Projective Properties and Expression in Literary Appreciation

ELISA GALGUT

Projective Properties and Expression in LiteraryAppreciation

i. expressive projection

Richard Wollheim provides us with one of therichest accounts of artistic expression in recenttimes and with the “best psychological account of aparticular art in the twentieth century.”1 Wollheimexplains and explores the expressive properties ofpainting in relation to the mind and personality ofthe artist through the lens of a (Kleinian-laden)theory of psychoanalysis. For Wollheim, the ex-pressive qualities of a work of art, its ability tomove us, are grounded in the psychological ca-pacity to seek correspondences between our owninternal worlds and the world around us. Suchcorrespondence is founded on our capacity forprojection. Thus, “A broken tree or tower willrepresent for us the sense of power or strengthlaid waste: the blue of the distant sky suddenlyrealizes a feeling, a lost feeling, perhaps, of happi-ness. The objects, of course, have originated quiteindependently of us: they are parts of the environ-ment, which we in some broad sense appropriate,because they have this special resonance for us.”2

Wollheim discusses and elaborates his accountof expression as a form of projection in a vari-ety of places, and his account covers both theexpressive properties of nature and of art. Withrespect to works of art, “these matching objectsare made, not selected. So we bring into being,where previously we discovered, correlates to ourinner states.”3 It is a central tenet of many of Woll-heim’s writings that both artists and spectators(and artists are centrally spectators for Wollheim)engage with art as a way of understanding theirinner lives. Wollheim explicates expression psy-chologically, by invoking projection, psychoana-

lytically understood. It is as a consequence of theactivity of projection that we perceive correspon-dences between our internal mental states and ei-ther the external world or, in the case of artisticappreciation, the work of art; the latter “arises outof a creative act;” it is made rather than found, andis subject to a standard of correctness, unavailableto correspondences with nature.4 For Wollheim,

artistic expression is invariably expression of an internalor psychological condition. . . . A work of art expressesan internal condition by corresponding to, or being ofa piece with, it. Furthermore the perceptible propertyin virtue of which it does so is the property it has in-tentionally. . . . The artist intended the work to have thisproperty so that it can express some internal conditionthat he had in mind. (1993, p. 155)

It is important to note that the work of art isno mere vehicle for the expression of a state ofmind which could be accessed via other avenues;in recognizing the expressiveness of the painting,in interpreting the activity of the artist in the ap-plication, say, of a brush stroke, we simultaneouslyperceive the state of mind of the artist. It is in thevery particularity of a work of art where its ex-pressive power lies, and it is this particularity thatdistinguishes works of art from ordinary language,“which is about socially given semantics” ratherthan the individual expression of intention, desire,and feeling.5 Wollheim is thus also at pains to em-phasize that the expressive power of the work andits perceptual properties are not separable: “Thecorresponding emotion, once invoked, shouldnot stand apart from the perception throughwhich it is invoked.”6 Such expressive perception

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 68:2 Spring 2010c© 2010 The American Society for Aesthetics

144 The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

requires, according to Wollheim, the activity ofprojection.

Projection, understood as a psychoanalytic con-cept, is the “operation whereby qualities, feelings,wishes or even ‘objects,’ which the subject refusesto recognize or rejects in himself, are expelledfrom the self and located in another person orthing.”7 In Kleinian thought, “the thing projectedis the phantasied ‘bad’ object, as though it werenecessary, if the instinct or the affect is to be trulyexpelled, for it to become embodied in an object.”8

Thus at the heart of the notion of projection liesthe primitive impulse to expel from the self thatwhich is undesirable. Projection can also be usedpositively, though—to preserve a positive feelingby placing it onto a benevolent figure in the ex-ternal environment; it has also been argued that itis a necessary constituent of empathy and that itenables its development.9

Wollheim is careful to distinguish between twodifferent kinds of projection—simple and com-plex—and only the latter will be invoked to explainartistic expression. With simple projection, in anattempt to get rid of a negative emotion, such assadness, or to “protect or perpetuate” a positiveone, a person will project these feelings into theexternal world. As a result of this projection, theperson no longer feels sad himself, but “ends upwith a belief about the figure on to whom he hasprojected his sadness” (1987, p. 83). Moreover, theproperty that the external figure has as a result ofsimple projection is the same as the property thatthe person originally experienced himself. Indeed,this sameness of feeling is often one of the (uncon-scious) reasons for the projective act—the personfeels a negative emotion such as sadness or anger,rids himself of the emotion by projecting it ontoanother, and thus perceives the other as now pos-sessing the unwanted emotion. With simple pro-jection, there is no necessary correspondence be-tween the person and his external world, whichtakes on the features of his emotional life only asa result of the act of projection. The emotion flowsfrom the agent to the external world, and “it is cor-respondingly indifferent to the look of the scene”(1987, p. 82). Thus simple projection, which is partof infantile development, and which is often a fea-ture of neurosis, is inadequate to explain both or-dinary cases of the expressive properties of natureand also the expressive properties of works of art.To this end, Wollheim invokes complex projection,which, unlike simple projection, requires this not-

