express? Geiger thought that the hierarchies of experience within the text are the 32 primary "message." This, or these as the case may be, hierarchy of experience possesses three elements: atti- 31 For additional readings in empathy as writers in oral interpretation have treated it, attention is directed to the following: Lee, Oral Interpretation. 3rd. ed., pp. 61-64; Aggert and Bowen, Communicative Reading. 3rd. ed., pp. 148-150; Armstrong and Brandes, The Oral Interpretation of Literature, pp. 169-171; Veilleux, Oral Interpretation: The Re-Creation of Literature, pp. 117-119; Lowrey and John son, Interpretative Reading, pp. 48-60. ■^Geiger, Sound. Sense, and Performance, p. 93. 302 tudes. properties of objects, and actions. "[By] attitudes we mean that the interpreter can express an author's or his fictive characters' 'sadness,1 'happiness,' 'jocularity,' and such qualities, in their various modulations and levels 33 of intensity." Properties of objects are suggested through tone and intonation, properties being varying de grees of intensity, taste, preference, subordination, sen sory experiences of all kinds. "Auditory metaphors," Geiger calls them, metaphors which only become meaningful "in the enunciation of verbal symbols, with specific denotations and 34 fields of connotation." The dynamic properties of persons, objects or events are the actions of one sort or another which the interpreter expresses. A good example of this might be found in the phrase of Arnold's where he talks of the sea's "melancholy, long withdrawing roar," which the reader can express by suggesting in the context of briefer vocal signs, this "long" withdrawing-ness.3^ Geiger's three elements of expression, attitudes, proper ties, and action, are closely "aesthetic" in approach. One of the longest and most extended treatments of expression occurs in Grimes and Mattingly's book, Interpre tation: Writerr Readerr Audience. In Chapter VIII, "The 33Ibid. 34Ibid.. p. 95. 35Ibid.. p. 97. 303 Interpreter's Use of His Body," the authors developed ex tensions of expression through the total bodily action of the interpreter, utilizing expression as a means. similar in basic approaches to that of Geiger. Grimes and Mattingly observed that "before we listen to a speaker we look at him." His total "expressive self" is revealed to the audi ence: with the concept of empathy, expression is the ex tension of it through the body. Expressive movement reduces itself to posturing and gesturing and from those the interpreter must elimi nate all details that do not contribute to the lis tener's understanding, appreciation, and enjoyment of the piece of literature at hand. ® The criteria for effectiveness in expression are several. The writers noted first the requirement of strength in pos ture and gesture. Key to expression is "pressing out" and externalizing a response, and weakness, casualness, and dis interestedness are not strength-filled. Equating the action and the word, we should first apportion the energy of the movement to the thought and the feeling. Changing energy or the dynamics of an action changes the feeling for ourselves and for observers. Duration of the action, degree of force in the release of energy, and over-all rate of movement vary and convey nuances of meaning.^7 36Grimes and Mattingly, Interpretation. p. 251. 37Ibid.. p. 257. 304 When there is strength, there will be dimension to the per formance, and dimension which will augment and facilitate the form and purpose of the literature. The form of expressive action needs to become sig nificant of the thoughts and feelings to be shared with the hearers. Just as words become meaningful by arrangement within context, so do actions relate to what precedes and what follows. There are phrases of action as well as of language. It is all too easy to carry over from a preceding sentence or paragraph a posture and facial expression which, appropriate in the first, are inappropriate in what follows.38 Expression is also related to the filling out of space, according to Grimes and Mattingly. There should be the aura that the interpreter is literally filling the room, affect ing all members of an audience, projecting to all members of the audience. Another requisite is ease. To achieve ease the interpreter will work for ade quate relaxation, promoted by feelings of "inner calm," and for a balance between activity and ten sion. There will be economy, rhythm, and grace in his movement, and his technique and his expression will become one and the same thing, there being nothing "detected so quickly as the resolution to be expressive and to appear emotional39 The criteria for expressiveness include, in summary, energy, form, purpose, and ease. While most writers approach the discipline of oral 38Ibid.. p. 258. 39Ibid.. p. 259. 305 interpretation with long and detailed discussions about the elements in literature which are to be expressed, few dis cussions can be found that forthrightly approach the art through the aesthetic notion of expression. Two, in fact, suggest that expression is a form of private communication, and this something to be avoided. Martin Cobin would have an interpreter eschew expression for communication. To address the rhetorical question, "How do I love thee?" directly to some member of an audience, may prompt that member of the audience to feel an awk wardness which distracts attention away from a rela tionship between Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Brown ing, At such a moment, it is best to ignore the rules and avoid directness by looking over or through rather than at the members of the audience. This is a good example of the distinction between expression and communication. a distinction which must be made at times because of the nature of the material.4® While expression such as that described in the example above may be bad taste, or inappropriate, or a thousand other things, it does appear most inadvisable to suggest that communication is superior to expression, as if expression in and of itself is denigrative and bad form. This is a matter of reflecting individual taste rather than sound aesthetics. 40Martin Cobin, Theory and Technique of Interpreta tion (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.j Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1959), p. 231. 306 A similar mood is established by Aggert and Bowen. Beginning a discussion entitled "Poetry Must Communicate," they wrote, As an oral interpreter, you may be disturbed by the current fashion of expressionism in the arts. It is concerned with the "expression" of the artist's state of mind, thoughts, emotions, dreams, and the like by objects or words which have some public reference but are not necessarily interrelated.^ Stating, in addition, that aesthetic considerations depend upon the fact that all art must communicate, these authors are critical of writers whose form of communication is, by their judgment, poor. The imperative voice in the title, "Poetry Must Communicate," is then extended to the admoni tion, "[if] a poem is not readily understood, it is in no 42 case suitable for oral interpretation." The aesthetic concepts of expression are here confused with the artistic forms of expression. Aesthetically, expression is a rela tionship between the subject matter and the visible and audible movements and state of mind of the owner of the body: this remains an interpreter's concern. The form of expression, whether a critic approves of it or not, still 41-Aggert and Bowen, Communicative Reading, p. 400. 42ibid., p. 401. 307 remains an interpreter's challenge, which he may, in turn, decide to accept or not. Where Geiger and Grimes and Mattingly make this clear, Cobin and Aggert and Bowen do not. With what can be inferred as controlled sarcasm, Parrish, too, considers expressionism as permitting license in interpretation rather than considering the term in its aesthetic sense. Referring to the "vogue of subjectivity, expressionism, individuality, or whatever it may be 43 called," Parrish used the term as if it were generally acceded to mean the individualistic self-reign of interpre tation . It must be confessed that some teachers of literature and interpretation accept such reactions from their students as sound and proper. They even encourage them. They say to each student, "Now what do vou find in this poem?" And if one student finds a poem soothing, and another finds it arousing, the teacher is pleased, believing that his students are showing commendable originality. They even go so far as to insist that each must find something different in each poem. And some take the extreme position that it isn't necessary that the student find anything in the poem he is interpreting so long as he expresses himself.44 Parrish's main fear was that the theory of expressionism led 43Parrish, Reading Aloud, p. 464. 44Ibid. 308 to the subjective method in interpretation— "that the reader 45 will express not the poem, but himself." It could be argued from an aesthetic point of view that the situation is futile, for indeed how can any artist express a poem but not express that within himself? Parrish's aesthetics of art stress universality of meaning, and meaning as revealing ideal truth. He observed that the function of the inter preter is to provoke a reaction between the work of art and the spectator, and that, be it noted, remains the province of expression. "It is [the] qualities of understanding, appreciation, intelligent enjoyment that we should try to develop instead of merely expressing ourselves. or the half- baked impressions we get from a cursory reading of a poem," 46 . . Parrish wrote. Few writers in interpretation disagree with him, but there is considerable room for disagreement with the use put to the term "expression" by Parrish. Ex pression remains, in spite of abuse, sound aesthetic sense. Form If the aesthetic concept of form is to have rele vance for the oral interpretation of literature, it should have such in two senses: the form of literature and the 45Ibid.. p. 474. 46Ibid. 309 form of performance. It is obvious to observe that the form of performance was perhaps the main preoccupation of the elocutionary period. Elocution was not artificial, it was artifice. Its artisans were dedicated to the presentation of the controlled signs of emotion. However, in a curious anomaly of artistic productiveness, the training in elocu tion frequently pre-empted the very source of the presenta tion and the vehicle of its end: the literature. What might have become psychologic became pedagogic, and the delicate balance of the literature to the appreciation of the performer equal in perception of its form was sacrificed for the sake of the performer's form, his skill, his arti fice. The source of aesthesis was shifted from the appre ciation of the literature to the appreciation of the per former, the virtuoso of literature. The very foundation of all performance of literature, delivery, became its own ex cess, and the term designating delivery became pejorative in the early years of the twentieth century. Elocution meant an elocutionist; an elocutionist was an imitator, and imi tation emerged in time as aesthetically displeasing. With what amounts to a virtual disregard for the foundations of elocution, denigrative criticism of elocution side-steps, if not ignores, elocution's contribution to an understanding 310 of expression: the breadth and depth which the elocution ists gave to the gestural component of expression. Oral interpretation of literature in the twentieth century has been a search for pedagogy and terminology to proscribe and describe the artistic endeavor of reading aloud. It has been a search for suitable approaches to con vey the complex psychological, philosophical, and socio- 47 logical awarenesses in literature. Without any attempt to attribute causation, the demise of elocution as an "art form" was synchronous with the rise of literary criticism to a similar pre-eminence. That the art of criticism enjoys a reputation virtually equal to the production of literature is simply one of the truisms by which writers and critics exist symbiotically. Whatever the causes of the rise of literary criticism, the oral performance of literature suf fered from the sad stereotyping of its adherents as "elocu tionists." In efforts to meet the shifting intellectual trends of psychology and literary scholarship, there were those who sought new terms and approaches for the oral study of literature. ^For an example of the exploration suggested here, see Robert Beloof, Chester C. Long, et al.. The Oral Study of Literature (New York: Random House, 1966). 311 The suppositions of teachers of interpretation about the form of delivery have been about the style of delivery. The arguments and suggestions advanced have been basically aesthetic in nature. They have argued the nature of imita tion and the degree to which it is desirable, they have written on the nature of empathy, sensory responsiveness, importance of aesthetic distance, and responsiveness to the "form" of literature. Thus, form is an inclusive term, en compassing many considerations of delivery and the study of literature. An examination of representative writers re veals this. Grimes and Mattingly stressed the need for form. To them, form must not be confused with certain artistic attri butes of spontaneity and creativity. They wrote, This is not saying there must be this or that form; it is an assertion only that there must be form, the need of which is universally recognized by aestheti- cians considering any art— painting, architecture, ballet, sculpture, literature (or even cookingl). Life is chaotic, nonselective, and accidental; art is ordered, discriminating, and patterned. Just as there can be no separation between form and func tion, or form and substance of the human hand, for example, so, in art, there can be no dividing of form and content, or form and subject . . . [The] style of the writer is inseparable from what he says; likewise, in artistic performance, the style of ut terance is an organic part of the literature. Con trol of the literature implies initially that the interpreter understands, appreciates, and responds to his material and that he finds a form of utterance equivalent to the style of writing. 312 Form is achieved in oral interpretation, as in any other art, through the artist's technique, the manner in which the material is handled. Grimes and Mattingly noted that tech nique is best when it is least conspicuous. It is interest ing to speculate how conspicuous a contemporary interpreter would be for a nineteenth-century audience; and, likewise, how inconspicuous an elocutionist. Form is a matter of taste, and taste can be cultivated. However, the position taken by Grimes and Mattingly is essentially an organic approach: form follows function, and in the oral interpretation of literature this means that the interpretation itself must be consonant with the form of 49 literature. When the form is apprehended, a totality is apparent, a total impact felt. By the time an interpreter comes to the end of a lyric, a story, or any selec tion, thoughts and feelings have taken "shape." When anything is well done, we say it has shape or form . . . By his form of expression, the interpreter must keep together the experience made available by the writer. To achieve this unity, he will reveal anti theses, expressed or implied; elements of variety and contrast; transitions of time, place, thought, and character; situation-attitude, relationships; turning 48Grimes and Mattingly, Interpretation. p. 314. 49Ibid.. p. 315. 313 points and crises; and climax . . . Sometimes this progression is inherent in the regularized movement of ideas; sometimes the movement is not regularized. In either case, dependent upon repetition and expec tancy, it constitutes rhythm, an essential of form.^ Other writers have spoken of the apprehension of form in similar terms. Chester C. Long wrote that in order to describe fully an object's form, we must describe the material in its form, the effi cient structuring of that material within its form, and the purpose the materials serve within the ob ject's form. Only then can the way in which a thing exists . . . be fully perceived.^ Long's position was that perception of form is a contempla tive activity, not an acquisitive one. That is, the inter preter in his study, detached from either desire or action, apprehends the sensory life of the piece. These sensory stimuli of sight and sound, touch and taste, etc., "are extended into the pattern of the object which is being per- 52 ceived ..." When this is done, so does the perception of form emerge. Beloof considered the unconscious effect of meter as 50Ibid. 5^Chester C. Long, "Formal Analysis: Long Dav1s Journey into Night as Aesthetic Object," in Beloof, Long, et al., The Oral Study of Literature, p. 89. 52iM<i., P. 90. 314 creating a recurrent rhythmic entity, perceived as the form of the piece, however unaware the auditor might be of such a presence. This regularly recurring entity is the line. which, in the case of such an unvaried one as the ubiquitous English decasyliable . . ., quickly becomes a rhyth mic unit drummed firmly into one's unconsciousness. This unit functions, it seems to me, much like the rigid warp of thread laid on a weaving loom, across which the woof of the syllables, with their constantly shifting stress and slack, weaves a pattern of great variety and richness. It thus satisfies the two essentials which all works of art seem to require: (1) the arbitrary frame, setting limits within which aroused expectations can reasonably be satisfied, and (2) the scope for the surprises, variations, creations, of the individual vision, that reordering of life which is the great work of art.^ It would appear that virtually only in the authors cited has the aesthetic problem of form been discussed directly as such. As will be noted in the section which follows on C. C. Cunningham, the constituent elements of art to which the artist interpreter sensitizes himself constitute the form of his literary selection. Discussions of aesthetic form have not been explored to the degree which might prof itably permit the interpreter to consider the nature of his craft. Form is perceptual, apprehensive, the result of ^Beloof, The Performing Voice in Literature, pp. 426-427. 315 contemplation. There are few writers in interpretation who do not stress the necessity for the analysis of constituent elements in literature? this is patently a truism of the discipline. Emphases may vary about the nature of the ele ments themselves and their relative importance, but a thor ough analysis of the relationship of verbal form to written form, auditory form to visual form, these transpositions which occur because of the nature of oral interpretation, have been side-stepped and overlooked in their aesthetic implications. Imitation. Suggestiveness. and Verisimilitude When Parrish wrote that all misconception about the art of oral interpretation can be corrected only by the understanding which will come by knowing the true nature and function of art, he meant but one thing. Like some public speaking rhetoricians who have considered the Rhet oric of Aristotle the definitive study of the deliberative and suasive uses of language, Parrish represents the clas sical and idealistic notion of the purposes of art. The purposes of art, if one were to subscribe to his position, are simply to give the forms of imitation. This Aristotel ian position, drawn from the Poetics. states that the 316 objects of imitation in poetry and drama are men in action in the revelation of their character, deeds and emotions. According to Parrish, the interpreter, though more limited than other artists by having words created for him, should imagine "an ideal type" and strive to present it in the 54 medium of voice and gesture. The work of art rs not to create a literal likeness, but rather only the outward appearances, the sensible appearances, that cannot be con fused for "nature's original." To Parrish's notion, this is accomplished by inspiration and study. [Partly] by inspiration, and partly by long patient study, the interpreter will discover the essential form, or soul, or gestalt of the character, or ac tion, or emotion which he is imitating, and repre sent it, after repeated trial and criticism, to his audience. In the words of another experienced ac tor, "We must generalize and abstract, and not mis take the accident for the essence . . . We must follow the method of men of science who compare and observe a great number of specimens until they dis cover one note . . . It is only long, patient, mi nute observation that will discover for us what points are common to every specimen. This, then, is the method that all our great actors, consciously or unconsciously, follow, and it is the only method.^ And further on, Parrish concludes, The essential problem of any interpreter is to reveal 54Parrish, Reading Aloud, p. 389. 55Ibid.. p. 397. 317 to us the truth of idea, of character, of incident, of emotion, set down by the poet or playwright. As a medium of expression he may use his voice alone . . . or action alone . . . or he may use both . . . But always his task is the same— to represent the truth of the poet's conception.^ In Parrish's opinion, the interpreter is a teacher and critic, a commentator and narrator. He does not confuse his role? he does not become the thing. He does not "imitate" the likeness, for he is revealing the imitation of a like ness? in other words, the interpreter does not act. he shares his mental intuitions of the manifestations and ex pressions of the literature. What apparently struck Parrish was the Aristotelian notion of the once-removed idealization of form. To him, "imitation" was a way of developing an aesthetic of sug gestiveness, of sharing the results of insight, intuition, apprehension? if you please, of the literary construct. He stressed repeatedly that the interpreter does not and cannot give a presentation of real life? rather, he gives a repre- 57 sentation of life, the appearance or image of life. He must idealize his material, by eliminating what is trivial, transient, and accidental, and repre senting only the essential form of the thing he imitates. In such representation his own personality 56Ibid.. p. 398. 57Ibid.. p. 403. 318 i 58 has no place. One could condense Parrish's aesthetic of imitation, which amounts to his aesthetic of oral interpretation as well, as form is imitation. Apparently he meant to suggest a form of discipline which intuits the substance of character, situa tion, and emanating meaning which in turn is presented in such a way as to "play" upon the imagination and intuition of a hearer. It is important in discussing Parrish to keep in mind that he opposed the motion of imitation with the "problem" of impersonation. Impersonation was an actor's craft, not the interpreter's, and he thought he had found a suitable aesthetic and rationale for solving a polemic which had plagued the study of oral interpretation since the elo cutionary period: in the reading aloud of literature, does one impersonate? His answer was, "Reading and acting are alike in method, subject matter, media, and effect. But they differ in manner, since the actor is in. the play while 59 the reader merely shows us the play." Acting is imperson ating; showing is suggesting 58Ibid. (italics mine). 59Ibid. f . rv wFor a series of essays on this polemical matter, the reader is referred to Gertrude Johnson, ed., Studies in the Art of Interpretation (New York: Appleton-Century- Crofts, Inc., 1940). That the issue "Does an interpreter 319 Suggestiveness (Suggestion) From the point of view of aesthetics, suggestion usually is construed to mean, "Calling to mind through the association of experiences, images, or ideas, or having the 61 power to do so under specified conditions." Suggestion can obviously only exist through a previous conditioning of the perceiver to recognize the image, symbolism, or what ever, and to make the association meaningful. When Lowrey and Johnson then used the term to suggest a literary tech nique that points up details which indicate, or suggest, the denouement, they were not using the term in an aesthetic 62 sense at all. They were using the term synonymously with "foreshadowing," the technique which writers use to place ever impersonate?" was impassioned can be quickly ascer tained by reading the colloquies anthologized there. The position taken by Parrish contains sufficient internal evi dence to suggest what adherents of both sides, pro and con, argued. Parrish's use of the aesthetic term "imitation" was, perhaps, unfortunate. Imitation is often used to sug gest "impersonation" or imitating another person. See Co bin, Theory and Technique of Impersonation, pp. 211-216, for such a use of the term. Advising against imitation, Cobin concludes his comments, for example, "[The interpreter is not] supposed to create distinct voices for completely in dependent personalities. Your own identity is maintained throughout" (p. 216). ^Dagobert D. Runes and Harry G. Schrickel, eds., Encyclopedia of the Arts (New York: Philosophical Library, 1946), p. 976. 6P Lowrey and Johnson, Interpretative Reading, p. 210. 320 details at points in the narrative, poem, or drama that make the ending logical, consistent, appropriate no matter how obscure these details might have been within the structure of the work. Suggestion as an aesthetic element, and as employed in most textbooks in the oral interpretation of literature, is usually identified as one of the extrinsic elements of art and literature. The use of "extrinsic" as describing universality, individuality, and suggestion first appeared in C . C. Cun ningham's book, Literature as a Fine Art. His entire aes^ thetic views are elaborated upon later in this chapter. Suffice it to note that his influence and terminology have been variously and widely used in the field of oral inter pretation. Charlotte Lee's book, Oral Interpretation, a text which has enjoyed considerable distribution in American colleges and universities, is based in large measure upon the foundation laid by Cunningham. In her book, Lee stated that suggestion characterizes "the subtlest and most reward- 6 3 ing writing." But the term is also employed to concern audience relationship, physical action, as well as a crualitv of writing. Thus suggestion, as an aesthetic term, is used ®3Oral Interpretation, p. 9. 321 to connote the quality of performance and writing. Suggestiveness in performance, Lee suggested, is the opposite of explicitness. In writing of the presentation of dramatic literature, for example, Lee noted, If the action is primarily important for its revela tion of attitude or emotional state, then the audi ence should be made aware of the cause rather than the action itself. The action is the outward mani festation of an interior response, and this gives the interpreter an important clue to the way it should be handled. It is not so much what the char acter does as how he does it that will reveal what he is thinking and feeling. If, for example, a character sinks dejectedly into a chair, it is not the mere process of sitting down that is important, but rather the dejection pointed up by the action. The dejection will show itself in the muscle tone of the entire body, in the pace of the speech, in the vocal quality, and in numerous other ways . . . The safest plan is to continue standing throughout and to suggest repose not by overt bodily act but by empathy, muscle tone, and whatever aspects of vocal technique are appropriate.64 Thus, one aspect of suggestiveness in oral interpretation includes the subtle use of body, muscle tone, etc., not to carry through action, but, rather, to "connote" and to sug gest that action. Lee noted another use of suggestiveness in the elements of sound, particularly the tone colorations given to words by assonance, alliteration, consonance, and the like. 64Ibid.. pp. 318-319. 322 Most authorities agree that it is nearly impossible to divorce the connotation of a word from the sound of it. Even in everyday conversation, words are colored and their meanings intensified or depreci ated by the elongation or shortening of the vowel sounds and by the softening or sharpening of the consonants. This coloring or intensification through sound is even more marked in poetry, when a word is used in relation to others which strength en the associational values. Thus it makes an im portant contribution to suggestion.65 Inherent within the literature, and a technique for the performer, the extrinsic element of suggestion is advanced as an aesthetic antidote to the presentation of material which "represents" or "imitates" the action. As noted above, in this sense "suggestion" was what Parrish concluded was the true function of the interpreter. About this, there is little disagreement among the writers of textbooks. 66 "Suggestion is the mark of art." Aggert and Bowen would have the interpreter look between the lines for the ideas suggested by the author, to examine the images for the feeling they recall and the concepts they express without 67 being literally stated. But it was Veilleux who held that the crucial and key word to the understanding of 65Ibid.. p. 384. 66Aggert and Bowen, Communicative Reading, p. 108. 