New Criticism commenced as a revolutionary movement of poets and iconoclasts against the jaded aestheticism that had been dominant since the nineteenth century. Its initial purpose was to focus on the text of a work of literature and to exclude the reader's response, the author's intention, historical and cultural contexts, and moralistic bias from their analysis. New critics began with rigorous and close examination of language, to discover how a work of literature functioned as a self-contained, self-referential aesthetic object and believed the structure and meaning of the text were intimately connected and should not be analyzed separately. Scholars like I.A. Richards associated with Cambridge philosophers to examine the language used in literature. The whole history of language is encompassed by the writer in his literary effort and the effort of the critic is to map it out. Without doubt I.A. Richards has been the dominant and the most influential figure in the history of New Criticism. Many often disagreed with him but their differences obliged them to spell out their own understanding, confirming his pivotal role as the source and point of departure for their ideas.
John Crowe Ransom stated, “Discussion of the New Criticism must start with Mr. Richards . The New Criticism very nearly began with him.” Alan Tate and Cleanth Brooks also claimed their indebtedness to him.
Richards confronted the issue of metaphor in “Metaphor and The Command of Metaphor”. He considered metaphor to be “the omnipresent principle of language” and unlike Aristotle, he claims that the ability to use metaphors can be imparted, learnt and taught. For Richards, thought itself is metaphorical because it is based on the ability to reassemble sense perceptions in such a way that they are linked to other disparate sense perceptions, forming clusters which are conjured up in the mind forming thoughts. These thoughts are expressed in language and thus thought and language become relational enterprises giving rise to transference of meanings which Richards refers to as metaphors. Metaphors instead of being an embellishment constitute the crux of language when it is put into practice.
He differentiates between dead metaphors and live metaphors. The former are those which are not able to generate any new interaction of contexts. They are seemingly literal, which on close examination turn out to be metaphors. The latter are new, not commonplace, not only existing with resemblances but with absolute disparity. Thus, whereas "the leg of a table" would be a dead metaphor, one so deeply embedded in commonplace language that by and large it is no longer considered metaphoric and Eliot's comparison of the evening sky to a "patient etherized upon a table" would be a live metaphor. If language is metaphorical then command over language would mean command over metaphors, but it does not include live metaphors. These metaphors require a certain command, a conscious ability which according to Richards can be easily imparted; there is nothing innate about it. Rhetoric for Richards is not merely how we persuade each other but to communicate and achieve meaning in a shared context, with other people, ideologies and worldviews. Thesis and antithesis are the contradictions expressed through continuous interaction. Sometimes they polarize and sometimes they become indistinguishable from each other forming synthesis, a new dynamic when none of the features of the prior two are individually present. In the same way, Richards designates two parts of a metaphor – the tenor and the vehicle. Neither the tenor nor the vehicle carries with it, merely by virtue of being composed of words, an unalterable meaning of its own; but when the tenor and vehicle are brought together, there is an irruption of one context upon another. Metaphor, as Richards defines it, is what results from the interaction of these two contexts .They interact and reshape each other arriving at a new synthesis called the metaphor which is essential to meaning. The tenor can be identified as the principle subject and the vehicle as a qualifier of the principle subject. Sometimes the tenor is used to introduce the vehicle, which adds to the dynamism of language. Richards warns us, however, that we must not jump to the conclusion that the tenor is central and the vehicle is marginal. He states, “the vehicle is not normally a
mere embellishment of a tenor which is otherwise unchanged by it but that vehicle and tenor in co-operation give a meaning of more varied powers than can be ascribed to either...At one extreme the vehicle may become almost a mire decoration or colouring of the tenor, at the other extreme, the tenor may become almost a mere excuse for the introduction of the
vehicle.” There can be a dialectical relationship between tenor and vehicle. So if this dynamic of interaction is maintained, then language is able to transcend its normal order. Richards give th
the example of the 13 Century Sufi poet, “I am the child whose father is his son, and the wine whose vine is its jar.” The child is the tenor here. The tenor is then dismissed
dynamically by the vehicle “whose father is his son”, because the status of “father” can be approved only when the “son” recognises him as the “father”. So the tenor doesn‟t mean anything by itself without the vehicle. And hence the subject is not a fixed entity. Wine is a reference to the body. Rumi wrote this poem in his old age. But nothing has gnarled the body because it had a soul which was youthfully alive. The vehicle is dynamically interacting in immediate manner and changes the meaning both of itself as well as the tenor. This is an example of the unhinging of original meaning of objects to new meanings. The tenor and vehicle, if they share some commonality or resemblance, can be said to have a
„ground‟, f or instance, when we say „the leg of a chair‟ keeping in mind the legs of a horse, the chair, of course, does not walk with its legs, they hold it up, but the common characteristics between the literal legs of a horse and that of the table is evident. But if we are
to say “You are a pig”, efforts to search for a direct resemblance would be obviously futile. This kind of metaphor can be justified on the basis of some common attitude pertaining to both the tenor and the vehicle. This division of metaphor is not however ultimate according to
Richards, but it leads us away from the wrong “assumption that if we cannot see how a metaphor works, it does not work”.
There are varying relations between tenor and vehicle upon which the effectiveness of the metaphor depends. A question arising out of this context is whether the resemblances between the two or the disparities between them should be emphasised? Richards evades either extreme. He rejects the "18th Century conception of the kind of comparison that metaphor should supply, the process of pointing out likenesses perspicuously collecting particulars of resemblances." His validates this view by stating that disparities between tenor and vehicle are as much operative as the similarities. But he also rejects "the opposed conception of comparison-as a mere putting together of two things to see what will happen as a contemporary fashion, which takes an extreme case as the norm." He is referring to poets whose metaphors are so vague that they leave most readers with a sense of confusion. Poets are continuously engaged in creating new metaphors and if they stop such innovations, then language would be dead. It would cease to contribute to the nobler purposes of human endeavour, intercourse, and discovering newness in the very world we inhabit through interactions and inter-subjectivity. Every object in the world is interacting with each other to form new meanings and thus there is an unhinging of original meanings. This dynamism provides the flux of a language and enables it to remain vibrant.