ing of a correspondence between the self and theexternal world. As A. W. Price notes, “Whereassimple projection may be indiscriminate, complexprojection is sensitive to, and inventive of, corre-spondences between feelings and phenomena. . . .Complex projection, unlike simple, thrives on dis-crimination.”10 As a result of complex projection,the person experiences the external world not astaking on the same features as the projected emo-tion, but rather as being “of a piece with” theprojected emotion. Furthermore, says Wollheim,with complex projection, these projected featuresof the external world are “not fully comprehensi-ble without going back to projection itself” (1987,p. 83). Unlike simple projection, complex projec-tion intimates its own origins; it brings with it—andperhaps requires—the psychological ability to re-flect on one’s internal world and emotional states.Thus, the person recognizes that she perceives theexternal world as possessing a certain quality—melancholy, a sense of loneliness—because she rec-ognizes in herself the source of these emotions.This recognition of the origins in oneself of theprojected feelings may also explain why the ex-pressive properties of complex projection tend tobe more complex than those of simple projection.In simple projection, the act of projection is invis-ible to the agent, which is why it feels to him thatthe external world now possesses those proper-ties that he himself once felt. Complex projection,on the other hand, involves self-reflection, whichcolors the ways in which the projective proper-ties are experienced, so that the relationship be-tween the external world and the internal selfis more nuanced, and is experienced with morecongruence, a sense that Wollheim’s phrase “ofa piece with” seems to connote. These proper-ties perceived in the world as a result of complexprojection are termed “projective properties,” andWollheim states clearly that expressive perception“is perception of projective properties” and “restsupon projection” (1987, p. 83).

Malcolm Budd raises a worry that expressiveperceptions of nature and art are too differentto be accommodated by “a monolithic concept.”With regard to nature, “the expressive perceptionof nature requires the beholder actually to feel theemotion she sees nature to correspond to.”11 Thisis not so for works of art, as Wollheim explicitlymaintains that neither the artist nor the specta-tor need actually feel the expressive propertiesthat are perceived in the work of art: “That the

Galgut Projective Properties and Expression 145

emotion is felt is not a sustainable requirement.What is enough is that . . . the emotion is some-thing that the artist or spectator has in mind”(1993, p. 157). Another worry about understand-ing the expressive properties of nature as on apar with those of artworks is one about circularity.In Painting as an Art, Wollheim claims that “ex-pressive perception rests upon . . . complex pro-jection, ” which would entail that the experienceof a rainy landscape as melancholy is the resultof an act of projection (1993, p. 83). Elsewhere,however, Wollheim states: “When some part ofnature is held to correspond to a psychologicalphenomenon, this is because it is perceptible asbeing of a piece with that state or as something onto which we might have or could have projectedthe state” (1993, p. 154, emphases added). In otherwords, the correspondence we perceive betweenaspects of nature and our internal worlds seems anecessary condition for an act of projection, ratherthan being a consequence of it. This projectableproperty of nature “comes about through two fac-tors which make their independent contributionsto this result: an affinity in nature, and our capac-ity to project internal conditions” (1993, p. 154).In this paragraph, Wollheim seems to indicate thatnature is experienced as serene or melancholy, say,prior to the act of projection—as a result of a per-ceived “affinity” in nature. But it seems difficult, ifnot impossible, to spell out what the properties ofnature are that would facilitate this rather than thatact of projection. Wollheim is alert to this worryand concludes that our ability to “forge correspon-dence” between our psychological states and theexternal world is molded by cultural and personalfactors, factors which are at work in the case ofartistic expression too. There may also be causalexplanations for this affinity in nature that arenot at work in the case of artistic expression—grayrainy days are “gloomy” just because they cause usto feel gloomy.12 Works of art do not present simi-lar worries, however, because they have been con-structed by the artist with the intention of invitingacts of projection by the spectator. Works of artthus have a standard of correctness which narrowsthe range of permissible projections. Thus, Budd’sworry that “[p]art of the difficulty for Wollheim’stheory presented by the tension within it derivesfrom his attempt to construct a monolithic con-cept of expressive perception, applicable to bothnature and art” need not concern us here, as it iswith Wollheim’s account of the expressiveness of