67Ibid. 323 interpretation lay in "suggestion." We might describe the total interpretative process as a sequence that begins with the interpreter's insight . . . and moves through suggestion to the ultimate re-creation of the literature. What do we mean by suggestion? Suggestion includes all those valid methods by which the interpreter, with in the conventions of the interpretative situation, can give oral and physical expression to the written words and the inherent actions of the manuscript. Since the interpreter only suggests the content of his material, he wishes the members of the audience to respond to his suggestion. When they do, they are then "interpreting" in the theater of their minds. This active interpretation on the part of the audience is the key element in the dynamics of oral interpretation. Suggestion . . . is the interpreter1s primary tool for the indirect communication of literary meaning and feeling to the audience.68 Suggestion is not only the quality of literature which must be discovered and adhered to within the nuances of meaning and emotion, it is, in Veilleux's approach, the most important aesthetic characteristic of the art of per formance. But Veilleux is not alone in this. The entire profession has since the beginning of the twentieth century employed the term in one guise or another to distinguish what it is that marks the interpreter as different from the actor. The psychological dimension of suggestion is the 68Veilleux, Oral Interpretation, pp. 46-47. 324 capacity to retain sensory images in the mind, to permit them freely to associate with the experience of the inter preter and audience, and in so doing, to place the emphasis upon an active mimetic sense of conceptualizing in some means the emotional content of meaning as well as the in tellectual, if even such a distinction can be made. It would appear that the aesthetic and the oral interpretative uses of the word are very much the same. Seymour Chatman, in identifying the interpreter's task of seeking the persona in literature, that is, the speaker, employed the aesthetic term verisimilitude and employed it in much the same fashion that other writers in interpretation have written of suggestiveness. What he was concerned with was the "identificational cast of the voice" that depicts the emotional effects of the character. What constitutes plausibility or verisimilitude will . . . be determined by what [the interpreter] under stands to be culturally typical of such a persona; an old, weary man? a man of intelligence and culture? a neurotic? or what have you. The interpreter's task, then, is very much like the painter's. The painter, even when reconstructing historical scenes, creates in terms of his own vision of how people look to him at the moment. If he is successful, his image achieves a kind of freedom from time.69 ^^Seymour Chatman, "Linguistic Analysis: A Study of James Mason's Interpretation of 'The Bishop Orders His Tomb,'" in Beloof, Long, et al.. The Oral Study of Litera- 325 Verisimilitude is not imitation, the slavish, yet occasion ally artistic, reproduction of a personality. Verisimili tude is a kind of emotional expression which suggests the temperament of the voice in literature. To Chatman, the quality is best controlled and revealed by the physical fact of sound— the typical phonological forms which are associ ated with emotions. Whether it be called suggestiveness or verisimili tude, the effect of suggestiveness is what most writers have identified as the mode of interpretation: its total con struct is built upon the aesthetic control and revelation of the elements in the literature suggested to the mind of the auditor by what might be termed minimal cues. For some writers the emphasis is upon minimal, the irreducible core of emotional cues that must be suggested. To others, greater latitude has been allowed in this suggestibility. There is n^. book in interpretation of literature which con dones imitation, either by the application of its pedagogy present in the book or by the extension of its aesthetic principles, particularly those principles spelled out under suggestiveness and verisimilitude. ture. p. 107. 326 The peculiar aesthetic paradox of the interpretative mode, at least as exemplified by its most articulate writ ers, is that aesthetic principles become just these. virtu ally absolute rules of art. This will be particularly noted in the section on Cunningham's artistic and aesthetic ap proach to interpretation. But suggestiveness is not an absolute principle. There is suggestiveness in the most competent acting; indeed, it is inconceivable that it would not possess it. With or without the accoutrements of cos tume, make-up, lights, and the general paraphernalia of the theater, the suggestiveness of performance, any performance, is that which is completed within the viewer’s, auditor's, perceiver's mind. Suggestiveness, or verisimilitude, is the link to the subterranean emotional life of literature. It is the literature by its quality which is suggestive. The continuum of non-suggestiveness to blatancy is the line from inaccessibility to puerility. Universality For Parrish, universality was the immutability of the art, the degree to which it revealed the "higher truth" . . 70 of man s condition. Lee discussed it in terms of the ^ P a r r i s h , Reading Aloud, p. 393. 327 potential the literature possesses in interesting people, 71 the touches of common experience shared by men. Both Lee and Aggert and Bowen link universality with suggestiveness and individuality, three touchstones of literary quality. These touchstones are used, presumably, as intended guides in the selection of literature for oral reading. Univer sality as a term is not included in the Encyclopedia of the Arts as a generalized quantum in art. It is associated with the Aristotelian notion of art, not necessarily all art. Universality, if of aesthetic moment, is concerned with the truth in the human condition, of the universal as revealed in a particular. That which appeals to all men mav be uni versal, but that does not make it an aesthetic element in art; that which may be universal mav be an attitude on morality, of human action, of the worth of man. Of this latter, there may be disparate evaluation. If a writer in the oral interpretation of literature wants to suggest that universality is necessary, that is his aesthetic rationale, not the rationale of all art. The pervasive presence of this term is but another indication of the degree to which Aristotle's notions have influenced the adjunct speech and ^Lee, Oral Interpretation, p. 8. 328 rhetorical arts to this day. The revelation of idealized truths, Aristotle's universals, and the "appealing to all men," matters of taste, are two distinct, different, and preferential matters. Of aesthetic terms found in the literature of oral interpretation, two are widespread and generally consistent in the discussion of them: they are aesthetic distance and empathy. The widespread disagreement over the term expres sion (and impression. which is associated with it) is a curious anomaly in oral interpretation. Dismissed as li cense, substituted for by communication, expression finds but limited enthusiasm among today's writers in interpreta tion . Form is not treated as the form of the art of oral interpretation as frequently as it is analyzed in terms of the form of the literature presented, and the latter can usually be acceded to literary criticism. Suaaestiveness and verisimilitude follow more closely the aesthetic im plications of these terms. Universality was found to be confused and used differently, sometimes to refer to the accessibility of the literary work to an audience. 329 The Contributions of Samuel Silas Curry. Cornelius Carman Cunningham. Wallace A. Bacon and Robert S. Breen In 1897, at the very height of the elocutionary movement, at the period of time when elocution was the de scriptive term used to designate the study of speaking and reading aloud, William B. Chamberlain and S. H. Clark, both of the University of Chicago, wrote: Interpretation is the true purpose of all expressive reading. This word "read" in its original signifi cance indicates translation. All attempts at inter pretation rest upon the essential principle of trans lating or carrying over into one's own realm of ex perience, observation, and communication, things that are found in some less familiar realm.7^ Emphasizing what they hoped would become a discipline of mental technique in oral reading, they developed an approach based upon the apparent meaning of words in their connota- tive and denotative referents. In addition, the art of recitation was examined for its artistic base. This base, they sensed, was in its synthetic nature of re-creation. "Recitation is based upon literature. This being true, it is evident that unless one is acquainted with the laws 72Principles of Vocal Expression and Literary In terpretation (Chicago: Scott, Foresman, and Company, 1897), p. 9. 330 73 underlying literature, good recitation is hopeless." The "laws" of literature and their consequent bearing on the interpretation of literature are five: Unity, Principality, Movement, Contrast, and Climax. Unity demands the concen tration upon every word, its force and its bearing. Out of the individual words, the principle of Unity unites into 74 "making one whole out of many parts." That all works of art should possess a leading idea or figure to which all other parts are subordinate is the law of principality. "All literary analysis must be made with the object of dis- 75 covering this central idea." The law of Movement consid ers a literary production to progress from beginning to end in a rational order; if this is not attained, "the attention of the reader is distracted, and the central idea lost sight 76 of." The law of Contrast states that weakness is placed alongside strength, villainy next to virtue, etc. "All the arts take advantage of this psychological phenomenon for the 77 enhancement of the effect." The last law, that of Climax, states that in literature the Central Idea is given a grad ual accumulation of force or feeling, compelling attention 73Ibid.. p. 324. 74Ibid. 75Ibid., p. 325. 7^Ibid. 77Ibid. 331 and interest. However rudimentary these aesthetic principles may be, they are illustrative of the initial forays into the nature of art in the field of oral interpretation. S. H. Clark never returned to them as criteria for interpretation; instead, his writing took an increased interest in the script and its preparation, and he concerned himself with phrase groupings, assessment of emotion, pronunciation, and the like. The promise of a profound aesthetic of interpre tation latent within the early writing of Chamberlain and Clark, and later Clark by himself, simply failed to materi alize. What is found in these writers are the elements of the aesthetic rationale which were to be amplified and clarified in the writers who followed thenw Chamberlain, who stressed understanding of meaning through paraphrasing, and Clark, who elaborated the shadings of phrasing and punc tuation, language and emotion, provided one of the first shifts in direction away from the study of voice and ges ture, erroneously or not associated with the elocutionary movement. Their work was an attempt to return to the liter ature as the source of interpretation. That they fulfilled neither the systematic analysis, nor incorporated the evolving psychology of delivery into the grid of ideas first 332 enunciated in Principles of Vocal Expression and Literary Interpretation is not as relevant to the discussion here as the shift in direction their work took away from the ex cesses of delivery. Their five laws of literature were reiterated with variation among many writers, particularly in the work of C. C. Cunningham. There are three general ways in which an aesthetic can be proposed. The first is what might be termed "a philosophy of aesthetics." Here a system of art is pro posed. In the field of oral interpretation, it was Samuel Silas Curry who early accomplished this in Foundations of Expression. The second approach is what might be termed "comparative aesthetics." This approach attempts to expli cate and explain that which is inherent in artistic experi ences, what the influence of form is upon the perceiver, the effects of suggestion, rhythm, variety and contrast. C. C. Cunningham offered this detailed comparative aesthetic in his book, Literature as a Fine Art. The third system is psychological aesthetics, a system which analyzes what hap pens to a person when confronting a work of art. This is the effort and accomplishment of Wallace A. Bacon and Robert S. Breen in Literature as Experience. The system, the com parison, and the effect of art have been the progressive aesthetic movement in oral interpretation. 333 Samuel Silas Curry Samuel Silas Curry ushered in the Romantic aestl^tic principles of art to the performance of literature. Usually considered to be the originator of the "think the thought" school of oral reading, Curry's contribution and depth of involvement with the aesthetics of performance far exceeded the almost casual reaction which the distiHated "think the thought" might suggest. The complexity concerning Curry's contribution can be suggested by the asking of two ques tions: first, think what thought?, and second, express it how? Throughout his writings, Curry inextricably bound these two questions together, and to isolate them as aes thetic determinants requires considerably more sophistica tion than to suggest that one thinks the thought of the literature and expresses that thought through the voice and body. Because Curry felt that the "art of voice production and training" was equal in stature to the "art of litera ture," perhaps it is prudent to begin the discussion of the aesthetics of Curry's system with his views of the instru- 7®This writer is indebted to this structuralization by DeWitt Parker, who similarly developed the field of aes thetics in the Encyclopedia of the Arts, pp. 15-16. 334 ments of expression, the voice and body. Curry maintained that the arts associated with the voice were not only misunderstood, but most liable to abuse. He attributed this misunderstanding and abuse to factors which were unique to his own time: the transitory and eva nescent nature of the form. Vocal arts are transitory, he 79 wrote, "dying the moment they are born." In an age where in the voice is given substantive endurance through record ing and film, it is important to remember the world of art in which Curry functioned. "The various arts are simply 80 phases or modes of expression," he insisted. We can divide [arts ] into the arts that are primar ily expression and those which are rather records of expression. Painting, sculpture, and architecture are permanent possessions of the race; they can be seen, felt, and realized for thousands of years. But the arts that use the voice as an agent cannot be recorded.81 The advantage of objective arts, according to Curry, was that standards of criticism could be established, and even further, that the unique characteristics of objective arts could be duly noted and codified. The advantage is worth noting, for it is the very permanence of objective art forms ^9Samuel Silas Curry, Mind and Voice (Boston: The Expression Company, 1910), p. 431. 80Ibid.. p. 432. 81Ibid. 335 which allows for a basis of comparison. There is special reason why transitory arts like vocal expression should be compared with the record able and permanent arts like painting. On the other hand, there are many reasons why painters and sculp tors should study human expression. The word "ex pression" belongs to natural acts, such as the smile or the simplest voice modulations. A painting or statue are records of expression, records of one instant. If well chosen, they may reveal the spirit of a character, but to make any advance the sculptor or painter must study the natural expression of everyday life and should know the fundamental prin ciples of the transitory arts.8^ From the objective arts, Curry noted that the principles of rhythm, or composition, are obtained. From these, the parts of the composition are perceived in such a way that the relation of the parts is sustained as attention leaps from one element to another. Objective arts yield the principle of unity, the principle which states that "All its parts must be brought into relation, and further consideration of it reveals that a true picture is one impression, one con- 83 centration of attention." Yet, perhaps most relevant, the objective arts stress the importance of "impression"— the 84 "objective record of one mental impression." Curry thought that impression was of particular importance in the 82Ibid.. pp. 432-433. 84Ibid.. p. 434. 83Ibid.. p. 433. 336 right use of the voice, for it is the voice which through its ictus secures the vivid and deep impression. And fin ally, objective art reveals the necessity of "right quali ties of execution." The painter must have a touch characterized by deci sion, ease, and facility, and here as in all other arts we discover a technique, and perceive that a system of training which will master such qualities is necessary.®5 All art is expression, according to Curry. As noted, the only distinction Curry made in the arts was that some are primarily expression, while others are the record of expres sion. Beginning with the assumption that the study of voice is a science, Curry also noted that, unlike other sciences, the product of voice science is artistic. However, all art . . . is based upon science. The sculptor must have a knowledge of anatomy; the painter is not hindered by knowledge of color; geometry and mathe matics are necessary to the architect. The art of vocal training depends upon a thorough knowledge of certain fundamental principles.®® Though the discipline of training may be and can be scien tific, the voice at the beckoning of the mind creates the aesthetic result of impression, the chief responsive "pres ence" within a viewer or auditor. A voice is only as ®5Ibid. 86Ibid., pp. 16-17. 337 expressive as the "imaginative" play it affords. Important to realize here is that Curry, consciously or unconsciously, applied Romantic theories of aesthetics to the art of oral expression. Beardsley has pointed out that poetry (and art in general) is essentially the expression of feeling can, then, be taken as the first principle of Romantic aesthetics, and this statement will serve as the first approximation to a distinction between Romantic aesthetics and neo- 87 classical aesthetics. Eighteenth-century neo-classical aesthetics placed emphasis upon the didactic elements of proportion and balance, the elaborate figures of speech and rhetorical elements in lit erature, and stressed the proscriptive elements of form. The neo-classicists stressed the idealization of art. The Romantic view subordinated these elements for the sponta neity and intensity of emotion. The Romantic artist at tempted to achieve "the soul's awakening to the dictates of inspiration." Crucial to Romantic aesthetics was the recon- 88 ciliation of imagination and feeling. To this end, it would be the force of the imagination giving form to the feeling inchoate within the artist. There is, it would appear, a marked similarity between Curry's goal of 87Beardsley, Classical Greece, p. 252. 88Ibid.. p. 254. 338 "imaginative play" and the Romantic aesthetic position. Curry stated that it was science that was delibera- 89 tive compared to art, which was instinctive. Science is more abstract, impersonal, judicial, in tellectual; art is more imaginative, emotional, syn thetic, concrete, and creative. They complement each other in any true human development. This is especi ally true of the voice. It is primarily an agent of expression, and all our knowledge of it must be ap plied knowledge. We are apt to regard the voice as merely a useful tool, if not a mechanical one. Even in this respect it has been depreciated and for any higher artistic use of it men have little thought. The voice is continually used to express commonplace ideas.90 That which gives an aesthetic quality to the human voice, in the system which Curry developed, he called "dramatic instinct." The voice and body, naturally, are the respon sive material to communicate this dramatic instinct. Uni versal in its appeal, "The dramatic arts are the arts of 91 humanity," observed Curry. And for Curry, it is in the training of imagination that the voice of humanity is given its acculturated accent and touch. That Curry reflected the Romantic view of litera ture, if not all art, can be noted in his statement that the 89Curry, Mind and Voice, p. 437. 90Ibid.. p. 431. 91Ibid.. p. 433. 339 imaginative forces should be trained "because all true ap preciation of art and literature is dependent upon [their] 92 exercise." The Romantic view is further reflected by the training of the sensibility of imagination. Imagination not only creates art, it appreciates it; it lies at the founda tion of all altruistic instincts; it allows for the sym pathy with one's fellowmen; it allows for the penetration into Nature; it helps man to realize eternity. Feeling is enshrined and imagination is the primary and facilitating tool for the experience of art. "The imagination should be trained, because it is the fountain-head of all noble feel ing, and upon its discipline depends any true education of 93 the emotions." The dramatic instinct which Curry thought to be the complement of imagination can be described as heightened empathy, or, as he stated it, "the instinctive knowledge of 94 human nature." In his writings, Curry advanced the argu ment for the education of imagination and dramatic instinct with something of impending urgency. What he felt had happened, in the field of elocution at least, was that art ^^Samuel Silas Curry, Imagination and Dramatic In stinct (Boston, the Expression Company, 1896), p. 8. 93Ibid.. p. 9. 94Ibid.. p. 10. 340 had been debased; that is, art had become the handmaiden of manuals, posturing, and the studious application of rules. What he found missing was the impetus of art itself. In stead of the uses of art, he lamented the abuses. "[To] bring the mind into contact with the greatest products of imagination, and train students to appreciate the highest 95 in literature and art" is the aesthetic goal of Curry. The best method of developing the imagination is by the study of Nature and poetic expression. A sympa thetic love of the beautiful in Nature is character istic of noble imagination. Even in the study of art there must be ever a comparison with Nature. George Watts once said, "People must be trained to a higher appreciation of art by being led to see what a great artist Nature is."9® It is the dramatic instinct which empathically responds to the poetic nature because dramatic instinct is the means of . securing discipline and power needed over feeling, of pro- 97 viding the insight of one mind into that of another. The highest of the arts of the "great artist Nature" is poetry, existing, like music, in time, revealing the sequence of 98 ideas and the movement of life. Other arts, painting, sculpture, architecture, are spatial? and while both spatial 95Ibid.. p. 11. 96Ibid. " ibid. . p. 12. " ibid. . p. 10. 341 and temporal arts are equally instructive of man and beauty, the greater of the two is poetry, for it is poetry which is the fullest and most complete embodiment of life and energy. In every poem there are possibilities of innumerable paintings, if only the artist's nature can intensely realize each successive picture. Its materials are the simple words of common minds; its form or body is simply an orderly or rhythmic arrangement of human speech .^9 Curry's repeated idea was that all art is expres sion. His aesthetic position stated that the expression can exist and does exist "out of the mind."^^ Because art generalizes the details of experience into a oneness of impression, he would begin the training of the artist in testing his responsiveness to the feelings generated within him. The artistic ability to select from experience and to generalize about it possesses the qualitative equivalent of awakened feeling. How this awakening is achieved is deter mined by the degree of attention given to the artistic ex pression . Two forms of attention are therefore necessary. Contemplative attention is just as necessary as active attention. In fact, a failure to change our point of view, and to exercise sympathetic attention, is the chief cause of a lack of love " ibid.. p. 13. 100Ibid.. p. 2 2 . for Nature, music, painting, or art. 342 The attention which Curry would strive to have the sensitive interpreter possess is that attention which can "read the language of the human soul." To read the language of art, the perceiver must be trained to react in three ways; passively, responsively, and actively. By "passively" Curry did not mean with passivity. He apparently meant "openness" and "receptivity" to the new and unusual, a state of per ception free from the encumbrances of prejudice. Such passive responsiveness, such reposeful and un prejudiced attitudes of receptivity, are not only necessary to the appreciation of art, but to any exercise of the imagination. The reason may pre judge, may mechanically compare, may be unreceptive and unresponsive; but not so with imagination. In tellectual or commonplace attention may dwell upon accidents, but imagination looks to the heart. Imagination is the spontaneous result of sympathetic contemplative attention. It was this mystique of art, and the mystique of the responsiveness, which Curry offered as the aesthetic goal to rid the art of oral reading of imitation, posturing, and mechanical gesturing posing as art, but in posing, ut terly devoid of the Romanticist's sine qua non, the expres sion of Nature. Expression begins within man, within his 1Q1Ibid.. p. 31. 102Ibid.. p. 32. 343 soulful link to all life as it is extended into the created forms of art. How crucial this is to Curry's aesthetic is reflected in his belief that oral reading suggests the rep resentations of life through the power of the voice and body, not the imitations of life. [Representation] is not identical with imitation. Imitation copies effects, and acts from without in ward. Representation, on the contrary, is the ob jective embodiment of the subjective assimilation of a living process. It proceeds from within outward. It is a revelation, simple and natural, of genuine thought and feeling. It springs from a desire for objective form, to make the external body present the life within. It is due to the fact that all expression is a revelation to sense of what is mys tic and subjective. Each objective form results from a process of identification, not from external imitation of accidents. Thus, concluded Curry, the most accessible, and least satis factory, form of expression is imitation. Because it con sists of external manipulation of voice and body, it is the lowest form of expression. Curry would admit that manipu lations alone are capable of producing an impression, but the impression is vacuous and devoid of artfulness. A second form of representation is achieved through the "dra matic realization of actions, and to vivid, imaginative 104 conceptions." But the limitation of the second is that ^^Ibid., p. 230 (italics mine). 104Ibid. 344 it lacks the quality of the third mode of expression, feel ing . This latter mode is a manifestation of the feeling of a man. It is due to sympathy, and appeals to sympathy. It conveys an impression, not by representing the thought, or object, or action, but by revealing the feeling it awakens.105 Curry was striving to achieve an antidote to the mindless and essentially artless representations of litera ture which elocutionists at their worst represented. Ges ticulating and vocalizing are not artful in and of them selves because they lack assimilation? interpretative art without assimilation is half-art, or perhaps no art at all. Assimilation . . . acts from within outward? and while it sometimes results in an objective represen tation, such representation is a direct revelation of feeling, and is not a mechanical process. Thus representation implies subjective assimilation and life as its cause. It is objective form resulting from within outward, not an external imitation of accidents. 106 Imitation and artlessness result when there is no interven tion of the personality? indeed, it could be argued that the very matrix of the Curry system is tied to this phrase, the intervention of the personality. It suggests sympathy, empathy, and total surrender to the literature, assimilating 105Ibid. 106Ibid.. p. 231. 345 the emotion suggested and selecting for presentation that element within the literature which the dramatic instinct of the perceiver has seized as the aesthetic essential of the particular literary experience. Where there is no intervention of the personality, no "conforming of the shows of things to the desires and feelings of the mind," all is a mere copy and reproduction of the literal object. It has been something of a dispensation to summarize the Curry system as a process of "thinking the thought," as Mary Margaret Robb states in her Oral Interpretation of 108 Literature in American Colleges and Universities. Yet what must be made clear for any understanding of Curry is what "thought" is in the presence of art. For this, two elements can be considered. First, Curry's aesthetics were essentially Romantic and idealistic. Not only did the writer's emotional and evanescent encounter with life remain the precipitating cause of creation, but the creation itself represented something immutable and true of the human con dition. Participating in the inner lives of other human beings through art not only reveals the feelingful nature 107Ibid.. p. 48. 10®(New York: The H. W. Wilson Company, 1941), p. 165. 