affective fallacy

Wimsatt and Beardsley balance the intentional fallacy with an affective one, thus attempting to hold focus on the poem itself:

The Affective Fallacy is confusion between the poem and its *results* (what it *is* and what it *does*)...It begins by trying to derive the standard of criticism from the psychological effects of the poem and ends in impressionism and relativism...the poem itself, as an object of specifically critical judgment, tends to disappear (1388).

At the same time, they do not deny that poetry does affect its readers:

The report of some readers, on the other hand, that a poem or story induces in them vivid images, intense feelings, or heightened consciousness, is neither anything which can be refuted nor anything which it is possible for the objective critic to take into account. The purely affective report is either too physiological or it is too vague. (1397)

If the affective critic...ventures to state with any precision what a line of poetry *does*—as "it fills us with a mixture of melancholy and reverence for antiquity"—either the statement will be patently abnormal or false, or it will be a description of what the meaning of the line *is*: "the spectacle of massive antiquity in ruins." (1398)

I can't help but agree with their example. It presumes too much. But W&B list Tolstoy and Aristotle and Longinus and Colridge as affective critics without ever admitting their theories for direct discussion.

It strikes me that the distinction between what a poem "is" and what it "does" is as difficult to maintain as that between what is "internal" and what is "external" to a poem. A poem is made of language. All uses of language are social, are an action of one party toward another. If they are "well-wrought" it is because some critic finds them to be so. The poem is "doing" well-wrought-ness for that critic. Or the critic is doing well-wrought-ness with that poem... Or something.

W&B draw an interesting distinction on the same page. They want to be able to talk about emotion as, in some sense, a part of poetry without slipping into the affective fallacy, so they offer two statements about the same passage, one fallacious, one valid.

This is a no-no:

"The second stanza...gives us a momentary vivid realization of past happy experiences, then makes us sad at their loss."

This is okay:

"The conjunction of the qualities of sadness and freshness is reinforced by the fact that the same basic symbol—the light on the sails of a ship hull down—has been employed to suggest both qualities."

I have to agree. The former, again, is presumptuous. The latter is more sophisticated, but still suggests that the poem has the power to move its readers in a particular way. Not so easy to make a distinction between these, either. Yet the authors feel there is an important, if faint, difference between "translatable emotive formulas" and "physiological and psychologically vague ones" (1389).

And then W&B seem to undo themselves with this number:

The more specific the account of the emotion induced by a poem, the more nearly it will be an account of the reasons for emotion, the poem itself, and the more reliable it will be as an account of what the pome is likely to // induce in other—sufficiently informed—readers. It will in fact supply the kind of information which will enable readers to respond to the poem...[by speaking of] shades of distinction and relation between objects of emotion...The critic's report will speak of emotions which are not only complex and dependent upon a precise object but also, and for these reasons, stable. (1399)

So there are emotions caused by poetry of which it is appropriate for the "objective critic" to speak. These emotions are somehow still "in" the poem itself, since they are attached to or elicited by (I'm not sure which is better) "objects" that are themselves contained by the poem.

How is this not affectively fallacious? The object is the thing, so let's look more closely at that:

There are two kinds of real objects which have emotive quality, the objects which are the literal reasons for human emotion, and those which by some kind of association suggest either the reason or the resulting emotion:—the thief, the enemy, or the insult that makes us angry, and the hornet that sounds and stings somewhat like ourselves when angry; the murderer or felon, and the crow that kills small birds and animals or feeds on carrion and is black like the night when crimes are committed by men. (1400)

Simile and metaphor are methods of bringing these two kinds of emotive objects together. Duncan's murder by Macbeth, for example, is made a richly emotive object by the play's artful combination of these types:

Set in its galaxy of symbols—the hoarse raven, the thickening light, and the crow making wing, the babe plucked from the breast, the dagger in the air, the ghost, the bloody hands—this ancient murder has become an object of strongly fixed emotive value. (1402)

W&B conclude their essay with a valorization of poetry as "the most precise emotive evaluation of the customs" of any culture, giving invaluable data to historians and sociologists, etc. An odd ending for such an essay. It seems W&B give more time and care to treating emotion as an aspect of poetry than to demonstrating why such treatment is fallacious. Or why it is not quite fallacious and other, similar things are.


leads:
Look up Tolstoy's "contagion theory." And Longinus "On Sublimity" which W&B point to as examples of affective theory. They put Aristotle's catharsis on the list, too. And Coleridge's "willing suspension of disbelief." They have the same problem, apparently, with all of these.