art that concerns us, so it is to this account that Inow turn.13

For the purposes of this article, I accept thebroad claims of Wollheim’s account of the expres-sive properties of painting. My aim in this articleis to show how it may fruitfully be extended toother art forms—in particular, to the lyrical poetryof Wordsworth. By so doing, I hope to provide akind of defense of Wollheim’s account—if it canbe fruitfully invoked in the critical analysis andappreciation of poetry, then its value as a theoryof artistic expression has been strengthened. Al-though this defense is a limited one, especiallysince I am cherry-picking those poetic exampleswhich I think best do justice to Wollheim’s the-ory, my hope is that this is the beginning of adiscussion, rather than the final word. I also donot rule out the possibility that artistic expressionmay be multilayered: some of it may be the re-sult of expressive perception, while some expres-sive properties of artworks may be less steeped inunconscious material. But I think that Wollheimoffers us one of the richest and most interestingtheories of artistic expression, and it is my hopethat by exploring it further and examining its ap-plicability to other art forms, its plausibility can bestrengthened. If Wollheim’s account of expressiveperception works for Wordsworth, then the gen-eral principles that have been provided may beused in the appreciation of other poetry and poeticgenres, and then extended further to include moreliterary genres. What makes for the successful ap-plication of Wollheim’s theory to Wordsworth’spoems are features not uncommon to other liter-ary works. In exploring the applicability of expres-sion as projection to lyrical poetry, I hope to bringinto bolder relief some of the characteristics ofpoetry that make such application relevant and,hopefully, fruitful. The following discussion thusbroadly accepts Wollheim’s claim that a work ofart derives its expressive properties in virtue ofthe projection of the internal, psychological, stateof mind of the artist. Such activity is intentional:the artist creates the work of art (partly) in orderto “express some internal condition that he hadin mind” (1993, p. 155); appropriate perceptionby a spectator of the expressive properties of thework of art will contain an appreciation and un-derstanding of the psychological state of mind ofthe artist that underlies the creation of the workof art. Wollheim’s theory does not require that theemotion of which the work is expressive actually


be consciously felt by either the artist or the specta-tor; the artist need not have been feeling sad whenhe created a sad piece of art or music. Nor needthe spectator feel sad when looking at a sad paint-ing or when hearing a sad piece of music. Whatis required—if a work of art is successfully expres-sive—is, on the one hand, that the work of art be“of a piece” with the artist’s sadness and, on theother, that the spectator recognizes the work of artas being “of a piece” with sadness. Again to quoteWollheim, what is enough is that the emotion “issomething that the artist or spectator has in mind,or (perhaps better) it is something with which theyare put in touch, or (perhaps best) it is somethingupon which, or upon memory of which, they candraw” (1993, p. 157). This may—and most proba-bly does—require that the emotion projected mustreside unconsciously within the mind of the spec-tator, or else the very notion of projection used byWollheim would belie its psychoanalytic origins.

Before I turn to the poetry, let me raise someworries about the applicability of Wollheim’s ac-count of the expressive properties of painting toother art forms. Wollheim’s account of expressiveperception is rooted in the act of looking: “Themeaning of a picture is the result of this transac-tion between artist, pictorial surface and viewer,”and the emphasis on the visually perceived quali-ties of artworks is stressed in Wollheim’s accountof expressive perception.14 For instance, Wollheimwrites: “I believe that expressive perception is agenuine species of seeing, and it is for this reasonthat it is capable of grounding a distinctive varietyof pictorial meaning” (1987, p. 80), and “expres-sive perception, as a form of seeing, is responsiveto features of the perceived scene” (1987, p. 83).The properties of the external world onto whichstates of mind are projected are properties whichare perceived visually. This seems to provide aprima facie objection to applying Wollheim’s ac-count of expressive perception to poetry: althoughwe use phrases like ‘seeing in one’s mind’s eye,’the scenes depicted in literature are imagined, notliterally seen, as are works of painting. The claimthat I shall defend in the rest of this article is thatwhile it is true that expressive perception of paint-ings requires actual looking, this is so only be-cause any appreciation of paintings qua artworksrequires looking at the painted surface. And evenhere, expressive perception requires much morethan mere looking—involving as it does acts of pro-jection rooted in the unconscious, Wollheim’s ac-

count of expressive perception lies very heavily onits imaginative soil. Expressive perception is thusboth an act of perception and an act of the imag-ination. The act of looking so necessary for theappreciation of paintings is not essential to a gen-eral account of expressive perception. I take it thatwhat is central to Wollheim’s account is that theaesthetic perception of the expressive propertiesof works of art has its roots in an act of unconsciousprojection; if this is so, then—although perceivingexpressive properties in paintings requires actuallooking—this is not the case for other art forms.15

The rest of the paper will explore these ideas inrelation to two of Wordsworth’s poems.

ii. wordsworth’s poetry

“I have said that poetry is the spontaneous over-flow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin fromemotion recollected in tranquillity: the emotionis contemplated till [sic], by a species of reaction,the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emo-tion, kindred to that which was before the sub-ject of contemplation, is gradually produced, anddoes itself actually exist in the mind.”16 Here, inhis Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, is Wordsworth’sfamous pronouncement on the expressive powerof poetry. Thus, “poetry is born in contemplation,in the meditative recollection of a feeling sum-moned from the past.”17 Such emotions, rousedeither by the perception of a natural scene or,interestingly, by the memory of such a percep-tion, give the poems their expressive properties.18