346 of life, but permits a participation in the inner life of 109 the world as well. In terms of nineteenth-century aes thetics , [it] was the claim to this form of knowledge that gave rise to a new theory of the imagination— or, perhaps better, that was marked by a new extension of the term "imagination," to cover not only a faculty of inventing and reassembling materials, but a faculty of seizing directly an important truth.H0 In this light, it is interesting to compare what Curry wrote in what constitutes his aesthetic treatise on the art of interpretative reading. It is the usual opinion that the imagination is con cerned with the ideal; that it creates the ideal. This is true; but this is only one function of the imagination. All great art is either a realization of an ideal, or an idealization of the real. In fact, it is usually both. In fact, realism and idealism are two modes of artistic endeavor. Idealism begins with mental con ception, and brings it into the realm of real ob jects, and makes that an object of sense which was only a dim dream. Realism begins with the physical object, with the definite literal fact; brings imagination to bear upon it; paints the spirit be neath the surface, and so lifts it into the realm of poetry and of beautiful truth. In both the idealistic and the realistic processes a coloring is received from personality. Thus art in each 109Beardsley, Classical Greece, p. 253. 11QIbid. 347 case is "the intervention of the personality It would be more appropriate to suggest that "thinking the thought" is best defined as suggesting "intuiting the thought," or "sensing the thought," or "feeling the thought." Thinking connotes a rationalistic approach, per haps even a logical approach. Curry's aesthetics are non- rational and intuitive, and they rest upon premises concern ing art, the precedents and foundations of which, at least aesthetically, are but extensions of prevailing nineteenth- century aesthetic thought. As an antithesis to the art for art's sake school of aesthetics, Curry's dictum, art must be studied as art and bv means of art. states the principle upon which his lessons of training the voice for the utterance of literature are ^ 112 based. [To] develop the imagination, to secure a true appre ciation of any literary work, there must be earnest study and practice to render the highest products of the artistic nature of the voice. The most natural language, that of the voice, must be exercised to give expression to the noblest forms of poetry and literature. H-3 ^^Curry, Imagination and Dramatic Instinct, pp. 47-48. 112Ibid.. p. 156. 113Ibid. 348 Curry quotes two writers of the nineteenth century to sup port his thesis, John Ruskin and Thomas De Quincey. Rus- kin's aesthetics and the basis of his aesthetic judgment was, Beardsley suggested, a limited imitation theory. Truth and beauty were his two elements of art. The greatest art conveys to the spectator the greatest number of truths, per ceived by a higher faculty of the mind. These great ideas are true to experience; aesthesis is that which is pleasing 114 to the human senses. De Quincey is cited by Curry to support the notion that the higher purpose of literature is to yield the power latent in the human condition, not merely to express a knowledge of that condition. De Quincey speaks of a kind of surcharge in literature, a sum total of emotion and impression greater than the "literary elements" of which it is constructed. It is the knowledge of these emotions of the human spirit culminating in the inevitable pull of lit erature with its washes of feeling and grandeur of truth which De Quincey cites as the "higher functions of litera- 115 ture." To Curry, the perception of those truths, 114See Beardsley, Classical Greece, pp. 301-305. H-^Curry includes a long selection of De Quincey, "Literature of Knowledge and Power," in Imagination and Dramatic Instinct, pp. 157-159. 349 purposes, and heightened emotions of literature are acces sible and capable of training through the elements of dra matic instinct. Our powers of perception, or our capabili ties of "thinking the thought" are ultimately dependent upon the correlative capacity of this instinct. "The word 'dramatic,' directly or indirectly, im mediately or figuratively, has some reference to the reve lation of the life and movement of passion and character 1X6 through the voice and body." The important factor here is the separation of dramatic as it might apply to the ex pression of character; Curry's purpose is to apply it to the ideas and feelings expressed in literature. What is dramatic is the thought, emotion, and experience in the situation, the distillated essence of what occurs within the context of situation. "Imagination gives insight into another's point of view, creates situations, penetrates to 117 the aim and motive-springs of character." "Instinct" refers to the spontaneous action of the mind, a quality innate within the human heart. It is the means of getting outside one's self and identifying with human experience. That which is instinctual is revealed in 116Ibid.. p. 234. 117Ibid., p. 235. 350 the human voice, its modulations, its tones, and its evoca tions of the spirit within man. The instinctive is the leap of understanding occurring in the presence of an uttered reality, of the knowledge of emotions because they are com municated from the inner depths of being; they are not sug gested by the superficial applique of posture, gesture, and voice. Here instinct is akin to intimation and premonition, and the development of these is cultivated by great litera ture, the revealer of heart and motive. The qualities of art founded upon the notion of expression are three: spontaneity, consistence and unity, and intimation. These elements are derived from a study of the literature from its smallest elements to its noblest thoughts. He would not neglect the minutia of single tones, letters, syllables, words or phrases. But interpretative art lacking the grand essentials was not art, and Curry's system, founded upon so articulate an aesthetic as he de veloped, cannot be fairly or adequately understood divorced from his artistic qualities of art. The quality of spontaneity when present in oral reading is Curry's fundamental law of expression. "It might be called originality, since everything that obeys this law 351 118 has a character distinct from everything else." Spon taneity is the means and the process by which the interpre ter trusts himself, trusts his instincts, trusts his body, trusts his voice. It suggests a quality of "possession" of the literature so integrated and integral to the performer that it literally manifests itself from within outward. Spontaneity does not mean impulsiveness or chaos. It means harmonious union of all the faculties and powers of the man, voluntary and involuntary, the voice sympathetically responding to these, and all its parts coordinated in response to the deeper co-ordinations of thought, emotion, and will.^9 A feeling without thought is not spontaneity; it is impul siveness. "Spontaneity does not imply absence of control 120 but of manipulation." What Curry means here is that the experienced emotions, spontaneously occurring, are directed by the will, or perhaps the character, of the interpreter. [To] repress and have no faith in feeling, to obey mechanical rules, to manipulate our voices in all phases of expression, means taking the forces of nature into our own hands and interfering with the deepest human i n s t i n c t s . ^1 Training in spontaneity is indirect; it involves the train- H^Curry, Mind and Voice, p. 435. 119Ibid.. p. 436. 120Ibid. 121Ibid.. p. 437. 352 ing of the will, the discipline of the artist, and suggests the training of the means of allowing the emotion to be communicated through the body and voice. Any training of the voice, any training of the body is done to permit the intuitive and emotional perceptions to be adequately com municated. "Vocal expression as an art is subjective and 122 must be free." The function of unity and consistency in art, and the pleasure that is derived from such a function, is to perceive, communicate, and suggest the interrelationships of all parts. "Every play, every story, every fable, every speech, every poem, must be so rendered that its organic 123 unity is revealed." The opposition of parts, the para doxes, the details, the transitions and contrasts, each element must be revealed and reconciled? as Curry observed, 124 "Harmony is the reconciliation of opposites." While the petals of a flower unfold in opposition yet they come from the same bud and the same life in the stem. So, in the interpretation of the best literature the deep, inner life of the passage re quires the direct opposition of parts, and by this opposition their deepened kinship and unity is found. ^ - 23 122m d., P. 438. 124Ibid. 123Ibid.. p. 439. 125Ibid. 353 Of the three qualities of art which Curry felt to be the fundamentals of expression, "intimation" was the singu lar quality to which he addressed himself with greatest effort and zeal, for it is this quality which was linked most directly to the use of the human voice. The aim of the voice, as of all true art, is to reveal thought, imagination, and feeling. Hence, the highest quality which should always be recog nized is its power to intimate or to suggest the deepened conditions of the human heart. The human voice gives to literature the intimation of the emotion inherent in it; the interpreter would never seek to duplicate that emotion, he would never seek to debase that emotion by what Curry identified as the "accidentals" of the voice. By accidentals, Curry apparently meant those quali ties of the voice that can be isolated for specific train ing: nasality, flatness, throatiness; in short, what could be identified as the resources of the voice. These "quali ties" possess little relationship to the emotional life of the individual. Though they may reflect attitudinal states, they are not emotional states. True emotion, fundamental to the human condition, has a deeper wellspring than the acci dentals of pitch, timbre, rate. The degree to which Curry 126Ibid.. p. 441. 354 carried his idealism in aesthetics is nowhere better exem plified than in his notion of intimation. Intimation is the source of knowledge of the higher aspirations of emotional life; it recognizes what it means to suffer, to be, to exist with the purified synthesis of knowing "the difficulty . . .to grapple with higher 127 things." Curry's article of faith is that literature reveals these higher emotions and that these same emotions are accessible through a system of training which searches for them. We find here the glory of the human voice in expres sion. It is subjective, personal. When properly trained it becomes so allied with human powers that it intimates their action, even their effort to con ceive the inconceivable, to express that which is most exalted and most sublime. 28 Curry's use of the term "sublime" cannot help but recall the work, On the Sublime, by the presumed author, Longinus. In Book VIII Longinus identifies the two important features of the sublime: important, great, and imposing ideas, and vehement emotion. While the sublime is attainable with emotion, Longinus says that "nothing makes so much for grandeur as a genuine emotion in the right place. It 127Ibid.. p. 442. 128Ibid.. p. 445. 355 inspires the words as it were with a fine frenzy and fills 129 them with divine afflatus." Curry's definition is less direct, but suggests the same purport. The student should study the most ideal poem he can find. He must endeavor to realize it deeply and profoundly and express it truly. He must realize it not by the intellect, as if it were something to be easily understood, but as something that can only be hinted to the imagination.130 The power of the voice is that it holds the expressive link to man's emotional communicative self, "the appeal of the 131 faculties of one to similar faculties in another." The reaches of human awareness are touched by the expressive foundations in man, extended and made manifest in the voice. Thus, Curry's training for the voice and of the voice was not, as some writers insist, a contradiction in terms, purpose, or focus. The training of the voice was the means to expression, not the end. Curry regarded the training associated with the elocutionary movement as manip ulative, mechanical, suppressive of emotion. He chose to describe his system of training the instrument of expression 129Cassius Longinus, On the Sublime, pp. 57-59. 130Curry, Mind and Voice, p. 445. 131Jfeia., p. 443. 356 as modulative, a system expressive of the voice and body creating the spontaneous event of realized literature. His methodology in the training of the voice is found in his 132 book, Foundations of Expression. In Curry's treatise, expression is considered as the outward manifestation of the spirit of man. The "founda tion" of expression is more than a pedagogical term denoting the elements of the discipline, suggesting as it does in the context of his book the inward search and communication of human consciousness. Curry argued for the elimination of self-consciousness, for with its elimination the responsive voice is attuned to the elemental conditions of human ex- 133 istence. Elocutionary training is the training of self- consciousness, and thus avoids the spontaneous response and actions of the body. Elocutionary training, as noted above, is the training in accidentals, not fundamentals. The fun damental communication of literature is the ineffable leap of the "message" through vocal expression from verbal ex pression, from rhythms of thought, from the power to con ceive and germinate impressions, and by the power to awaken 132Boston: The Expression Company, 1907. J-33Ibid. . p. 16. 357 "that instinctive action of the mind in which vivid, clear ideas gather words into groups, which is the characteristic of naturalness in conversation What is the characteristic of naturalness in con versation, reading, or speaking? Curry replies, "Touch is 135 the ictus of the voice." Ictus, the pulsation and rhythm of the heart beat, the recurring pattern of sound and the absence of sound, is to be sought and discovered, felt and communicated. An understanding of "touch" is the under standing that emotion cannot be codified into markings and terminology. Touch is subjective, not objective. Touch is the confidence that emotion is radical, meaning progressing from the root of being and extending naturally from the center of the self. As Curry uses the word, he does not mean aberrational or uncontrolled. He means non-controlled? that is, touch is the emotional connection to that which is deepest in man, the spontaneous knowledge that emotion has "sound" equivalents which can be brought to the level of utterance by command. One commands the intuitive self. "It cannot be too definitely realized that the vigor of the touch is in direct proportion to the intensity of the ^-34Ibid. ^3^Ibid., p. 45. 358 136 feeling, no matter what that feeling may be." Touch expresses primarily the will; therefore the control is the regulation or a knowledge of the reverse available to the reader. What cannot be regulated by this will are the im pressions given to the mind as it passes from one center of attention to another. Thus, concentration, and the willing ness to concentrate, free the mind to respond to the im pressions, the impressions yield emotions, the agent of the will within the human being summons the radical touch, the touch is the vocalization, the vocalized command of the literature. If the language by which Curry developed his aes thetic of interpretation is characterized by undue abstrac tion and abstruseness, it is certainly not the fault of the system, but rather the result of attempting to become onto logical in an area of knowledge and practice which had, in his own time, become limited by its prescriptions, arbitrary codes, and superficiality. He maintained that training can assist the volitional qualities of the performer, and para mount among these were the voice, the command of the body, and the heightened attitude of mind which could, he most 136Ibid.. p. 34. 359 strongly maintained, seize the thought of literature. Thus, thinking the thought, while facile in its terminology, was for Curry an activity of profound engagement, suggesting the capacity of sublimity itself. Thinking the thought through the will to explore the literary experience? the response to the exploration, at its most and total realization is ar tistic spontaneity. Spontaneity is involuntary? it is the consent to the literary experience which is voluntary. The realization of the import of literary art as it "washes" and "illuminates" consciousness fulfills the trained complements of voice and body? this is what Curry meant when he wrote, "Artistic spontaneity is the harmonious union of involuntary 137 action with voluntary and conscious actions." The train ing of the interpreter is the development of sensibility, of emotior, "The sympathetic awakening of man's subconscious 138 and spiritual sensibilities." The end to be achieved through the greatest and noblest statements of man's litera ture is, as has been noted, sublimity, which defined by Curry is "the sense of the transcendence of idea over form, 139 of mind over matter." 137Ibid.. p. 138. 138Ibid.. p. 152. 139Ibid. 360 Expression is commonplace when mere statements pre dominate; poetic, when truth is expressed with human realization; sublime, when man suggests his effort to grasp what cannot be conceived in finite form.140 The system of expression which Curry enunciated remains one of the most complete, thorough, and consistent aesthetics of interpretation written in the twentieth cen tury. Though the aesthetics themselves are reflective of classical idealistic aesthetics, Curry must be taken seri ously. It is an egregious error to dismiss him with a phrase that reduces complexity to a virtual puerility. His understanding of the artistic process inherent in the crea tive domain of interpretative literature covered every major canon of the aesthetic experience. He wrote of the impor tance of imagination, mimesis, sympathy and empathy, spon taneity, comprehension, and in doing so, never suggested that accessibility to the artistic experience was subject to the application of superficial rules of conduct which could appear as art. He stressed the individuality of interpretation, "spontaneous variations peculiar to every 141 individual." He knew that all art begins with the effort of attention, the contemplative perception of relationships in art. And above all, he knew that all art is the communi- 140Ibid. 141Ibid.. p. 309. 361 cation of intuition, which by the very nature of the artis tic process itself is dominated by the discipline of the means of communication. What is trained are the potential extensions of intuition through expression by the voice and body. To criticize Curry for the training of voice and body and to suggest that by so doing he violated his own aes thetics is a failure to grasp his intent. Without the trained voice and body, the extensions of literature could not be given the palpable moment of utterance? the resources of the interpretative artist are his voice and body released in the inventive and spontaneous setting of time and space, emotion and place. "All art is play reduced to order." There must be play and enthusiasm, that is, spontaneous energy and feeling. The true development of delivery depends upon the awakening of man's faculties, contemplation of the world, and a truer obedience to the highest ideals and deepest dreams of life. Delivery is the liberation of thought and emotion; it is the giving of form to aspiration and emotion. A true study of delivery is the highest means of discovering man's hidden power. "All education is emancipation"; but this is especially true of delivery. To express is to set free. ^2 A far more appropriate summation of Curry's position in the aesthetics of interpretation is contained in the last 142Ibid. 362 sentence quoted above. "Think the thought" may describe one step in his process, and be absolutely crucial to the aes thetics which Curry enunciated. However, it is the phrase, "to express is to set free," which carries with it the sug gestiveness of the process to which Curry dedicated his life and his work. Cornelius Carman Cunningham Among the more successful texts in oral interpreta tion published since the conclusion of World War II has been Oral Interpretation by Charlotte Ives Lee. In the preface to the first edition, Professor Lee acknowledges the incal culable debt she owes to C . C. Cunningham. As a student of his, Lee formulated many of the principles which she later expanded and delineated in her own professional work. How ever, a close reading of her texts will reveal that the bases for her own aesthetics of interpretation are directly traceable to the work of Cunningham, and thus, the most influential text in oral interpretation in the United States is the continuation of Cunningham's formulations and ideas 143 which were first enunciated as early as 1928. 143c. C. Cunningham, "Interpretative Reading as a Fine Art," Journal of Expression. II (1928), 78-79. 36 3 Cunningham remains without peer in the extent to which he insisted that the oral interpretation of literature is based upon the aesthetic principles of all fine art. When interpretative reading is analyzed carefully as to the particular method of the application and development of the underlying principles in a given form of art, it is found to demand precisely the same qualities or characteristics of technic as do the major fine arts . . .144 The later expansion of what he perceived these techniques 145 and principles to be in Literature as a Fine Art remains to the present day the longest, most complete, and most aesthetically oriented treatment of literature and oral reading. With his principles as the basis for one of the most successful texts in oral interpretation, and with his own book's uniqueness, it is something of an anomaly, per haps, to find Literature as a Fine Art referred to as a 146 "somewhat neglected classic in oral interpretation ..." Perhaps the cause of this can be attributed to the nature of Cunningham's book itself. Not so much a text as a trea tise, the book's importance has been in its influence rather 144Ibid. 145jjew York: Ronald Press Company, 1941. 14&Veilleux, Oral Interpretation, p. 146. 364 than in its popularity. Cunningham's design of the aesthetic structure was one contrived for the performer, devised for the performer's perception of the literary work, and laid down as the neces sary elements for total audience effectiveness. What he established was a three-fold analysis of art. Fundamental to any art is the technique of that particular art; the art work possesses intrinsic qualities which inhere within it and give to it its uniqueness, purpose, and structure; the art work affects and impresses by its extrinsic qualities, qualities which create the artistic import of the experi ence. In the briefest summary, there exist the tools of the craft, the innate qualities of the work, and the effect of the work upon a spectator. All training in the inter pretation of literature must of necessity, he argued, con sist of the training in these principles; they are the principles of fine art. The tools.— The tools are the resources available to the interpreter: his voice and his body. It was, however, necessary to perceive these tools as something greater in magnitude than mere resources, or, as Cunningham put it, "[they] must . . . be dedicated to a higher objective than they represent in themselves." 365 The reader does not exist for the sake of his own agreeable timbre of voice, nor for his capacities for getting good emotional quality or making de sirable changes in pitch, rate, time, or inflection, or calling attention to a pleasing melody, nor for the purpose of exhibiting his graceful or command ing posture or his ease of movement or the smooth ness or strength of his gestures. The body and the voice of an oral reader should be like the pen and paper of the creative artist— mere instruments with which he works . ^48 It was in the use of instruments that Cunningham called for the artistic restraint and absence of technique, apparent technique. Nothing the interpreter does, Cunningham warned, should call attention to itself. What Cunningham feared most was the encouragement of what he called impersonation? that is, the use of tech niques with the body and voice which would violate an aes thetic standard which he considered something of an abso lute. In a personal note to this writer, he provided a "statement of position" on the mode of interpretation. Cunningham wrote, The teachers of Oral Interpretation who instruct a student to "impersonate" the several characters in a play he is interpreting to an audience are wrong— 147Cunningham, Literature as_a Fine Art. p. 262. 148Ibid. 366 deeply, profoundly, intrinsically wrong. They are asking the student to "pass the impossible," to do something which, in the very nature of things, can not be done . . . Is there another road they can take? Assuredly there is 1 It is the road of the interpretative-reader as artist, the road on which suggestion takes the place of personation. By sug gestion, chiefly through the tones of the voice but also by bodily movement that merely begins the action and does not work it out completely, the characters can be created in a much higher realm than the phys ical— the realm of the audience's imagination.^49 The interpreter was conceived by Cunningham to be "a senti ent instrument," an instrument which he adamantly insisted was the means, and the means alone, by which the aesthetic qualities of the literature are re-vitalized in the form of 150 human speech. The interpreter-artist was likened to the musical artist in that the two shared the same aesthetic continuum— extending print, literal print, into the sound which transcends the perceptible notations. In the inter pretative mode, there is, he wrote, a distinction between language and speech. Speech is the completion of what is incipient in written language: tone and its myriad con comitants of inferential communication. The training of the interpretative artist was the 149c. C. Cunningham, personal communication, 1951. l50Cunningham, Literature as a Fine Art. pp. 262- 263. 367 training in the skills of the aesthetic discipline. To Cunningham, the basics of this discipline were objective and quantitative. It was in the preparation for the inter pretative moment, a preparation in the intrinsic and ex trinsic factors of art, that led to the drawing up into consciousness and awareness the tangibles in the literature. The oral reader who makes his preparation in line with the aesthetic discipline and who seeks to "read out" the artistic qualities which his analysis has discovered, encounters, however, that difficulty which arises whenever both objectivity and subjec tivity enter into a problem. Always, in so far as possible, he should seek to make the objective pre vail over the subjective. He should make his read ing reflect as accurately and completely as possible the art which is in the composition.^51 Where there is subjectivity in the oral interpretation of literature it is not, necessarily, in the vocal means by which the literature is read, but, rather, in the intellec tual discipline which discovers differing aesthetic compo nents. The interpretative artist reveals his insights and critical acumen not by the didactic lecture, but through the reading aloud of the work. This discipline in aes thetics will yield marked individual differences of inter pretation, but it is not the subjectivity of caprice and 151Ibid.. p. 264. 368 "undisciplined" oral reading. The question which confronts the interpretative artist is, therefore, this: How can aesthetic values, arrived at by analysis, be correlated with the technical phases of oral reading? Before he can answer this question correctly, he must bear in mind that the interpretative artist never super imposes any techniques of expression, whether of body or voice, upon the material which he is inter preting, in whole or in part. He never says: "I have trained myself to do so-and-so with my pos ture, my muscle tensions, my facial expressions, my gestures, my quality of voice, my melody, my timing, my stress. Therefore I will be on the alert to do these things whenever this selection which I am to read gives me the chance." Instead, he considers each aesthetic quality in the compo sition in turn, makes himself aware of what the creative artist has done to attain it, and then proceeds to call forth such powers as he may pos sess and to use them so that they will transmit to his audience as much of the art as he has become inwardly aware of and is capable of being outwardly responsive to. ^2 The aesthetic elements in the delivery of literature are two, according to Cunningham. They are harmony and rhythm. In harmony all elements of the body and voice are in such rapport with the literature that they do not call attention to themselves. No awkward gestures, no undue grace, no technique of the voice allow themselves to intrude between the literature and the audience. In rhythm, the organic pulse of the literature pervades the moments of 152Ibid.. p. 269. 369 interpretation. "Rhythm," Cunningham wrote, "in a temporal art is not only the carrier of its meaning, but is the car- if not paradoxical quality, in the nature of rhythm which created for Cunningham the mystique of oral interpretation. The extent to which the interpreter loses himself in the work of art is the extent to which he will find himself as an artist. "The complexity of expressional technique of body and voice involved in the rhythmical unison of the creative and the interpretative artist defies detailed 154 analysis . . ."he noted. Rhythm in the two media of expression— written and oral— is the result of the effects of unity and harmony, variety and contrast, and balance and proportion. Rhythm is the perceived synthesis of these in the work of art, and in the oral moment particularly the result of the discipline of submitting to the aesthetic discipline of analysis. The totality of the delivery con sists of thought stimulation, emotional stimulation, and aesthetic stimulation in varying degrees. How a given selection of literature embodies these areas of stimulation required the keen analysis of them by the interpreter. The rier of its interpreter as well." 153 It was this enigmatic, 153Ibid.. p. 282. iS^Ibid. 370 interpreter, Cunningham wrote, says to himself: "This composition has done something to me; it has awakened my aesthetic perception. Now I must let it use my powers of oral expression as a channel through which it may pass to the aesthetic perception of others."155 Thus, in the triadic relationship of the literature, the reader, and the audience, there is in the discipline of study the understanding of the tools of interpretation, the artist's responsive body; the intrinsic qualities of the literature, the construction of the literature; and lastly, the effect of the literature upon an audience, the extrinsic qualities of impression. Having suggested how Cunningham regarded the interpreter's role, noting how he depressed the "training of the voice and body" for the disciplined response of the body to its aesthetic sensibilities, it is interesting to compare how the vagueness of his approach to delivery is supplanted by a rigid system of analysis of the literature. The analysis of literature.