There is in these poems an important and intimateconnection between the properties of nature thatgive rise to the poet’s emotional experiences andthe expressive properties of the poetry. The ex-pressive properties of the natural scenes are cre-ated by the poet’s act of recollection or contem-plation, while the expressive properties of the po-etry are due, in part, to the poetic expression ofthis act of recollection. In being moved by theexpressive aspects of the poetry, the reader seesthe poetry as the meditative recollections of thepoet, and she is also encouraged to view the nat-ural scenes described under the influence of theexpressive medium of the poetry or, more likelyin the case of poetry, to imagine that she is seeingthem under the direction of the poet’s expressivegaze. This poetic activity of Wordsworth exhibitsmany of the features that Wollheim attributes to


the painterly activity of the artist: “pictorial ex-pression is controlled, and boosted, by a reflec-tion upon, and by recollection of, the emotion.Even as the artist paints, this activity stirs suchreflection and recollection” (1987, p. 87). The ex-pressive elements of the poetry may be even morepronounced than in pictorial art, because—at leastas is the case with Wordsworth—the poems them-selves contain or refer to the emotional states ofthe poet underlying the poetic creation.19 “I Wan-dered Lonely as a Cloud” contains many termsthat refer to a psychological condition: ‘lonely,’‘glee,’ ‘gay,’ ‘jocund,’ ‘pensive,’ ‘bliss,’ ‘pleasure.’20

The poem refers directly to an act of recollec-tion, and the tone of the poem is shot throughwith this act of remembrance, which adds a touchof poignancy and sense of loss to the overall de-lightfulness—and lightness—of the poem. One ofthe ways in which the reader is encouraged in herexpressive perceptions is to adopt the viewpointof the poet, to identify with his perspective. By‘poet’ I mean here the poetic voice, as it were, thespeaker of the poem, who may or may not be iden-tified with the person of the poet.21 This identifica-tion of the speaker by the reader not only directsthe reader’s imaginative gaze onto the elements ofthe scene, but it also provides a way for the readerto identify emotionally with the speaker, to adoptthe perspective that he himself adopted in view-ing the scene. In this way the projective activityof the speaker, which colors his description of thelandscape and provides it its expressive proper-ties, is adopted too by the reader. In the poetryof Wordsworth, where the identity of the speakerand the poet are closely allied, the reader is thusalso acquainted with the projective activity of thepoet. It is partly by adopting the perspective ofthe speaker that the reader is able to perceive theexpressive properties of the poem.

“I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” begins witha description of the poet as looking down onthe landscape below, as a cloud “That floats onhigh o’er vales and hills.” The identification of thereader with the poet is encouraged immediately bythe use of the first person; we adopt his perspec-tive and view the descriptions that follow throughhis eyes. The reader is told of the speaker’s “lone-liness”; we are given the psychological state of thespeaker, which not only provides a glimpse intothe speaker’s emotions, but it also allows us tounderstand the impact that the vivid flowers hadon the speaker’s emotions—the flowers burst “all

at once” into the speaker’s mind, and replace theloneliness with a vivid “fluttering and dancing”that contrasts with the speaker’s slow, cloudlikefloating. The language of the poem conveys theemotional tone: the daffodils are “golden,” theyare compared to the stars that “twinkle on themilky way,” they toss their heads, they sparkle; thedaffodils are presented to us in a burst of color,light, and movement, the contemplation of whichbrings much joy to the poet. It is interesting tocompare the liveliness of the depicted scene withthe pensiveness of the act of recollection: by theend of the poem, we return somewhat to the lone-liness expressed in the first stanza, as the poet lieson his couch “in vacant or in pensive mood,” butnow the recollection of the dancing twinkling daf-fodils brings pleasure—a pleasure different in kindfrom the pleasure seeing the flowers brought. Thisnew pleasure arises from an act of contemplation,of reverie. It is the kind of pleasure more akin tothe experience of the reader, who has not liter-ally seen the flowers the speaker has.22 By makingvivid the pleasures of recollection, of contempla-tion, pleasures with which the reader can moreeasily identify, the emotional tone of the poem islikewise made more vivid. The emotion is “some-thing upon which, or upon memory of which,”both reader and poet can draw. By the time we re-tire with the poet to his couch, our minds, like his,are filled with thoughts of the dancing daffodils.

In experiencing, in her mind’s eye, the sightof the daffodils “tossing their heads in sprightlydance,” the reader is taken on an emotional jour-ney; what we “perceive” and how we perceive itare of necessity linked. The perspective the poet—and thus the reader—first takes on the daffodils isfrom a godly height; in wandering “lonely as acloud,” we not only sense the speaker’s emotionalstate, but we are also led into imagining that hisfirst sight of the daffodils is from on high. Thisis emphasized in the second stanza of the poem,as the flowers are compared to stars, stretchingendlessly “along the margin of a bay.” Thus, al-though the poet’s loneliness brings pain, it also of-fers a unique perspective from which to view theworld of nature. Indeed, solitariness is a condi-tion for creativity, providing the mental space intowhich thoughts can arise. The reader is asked toadopt two viewpoints simultaneously: on the onehand, we look down to the daffodils below, buton the other hand, the description of the flowersis so vivid that the perspective does not blur the


detail. On the contrary, the emotional sense is ofbeing dropped right in the midst of these tossing,golden flowers. The poem is able to express simul-taneously the quiet loneliness of the poet, whichmerges with, and is then overtaken by, the exu-berant joy at the natural scene. The unity of na-ture too is emphasized, and its benevolence high-lighted: the flowers compete with both the starsand the waves for “glee” and brightness; they areten thousand shining suns, which the poet sees “ata glance.” Stars, sun, earth, and water are jointpartners in creation. The poem affirms life andlife’s creative energy. But the poem does more: itaffirms human creative energy. The poet retiresto the couch in the final stanza, where, we imag-ine, the scene he has just observed re-creates itselffor the purposes of poetry. Indeed, were it not forthe creative genius of the poet, the wonders ofcreation would have gone unnoticed, unobserved.And it is in their observation, seen with “that in-ward eye,” where true happiness lies—in the “blissof solitude.” The poet’s solitude frames the poem;it is both a condition of creativity and its resultant.

In a similar vein, we are encouraged to adoptthe perspective of the speaker of the sonnet “Com-posed upon Westminster Bridge.”23 Although thespeaker mentions his presence from only line 11—“Ne’er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!”—it ishis perspective that the reader takes throughoutthe poem. The speaker affirms the connection be-tween his internal world and the external world heperceives: “ne’er saw I . . . a calm so deep” is thecondition for “ne’er . . . felt [I] a calm so deep.”The poem originates from an experience of com-plex projection on the part of the poet toward thenatural scene; there is thus an intricate relation-ship between the affinity the poet feels to nature,the resultant creative act, and the expressive prop-erties of the poem. The expressive features of thesonnet are in part derived from an identity of thereader with the poet’s original act of projectiondirected toward nature, which itself becomes thesubject of the poem. In order to recognize the ex-pressive properties of the poetry, the reader mustrecognize the projective activity of the poet.

In viewing the city of London “in our mind’seye,” we are asked to imagine taking a particularview of the city of London; such particularity isstressed not only by the dating of the poem, butalso by the imagery, which directs our imaginativegaze to specific sights: “Ships, towers, domes, the-atres, and temples lie / Open unto the fields, and to

the sky.” This concordance between the psycho-logical state of mind of the poet and the describedscene is noted by Hillis Miller, who writes: “in-ner calm matches outer calm. The poet ‘feels’ thedeep calm within the city as if it were a calm deepwithin himself, and in this sympathy subject andobject are reconciled, made one.”24 Of course—aswith the previous poem—the poet uses other po-etic techniques to create the expressive qualitiesof the poem; the city is personified as someoneasleep, dressed in a beautiful garment, which wefeel may be replaced with humbler attire later,as the “smokeless air” becomes more pollutedwith the progress of the day. The sun, too, is de-scribed in human terms, as he “steeps” towardthe earth in the benevolent gesture of a parent.Emotive content is illustrated in other ways too.Hillis Miller notes the many uses of “negatives” inthe poem: “Earth has not anything to show morefair,” “Never did the sun,” “Ne’er saw I, never felt,a calm so deep!” One of the effects of the use ofnegatives is to emphasize the depth of feeling ofthe speaker, as if he struggles for words in whichto express himself positively. The descriptions alsobring with them a comparison with natural beauty,forging a connection between the urban nature ofthe city and the natural landscape surrounding it.The city is seen as an organic, living entity: “Thenegatives throughout the poem have the paradox-ical power to create as a shimmering mirage ly-ing over their explicit assertions the presence ofwhat they deny.”25 “Composed upon WestminsterBridge” does not refer as directly as “I WanderedLonely as a Cloud” does to the poetic activityitself, nor is it characterized explicitly as an actof memory. Whereas “I Wandered Lonely as aCloud” evokes a sense of temporal movement, ofloss in the passage of time, “Westminster Bridge”evokes a sense of place, of the grandeur of na-ture. Particularity here gives rise to general claimsabout one’s place in God’s universe. The view-point of the “I” is not confined to the speaker, butis shared by anyone in the same circumstances:“Dull would he be of soul.” The reader is thusencouraged to move back and forth between par-ticularity and generality, between a dated eventand life experiences of a similar kind, betweenthe loveliness of the city and the splendor of na-ture; part of the emotional resonance of the poemis created by this movement. The reader is led“towards the recognition that the poem expressesan oscillation between consciousness and nature,


life and death, presence and absence, motion andstillness. This recognition is the characteristic end-point of any careful reading of Wordsworth’s bestpoems.”26