— Cunningham's aesthetic argument was that all art had innate qualities of unity and harmony, variety and contrast, balance and proportion, and 155Ibid.. p. 269. 371 rhythm. Further, these elements were manifest in the form of the art as well as its content. In applying these to the literary medium, it was his contention that it was the in terpreter's responsibility to extend these into the moment of audible and visual communication with an audience. What was communicated was the perception of these elements as discovered and found after the most rigorous analysis of the literature itself. The most important of these elements was the factor of unity. Unitv.— Unity, in Cunningham's opinion, is the most dominant and fundamental element in the art form of the literary work as well as in the oral interpretation of the piece. Unity . . . is the dominant or fundamental conception which controls the whole and gives significance to its parts. It determines the organization and execu tion of the whole and governs the way in which the parts must be subordinated to it. But, by whatever means it may be attained, there should be, and there always is in great art, such an entirety and com pleteness that is comparable to an organic being "breathing thoughtful breath."156 Cunningham assayed the "entirety and completeness" of art in literature by identifying five elements which ■ * - 56Ibid. . p. 24. 372 contribute to the totality and the unity of a work of liter ature: the structure, the action, the details, the mood, and the effect of characters. Drawing his illustrations from specific pieces of literature, Cunningham's position was that the interpretative artist's knowledge of the manner in which the parts cohere would be the same knowledge com municated in the oral reading of the literature. Thus, aesthetic pleasure of the unity in a literary work is not only perceived but re-created. The structural unity in literature is that quality wherein the literary form into which the content is cast is organic to the subject matter. The epic form, for instance, is the suitable "organism" for the theme and treatment of Paradise Lost: iambic pentameter is the most suitable form for English cadenced speech; the ballad form is the most suitable method of retaining structure and content for the folk ballad. "The structure is built in such a way as to make a fitting habitation for what lives inside it," Cun- 157 ningham wrote. It must be readily apparent that this factor of structural unity is judgmental, but Cunningham's aesthetics rests upon the assumption that this is percep- 157Ibid.. p. 95. 373 tible and knowable. What could be argued as an a priori factor in Cunningham's aesthetics, i.e., form exists because literature exists, is not taken as a matter of argument by him. The aesthetics of literature contain the elements of form, and his definition of form is derivative of his exam ples . It would appear that what he meant by form was an assessment of the mode of arrangement and the coordination of parts within any given selection of literature. Hence, suitability of theme and the epic form are a matter of appropriateness? theme corresponds to structure. Structural unity is also found in the uses of lan guage, per se. How words are in the minutiae of composi tion, in the prosodic structure and metrical melody, add to the unity of the aesthetic effect, regardless of the "tech nicality" of the use upon observation. Here Cunningham stressed the attention which the interpreter must give to the caesura, or internal line pause, the prevailing stress and cadence of the line, the impact value of formal metrical patternings, i.e., Alexandrine lines and Spenserian stanzas, for instance, and word structure itself. In this last cate gory, Cunningham would have the interpreter be especially careful to note sibilancy, liquid and mute consonants, long vowels, alliteration, and the host of specific patternings 374 that can be given to words. In the problem of structural unity, each plays an important role, and the assessment of this role is the artist interpreter's responsibility. The unity of action is another kind, or a variation on the theme, of appropriateness. Here the action of the poem is consonant with the purpose of the poem. By what might be termed the economy of action. Cunningham argued that there is in great art little in excess. What is sug gestive in literature is superior to that which is blatant? and even should some literature become didactic, the hall mark of quality is still retained by artistry, as if one might argue that a good argument can be enjoyed by its form and the quality of its content. Perhaps the most important word to Cunningham on this particular matter of unity of action is deviation. Unity of action is non-deviational? it does not veer from its purpose, nor, on the other hand, from its suggestiveness. Cluttered deviations, extraneous materials, inappropriate behavior— each of these would de tract from the unity of a work of literature. The unity of mood is an apprehensive quality on the part of the perceiver. The impression gained from the unity of mood is the feeling of sustained emotion, or what Cun ningham termed "compelling emotionalism." This is achieved through the careful and delineating culmination of details which writers use to convey mood and atmosphere, mood and character. It consists of the "intermarriage of content 158 and structure between both the large and small members." In the training of the interpreter, the apprehensive quali ties are cultivated by asking the interpreter to discipline himself to perceive the "empathic sensory appeals" of mus cular, organic, and kinetic senses. By these latter three appeals he meant the "feeling into" the language stimuli which elicit muscular strain and effort, inner physical responses, and the feeling into motion external to the self. When these empathic senses are amplified by the five sensory appeals of equilibrium and temperature, the heightened awareness of the interpreter is so keyed to the nuances of mood which total sensory awareness brings that he fulfills Cunningham1s own definition of oral interpreter, "the sen tient instrument through whom words are given vividness and 159 fulness of meaning." Cunningham included, as well, the unity of charac ter and personality in his general discussion of this 158Ibid.. p. 101. 159ce c. Cunningham, Making Words Come Alive (Du buque, Iowa: William C. Brown Company, 1951), p. 26. 376 principle. Here, he noted that nothing in the artistic handling of character is extraneous; all language, gesture, quality of presence, intonation are usually so selected and focused that it is the interpreter's responsibility to main tain the quality of this selective process. Taking his cues solely from the literature, the interpreter's task is to harmonize perhaps what amounts to the minimal cues of char acter and to project them with the fidelity of his artistic resources. This means assiduous study of dialogue in narra tive poetry to ascertain the rhythm of speech, of descrip tion to polarize the salient qualities of the characters, and of phrasing to suggest the irony of situation and plot. Characters projected in the interpretative mode are created by the power of suggestion, and because of its subtlety, suggestion demands the craft of integrating and infusing character with those elements most salient to him. Variety and contrast.— The second of the intrinsic factors which Cunningham treated was that of variety and contrast. This aesthetic principle is predicated on the notion that art, of psychological necessity, is dependent upon "the requirements of mankind with respect to their subjective capacity for aesthetic and emotional 377 16 0 response.” Cunningham's premise of the psychological necessity-concerned the purpose of art itself. Quoting the eighteenth-century aesthetician Frances Hutcheson, and the contemporary aesthetician E. F. Carritt, Cunningham stated that the purpose of art is beauty, the revelation of it, the experiencing of it. Both revelation and experience are more artistically achieved when attention is directed and alertness is maintained by placing emphasis where it be longs; that is, by elaboration, or variety, and by change, or contrast. Genius or high talent in creative writing takes as its central purpose the projection in terms of beauty of some theme or emotion. Then it so clothes the subject with artistic variety and contrast that its message can be known by others whose attention and interest are kept alive as they contemplate it.^^ Variety amplifies, contrast intensifies. Variety reduces the boredom, the monotony and repetitiousness of theme and statement. Contrast "accentuates the nature of 162 the part which affords the contrast." Contrast . . . tends always to strengthen the oppo site quality. Thus, when contrast is introduced into a work of temporal art, it intensifies that which has been dominant up to the time when the 160Cunningham, Literature as a Fine Art. p. 133. 161Ibid. 162Ibid.. p. 134. 378 shift is made . . . A very obvious example of this effect of double emphasis comes from music, in the contrast which results when an entire orchestra builds up to a tremendous volume of sound which is followed, after a pause, by the mellow notes of a single flute or by the soft singing of the violins alone. - 1 - 63 Subordinated to the earlier concept of unity and harmony, variety and contrast reveal themselves among the parts of the composition. These parts are often slight in their importance, but by their presence make a contribution to the quality of the work. In language, there is the variety and contrast in the uses of language. Similes and metaphors and the sundry figures of speech enhance, enlarge, contrast, select and in many small, yet vitally important ways, amplify and inten sify the literary experience. In structure, there is the change and amplification brought about by variations within stanzaic length, in the "thought weight" of description and observation, detail and commentary. Both language and structure permit the juxtapositioning of elements; by what precedes and by what follows a word or thought group, con trast can be achieved and variety attained. The figures of thought, irony and paradox, often provide the contrast which 379 is the result of mental perception of the significance of the parts. However variety and contrast are achieved, they provide the "counterpoint" effect by balancing and con- 164 trasting ideas against and with each other. Contrast and variety, whose reason for being in arts grows out of the necessity for holding attention and interest and emphasizing important details, cannot be regarded merely as considerations forced upon an artist, of which he is bound, perhaps reluctantly, to take cognizance. If art is good or great it will prove that an outward necessity can be transformed into an intrinsic virtue which ministers to the given central interest or concern of the work itself.1®5 However, it was, according to Cunningham, of utmost impor tance for the interpreter to take seriously the problem of identifying the elements of variety and contrast for two reasons. First, because the interpreter knows what is present in the literature, he also has knowledge of what is necessary for the audience to seize and have called to their attention. And second, the knowledge of variety and con trast within a selection is a clue, and an important one, to the "fundamentally right manner of speaking his i . „ 166 lines." The oral reader, like every other artist, must get variety and contrast within limitations. His under standing of unity and harmony enables him by his P- 157. 165Ibid. 166Ibid. 380 techniques to achieve these qualities. His under standing of variety and contrast impels him toward their attainment, too, as he reads. No more, no less variety and contrast than is present in the composition is his goal in reading it.167 Balance and proportion.— Of the two elements in art described by Cunningham to this point, unity and harmony, variety and contrast, it is the third, balance and propor tion, which is the least discernible. That is, it was Cun ningham's belief that discernible was "conscious awareness," and though balance and proportion may not be a conscious factor of appreciation, it is apprehensive in its quality and import. What balance and proportion suggest is the awareness of balance, of things in equilibrium and equi poise. There is in literature an arrangement of parts, of units, of the elements within the piece which give it sub stance, form, and palpability. For example, at the word level, there is the balance implied in the simile, the con notation of one thing suggesting another, balancing another. There is the balancing of technical devices, of recurrent rhythms, stanzas, sections, books, chapters. The inter preter must know how this balance is achieved and how the parts are structuralized into the architecture of the 167Ibid.. p. 158. 381 selection. To achieve the insight of balance and propor tion, the knowledge of scansion is important, of verse forms and dramatic structure, as well. The interpreter must per ceive the balancing of characters, of how "good" and "evil" are given proportion and substance, of how protagonists and antagonists function within the structure of the work. Both by intention in his handling of materials and by rhythmic response to their nature, the creative literary artist, like every other artist, makes balance and proportion contribute to the totality of effect. The interpretative artist bears the same relationship to the creative artist with re spect to these intrinsic factors as he does on all other counts. ^8 The balance of literature, as in architecture itself, is either symmetrical or asymmetrical. The knowledge of where the fulcrum of emotional intensity rests gives the inter preter that needed information to know which section of the composition to give the greater intensity. [The interpreter] permits his knowledge of their presence in the work to impel him toward the balanc ing and proportioning of the composition as he holds it before his audience. . . . When he has discerned that the balance is asymmetrical, he will be more likely to give greater intensity to that section of the composition which needs it if the equilibrium is to be attained. 168Ibid.. p. 185. 169Ibid. 382 Balance is the process by which parts are given due counter poise and equilibrium; proportion, the achievement of each part's relation to the whole. The effect of balance and proportion is to sustain the aesthetic and emotional content . . 170 of art. Rhvthm.— In literary art rhythm is projected by the sound of words, either real or imagined, as they are related to one another by the artist. It manifests such content and structural qualities as the artist is capable of giving it, and it stimulates su»_h rhyth mic responses— thought and emotion, supraliminal and subliminal— as those who hear it, either actu ally or in imagination, are capable of making.I?1 It is rhythm which is, perhaps, the most organic quality in art. And because it is, suggesting the continual flow of life, its regularity of inhalation and exhalation, it regu lates the life of the entire organism. It was this "total ity" of the rhythmic cycle that Cunningham attributed to the last of the intrinsic qualities of literature. Like 172 life itself, he asserted, art possesses rhythm. "Rhythm is the carrier of [art's] content and the imparter of that 173 content to the person who gives heed ..." 170Ibid.. p. 31. 171Ibid.■ p. 187. 17gIbid.. p. 32. 173lbid. 383 Rhythm, existing at the level of consciousness and below, functions at the level of word stress and at the level of content, or contextual, stress. The former heeds the sound formation of words as they occur one after the other. In making his point, Cunningham suggested three approaches to word-stress principles. First, there is the simple etymological level; that is, if a word possesses more than one syllable, obviously one or more of these syllables is stressed. Second, there is the logical stress? that is, there is the presence of stress upon monosyllabic words that give meaning to a poem. And finally, there is prosodic stress, the stress of prevailing metrical feet in a poem, the object of such stress being the oral prevalence of that foot in the oral reading whenever possible without doing violence to the poem. The latter form of stress, the con tent, or contextual, stress "stimulates rhythmic responses in the attention waves of the auditors by recurrent appeals to their various capacities for response— intellectual, 174 imaginative, emotional, aesthetic." In the prosodic speech patterns, Cunningham worked with a freedom of approach rather than a strictly formalis- 174Ibid.. p. 190. 384 tic and rigid insistence upon scanned and static metrical patterns. Cunningham's philosophy of language was that there existed a profound difference between speech and lan guage. Speech is the precursor of language, and because it is, the oral interpreter must be guided by the principle of it: namely, the speech-phrase. The speech-phrase is the rhythmic unit, and the artist's use of it is the major dif ference between prose and poetry. In the speech-phrase, there is a variety of stress; in strict prosodic scansion there is often little. Thus, Cunningham's approach to scansion of poetry was first to mark words stressed in 175 reading the poem aloud. The result of this approach, Cunningham felt, was a rhythm of speech more closely iden tified with meaning and artistic purpose. Further, the stress approach aided in grouping the words of the most formalistic "prosodic form" into units of meaning. rather than arbitrary and artificial units of stress-unstress, or whatever particular metrical foot prevailed in a poem. Speech-phrases are determined by logical content and by the meanings of words, both individually and in their contextual relationships; but these factors do l^See C. C. Cunningham, "The Rhythm of Robinson Jeffers' Poetry as Revealed in Oral Reading," The Quarterly Journal of Speech. XXXII (October, 1946), 351, for a de tailed "argument" of his position. 385 not account for all of them . . . [Emotional] or dramatic significance given to parts of a sentence has the power to break it up into speech-phrases. Yet, stress and speech-phrasing are influenced by the factor unique to the oral reader: breathing. It is the oral reader's training so to discipline himself that speech- phrasing is organic to the physiological process of pausing, influenced by punctuation and the psychological-emotional content. In addition to the prosodic word-stress pattern and the content "speech-phrase" stress, there existed a third element of rhythm, the rhythm of images. He was particu larly interested in the interpreter's ability to recognize the nature of prevailing mental imagery, for it brought about an association between the poet and audience that was potent. Not sound alone, even though in the most melodic and rhythmic sense, carries the meaning of art. A rhythm far deeper sweeps through the composition to work upon those who are in contact with the poem.-^^ So important was this latter concept to Cunningham, that he developed an entire text to train the beginning interpreter l ^ C u n n i n g h a m , Literature as a Fine Art. pp. 197- 198. 177Ife.ifl., P. 225. 386 178 in the art of imagistic responsiveness. What he wanted and was desirous of the interpreter's achieving was con sciousness of the "sensory images" of sight, sound, taste, touch, smell; and the empathic images of inner feeling, balance, muscular strain, etc. When that rhythmic application of the power of im agery is made in such a way as always to be in har mony with the purpose of the creative literary art ist, the result is the realization by poetry of the condition of music in the most profound and effec tual significance of those words.-*-79 The extrinsic factors in literary art.— The intrin sic factors of art demanded something of the artist, accord ing to Cunningham. That is, they constituted factors of craftsmanship, of artistic purpose, of technique. The in terpreter was to participate actively in the conscious analysis of them and to attempt the communication of them. The extrinsic factors are those factors which constitute the personality of the artist, his attitude or stance toward his subject matter and audience; they are the factors which establish the line of communication between the artist and his audience. The intrinsic factors possess something of 178cunningham, Making Words Come Alive. 179Cunningham, Literature as a Fine Art. p. 223. 387 the quantitative about them? the extrinsic factors inhere with the elements of qualitativeness. And though this dis tinction is somewhat arbitrary (extrinsic and intrinsic factors possess both), it at least establishes the signifi cant differences between the two. The extrinsic factors, according to Cunningham, are qualities "which pertain to, or are derived from, the relationships which works of art bear to human beings, both those who make them and those for whom 180 they are made." Cunningham lists four extrinsic factors. Universality; the degree or extent to which the work of art possesses an aesthetic, emotional, or thought content that gives it significance as a commentary on life; Individuality; the degree to which, in whole or in part, the particular conception and execution differs from any and every other concept and treatment; Suaaestiveness; the degree to which the work of art requires that the observer or hearer shall translate it into terms of his own experience and imagination; Psychical, or Aesthetic. Distance; the degree to which the artist has preserved a sense of unreality in his work, thereby attaining a result which will never be confused with actuality. These factors Cunningham took to be the pervasive and pro scribed aesthetic elements of art. He felt that they ex pressed the substance of what the artistic and aesthetic were all about, and he wrote of them as if they encapsulated 18QIbid.. p. 35. 181Ibid.. p. 36. CUNNINGHAM'S AESTHETIC SYSTEM The extrinsic factors: The intrinsic factors: (the innate qualities) < o < u +» id o -H c 2 o o UNIVERSALITY INDIVIDUALITY SUGGESTIVENESS AESTHETIC OR AESTHETIC DISTANCE TOTALITY OF EFFECT (consisting of thought stimulation, emotional stimulation, aesthetic stimulation, in varying degrees) t o ( U > •rH 0 ) U u CD ft UNITY AND HARMONY VARIETY RHY1 AND CONTRAST BALANCE AND PROPORTION 'HM (The tools) o +j •o - 0 p < u o c ft •h r a id 0) u n THE TECHNIQUE OF A PARTICULAR ART (voice and body communication) Based upon a diagram given to the writer by C . C. Cunningham. 388 389 the totality knowledge of the essence of art. His aesthetic criteria of art were "restrained feeling, clean individual- 182 ity, universal significance." Cunningham allowed for a latitude of interpretation, he encouraged the individuality of the interpreter, he stressed the continual need for excellence. Though filled with a didacticism and personal taste, his assessment of art and the place of an aesthetic discipline is among the most thorough, if not the most thorough, in the field of oral interpretation. His use of aesthetic terminology, particu larly in the uses of suggestiveness and aesthetic distance, could have benefited from a more rigorous treatment, par ticularly from the work of Bullough. Cunningham's aim was performance of the most enlightened, sensitive, and dis ciplined type. He repeatedly felt the kinship of the musi cal performer to that of the oral interpreter, and was con vinced that the efficacy of literature lay in its apprecia tion first through the processes of interpretation and listening, reading and re-creation of the reading experi ence. He sought active and total involvement on the part of the interpreter, dismissing the superficial, trivial, and 182Ibid.. p. 39. 390 "elocutionary" art as unworthy of the high purposes of lit erature itself. For, as he concluded in his study on the fine art of literature, it is the oral reader who touches the words of the creative artist, giving to the literature I Q O a "life beyond life." Wallace A. Bacon and Robert S. Breen 184 Published in 1959, Literature as Experience rep resents an attempt to fuse the psychological and aesthetic approaches to literature as a viable means for the oral interpreter. In contrast to Cunningham, who approached the interpretative mode through the work and its constituent elements and affective features, Bacon and Breen attempted to bridge the experience of literature with the experiential life and sensibilities of the interpreter as the suitable touchstones for extending the literature through the oral medium. Their thesis that literature is an imitation of life in words closely resembles the aesthetic position of John Dewey, who, it will be recalled, held the view that p . 283. 184y/allace A. Bacon and Robert S. Breen, Literature as Experience (New Yorks McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc., 1959). 391 all art was vitalized and vivified experience. But here again, it appears to be the purpose of these authors to create an aesthetic of interpretation drawn from wide- ranging and catholic sources, and like Cunningham, their system is best described within the context of their own rationale. What art does, according to Bacon and Breen, is clarify, intensify and re-state the data of experience, and 185 this it does by magnifying it. What is important is the adaptive behavior of the interpreter, a behavior which, if sensitive and alert to the expressive elements in litera ture, can actively achieve a degree of congruence to the literature. Art as a means of expression demands the awakened sensitivity of expression within the interpreter. The characteristic of clarified, intensified, and magnified experience on the artist's part is the acute state of awareness. The artist absorbs the data of experience into his inner being in such a way that they become the stuff, the material, of expression; eyes become inner eyes, ears listen with the inner ear; experience becomes symbolized and reduced. But even in the symbolization and reduction 185Ibid.. p. 38. 392 there is no loss of vitality and the compelling intensity of the experience. The axiomatic statement, art is experi ence, suggests that art is also organic, sensory, neural. The position of Bacon and Breen is that the interpreter must sensitize himself to the very physiology of art and its visceral origins. At the same time art clarifies and intensifies, it also evaluates. When there is a sense of the shared mutu ality, there is, at least in all but the most private and secretive art, a unity of experience and a universality of appeal. A completed pattern, a wholeness, brings pleasure and satisfaction. The effective communication yields uni versality. Through these perceived reactions by the poet on the nature of his confrontation with life itself, the interpreter is allowed to share with the artist the evalua tion, the reaction to life. Thus the cycle is completed. Aesthesis is the result of heightened emotional participa tion in life. "Oral reading is the surest way to an affec tive experience of literature." The important thing to remember about literature, Bacon and Breen assert, is that literary experience is never 186Ibid.. p. 54. 393 identical to the experience from which it derives. What is often achieved through literature is the sense or feeling that the experienced moment as transposed into language is more meaningful because of its order, its completeness, its totality. This factor unique in art is explained in terms of imitation. To Bacon and Breen, the concept of imitation is crucial. The experiences of life cannot be "put" into language because language is linear, developmental, sequen tial? experience is total, immersing, constituting many impingements. Through language, literature attempts to re construct experience by endowing it with a linguistic, sym bolic imitation. The process of imitation involves selection of detail through choice of a point of view, choice of language, arrangement of parts, choice of final effect, and so on— many things, indeed, all of them resulting in a distortion of the thing being imitated . . . In this way it is safe to say that we learn through litera ture; we undergo experiences we should not otherwise undergo, we assume dispositions of persons we should not otherwise come to know, we look from points of view different from our own and frequently more pene trating than our own and almost always more complete than our own because they can take in the whole of the thing which is being viewed. In this way, liter ature is experience. Thus, aesthetic experience in literature has its foundation 187Ibid.. p. 101. 