iii. discussion

In these (albeit limited) readings of these poems,I have been at pains to show that Wollheim’s ac-count of expression as projection provides a fit-ting account of the expressive properties of thepoems. Not only does Wordsworth himself viewhis poetic activity along these lines, but the inti-mate connection between speaker and describedscenes is what gives the poems their expressivecontent. In addition, it is via the act of identifica-tion with the speaker that the reader—who is en-couraged to adopt the perspective of the speaker—becomes sensitive to the expressive properties ofthe poem. In other words, it is partly the recog-nition by the reader of the expressive propertiesof the poem as resulting from an act of projectionby the speaker/poet that the poem gains much ofits expressive power. An awareness of the pro-cess of projection facilitates the reader’s percep-tion of the expressive properties of the poems.This is especially so in the case of Wordsworth,who we know was concerned to capture in his po-etry something of the experience of the creativeprocess.27 I noted above that the expressive fea-tures of “Westminster Bridge” are derived in partfrom two projective activities on the part of thepoet: one directed toward nature and one that iscentral to the creative activity. This is so because,for Wordsworth, nature is a source of poetic inspi-ration. Now it might seem as though I am back-tracking on my original point—that the expressiveproperties of nature and art are different and mayrequire different accounts. I maintain, however,that this distinction is important, and in noting theaffinity that the poet feels toward nature, I amnot thereby arguing for a single account of projec-tive expression that will cover both art and nature.What I am suggesting, however, is that, becausethe subject matter of so much of Wordsworth’spoetry contains reference to his emotional con-nection with nature, this highlights the expressiveproperties of the poetry in ways that are easierto note than with other poetry, and, hence, thismakes Wordsworth’s poems a good place to startin examining Wollheim’s claim that the expressive

properties of artworks derive in part from an actof projection by the artist. It is because we recog-nize our own experiences toward nature that weare able to recognize what Wordsworth is doingpoetically. The actual origin of his poetry is, to thisextent, irrelevant. What is at work in our apprecia-tion of his poems is the identification of the readerwith the poet’s emotional activity.

This act of identification of the reader with thepoet or speaker is, I would like to suggest, an im-portant feature of much—although certainly notall—of our experience of literature. I could proba-bly go further and say that this ability to perceive astate of affairs from the perspective of the speaker(or narrator) is—again partly—what contributes toliterary appreciation (as opposed to other kindsof artistic appreciation). In other words, projec-tion as a means of literary appreciation is en-couraged or facilitated because engaging with aliterary text is, in certain fundamental respects,akin to engaging with the mind of another person,an ability which—following recent developmentsin the psychoanalytic literature—is termed “men-talization.” According to the psychoanalyst PeterFonagy, mentalization “is the process by which werealise that having a mind mediates our experi-ence of the world. Mentalization is intrinsicallylinked to the development of the self, to its gradu-ally elaborated inner organization, and to its par-ticipation in human society, a network of humanrelationships with other beings who share this ca-pacity.”28 Mentalization, which is a developmentalachievement, requires an ability to attribute men-tal states to others, to distinguish between others’minds and one’s own, as well as an ability to distin-guish between the world and representations of theworld. Although a full development of this pointgoes beyond the bounds of this article, I wouldlike to claim that mentalization is both requiredand facilitated by engagement with much litera-ture, and first-person narratives in particular arean obvious example of literary narratives that re-quire mentalization, although other literary tech-niques may foster the adoption of the perspectiveof another. A literary work that engages with ourability to mentalize, I would like to suggest, alsorequires that we reflect on our own emotional en-gagement in reading; as we adopt the perspectiveof another, we are encouraged to reflect upon ourparticipation as readers in the literary endeavor.We move between the narrator’s perspective andour own thoughts on that perspective.


Taking the perspective of a character or narra-tor is engaged more regularly by works of liter-ature than by other artworks; it may be akin toWollheim’s account of the “spectator in the pic-ture,” which, as Wollheim points out, is not a fea-ture of most paintings. When mentalization in lit-erature happens, it provides the reader with a wayof accessing many of the expressive properties ofa literary work, especially when it facilitates thereader’s understanding of the projective activitiesthat underlie the creation of the text. The aspectof mentalization that I am emphasizing here isthat of the ability to take another’s perspective,to see a situation from his or her point of view.In the cognitive psychological literature, this istermed “simulation,” and, although there are dif-ferences between mentalization and simulation,they agree on this point—namely, that emotionssuch as empathy are (in part, perhaps) facilitatedby our ability to see a situation from the perspec-tive of another. I also do not wish to claim thatthe mentalization or simulation accounts tell thefull story regarding expressive perception; a poemcan invite many emotions which are neither ex-pressive nor which result from identification withthe poet. Appealing to mentalization, however,does explain some of the expressive power of po-ems—like Wordsworth’s—where the reader is in-vited to share the poet’s perspective and wherethis sharing of a point of view contributes to theexpressive qualities of the poem. It is importantto note—as Wollheim does—that such interpretiveunderstanding does not amount to the claim thatthe reader must herself adopt the same state ofmind as the poet; the adoption of the poet orspeaker’s perspective never amounts to identifi-cation. Indeed, it is vital that the reader maintainsher own assessment of the poem and its effectson her. As pointed out above, mentalization re-quires that one maintain an ability to distinguishbetween one’s own mental states and those of an-other. Such empathy or sympathy does not erasethe distance between oneself and the other, be-tween reader and poet or narrator.

Although I have highlighted for discussion the“taking of a perspective,” there are other literarytechniques at work that enable the reader’s per-ception of the expressive properties of a literarywork. For instance, the use of the pastoral hasa long history in English literature, and a readerwould bring much of this history to her reading ofWordsworth’s poetry. The aliveness of the city in

“Composed upon Westminster Bridge” is assistedby a sense of motion, so that we anticipate the citywaking soon from its dreamy slumbers. The inter-weaving rhyme scheme of the octave of the poem(abba abba) further emphasizes the harmony ofthe scene, and the structure of the poem as a Pe-trarchan sonnet alerts the reader to comparisonsbetween Wordsworth’s poem and the tradition oflove poetry that gave rise to this poetic form. Theinterpretation of a poem will always take placeagainst the background of poetic and literary tra-dition and composition. Such “background knowl-edge must include beliefs about a work’s historyof production and the specific processes of art thatwent into its making” (1993, p. 156).

iv. objections and replies

In his examination of Wollheim on expression,Malcolm Budd lays down three desiderata “if thetheory is to be viable.” These are as follows:

(i) the characterization of any instance of expressiveperception as intimating the origin of the kind of per-ception it exemplifies in complex projection must bejettisoned, (ii) an argument must be provided that estab-lishes that the perception of correspondence is possibleonly in virtue of the perceiver having the capacity forcomplex projection (on pain of expressive perceptionnot being tied to complex projection), and (iii) the no-tion of correspondence needs to be rendered definite byan elucidation of what it is for someone to experience anexternal item as corresponding to a psychological condi-tion, and this elucidation must further an understandingof why an affect is an integral part of the perception ofcorrespondence and of the affect’s capacity to endow theperception with a representational content that it wouldotherwise lack.29

Budd takes these desiderata as pertaining to both“an account of artistic expression” and to “the per-ception of nature as the bearer of emotional prop-erties.”30 I shall explore these criteria only in rela-tion to artistic expression, which, as noted earlier,may require a different explication from expres-sive properties perceived in nature. Budd’s firstrequirement for an improved theory of expres-sion as projection is that “the characterization ofany instance of expressive perception as intimat-ing the origin of the kind of perception it exempli-fies in complex projection must be jettisoned.” He


reasons that, “for an experience to initiate some-thing about itself the intimation must be an aspectof its phenomenology” and this will be an essentialpart of the thought content of the experience.31

One thus should be able to tell from the experi-ential nature of the experience itself that it hasits origins in an act of complex projection. Buddfinds this an unreasonable requirement because“this would require not only that anyone capableof expressive perception possesses the concept ofcomplex projection . . . but also that this conceptis drawn upon by the subject and enters into herexperience of correspondence between inner andouter. And this certainly seems contrary to thefacts.”32 But does Wollheim’s claim that complexprojection intimates its own origins mandate thatthe experience of expressive perception requiresthat the subject has a concept of complex projec-tion? This requirement seems too strong; rather,what seems to be necessary is that the subject hassome kind of experiential understanding of theorigins of her experience of expressive perception,an understanding which may fall short of a full-blooded conceptual or intellectual understanding.

In his discussion of what it might mean for anexperience to intimate its own origins, Wollheimdiscusses experiential memory. In order for some-thing to count as an experiential memory, “thememory intimates that it originated in the eventthat it is of” (1993, p. 150). In fact, the requirementfor expressive perception is somewhat weakerthan the requirement for experiential memory, asWollheim claims that it is sufficient for expressiveperception of projective properties to intimate“how experiences of the sort that they exemplifycome about in general” (1993, p. 150, emphasisadded). Just as in the case of memory, the plausibil-ity of Wollheim’s account of expressive perceptionwill depend to a large extent on our recognitionof the phenomenon; someone who is incapable ofremembering anything about his past would failto understand the difference between simply re-membering that something happened and remem-bering the event itself. Thus, part of the defenseof the plausibility of Wollheim’s account will liewithin its particularity. As I have tried to showabove, the recognition of expressive projection asarising from complex projection illuminates ourunderstanding of the analyzed poems: the expres-sive properties of “I Wandered” or “WestminsterBridge” depend to a large extent on the reader’srecognition of the origins of the poet’s creative

activity in an act of projection onto nature as wellas requiring the reader’s identification with theseacts of projection. The comparison with memoryis an apt one here; “I Wandered” presents itself asan experiential memory, and many of the expres-sive properties of the poem noted above—its en-nui and sense of loss—require this recognition bythe reader. It also seems evident that many of theother expressive properties of the poem—its live-liness and sense of joy—require both the reader’srecognition of the projective activity of the poetand her recognition of her own projective experi-ences. This seems necessary if the reader is to iden-tify imaginatively with the speaker. Thus, it seemsthat, here at least, it is the case that “the percep-tion of correspondence is possible only in virtueof the perceiver having the capacity for complexprojection,” where “the perceiver” here is the ap-preciator of the artwork—that is, the reader of thepoem. In engaging with the poems, in understand-ing and appreciating—and being moved by—them,the reader is simultaneously made aware of thepoet’s creative journey. The reader not only un-derstands the poet’s projective activity regardingthe uses to which nature is put in the creative act,but, if the poems are successful, the reader will alsocome to experience nature through the eyes of thepoet. In this way, the poetry serves as a way forthe reader to gain access to the kinds of reflectiveactivities that generated the creative act itself. Itthus seems important for Wollheim to retain ratherthan jettison “the characterization of any instanceof expressive perception as intimating the originof the kind of perception it exemplifies in complexprojection.”