394 in imitation as well as experience? it is the construct of literature as the imitation of life which promotes the aes- thesis. If the imitation is truly successful, it will be suitably distanced from the observer and it will be recog nizable as an experience, for it will possess objectified correlatives to life. The duty of the reader, according to Bacon and Breen, is "to be receptive before he becomes 188 critical.1 1 The receptivity will elicit an impression, a feeling about the general import of the literature read. Leading then from the stance of literature as an imitation of life which provides to the sensitive reader the dimensions of a particular experience from life, the work on understanding how the effects were achieved and assessing the nature of the impression itself begins. To begin with the impression, Bacon and Breen note that it may be as 189 "vague as a 'feeling'— or as strong as a feeling." It may be crystal clear as an idea. But whatever it is, that impression is what the reader must start with in his rereading, his criticism, of the poem. In rereading one tests his impressions by looking for their sources. Frequently one finds that the initial impression was faulty or wrong because it overlooked things in the experience expressed in the poem.190 188Ibid.. p. 166. 189Ibid.. p. 167. 190Ibid.. p. 168. 395 Feelings may be checked against paraphrasing and discussion of the literature, for "[if] the experience of literature is worth studying, paraphrase and discussion of poems is not 191 only desirable but inevitable." The principles of as sessment are first to recognize that literature possesses decorum, or appropriateness of language, detail, and even attitude? second, to be able to appreciate and identify the uses of language, the figures of speech, figures of sound, the quality of the imagery? third to appreciate and be able to assess the structural units of the selection, the struc tural elements of poetry and prose. Upon the understanding of these rests the depth of appreciation of the aesthetic experience. In considering literature for oral presentation, Bacon and Breen attempted to amplify the oral purposes of language. Language, they argued, does not exist without the inner or outer ear which listens to it? it is not some thing apart from the potential sound it makes. Sound has an affective quality. When the sounds can be so articulated as to emphasize symbolically certain qualities of the experience ex pressed by the word or words that contain them, we articulate them emphatically; if the articulation of 191lbid. 396 the sound contradicts the sensorimotor symbolism, then they are articulated minimally. The words must contain sounds which provide the opportunity for creative interpretation on the part of the speaker.192 Despite the particular origin of language, Bacon and Breen felt that the aesthetic and psychological nature of content and sensuous expression is very important. Though the ob ject of literature is to provide dynamic experience, it curiously does this through the anomaly of stasis, of an equilibrium, of a holding together which attracts by the uniqueness of its structure, its sound, and its sense as perceived and affected. Language is the great medium of literature and life; its sensuous quality keeps literature from becoming completely abstract, ideal, or spiritual? its sym bolic character provides a consciousness of life's form, content, significance. The silent reader and the oral reader, alike, may be conscious of the symbolic function of language as it articulates an ideal experience, but it is more likely that the oral reader (through his intonation, vocal emphasis, emotional quality, and gesture) will reinstate the mimetic function of language and so provide the fullest interpretation of the text.193 The mimetic function is exemplifed in the gestural language of humans. Rather than eschewing gestures as a dynamic in the interpretation of literature, Bacon and Breen 192Ibid.. p. 284. 193Ibid.. p. 288. 397 attempt to establish a psychological, anthropological, and philosophical justification for them. From a psychological basis, they argued that the emotional life of the individ ual, and indeed of literature, is too complex to be solely limited to words. Words are often but the signs of a ges tural component, the residue in an iconic form of the com plex bodily engagement of communicating. This the inter preter must somehow sense in the language and restore to the interpretative moment. The anthropological basis of ges tural language is the pervasive fact of all men's "natural kinaesthesis," the mouth being "an instrument of gesticula- 194 tion first and an organ of sound-speech second." And the third basis, the philosophical, is drawn from the ob servations of Ernst Cassirer, whose speculation on the sensuous interrelation of symbol to the intellectual cogni tive process is the basis of a particular aesthetic position taken by Susanne Langer. Language, in its three-fold de velopment from solely gestural language to analogical ges tural communication, i.e., the sounds of speech imitate objects and relations, to complete symbolic communication and expression in grammar and syntax, reflects and contains l94Ibid.. p. 299. 398 the full cycle of evolutionary changes. Bacon and Breen observe that the oral reader is somewhat forced by^ the na ture of this development "to realize the extent of the im pact of the early stage of mimesis on the later analogical 195 and symbolic levels of language evolution." When we read literature, we assume the behavioral postures and attitudes of the text and we respond to our own assumed postures and attitudes even as we did originally to those in the text. In other words, we are impressed by what we ourselves ex- press. When we read, we experience the novelty of released impulses through imitation. But the in voluntary imitation is not fully released; it is formalized by the literary conventions and revealed to consciousness through selective inhibition. The contribution of Bacon and Breen to the aesthetic of oral interpretation is three-fold. First, the motion of literature as experience is an extension and an application of the aesthetics of John Dewey. Second, the analysis of literature in its structural elements and the development of the reader as a vitalized instrument of verbal and non verbal communication is an eclectic development from the fields of psychology and philosophy; from the former, its profound implicative meaning for the communicating agent as an extension of deep emotional involvement, and from the 195Ibid.. p. 288. 196Ibid.. pp. 304-305. 399 latter, an attempt to incorporate, however incipiently, the aesthetics of form and feeling generally associated with and attributed to Susanne Langer. And third, Literature as Experience represents the only single attempt since Cunning ham to address itself to the total aesthetics of oral inter pretation in a sustained study not designed as a textbook for the instruction of oral interpretation. If there be an aesthetic of oral interpretation, it must be based upon a more systematic approach to the role of the artist and his relationship to the work of art. The textbooks in oral interpretation have largely dealt with those elements in the work of literature which are acces sible to the student of oral interpretation. To this end, the most reputable are superior, the hackneyed, merely that. But with the possible exceptions of S. S. Curry's approach to expression and Wallace A. Bacon and Robert S. Breen's delineation of the nature of experience in literature and the accessibilities which the interpreter must develop, it can be safely stated that the lack of full-length treatments on the artist-interpreter's role in creation is a serious gap which can be profitably explored. Where interpretation must begin is with a theory of art. That is, it is something of a fallacy to designate one 400 thing as a fine art and then proceed to discuss something else as that fine art, as is the case of Cunningham. It is appropriate to ascribe literature as experience and to ex tend these experiential implications to the interpreter, as Bacon and Breen have done. Indeed, what reasonable expec tation could one make but this extension? Thus Cunningham, with his case for "fine art," and Bacon and Breen, with their emphasis upon "experience," have explicated theories of art? but the question remains whether such theories are adequate for an aesthetic of performance in oral interpre tation . Eight aesthetic concepts have been developed in textbooks of oral interpretation? aesthetic distance, em pathy . expression and impression. suggestiveness. veri similitude . form, and universality. While BuHough thought of aesthetic distance as the degree of detachment the ob server holds in relationship to a given piece of art, most writers in oral interpretation have carried the notion of aesthetic distance to the act of performance, suggesting that it is an active process of the interpretative mode. Other writers in interpretation have suggested that aesthetic distance resides in the piece of literature and have encouraged the interpreter to let the tone of the selection determine the amount of detachment. No major writer has ignored the aesthetic and psychological implica tions of empathy. There is widespread disagreement over the term expression (and impression, which is associated with it); it is dismissed as license, has been substituted by the term "communication" and appears to have but limited enthusiasm among writers in interpretation. Form is not treated as the form of the art of oral interpretation as frequently as it is analyzed in terms of the form of the literature. Suggestiveness has been treated as a form of aesthetic control by which minimal cues are communicated to the auditor; verisimilitude has been distinguished from imitation by suggesting that it is a kind of emotional ex pression which reveals the "voice" of the literature, and as such is to be distinguished from imitation, which the writers in interpretation identify as acting. Universality is used to describe the type of literature which would have an appeal to most listeners; it was pointed out in this study that universality is not an aesthetic term, but rather one which appears to signify taste among the writers of oral interpretation. 402 The philosophies of the art of oral interpretation of Samuel Silas Curry, Cornelius Carman Cunningham, and Wallace A. Bacon and Robert S. Breen were examined. Art as expression was developed by Curry; a comparative aesthetic linking the elements of literature to the oral performance of literature was attempted by Cunningham; and a psycho logical aesthesis based upon experience was suggested by Bacon and Breen. Curry's philosophy, while implicative in its aesthetic foundations, lacked the insights drawn from later developments in aesthetics in the twentieth century; Cunningham's literature as a fine art is an aesthetic of literature and not an aesthetic of performance; Bacon and Breen's development of literature as experience is not developed into an aesthetic of performance. CHAPTER V AN AESTHETIC OF ORAL INTERPRETATION An aesthetic of oral interpretation requires that the nature of an art form and the relationship of an artist to that art form be explicated. The purpose of this chapter is to establish (1) oral interpretation as an art form ful filling essential aesthetic criteria, and (2) the oral in terpreter as a creative auxiliary artist functioning within that art form. A definitional aesthetic of oral interpreta tion will be proposed, based upon contemporary aesthetic speculations, principally those theories and precepts of Croce, Dewey, and Langer. Thus, to delineate the art form of oral interpretation, the role of the artist within that art form, and to propose a general aesthetic of oral inter pretation from these two reciprocal elements constitutes the purpose of this chapter. 403 404 Oral Interpretation as an Art Form Louis Danz pointed out that the very word art is fundamentally misunderstood. Art has so often been given the equivalence of form, when in a greater sense, it should be associated with the process of "giving birth to."^ If the oral interpretation of literature is to lay claim to being an art, it must divest itself of stress upon its re creative function. One cannot, quite literally, give re birth; even the extended metaphorical sense of the word becomes clouded with metaphysical obscurantism. A work of art is created? it is presented. The literature in an oral interpretation is not re-created, or given a re-birth; it is presented. Thus, fundamentally and cardinally, the oral interpretation of literature is a presentative art form. The notion of a presentative art form stems from observation that there are three major types of artistic value: presentative, functional, and formal. Presentative values are those upon which the artist focuses his effort to make vivid and to articulate the character of the par ticular thing that has aroused him. Functional values are those which are subsidiary within the artist to explain or 1Louis Danz, The Psychologist Looks at Art. p. 171. to control things, as well as to present them, to instruct or persuade men, as well as to clarify a particular artistic vision. And the third, formal value, is that kind of value which lies within the medium, that is, the elements of the material, i.e., words, sounds, to which the artist devotes himself to exploit to the fullest possibilities of the 2 medium. It was an obsession with the formal values, and perhaps "legitimate" obsession because of the very presence of words and sounds, which fascinated the elocutionists. Teachers of oral interpretation who place paramount value upon qualities have, in effect, an aesthetic of formal value. The recent movement in oral interpretation, guided by Geiger, Beloof, and others, stresses oral interpretation as an art of functional value. Oral interpretation, they have variously written, is an activity of criticism, an activity of clarification of studies and thorough discip line. These writers do not deny, and indeed stress, the presentative values, but they add to these the functional and formal as well. The aim of presentative artistic value is to dis close the particularity of things, what traditionally has p See Jenkins, Art and the Human Enterprise, pp. 261- 262. 406 been called, according to Iredell Jenkins, the "imitative," "representational" and "expressive" elements in the art. In presentative art, the subject matter looms as the pre dominant element; it is created as a result of an intense encounter with the world. It is presentative art which is the major portion of traditional literature, drama, poetry, songs, opera. The effect of presentative art is immediate, it is impelling. As a result of its encounter with life, it articulates the meaning of these encounters.^ The value of incorporating presentative value as a legitimate aesthetic element in the oral interpretation of literature can be suggested by the diagram on the next page. The structure of presentative art allows the oral interpreter to assess definitionally his aesthetic purpose. Textbooks in oral interpretation tend to treat literature by generic identification, that is, classification by form. But if the artistic purpose is to "bring into life" the literature and its experience, its literary form is signifi cantly subservient to the expressive elements within it; the aesthetics of presentative art stress those expressive ele ments within the literature. Presentative form also 3Ibid. See pp. 262-273. IMITATIVE 407 CONVENTIONAL!ZED Discloses the world of our familiar acquaintance in fine detail and great comprehensiveness. Reflects the response of a more or less gen eralized human sensi tivity to the pressures of life. Robert Frost Henry James Anthony Trollope Lord Byron Charles Dickens William Faulkner Realism Naturalism Classicism Expressionists Art and spirit of the time Impressionism Surrealism Romanticism Art as release Dylan Thomas Franz Kafka Marcel Proust William Blake Thomas Wolfe James Joyce Discovers to us, in the private vision of the art ist, aspects of the world that are novel and un suspected . Reflects the personal impact of life and the world upon the indi vidual artist. V INDIVIDUALIZED 4 Structure of Presentative Art (adapted) 4Ibid.. p. 268. EXPRESSIVE suggests the mode, the approach to take. Plagued as the field of oral interpretation has been about "degree" of imitation (as if the problem were inherent in all litera ture), presentative art places the literature upon a plane of focus, allowing the trained interpreter to ask himself, "What aesthetic directions does the literature demand?" Is it the world of fine detail, close observation? Is the literature an expression of an age, a time, a sensitivity to the pressure of life? Is the literature an intense vi sion of a private world, a personal vision, an intimate discovery of self? Is the literature an expressive re lease? The term "conventionalized" suggests the external world of observation and the clues about it which the inter preter should reveal by expression or imitation. The term "individualized" suggests idiosyncrasies of diction, style, and personal authenticity, expressed or imitated. The term "suggestiveness" in oral interpretation has been used most often to connote restraint, as if all art were restrained. Some art obviously is, particularly if the direction of the art is in terms of conventionalized styles. However, the exuberance of individualized art often is not; it is full of the imitative sounds and words of experience, full of the release and expressiveness no longer contained 409 within the artist. Presentative art seeks the direction of the utterance, its plane of experience, its field of vision. If the aesthetic fulfillment of the particular literature is to be realized, locating the place it holds upon the axis suggested by Jenkins is proposed as an important element in an aesthetic of oral interpretation. Thus, the presentative value is the first factor to be established in delineating the art form of oral interpretation. The second consideration in discussing the form of oral interpretation is to point out that it is a process, an actualizing process by which the oral interpreter creates the sense of the "coming into being" of an insight, intui tion, artistic vision. A number of aestheticians have elaborated upon what they perceive as the process of artis tic production. It can be summarized in the following man ner. First, art employs one or more available media, util izing them in a seemingly effortless and in a skilled fash ion. Art, secondly, presents and deals with some object matter, drawing upon the world of experience, feeling, ob jective data, etc. Third, the artist, through his "formu lation" in words, provides a patterning of material and establishes some foundation, basis, or locus which is iden tified as worthy of expression. Fourth, a relationship 410 exists between what is expression and the manner in which it is expressed. Fifth, the content of art is the expression of the artist's evaluation and interpretation. Sixth, the artistic interpretation is a viable and unique one, con- 5 vertible into meaning and import by the viewer or hearer. Beyond these relatively simple elements, art does little else. It exhibits what it is, and as Victorino Tejera has pointed out, "does what it does, but does not actually state g what it is or does." An art does not often comment upon itself, reflexively stating what it is about; it acts, and, in the full sense of the present tense, it is. It is not "self" conscious of itself. Thus, engaging as it does a process, it exists dynamically for the perceiver's enjoy ment. To encourage the artist to "detach," "observe," and pull himself away from his expression while creating it is not only unsound aesthetics, it is unsound advice. The process of creation in the presentative mode is the process of discovery. The artistic process has also been proposed as one ^This writer is indebted to Theodore Meyer Greene's analysis stated somewhat differently, but conveyed, it is hoped, with reasonable fidelity to his intentions in Moral. Aesthetic, and Religious Insight (New Brunswick, N. J.: Rutgers University Press, 1957), p. 83. 6Art and Human Intelligence, p. 4. 411 of qualitative problem solving, not quantitative. David Ecker adapted John Dewey's five steps of reflective thinking to this qualitative analysis. They are worth considering carefully as an approach for the oral interpreter's sensi tivity to the artistic process. Summarized, Ecker's six 7 steps are these. The artist is confronted, first, with "something" in a relationship. This confrontation is ram bling, perhaps, or more immediately perceived as relevant for alteration, change, or reconstruction. There follows a period of meditation, the second step. Whether prolonged or short, the meditation produces substantive results. Ways and methods of "involving" the perceived relationship are initiated and discarded; choices are made and discarded; there is a search for methods. The third step in qualita tive problem solving for artists is in the determination of the "pervasive control." The pervasive control is intuitive and results from testing, manipulating the materials. The sense of the control to be employed in the artistic produc tion leads to the fourth step of "qualitative prescription." This highly intuited factor operates from within the artist 7David W. Ecker, "The Artistic Process as Qualita tive Problem Solving," The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. XXI (Spring, 1963), 283. 412 as he establishes the tone of his work; it may relate to the quality of intensity, the quality of relatedness in balance and proportion, the quality the artist infers as the appro priate one for the task at hand. Somewhat concomitantly with step four is the step five of experimental exploration. With each voice inflection and gesture, something of a test ing operation is being performed. The experimental explora tions are related to the pervasive control and to the quali tative prescription of avowed attainment. The sixth and final step is the sense of completion of the work; it is judged complete. Ecker concluded, "It is a tentative affair because future evaluations may yield a conclusion for future 0 modifications." Ecker's adaptation of the five steps of reflective thinking are helpful to the degree that they establish on the one hand the idea that the elements for artistic pro duction are qualitative and remain so throughout the crea tive discovery, and, on the other hand, that the steps pro mote a pattern of insight, meditation, pervasiveness of artistic elements, the search for control, the emergence of the qualitative mode, the continuing sense of discovery, and 8Ibid.. p. 284. 413 the significance, however transitory, of completion. The qualitative steps of artistic production emphasize, too, what all aestheticians regard as the paramount factor in all aesthetic discipline: the capacity for sustained attention. In these six steps, we are given the undulation of attention with its various points of concern and focus. They help to explain, too, that persistent paradox of aesthetics: par ticipation and detachment. As an art form, oral interpretation is a presenta tive mode, and is characterized as possessing a qualitative process. But it must also be pointed out that the oral interpretation exists in time and is an occurrent art form. It is time which is filled with sound and silence; like the musician, the oral interpreter exists in the creation of a psychological time. And for the percipient, it is the awareness of time passed, of the taking of it and the ab sorption in it that pervades the auditor's sense of time. The presentative mode, the qualitative process, the medium of time, and the use of literature are the elements present in the form of oral interpretation. Aesthesis takes place for the auditor in terms of these; the aesthetic ex perience derivative of the form has now to be linked to the oral interpreter as artist. 414 The Oral Interpreter as Creative Auxiliary Artist Three elements, or phases, can be identified as working within the interpreter's ken: the aesthetic experi ence, the cognitive experience, and the affective experi ence . When the interpreter goes about his task of reading aloud, he has passed through the first two and is actively engaged in the third. He has through his study of the literature experienced it as an aesthetic object: he has enjoyed it, experienced it, felt it. He has through his analysis of the literature come to understand its cognitive elements: its parts, its statements, its thematic struc ture. His task is to create for the auditor an aesthetic experience, which may trigger a number of cognitive connec tions and awarenesses within the percipient, and which may, in turn, so affect the percipient that he becomes poignantly aware of the poesis, of the mental and auditory beholding of literature. The aesthetic, cognitive, and affective compo- 9 nents have been called "the psychic matrix of sentience." They constitute the phases or stages of creativity and its complex web of apprehending and comprehending. The fact of interpretation is that the interpreter 9Jenkins, Art and the Human Enterprise, p. 18. 415 is totally dependent upon the work of literature for his performance. There have been various terminologies employed to explain the kind of artist he is. Some have called art ists who use already derived materials "derivative artists,1 1 while others have called them "auxiliary artists." Whatever the term applied, differentiating the implications of this auxiliary role to the literature is important. If the in terpreter's role is to affect the sensibilities of the per cipient, thus hoping to establish a condition of aesthesis, he is not functioning as a literary critic? he is function ing as an artist. The cognitive, intellectual, and critical awarenessses are depressed, subordinated, and supplanted by the affective artistic and aesthetic elements in the litera ture . What the auxiliary creative interpreter-artist establishes is a sense of experience, specifically, the experience of another artist: the writer. Mortimer Adler sought a rationale for clarifying this situation: Comparing the various arts, we can enumerate a number of relationships which seek to exhaust all the possi bilities. (1) Either the finished work is the product of one artist or more than one. We are ignoring here, of course, the problem of the audience as a contribut ing artist. (2) If the work is a product of more than one artist, either there is one primary artist and all the rest are auxiliary, or the several artists are co-operators co-ordinately . . . (3) If the work is a 416 product of a number of artists, one of whom is clearly primary, either the auxiliary artists add their work to the finished product of the master, or the primary artist is the master who directs the operations of the auxiliary artists as his aids in the production of the finished work. In oral interpretation the product of the primary artist, the piece of literature, is given its presentation by the co-operating auxiliary artist, the interpreter. Joseph Margolis noted the identifiable contributions of the per forming artist by stating that, in auxiliary fashion, the performer adds to the art, augmenting in a distinctive way the composition sketched by notation. What is stressed is the adding to rather than the invention; the performer has not invented the work for oral interpretation? rather, he completes it by his artistic contributory efforts.^ As an auxiliary artist, the interpreter can approach his material with one of two attitudes. Jenkins has termed these the traditional view and the modern view. The tradi tional view of the artist emphasizes the external phase, a view which regards the artist primarily as a man who has 10Mortimer J. Adler, Art and Prudence (New York; Longmans, Green, and Company, 1937), p. 483. 1:LJoseph Margolis, The Language of Art and Art Criticism (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1965), P. 59. 417 great skill in handling his material. The modern view em phasizes the internal phase, a view which regards the artist as primarily a man of great sensitivity in discerning the emotional impressions that things make upon him. The whole truth is that these two phases are alter nating and reciprocal moments of the same cycle . . . The artist's attention . . . shifts continually be tween the particular thing he is concerned with and the work of art that "imitates" this. [in subjective terms] the artist's attention shifts between the raw material of his sensations and emotions, and the "expression" to which he is trying to bring these. The difference between these two interpretations is little more than linguistic. Under both of them alike, artistic creation deals with certain material that is given to it by the impress of the external world upon human sensitivity? and artistic creation seeks to bring this material to a shape and form that present it with the utmost explicitness, pre cision, and stability. It must be stressed that the field of oral interpretation has laid emphasis upon both the traditional view and the modern view, that the interpreter is skilled in the handling of things as well as discerning emotional impressions. Paradoxically, the interpreter is using resources at his disposal for the "conferring of existence" upon things, but he is, at the same time, the discoverer who is making his way to things. If the artist is "creating" and the art is 1 P Jenkins, Art and the Human Enterprise, pp. 118- 119. 418 "revealing," both creation from the artist and the revela- 13 tion from the material are existing simultaneously. Jen kins has pointed out that most performing artists know this paradox, and she has termed the paradox the compresence of appreciation, expression, and creation. She exemplified her observation from the experience of the actor, but it applies with equal relevance to the interpreter. Anyone who has acted is familiar with the manner in which attention shifts among these levels, continu ally enriching each with what it takes from the others. You find yourself responding appreciatively to the poetry, the characters, and the dramatic move ment of the play itself; you find yourself absorbed in your own performance as an actor, in the stage techniques you employ so easily and effectively, in the details of gesture and emphasis by which you project your characterization; and you find yourself watching with utmost care the play-as-spectacle that you and your fellow actors are progressively creating, noting its effect upon the audience, correcting any distortions or false notes that may creep in, and anticipating its further development. The performer in anv medium, so far as I can judge, finds himself similarly entangled. . . . On the occasions when these three moments are fully integrated with one another and fused into a single whole, then there is brought to us a great performance.^-4 The auxiliary artist is creative in the sense of this compresence: the compresence of his appreciation for ■ * - 3Ibid. . see p. 129. l4Ibid.. p. Ill (italics mine). 419 the literature, his abilities of expression, and his capa city to confer an existence upon the work of literature in an interval of time. In short, the compresence achieves the aesthesis for the auditor. The compresence of performance is the mark of the artist-interpreter1s intelligence. In deciding what "propertied object" in the work of literature to reveal, he is asserting his own life of intelligence, he is acting upon the dictates of his own sensitivities. Through the compresence of the awarenesses he possesses, he attempts the clarification of experience in literature, knowing that he cannot reveal more in the literature than there is in it to reveal, and that he must not violate the aesthetic purpose of the literature by attempting to get it to say what it is not saying. Karl Aschenbrenner has de scribed this compresence of performance as his unique abilities. The action of the artist, that which constitutes him a maker, lies in his disposing the elements of his work as he sees fit. The result of it, and every placement has a result, is beyond his power to shape. He is passive in respect to the resultant properties. The artist can place, put, and set. He can chisel, polish, break, and join. His creativity lies in finding what his medium can do. He cannot, no matter what kind of prose he attaches to it on the side, make it do or say what it has not in it to do or say. ^ ^"Creative Receptivity," The Journal of Aesthetics 420 The interpreter as creative auxiliary artist is the seeker of inevitability in the performance of literature as well. The propertied objects, his awarenesses of the ele ments of compresence, are all derived from his stimulation from the materials of his medium, words. In Tejera's words, his relation to them is both assimilative and manipulative. The artist "understands" his materials and has an affinity for and dotes on them. You might say that though adopted, he understands their possibilities as if they were his own offspring. He is willing to be surprised by them— if they can carry it off; but he has his own plans for them. His executive talent exploits them without violating their na tures , but like a wise sovereign he is aware that any revolution that they force upon him must be accepted— stemming as it probably does from his previous, if unwitting, abuse. He concedes that a neglected need has been revealed that was too in timate for his unaided or habitual perception. The artist labors to see, and enjoys seeing, what his materials can be made to do. what they can be made into, what they can be made to express.^ Just as the literary artist has created an experience which possesses an inevitability, the task of the auxiliary crea tive artist is to make that moment of interpretation inevi table . The assimilation of the materials is the development and Art Criticism. XXII (Winter, 1963), 150. ^Tejera, Art and Human Intelligence, p. 33. 421 of the interpretative intuition. Aureliu Weiss stated that the interpreter's capacity to interpret is only in propor tion to his capacity to grasp the emotional nature of the 17 materials he has chosen to interpret. The interpreter's powers are only various aspects of his own temperament. The interpreter's performance is an elaboration of the talents 18 peculiar to him, "fecundated by the writer's vision." The interpreter's first responsibility is not the author, but the text. He is to avoid any contradiction between the language and the imminence of the thing as given gestural, sub-vocal, and presentational expression. The interpreter's success is in proportion to whether this mission has been fulfilled, said Weiss. "[His] mission is to provoke and sustain a continuous current of communion between himself and the spectator. The triumph or failure of his art de- 19 pends upon sympathetic contagion." Aaron Copland, in writing of the composer's rela tionship to and dependence upon the interpreter, asserted the necessity of creative intuition; the interpreter, he 17"The Interpretation of Dramatic Works," The Jour nal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. XXIII (Spring, 1965), 311. 18Ibid., p., 305 . l^Ibid.. p. 307. 422 wrote, brings the composer's work to life— a kind of mid wife to the composition. He partakes of the same dedication of purpose, the same sense of self- discovery through each performance, the same convic tion that something unique is lost, possibly when his own understanding of a work of art is lost. He even partakes of the involuntary nature of creation, for we know that he cannot at will turn on the well- springs of his creativity so that each performance may be of equal value . . . Thus we see that inter pretation . . . does share elements of creativity with the mind that forms the work of art.20 What the creative mind supplies is an object. It does this by putting experience in some extended form. Here, Copland argued, is where the clear boundary between the creative and the interpretative mind exists. The task of the interpreta tive mind is to give substance of performance to these ideas. The response to the materials presented to the creative auxiliary artist is in terms of spontaneity, in ventiveness, urgency, persistency, and emotionality. These the artist employs, and these must be interpreted and com municated to the auditor. As a creator, the interpreter faces his material, but he also faces another creator's in tent, and it is to this that the interpreter is submissive. The knowledge of all the parts of a poem would not neces- 2QMusic and Imagination (New York: Mentor Books, 1963), p. 52. 423 sarily reveal the intent of the poem, for the intent is that peculiar power within the poem that radiates from it. With out a sense of radiating and energizing the intent, the interpreter is not fulfilling his creative purpose in read ing the literature. It can be argued that approaches to oral interpre tation have been content-oriented to the sacrifice of the development of sensibility and spontaneity in creation. The interpreter must be encouraged to live in an environment of freedom, experiencing the literature as process and com presence in the existential moment of reading aloud. The fact is that in oral interpretation the interpreter himself becomes a part of the aesthetic object, a vehicle through whom an experience is manifesting itself, making itself real, making itself felt. The audience may indeed experi ence with the interpreter the spontaneous phases of insight and embodiment, contemplation and expression. This experi ence is achieved, if the principles of aesthetic precepts and theories are applied to oral interpretation, through the continually active participation on the audience's part in attending; it is perpetuated on the interpreter's part by the self-sustaining presence of compresence. By the inter preter's willingness to submit to the experience embodied 424 in the verbal symbols, associating them to his emotional sensibilities, he engages in the creative synapse of imagi nation as to how these symbols should be uttered. This was referred to in Chapter II as "psychic symbiosis," the power to connect the range of stimuli and assimilate them into a novel synthetic unity. The material subjects the interpre ter to necessities beyond the control of his will. The aesthetic of the interpreter must be contained in the notion that he does not select from the material; the material im poses itself on him. The personality of the interpreter is the resonator, amplifying and clarifying the undertones and overtones of the values in the literature. The interpreter provides the experience in immediate and intuited terms, revealing the felt aspect of things. To those who attend to him, there may be felt an aesthetic experience; this is the interpretative artist's goal. Empathy and aesthetic distance were terms estab lished to describe what happened to the perceiver when con fronted with a work of art. As will be recalled from the discussion of empathy in Chapter II, empathy does not reside with the work of art; it rests with the perceiver as he feels into the art work. The interpretative artist, as an auxiliary artist, is placed in the paradoxical position of 425 being both an active perceiver of a work of art and a crea tive interpreter of it. The enjoyment of the artistic transaction, aesthetic pleasure, Einftlhlung. is ultimately the enjoyment of self. It is the experience of being pulled into the "life" of the art object to the extent that there is a temporary unawareness of self. Aestheticians have stressed from a variety of aesthetic theories that such total abandonment in the act of creation is impossible; there is discovery and discernment in the creative act, there is flow and timelessness in the search for giving substance to idea, but there is not total abandonment. If the aesthetic notion of empathy is to be applied to the creative auxiliary artist and to his training, it is in the first stages of appreciating the literature, his initial aesthetic experience. What the interpretative artist at tempts is empathy in his listeners through his affective communication; it is an aesthetic element which he is striving to create. Psychical distance was described in Chapter II as an activity on the part of the observer. It was not de scribed as something the artist did in the act of creation, though it has been extended to the interpreter in numerous texts in oral interpretation. Emotional rather than 426 intellectual, aesthetic distance clears the art object of a practicality and concreteness, endowing the object with the capacity to elicit a revelation of its purport. The concept is one of perception, of "sensing" the difference between what the artist is as a man and what he has accomplished. The creative artist achieves this distancing through the tensions and elements within his work as he distributes the parts of it in terms of balance and proportion, rhythm, symmetry, euphony, etc. Writers in oral interpretation frequently overlook the fact that the "distancing" is more inherent in the quality of the literature than necessarily in the interpreter. "Over-distancing" is manifested in pretentious art, allegory, and didacticism. "Under- distancing" is the lack of emotional involvement in the literature or art work. The extensions of these to the creative auxiliary artist are not difficult to ascertain: over-distancing and under-distancing are effected by the nature of the interpreter's personality as well as the distancing of the literature. The combination of the two is the important element to stress. Aesthetic distance can be criticized in the training of oral interpreters if it emphasizes a "control" system which the interpreter exerts. Given the trained interpreter, it is the literature which 427 is distanced by its nature and quality. As pointed out in Chapter III, critics have urged that the control element be substituted for an active participation between spectator and object of contemplation, that emotions should be experi enced and communicated as experience. Some literature is designed to threaten the emotions, narrowing the distance between the source of emotion and the percipient? other literature is designed to create a considerable distance. Oral interpretation instructors have created something of an ethic for the necessity of aesthetic distance? it is not an ethic. It was formulated as a way of describing the degree of possession which an art object holds for an in dividual perceiver. No writer in oral interpretation has appeared to take advantage of the notion of funding as describing the intensity of aesthetic perception. As relevant, certainly, as either empathy or aesthetic distance, the notion of funding can assist the auxiliary artist in reflecting about the amount or degree of earlier perception and experiences fused into the perception of a work of art. The "fully funded perception," it was noted, was the necessary adjunct of criticism. Funding is a way of sensing the amount of relevancy in the work of art, the amount of experience 428 brought into a present moment of consciousness. Fusion is the amount of past experience which the memory yields as relevant to the work. Funding and fusion telescope the experience of the percipient into the drama of the present moment, imbuing the present moment with that total sense of relevancy. It would appear that discussion of this concept in the preparation of literature would assist the reader to fund with increasing resources the expressiveness of the literature, as much as it might poignantly reveal the pau city of experience within the interpreter. The oral interpreter as creative auxiliary artist suggests that he is an affective person, communicating his intuited and sensed emotional life of the literature to an audience. He establishes a sense of experience in a presen tational mode, emphasizing the internal sensitivity to the emotional impressions that the literature is making upon him. This process has been characterized as compresence of appreciation, expression and creation. He strives in his work for empathic responses in his auditors; he strives to reveal the aesthetic distance inherent in the literature and the degree to which it suggests emotional life. The interpretative creation is amplified by the amount of fund ing and fusion which the interpreter brings to the literary 429 experience he is creating. The oral interpreter is an art ist, not a craftsman. Whereas in a craft, the craftsman knows what he wants to make before he makes it and the end 21 is prior to the means, in an art there is discovery. In art craftsmanship is depressed; in the artistic experience there is a sense of discovery and revelation which takes place through expression. Given the resources of revealing his encounter with literature, the creative auxiliary artist experiences the act of translation. In effect, the stimuli provided by the literature are not simply re-created or given a re-birth; rather, the aesthetic experience of translating and transforming the stimuli in the literature is made manifest. As Munro observed, "An art always in volves doing something (a process) to and with something (a medium) in order to make or do something else (a product 22 or performance)." A capacity to be, to discover, and to flow within the confines of the object of exploration creates the spontaneity in oral reading. This is the inter preter's creation of inevitability in performance; it is ^For a detailed analysis of this distinction be tween art and craft see R. G. Collingwood, The Principles of Art. pp. 15f. ^Munro, The Arts and Their Interrelations, p. 438. 430 his artistry. The Art of Oral. Interpretation as Expression. Experience, .and the Presentation of Symbol In the Crocean aesthetic, all literature is poetry; in the aesthetic of Dewey, all art is experience, and in the aesthetic of Langer, art is the symbol of felt experience. How these three somewhat disparate views of art cohere into a philosophy of oral interpretation, or at least contribute to such a philosophical proposal, is here advanced. Poetry, Croce stated, was the presentation of tissues of images. These tissues are what the artist per ceives and what he produces, and they stem from the mental process of production, reproduction, and evaluation. The science of expression is the trust, experience, and psychic trust in intuition. It is not intellectual, but it is a knowledge of what the emotional life of man is. The imagis- tic tissues develop from impressions which are perceived and felt as expressions of an aesthetic synthesis. They are recognized as possessing a conceptualized pleasure, buoy ancy, or wash of feeling. When this inner state is trans lated into some form of sound or movement, intuition becomes externalized in art. But this externalization in poetry is 431 expression, not discursive language; it is an imaginative creation at the same time it is living speech. It is the form of the states of mind which is expressed. In this moment, the sounding moment, the atmosphere is charged with sight, sound, gesture, and subtle interrelationships. Artistic technique can never be isolated, for the expression and the technique exist simultaneously, the intuition and the word being one. Experience, Dewey contended, is continuous; it is never-ending. Refinement of experience or an intensifica tion of it is the creative act. Art is the celebration of experience and its elevation. Clarifying turbid emotion, inchoate emotion, constitutes the act of expression. Be ginning with an impulse, perhaps specialized or particular or instinctive, the impulse demands an outward movement at the same time it is funded within the human capacity to relate materials and experiences together. When the im pulsions compress to a degree of intensity, they are ex pressed, seeking to become articulate, seeking to become the energy which characterizes art. Experience, compres sion, and expression have within them their own tensions, holding them together in balance or symmetry. It is the present tense which creates art, the suddenness of finding 432 the available means to express the intensities of experi ence. There can be no duality of what is expressed and the image external to it. Artistry reveals the effortlessness of caring for the subject matter to be expressed as much as framing the perception for receptive enjoyment. The symbol, Langer asserted, acts as the counterpart of the thing it denotes, feeling. It is not feeling, but the conception of what a feeling is as form. From the audi ence standpoint, it is engaged in the work, not the artist. Art reveals what feeling is like? it is a transformation of subjective worlds into a projection of feeling. In the emotive act, there is the emphasizing of the exciting fea tures, of the perceptible forms of human feelings. Art thus becomes the mirror of experience, a virtual experience, not an actual one. The greater elaborations of these three philosophies of art are set forth elsewhere in this study. What is in tended here is a statement of what an aesthetic of oral interpretation can become through the rich suggestiveness of Croce, Dewey, and Langer. Oral interpretation is an expressive and occurrent art form, communicating the intui tive insights of literature, and in so doing, establishing a sense of inevitable experience from the objectified 433 symbols of feeling in the printed word. As an act of ex pression, oral interpretation exists in the present tense and becomes its own transformed moment of poesis; the mate rial presented issues from the interpreter's processes of responding to the emotional life inhered within the litera ture. This spontaneous act of imaginative creation cele brates experience in varying degrees of intensity and energy through the effects of funding and fusion. The tension in oral interpretation is the degree of compression before expression achieved by holding the perceived symbols of feeling in priority over technique or the construction of the literature. While other writers have stressed the need for empathy and aesthetic distance, these can be more accurately restored to the audience hearing and perceiving the litera ture. The oral interpreter is empathic to the literature to the degree that he celebrates the experience of the litera ture; he is objective to the degree that he senses that the symbol is the form which feeling has taken, that feeling has not become an indiscriminate emotional involvement, in which case it would be under-distanced, or pretentious and didac tic, in which case it would be over-distanced. The expres sion lies not in him, but rather in the poesis, in the 434 literature. It is his intuition which apprehends and gives to it the sounding moment, the visual impact. Thus, oral interpretation is a presentative art form; it discloses the particularity of the literature to be presented. The artistic intuition can seize upon the ex tremely individualistic or the more conventionalized struc tures of form, suggesting the private world of intuition and private vision as well as the qualities of the perceived world external to the poet and writer. This continuum can be identified on the one end as micro-interpretation and on the other as macro-interpretation. Whatever the encounter, the effect of the presentative act of expression is immedi ate and impelling. Guiding every aspect of the interpretative moment is the creative mind. As Max Schoen has written, The whole life of the creative mind is . . . one constant stage of preparation and maturation, each art work being a landmark, a record, of progressive discoveries. For while the creative mind is seek ing, it is also finding, each finding being, how ever, but an invitation, a stimulus for further seeking.23 If this study has attempted to establish any one thing, it Art and Beauty (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1932), p. 65. 435 has sought to place oral interpretation within the aesthetic domain. There, it has been found, oral interpretation can fulfill aesthetic criteria, just as other writers have in sisted that it fulfills critical insights and purposes. It would be a remission not to conclude that, whatever the need it fulfills, art begins and is most completely realized by the power of imagination seized and communicated by the reaches of intuition. BI BL IO G RA P HY 436 BIBLIOGRAPHY Books Adler, Mortimer J. Art and Prudence. New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1937. Aggert, Otis J., and Bowen, Elbert R. Communicative Read ing . 2nd. ed. New York: The Macmillan Co., 1963. Alexander, S "The Creative Process in the Artist's Mind." Problems of Aesthetics. Edited by Eliseo Vivas and Murray Krieger. New York: Rinehart and Co., Inc., 1953. Aristotle. The Poetics. Translated by H. Fyfe. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1927. Armstrong, Chloe, and Brandes, Paul D. The Oral Interpre tation of Literature. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., Inc., 1963. Aschenbrenner, Karl, and Isenberg, Arnold (eds.). Aesthetic Theories: Studies in the Philosophy of Art. Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1965. Bacon, Wallace A. The Art of Interpretation. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1966. ________ , and Breen, Robert S. Literature as Experience. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., Inc., 1959. Baensch, Otto. "Art and Feeling." Reflections on Art. Edited by Susanne Langer. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1958. 437 438 Bassett, Lee Emerson. A Handbook of Oral Reading. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1917. Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb. Reflections on Poetry. Translated by Karl Aschenbrenner and William B. Holther. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1954. Beardsley, Monroe. Aesthetics. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1958. ________ • Aesthetics from Classical Greece to the Present. New York: The Macmillan Co., 1966. Bell, Clive. Art. New York: Capricorn Books, 1958. Beloof, Robert. The Performing Voice in Literature. Bos ton: Little, Brown and Co., 1966. ________ , Long, Chester C., et al. The Oral Study of Liter ature . New York: Random House, 1966. Blackman, R. P. Language as Gesture. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1952. ________ . "The Language of Silence." Language: An In quiry into Its Meaning and Function. Edited by Ruth N. Anshen. Science of Culture Series, Vol. VIII. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1957. Boas, George. The Heaven of Invention. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1962. Bosanquet, Bernard. A History of Aesthetic. New York: Meridian Books, 1957. (First published London, 1892.) ________ . Three Lectures on Aesthetic. London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd., 1923. Brightfield, Myron F. The Issue in Literary Criticism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1932. Bruner, Jerome S. The Process of Education. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1961. 439 Bullough, Edward. Aesthetics. Stanford: Stanford Uni versity Press, 1957. Campbell, Paul N. Oral Interpretation. New York: The Macmillan Co., 1966. _________. The Speaking and the Speakers of Literature. Belmont, Calif.: Dickenson Publishing Co., 1967. Carr, H. Wilden. The Philosophy of Benedetto Croce. Lon don: Macmillan and Co., Ltd., 1927. Carritt, E. F. An Introduction to Aesthetics. London: Hutchinson's Universal Library, n.d. _________. The Theory of Beauty. 2nd ed. London: Methuen and Co., Ltd., 1923. Cary, Joyce. Art and Reality. Wavs of the Creative Process. New York: Doubleday and Co., 1961. Cassirer, Ernst. The Logic of the Humanities. Translated by Clarence Smith Howe. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961. _________. The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. Vol. I: Language. Translated by Ralph Manheim. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953. _________. The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. Vol. II: Thought. Translated by Ralph Manheim. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953. _________. The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. Vol. Ill: The Phenomenology of Knowledge. Translated by Ralph Manheim. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953. Centeno, Augusto (ed.). The Intent of the Artist. Prince ton: Princeton University Press, 1941. Chamberlain, William B., and Clark, S. H. Principles of Vocal Expression and Literary Interpretation. Chicago: Scott, Foresman and Co., 1897. 440 Chatman, Seymour. "Linguistic Analysis: A Study of James Mason's Interpretation of 'The Bishop Orders His Tomb.'" The Oral Study of Literature. Edited by Robert Beloof, Chester C. Long, et al. New York: Random House, 1966. Chaudhury, Prabas Jiban. Studies in Aesthetics. Calcutta: Shri Dhirendra Debnath, 1964. Chiari, Joseph. Realism and Imagination. London: Barrie and Rockliff, 1960. Clark, Barrett H. Professor Clark. A Short Memoir bv His Son. Chautauqua, N. Y.: Chautauqua Press, 1928. Clark, S. H. How to Teach Reading in the Public Schools. Chicago: Scott, Foresman and Co., 1898. ________ , and Babcock, Maud May. Interpretation of the Printed Page. New York: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1940. Cobin, Martin. Theory and Technique of Interpretation. Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1959 . Collingwood, R. G. "The Expression of Emotion." Problems of Aesthetics. Edited by Eliseo Vivas and Murray Krieger. New York: Rinehart and Co., Inc., 1953. ________ . The Principles of Art. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1938. Copland, Aaron. Music and Imagination. New York: Mentor Books, 1963. Croce, Benedetto. Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistics. 2nd ed. Translated by Douglas Ainslie. London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd., 1929. Cunningham, Cornelius Carman. Literature as a Fine Art. New York: Ronald Press Co., 1941. 441 Cunningham, Cornelius Carman. Making Words Come Alive. Dubuque, Iowa: William C. Brown Co., 1951. Curry, Samuel Silas. Foundations of. Expression. Boston: The Expression Co., 1907. _________■ Imagination and Dramatic Instinct. Boston: The Expression Co., 1896. _________. Mind and Voice. Boston: The Expression Co., 1910. _________. Vocal and Literary Interpretation of the Bible. New York: George H. Doran Co., 1903. Danz, Louis. The Psychologist Looks at Art. New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1937. Dewey, John. Art as Experience. New York: Minton, Balch and Co., 1934. Dodds, E . R . The Romantic Theory of Poetry. an Examination in the Light of Croce's Aesthetics. New York: Russell and Russell, 1962. Dolman, John Jr. The Art of Reading Aloud. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1956. Ducasse, Curt John. "The Aesthetic Attitude." Problems of Aesthetics. Edited by Eliseo Vivas and Murray Krieger. New York: Rinehart and Co., Inc., 1953. Dunham, Barrows. The Artist in Society. New York: Mar- zani and Munsell, Inc., 1960. Edman, Irwin. Arts and the Man. New York: The New Ameri can Library, 1949. _________. The World, the Arts and the Artist. New York: W. W. Norton and Co., Inc., 1928. Ehrenzweig, Anton. The Psvcho-analysis of Artistic Vision and Hearing. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd., 1953. 442 Ekman, Rolf. Problems and Theories in Modern Aesthetics. Malmo, Sweden: Gleerups, 1960. Ellison, Ralph, and Shapiro, Karl. The Writer's Experience. Washington, D. C.: Library of Congress, 1964. Fallico, Arturo B. Art and.Existentialism. Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1962. Feibleman, James K. Aesthetics. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1949. Fest, Thorrel B., and Cobin, Martin T. Speech and Theater. Washington, D. C.: The Center for Applied Research in Education, Inc., 1964. Fischer, Ernst. The Necessity of Art. Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1963. Flaccus, Louis W. The Spirit and Substance of Art. 3rd. ed. New York: F. S. Crofts and Co., 1941. FrOschels, Emil. Philosophy and Aesthetics of Speech. Translated by Joseph Noyes Haskell. Boston: The Expression Co., 1935. Geiger, Don. The Sound. Sense, and Performance of Litera ture . Chicago: Scott, Foresman and Co., 1963. Gilbert, Katherine E. Aesthetic Studies. Durham, N. C.: Duke University Press, 1952. _________ and Kuhn, Helmut. A History of Esthetics. New York: The Macmillan Co., 1939. Gilson, Etienne. The Arts and the Beautiful. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1965. Gotshalk, D. W. Art and the Social Order. Chicago: Uni versity of Chicago Press, 1947. Greene, Theodore Meyer. The Arts and the Art of Criticism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1940. 443 Greene, Theodore Meyer. Moral. Aesthetic, and Religious Insight. New Brunswick, N. J.: Rutgers University Press, 1957. Grimes, Wilma H., and Mattingly, Alethea Smith. Interpre tation! Writer. Readerr Audience. San Francisco: Wadsworth Publishing Co., Inc., 1961. Haezrahi, Pepita. The Contemplative Attitudef a Study in Aesthetics. New York: Abelard-Schuman, 1956. Halliday, F. E. Fine Arts. London: Gerald Duckworth and Co., Ltd., 1946. Hauser, Arnold. The Philosophy of Art History. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1959. Horatius Flaccus, Quintus. Ars Poetica. Translated and edited by Charles 0. Brink. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963. Hulme, T. E. "Bergson's Theory of Art." Problems of Aes thetics . Edited by Eliseo Vivas and Murray Krieger. New York: Rinehart and Co., Inc., 1953. Hungerland, Isabel C. Poetic Discourse. University of California Publications in Philosophy, Vol. XXXIII. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1958. Immel, Ray Keeslar, and Ogg, Helen Loree. Poetry. Least Popular of the Arts. Norman, Okla.: Cooperative Books, 1939. Jenkins, Iredell. Art and the Human Enterprise. Cam bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958. Johnson, Gertrude E. (ed.). Studies in the Art of Inter pretation . New York: D. Appleton-Century Co., 1940. Jung, Carl G. "On the Reflections of the Analytical Psy chology to Poetic Art." Problems of Aesthetics. Edited by Eliseo Vivas and Murray Krieger. New York: Rinehart and Co., Inc., 1953. 444 Kainz, Friedrich. Aesthetics the Science. Translated by Herbert M. Schueller. Detroit: Wayne State Uni versity Press, 1962. Koestler, Arthur. The Act of Creation. New York: The Macmillan Co., 1964, Kris, Ernst. Psychoanalytic Exploration in Art. New York: Schocken Books, 1952. Krutch, Joseph Wood. Experience and Art. New York: Collier Books, 1962. Langfeld, Herbert Sidney. The Aesthetic Attitude. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1920. Langer, Susanne K. Feeling and Form, a Theory of Art De veloped from a Philosophy in a New Kev. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1953. ________ . Philosophical Sketches. Baltimore: Johns Hop kins Press, 1962. ________ . Philosophy in a New Kev. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1942. ________ . Problems of Art. New York:- Charles Scribner's Sons, 1957. ________ (ed.). Reflections on Art. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1958. Lee, Charlotte I. Oral Interpretation. 3rd ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1965. Lee, Harold Newton. Perception and Aesthetic Value. New York: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1938. Lesser, Simon. Fiction and the Unconscious. Preface by Ernest Jones. New York: Vintage Books, 1962. Lipps, Theodore. "Empathy, Inner Imitation, and Sense Feelings." A Modern Book of Esthetics. Edited by Melvin Rader. 3rd ed. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1960. 445 Listowell, Earl of. A Critical History of Modern Aesthetics. London: George Allen and Unwin, Ltd., 1933. Little, Arthur. The Nature of Art. London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1947. Long, Chester C. "Formal Analysis: Long Day's Journey into Night as Aesthetic Object." The Oral Study of Lit erature . Edited by Robert Beloof, Chester C. Long, et al. New York: Random House, 1966. Longinus, Cassius. On the Sublime. Translated by W. Rhys Roberts. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1935. Lowrey, Sara, and Johnson, Gertrude E. Interpretative Reading: Techniques and Selections. New York: D. Appleton-Century Co., 1942. Lucretius Carus, Titus. De Rerum Natura. Edited and translated by Cyril Bailey. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1947. Lundholm, Helge. The Aesthetic Sentiment. Cambridge, Mass.: Sci-Art Publishers, 1941. McLean, Margaret Prendergast. Oral Interpretation of Forms of Literature. New York: E. P. Dutton and Co., 1936. Margolis, Joseph. The Language of Art and Art Criticism. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1965. ________ . Philosophy Looks at the Arts. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1962. Maritain, Jacques. Art and Scholasticism. Translated by J. F. Scanlan. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1938. ________ . The Responsibility of the Artist. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1960. 446 Maslow, Abraham. The Creative Attitude. Psychosynthesis Research Foundation Reprint No. 10. New York: Psychosynthesis Research Foundation, 1963. Mead, Hunter. An Introduction to Aesthetics. New York: The Ronald Press, 1952. Morris, Charles W. "Foundations of the Theory of Signs." International Encyclopedia of Unified Science. Vol. I, No. 2. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1938. ________ . Signs. Language, and Behavior. New York: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1946. Mouat, Laurence H. Reading Literature Aloud. New York: Oxford University Press, 1962. Mueller, Gustav E. Philosophy of Literature. New York: Philosophical Library, 1948. Munro, Thomas. The Arts and Their Interrelations. New York: The Liberal Arts Press, 1951. Nahm, Milton C. The Artist as Creator. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1956. Nandik6svara. The Mirror of Gesture. Translated by Ananda Coomaraswamy and Duggirala Gopala Krishnayya. New York: E. Weyhe, 1936. Newton, Eric. The Meaning of Beauty. Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1962. Ogden, C. K., Richards, I. A., and Wood, James. The Foun dations of Aesthetics. London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1922. Ogden, Robert M. The Psychology of Art. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1938. Orsini, Gian N. G. Benedetto Croce. Philosopher of Art and Literary Critic. Carbondale, 111.: Southern Illi nois University Press, 1961. 447 Osborne, Harold. Aesthetics and Criticism. New York: The Philosophical Library, 1955. Parrish, Wayland Maxfield. Reading Aloud. Rev. ed. New York: The Ronald Press, 1941. Pepper, Stephen C. The Work of Art. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1955. Plato. The Sophist. Translated by H. N. Fowler. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1921. Pritchard, F. H. Training in Literary Appreciation. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Co., Publishers, 1924. Rader, Melvin. A Modern Book of Esthetics. 3rd ed. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1940. Rank, Otto. Art and the Artist. New York: Tudor Publish ing Co., 1932. Raymond, George Lansing. Poetry as a Representative Art. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1899. Read, Herbert. The Forms of Things Unknown. London: Faber and Faber, 1960. _________. Icon and Idea. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Uni versity Press, 1955. Reid, Louis A. A Study in Aesthetics. New York: The Macmillan Co., 1931. Robb, Mary Margaret. Oral Interpretation of Literature in American Colleges and Universities. New York: The H. W. Wilson Co., 1941. Rothschild, Lincoln. Stvle in Art. New York: Thomas Yoseloff, Publisher, 1960. Runes, Dagobert D., and Schrickel, Harry G. (eds.). Ency clopedia of the Arts. New York: Philosophical Library, 1946. 448 Santayana, George. Reason in Art. New York: Collier Books, 1962. Schoen, Max. Art and Beauty. New York: The Macmillan Co., 1932. Sesonske, Alexander. What Is Art? New York: Oxford Uni versity Press, 1965. Stein, Leo. A B C of Aesthetics. New York: Boni and Li ver ight, 1927. Stoddard, George D., Edman, Irwin, and Bettelheim, Bruno. Art. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1964. Sypher, Wylie. Loss of the Self in Modern Literature and Art. New York: Vantage Books (Random House), 1964. Tassin, Algernon de Vivier. The Oral Study of Literature. 5th ed. New York: F. S. Crofts and Co., 1939. Tauber, Edward S., and Green, Maurice R. Prelogical Ex perience . New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1959. Tejera, Victorino. Art and Human Intelligence. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1965. Thorburn, John M. Art and the Unconscious. London: Kegan Paul, French, and Truener & Co., Ltd., 1925. Todd, John M. (ed.). The Arts. Artists. and Thinkers. New York: The Macmillan Co., 1958. Tolstoy, Leo. What Is Art? and Essavs on Art. Translated by Aylmer Maude. London: Oxford University Press, 1950. Veilleux, Jere. Oral Interpretation: The Re-creation of Literature. New York: Harper and Row, Publishers, 1967. Vivas, Eliseo. The Artistic Transaction. Ohio State Uni versity Press, 1963. 449 Vivas, Eliseo. Creation and Discovery. New York: The Noonday Press, 1955. ________ , and Krieger, Murray (eds.). Problems of Aesthet ics . New York: Rinehart and Co., Inc., 195 3. Weiss, Paul. Nine Basic Arts. Carbondale, 111.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1961. ________ . The World of Art. Carbondale, 111.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1961. Weitz, Morris. Philosophy of the Arts. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1950. ________ (ed.). Problems in Aesthetics. New York: The Macmillan Co., 1959. Wellek, Rene, and Warren, Austin. Theory of Literature. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc., 1956. Woolbert, Charles H., and Nelson, Severina E. The Art of Interpretative Speech. 3rd ed. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1945. Worringer, Wilhelm. "Abstraction and Empathy." A Modern Book of Esthetics. Edited by Melvin Rader. 3rd ed. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1960. Zuckerkandl, Victor. Sound and Symbol. Music and the Ex ternal World. New York: Pantheon Books, 1956. Periodical Literature Adams, Hazard. "The Criteria of Criticism in Literature." Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. XXI (Fall, 1962), 31-34. Aschenbrenner, Karl. "Creative Receptivity." Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. XXII (Winter, 1963), 149-151. 450 Bacon, Wallace. "The Elocutionary Career of Thomas Sheri dan (1719-1788)." Speech Monographs. XXXI (March, 1964), 1-53. _________. "Scholarship and the Interpreter." The Quarterly Journal of Speech. XXXIX (April, 1953), 187-192. Bahn, Eugene. "Interpretative Reading in Ancient Greece." The Quarterly Journal of Speech. XVIII (June, 1932), 432-440. _________. "Interpretative Reading in Classical Rome." The Quarterly Journal of Speech. XXIII (April, 1937), 202-213. Barbara, Dominick A. "Listening to the Essence of Things." The Southern Speech Journal. XXV (Winter, 1959), 134-137. Beardsley, Monroe. "On the Creation of Art." The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. XXIII (Spring, 1965), 291-304. Bennis, Warren G. (ed.). "Aesthetic Probings of Modern Man." The Journal of Social Issues. XX (January, 1965), 3-8. Berndtson, Arthur. "Semblance, Symbol, and Expression in the Aesthetics of Susanne Langer." The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. XIV (June, 1956), 489- 502. BlaU> Herbert. "A Character Study of the Drama." The Jour nal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. XIII (Septem ber, 1954), 52-68. Brennan, Joseph Gerard. "The Role of Emotion in Aesthetic Experience." The Quarterly Journal of Speech. XL (December, 1954), 422-428. Brooks, Keith, and Biedenberg, John E. "Readers Theater as Defined by the New York Theater Critics." The Southern Speech Journal. XXIX (Summer, 1964), 288- 293. 451 Brooks, Keith, and Wulftange, Sr. I. Marie. "Listener Response to Oral Interpretation." Speech Mono graphs . XXXI (March, 1964), 73-79. Brodbeck, Arthur J. "Placing Aesthetic Developments in Social Context: A Program of Value Analysis." The Journal of Social Issues. XX (January, 1965), 8-25. Burke, Kenneth. "Symbols and Association." The Hudson Review. IX (Summer, 1956), 212-225. Burkland, Carl E. "Hyacinths and Roses— on a Rationale for the Oral Reading of Poetry." The Quarterly Journal of Speech. XXXII (December, 1946), 469. ________ . "On the Oral Reading of Poetry." The Quarterly Journal of Speech. XXXI (October, 1945), 344-350. ________ . "The Presentation of Figurative Language." The Quarterly Journal of Speech. XLI (December, 1955), 383-390. Burrows, David. "Art and the Structure of Thinking." Etc.r A Review of General Semantics. XXIII (March, 1966), 51-56. Carmichael, Peter A. "Aesthetic Knowledge." Journal of Philosophy. LVIII (July 6, 1961), 378-387. Cunningham, Cornelius Carman. "Interpretative Reading as a Fine Art." The Journal of Expression. II (1928), 78-80. ________ . "The Rhythm of Robinson Jeffers' Poetry as Re vealed in Oral Reading." The Quarterly Journal of Speech. XXXII (October, 1946), 351-357. ________ . "The Sepia School of Interpretative Reading." The Quarterly Journal of Speech. XXVIII (February, 1942), 37-41. ________ . "Stress Variations in Oral Interpretation." The Quarterly Journal of Speech. XXXI (February, 1945), 55-62. 452 Curry, Samuel Silas. "The Philosophy of Expression." The Journal of Expression. I (June, 1927), 1-9. Dewey, John. "The Psychology of Drawing, Imagination and Expression, Culture and Industry in Education." Teachers College Bulletin. Tenth Series, X (March 1, 1919). Dickie, George. "Is Psychology Relevant to Aesthetics?" The Philosophical Review. LXXI (July, 1962), 285- 302. Dougherty, James P. "The Aesthetic and the Intellectual Analyses of Literature." The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. XXII (Spring, 1964), 315-324. Ecker, David W. "The Artistic Process as Qualitative Prob lem Solving." The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. XXI (Spring, 1963), 203-290. Fritz, Charles A. "From Sheridan to Rush." The Quarterlv Journal of Speech. XVI (February, 1930), 75-88. Garvin, Lucius. "Emotivism, Expression and Symbolic Mean ing." Journal of Philosophy. LV (January 20, 1958), 111-118. Geiger, Don. "Emotion in Poetry: The Oral Interpreter's Special Weapon." The Southern Speech Journal. XXI (Fall, 1955), 31-36. Gombrich, E. M. "Freud's Aesthetics." Encounter. XXVI (January, 1966), 30-36. Gotshalk, D. W. "Aesthetic Expression." The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. XIII (September, 1954), 80-85. Hallman, Ralph J. "Aesthetic Motivation in the Creative Arts." The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. XXIII (Summer, 1965), 453-459. Hardin, Ernest. "Fundamental Needs for Interpretative Attainment." The Southern Speech Journal. XVI (December, 1950), 141-144. 453 Hausm«n, Carl R. "Intradiction: An Interpretation of Aesthetic Understanding." The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. XXII (Spring, 1964), 249-261. Henze, D. F. "The Work of Art," Journal of Philosophy. LIV (July 4, 1957), 429-442. Hevner, Kate. "The Aesthetic Experience: A Psychological Description." Psychological Review. XLIV (May, 1937), 245-263. Hillbruner^ Anthony. "Interpretation, Aesthetics, and the Speech Curriculum." The Speech Teacher. VIII (Jan uary, 1959), 22-26. Hollister, R. D. T. "The Application of Aesthetic Criteria to the Oral Presentation of Literature." The Quarterly Journal of Speech. XXVII (April, 1941), 281-289. Hungerland, Isabel C. "The Interpretation of Poetry." The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. XIII (March, 1955), 351-359. Hutchins, P. AE. "Organic Unity Revindicated?" The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. XXIII (Spring, 1965), 323-327. Isenberg, Arnold. "The Esthetic Function of Language." Journal of Philosophy. XLVI (January 6, 1949), 5-20. Jessup, Bertram. "Taste and Judgment in Aesthetic Experi ence." The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. XIX (Fall, 1960), 51-59. Kain, Richard M. "The Limits of Literary Interpretation." The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. XVI (December, 1958), 214-218. Khatchadourian, Haig. "The Expression Theory of Art: A Critical Evaluation." The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. XXIII (Spring, 1965), 335-352. 454 Krugman, Herbert E., and Hartley, Eugene L. "The Learning of Tastes." Public Opinion Quarterly. XXIV (Winter, 1960), 621-631. Langer, Susanne K. "Abstraction in Art." The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. XXII (Summer, 1964), 379-392. Lissa, Zofia. "Aesthetic Functions of Silence and Rests in Music." The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criti cism. XXII (Spring, 1964), 443-454. Loesch, Katherine T. "Literary Ambiguity and Oral Perform ance." The Quarterly Journal of Speech. LI (Octo ber, 1965), 258-267. Lowenfeld, Viktor. "The Meaning of Aesthetic Growth for Art Education." The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. XIV (September, 1955), 123-126. Lowrey, Sarah. "Teaching Interpretive Reading as an Art." The Southern Speech Journal. IX (January, 1944), 70- 74. Lund, Frederick H., and Anastasi, Anna. "An Interpretation of Aesthetic Experience." The American Journal of Psvchology. XL (July, 1928), 434-448. Lynch, Gladys E. "Oral Interpretation: A Test of Literary Appreciation." The Southern Speech Bulletin. VII (March, 1942), 112-115. Marcuse, Ludwig. "Freud's Aesthetics." The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. XVII (September, 1958), 1-21. Margolis, Joseph. "Aesthetic Perception." The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. XIX (Winter, 1960), 209-213. Marshman, J. T. "The Mystery of Oral Interpretation." The Quarterly Journal of Speech. XXIV (December, 1938), 596-603. 453 Hausman, Carl R. "Intradiction: An Interpretation of Aesthetic Understanding." The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. XXII (Spring, 1964), 249-261. Henze, D. F. "The Work of Art." Journal of Philosophy. LIV (July 4, 1957), 429-442. Hevner, Kate. "The Aesthetic Experience: A Psychological Description." Psychological Review. XLIV (May, 1937), 245-263. Hillbruner, Anthony. "Interpretation, Aesthetics, and the Speech Curriculum." The Speech Teacher. VIII (Jan uary, 1959), 22-26. Hollister, R. D. T. "The Application of Aesthetic Criteria to the Oral Presentation of Literature." The Quarterly Journal of Speech. XXVII (April, 1941), 281-289. Hungerland, Isabel C. "The Interpretation of Poetry." The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. XIII (March, 1955), 351-359. Hutchins, P. AE. "Organic Unity iTevindicated?" The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. XXIII (Spring, 1965), 323-327. Isenberg, Arnold. "The Esthetic Function of Language." Journal of Philosophy. XLVI (January 6, 1949), 5-20. Jessup, Bertram. "Taste and Judgment in Aesthetic Experi ence ." The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. XIX (Fall, 1960), 51-59. Kain, Richard M. "The Limits of Literary Interpretation." The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. XVI (December, 1958), 214-218. Khatchadourian, Haig. "The Expression Theory of Art: A Critical Evaluation." The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. XXIII (Spring, 1965), 335-352. 454 Krugman, Herbert E., and Hartley, Eugene L. "The Learning of Tastes." Public Opinion Quarterly. XXIV (Winter, 1960), 621-631. Langer, Susanne K. "Abstraction in Art." The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. XXII (Summer, 1964), 379-392 . Lissa, Zofia. "Aesthetic Functions of Silence and Rests in Music." The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criti cism. XXII (Spring, 1964), 443-454. Loesch, Katherine T. "Literary Ambiguity and Oral Perform ance." The Quarterly Journal of Speech. LI (Octo ber, 1965), 258-267. Lowenfeld, Viktor. "The Meaning of Aesthetic Growth for Art Education." The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. XIV (September, 1955), 123-126. Lowrey, Sarah. "Teaching Interpretive Reading as an Art." The Southern Speech Journal. IX (January, 1944), 70- 74. Lund, Frederick H., and Anastasi, Anna. "An Interpretation of Aesthetic Experience." The American Journal of Psychology. XL (July, 1928), 434-448. Lynch, Gladys E. "Oral Interpretation: A Test of Literary Appreciation." The Southern Speech Bulletin. VII (March, 1942), 112-115. Marcuse, Ludwig. "Freud’s Aesthetics." The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. XVII (September, 1958), 1-21. Margolis, Joseph. "Aesthetic Perception." The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. XIX (Winter, 1960), 209-213. Marshman, J. T. "The Mystery of Oral Interpretation." The Quarterly Journal of Speech. XXIV (December, 1938), 596-603. 455 Mattingly, Alethea Smith. "The Teacher as Critic in Inter pretation Performance." The Speech Teacher. VIII (November, 1959), 321-325. Mohrmann, G. F. "Karnes and Elocution." Speech Monographs. XXXVII (June, 1965), 198-206. Monroe, E. Annette. "The Group Reading: Expression for Drama of Mental Action." The Central States Speech Journal. XXV (August, 1964), 170-175. Moynihan, William T. "The Auditory Correlative." The Jour nal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. XVII (Septem ber, 1958), 93-102. Munro, Thomas. "The Psychology of Art: Past, Present, Future." The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criti cism. XXI (Spring, 1963), 263-282. Olscamp, Paul J. "Some Remarks about the Nature of Aes thetic Perception and Appreciation." The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. XXIV (Winter, 1965), 251-258. Parrish, W. M. "Elocution— A Definition and a Challenge." The Quarterly Journal of Speech. XLIII (February, 1957), 1-11. ________ . "Implications of Gestalt Psychology." The Quar terly Journal of Speech. XIV (February, 1928), 8-29. ________ . "Interpretative Reading." The Quarterly Journal of Speech. XIII (April, 1927), 160-168. ________ . "Objective Literary Standards in Interpretation." The Quarterly Journal of Speech. XXII (June, 1936), 368-379. Pepper, Stephen C. "The Work of Art Described from a Double Dispositional Base." The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. XXIII (Summer, 1965), 421-427. Portnoy, Julius. "Is the Creative Process Similar in the Arts?" The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. XIX (Winter, 1960), 191-195. 456 Post, Robert M. "Achievement of Empathic Response in Oral Reading." The Southern Speech Journal. XXVIII (Spring, 1963), 236-240. Rarig, Frank M. "Some Elementary Contributions of Aesthet ics to Interpretative Speech." The Quarterly Jour nal of Speech. XXVI (December, 1940), 527-539. Rieser, Max. "Report on the Third International Congress of Esthetics." Journal of Philosophy. LIII (December 6, 1956), 814-819. Rudolph, G. A. "The Aesthetic Field of I. A. Richards." The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. XIV (March, 1956), 348-358. Rudrauf, Lucien. "The Morphology of Art and the Psychology of the Artist." The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. XIII (September, 1954), 18-36. Runchey, Geraldine. "The Oral Approach to the Study of Literature." The Quarterly Journal of Speech. XVII (February, 1931), 89-95. Seymour, William Kean. "Inspiration and Experience." Con temporary Review. CCIV (October, 1963), 185-188. Sibley, Frank. "Aesthetic Concepts." The Philosophical Review. LXVIII (October, 1959), 421-450. ________ . "Aesthetic and Nonaesthetic." The PhiInanphiga1 Review. LXXIV (April, 1965), 135-159. Simon, Clarence T. "Appreciation in Reading." The Quarter ly Journal of Speech. XVI (April, 1930), 185-193. Singer, Irving. "The Language of Aesthetics." Hudson Re view. IX (Summer, 1956), 226-243. Stallknecht, Newton P. "Art and the Four Causes." The Journal of Philosophy. XXXI (December 20, 1934), 710-717. 457 Stallknecht, Newton P. "Awareness of Actuality in the Es thetic Experience." Journal of Philosophy. XXXII (June 6, 1935), 323-328. Tatarkiewicz, W. "Classification of Arts in Antiquity." The Journal of the History of Ideas. XXIV (April, 1963), 231-240. _________. "Note on the Modern System of the Arts." The Journal of the History of Ideas. XXIV (July, 1963), 422. _________. "Theatrica, the Science of Entertainment." The Journal of the History of Ideas. XXVI (April, 1965), 263-272. Thompson, David W. "Interpretative Reading as Symbolic Action." The Quarterly Journal of Speech. XLII (December, 1956), 389-397. Vivas, Eliseo. "Animadversions on Imitation and Expres- sion." The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. XIX (Summer, 1961), 425-432. Weiss, Aureliu. "The Interpretation of Dramatic Works." The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. XXIII (Spring, 1965), 305-321. Wellek, Albert. "The Relationship between Music and Poet ry." The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. XXI (Winter, 1962), 149-156. Wiebe, Gerhart D. "An Exploration into the Nature of Crea tivity." Public Opinion Quarterly. XXVI (Fall, 1962), 389-397. Woolbert, Charles Henry. "Psychology from the Standpoint of the Speech Teacher." The Quarterly Journal of Speech. XVI (February, 1930), 9-18. _________. Review of The Aesthetic Attitude, by Herbert S. Langfeld. The Quarterly Journal of Speech. VII (June, 1921), 298. 458 Unpublished Material Bolton, Janet. "A Historical Study of English Theories and Precepts of Vocal and Gestural Expressiveness from Stephen Hawes to John Bulwer: 1509-1644." Unpub lished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Southern California, 1957. Burns, Kenneth. "A Survey of the Contemporary Outlook Rela tive to the Basic Aspects of Oral Interpretation, as It Is Evidenced in Selected Writings in the Field, 1915-1950." Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, North western University, 1952. Cohelo, Richard Joseph. "Some Factors Contributing to the Integration and Time Binding Behavior of the Oral Interpreter Obtained by Means of an Investigation of the Theories of George H. Mead, Susanne Langer, and Kurt Lewin." Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Denver, 1955. Dodey, M. Leon. "An Examination of the Theories and Method ologies of John Walker (1732-1807) with Emphasis upon Gesturing." Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Ohio State University, 1963. Forrest, William Craig. "Literary Kinesthesia: The Artis tic Import of Sensuous Perception Concerned with the Articulatory Stratum of Literature in Light of Re cent Critical Theory and Poetic Practice." Unpub lished Ph.D. dissertation, State University of Iowa, 196 0. Fredericks, Mary Virginia. "An Approach to the Teaching of Oral Interpretation in Terms of Dramatic Action." Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Minne sota, 1962. Gunkle, George N. "Vocal Cues to the Perception of Sponta neity." Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, State Uni versity of Iowa, 1963. 459 Jones, Lloyd S. "Trends in Oral Interpretation as Seen through the Professional Journals from 1940-1955." Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Den ver, 1955. Loesch, Katherine T. "Prosodic Patterns in the Poetry of Dylan Thomas." Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Northwestern University, 1961. McCarthy, Mary Margaret. "Interpretative Reading Behavior: A Study of Selected Factors." Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 1950. Marcoux, Joseph Paul. "An Analysis of Current Trends Con cerning Certain Basic Aspects of Oral Interpretation as Evidenced in Selected Writings in the Field, 1950-1963, with Implications for Speech Education." Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Northwestern Univer sity, 1964. Mattingly, Alethea. "The Mechanical School of Oral Reading in England, 1761-1821." Unpublished Ph.D. disser tation, Northwestern University, 1955. Monroe, Elizabeth A. "The Group Reading of Drama: Its Essence and Aesthetic Principles." Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 1963. Moulton, John R. "The Logic of Interpretation." Unpub lished Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, 1965. Neff, Dale F. "Imagination in the Aesthetic Experience." Unpublished Master's thesis, University of Southern California, 1957. Polzin, Donald Elmer. "The Relationship of Ethics and Drama as Seen in Some Recent Writings in Aesthetics." Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, State University of Iowa, 1961. Salper, Donald. "A Study of an Oral Approach to the Appre ciation of Poetry." Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Minnesota, 1964. 460 Sundstrom, Aileen Lois. "The Influence of the Traditional Schools of Interpretation on the Contemporary Eclec tic Philosophy of Reading Aloud." Unpublished Ph.D dissertation, Wayne State University, 1964. Weintraub, Stanley. "A Comparison of Textbooks in Oral Interpretation of Literature, 1760-1952, with Ref erence to Principles and Methods." Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 1954. Wentworth, Elizabeth C. "Some Aspects of Semiotic Language Theories of Ernst Cassirer and Wilbur Marshall Urban." Unpublished Master's thesis, University of Southern California, 1954. Workman, Allen John. "An Inquiry into Sources of Aesthetic in Pre-Socratic Philosophy." Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Southern California, 1951. Wulftange, Sister Ignatius Marie. "An Experimental Study of Audience Response to the Oral Interpretation of Literature as Perceived through Different Media." Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Ohio State Univer sity, 1962.

Linked assets

University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Conceptually similar

PDF

A Phonemic And Phonetic Description Of The Speech Of Selected Negro Informants Of South-Central Los Angeles

PDF

A Semantic For Oral Interpretation: A Wheelwrightean Perspective

PDF

A Comparative Study Of Acting And Oral Interpretation Theory And Practiceas Revealed In Selected American College Texts: 1900-1970

PDF

The genesis and evolution of the creative personality: a Rankian analysis of "The diary of Anais Nin," volumes I-V

PDF

An Experimental Study Of The Retention And Comprehension Of Poetry Resulting From Silent Reading And From Oral Interpretation

PDF

A Historical And Critical Study Of The Public Address Of James Harvey 'Cyclone' Davis (1853-1940) Of Texas

PDF

An Experimental Study Of The Ability Of Lay Judges To Distinguish Betweentypescripts Of Individual Idea Development And Group Idea Development

PDF

Emerson'S Philosophy Of Rhetoric

PDF

An Empirical Study Of Classroom Teaching Of Ethics In Beginning College Public Speaking Courses

PDF

Clement Attlee'S Advocacy Of Democratic Socialism: A Reasonable Rhetoricof Revolution

PDF

An Analytical-Historical Study Of The Factors Contributing To The Successof Mark Twain As An Oral Interpreter

PDF

A Historical Study Of Oral Interpretation In London, 1951-1962 As A Form Of Professional Theatre

PDF

A Descriptive Analysis Of Oral Argument Before The United States Supreme Court In The School Segregation Cases, 1952-1953

PDF

An Experimental Study Of Effects Of Interest And Authority Upon Understanding Of Broadcast Information

PDF

A Critical Analysis Of The Nature Of Plot Construction And Characterization In Representative Plays Of Harold Pinter

PDF

A Critical Study Of The Apprenticeship Plays Of Thornton Wilder And Theirrelationship To His Major Dramatic Works

PDF

Prescriptive Deontic Logic: A Study Of Inferences From Linguistic Forms Expressing Choice And Conditional Permission And Obligation

PDF

Communication Of Mexican Americans With Public School Personnel: A Study Of Channel, Code, Receiver, And Source Preferences

PDF

An Analytical Study Of Three Representative Existential Dramas Of Jean-Paul Sartre In Terms Of Aristotelian Structural Criteria Of Tragedy

PDF

Rhetoricians On Language And Meaning: An Ordinary Language Philosophy Critique

Asset Metadata

Creator Roloff, Leland Harold (author)

Core Title A Critical Study Of Contemporary Aesthetic Theories And Precepts Contributing To An Aesthetic Of Oral Interpretation

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Speech

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag OAI-PMH Harvest,Speech Communication

Language English

Contributor Digitized by ProQuest (provenance)

Advisor Bolton, Janet H. (committee chair), Fisher, Walter R. (committee member), Stahl, Herbert M. (committee member)

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c18-612375

Unique identifier UC11360278

Identifier 6810249.pdf (filename),usctheses-c18-612375 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier 6810249.pdf

Dmrecord 612375

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Roloff, Leland Harold

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the au...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus, Los Angeles, California 90089, USA