Budd’s second criterion—“an argument must beprovided that establishes that the perception ofcorrespondence is possible only in virtue of theperceiver having the capacity for complex projec-tion”—is discussed above.33 His third and, I think,most interesting criterion is that Wollheim’s the-ory of expression must elucidate “what it is forsomeone to experience an external item as cor-responding to a psychological condition.” Thisdesideratum does not imply that Wollheim’s the-ory is false, but is rather a request for further dis-cussion. In fact, Budd’s criterion is one that ap-plies to many other theories of expression in thearts and is not limited to Wollheim’s notion ofprojective properties. Peter Kivy famously arguesthat a piece of music is sad because the listener“perceives the sadness in the music.”34 Expressive


properties are properties of the music itself whichthe listener learns to recognize as sharing certainstructures or “contours” with human expression.Aaron Ridley defends an arousal theory of musicby appealing to melismatic gestures—instrumentalmusic resembles human expressive behavior via“‘melismatic gesture,’ which may include both vo-cal and physical resemblances.”35 Wollheim too,in his account of pictorial expression, argues that“there is a powerful analogy between the percep-tion of pictorial expression and the perception ofbodily expression” (1987, p. 88). How this getscashed out will require a detailed analysis of spe-cific paintings. Literature may draw upon differ-ent ways of relating inner psychological states toaesthetic elements; a listener may experience thequick rhythm of a line as corresponding to an in-crease in heart rate. A sense of anxiety or urgency,as in Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade” orthe stream-of-consciousness technique employedby Joyce in the “Penelope” episode of Ulysses,with its lack of punctuation, and run-on lines, re-flects Molly Bloom’s rambling thoughts and si-multaneously engenders in the reader a feeling ofmental chaos. These brief mentions are clearly notexhaustive, nor can they hope to be the final wordon the matter. They are meant to place Budd’s re-quirement in the larger context of the literature onartistic expression, to make the point that his thirdcriterion is one that will apply to a wide range oftheories across different genres. What a psychoan-alytic account like Wollheim’s further requires isthat complex projection will play a central role inaccounting for the correspondences between “anexternal item” and “a psychological condition.”And acceptance of this claim will depend to a largeextent on one’s acceptance of the psychoanalyticaccount of projection, its use in the psychoanalyticliterature, and an acceptance of Wollheim’s use ofit in his theory of artistic expression.

As indicated above, my defense of Wollheimis limited here to the plausibility of extending histheory to a different art form (poetry); a generaldefense of his account lies beyond the bounds ofthis article. Nevertheless, by applying Wollheim’saccount to poetry, I hope to have shown, by way ofillustration, that Wollheim’s account of expressionis indeed a plausible one. That the expressive per-ception of those properties of works of art whichare the result of the perceiver’s capacity for com-plex projection does provide at least some senseof what such an experience might be like. One of

the aims of the kinds of poetry that I maintainWordsworth (among others) was engaged in writ-ing was to provide not an account, but rather a wayof understanding or of coming to appreciate, via awork of art, what such a correspondence betweenan internal psychological condition and a piece ofthe external world might be like and how a partof the external world may be experienced in theparticular way of the poet’s. An appreciation ofthe expressive properties of the poem brings withit an understanding of the resonances between theinternal and the external and of the ways in whichthe latter is shaped and textured by the former.One cannot, I think, appreciate these poems ifone fails to understand these resonances.36

ELISA GALGUT

Department of PhilosophyUniversity of Cape TownRondebosch 7701South Africa

internet: [email protected]

1. Daniel Herwitz, Aesthetics: Key Concepts in Philoso-phy (London: Continuum, 2008), p. 102.

2. Richard Wollheim, “Expression,” in On Art and theMind (Harvard University Press, 1974), pp. 84–100, at p. 95.

3. Wollheim, “Expression,” at p. 95.4. Richard Wollheim, “Correspondence, Projective

Properties, and Expression,” in The Mind and Its Depths(Harvard University Press, 1993), pp. 144–158, at p. 155.Further references to this work will be noted in the text as1993, followed by the page number.

5. Herwitz, Aesthetics: Key Concepts in Philosophy,p. 103.

6. Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art (London:Thames and Hudson, 1987), p. 82. Further references tothis work will be noted in the text as 1987, followed by thepage number.

7. Jean Laplanche and J. B. Pontalis, The Language ofPsycho-Analysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (London:The Hogarth Press and The Institute of Psycho-Analysis,1985), p. 349.

8. Laplanche and Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-Analysis, p. 353.

9. Sarah Richmond, “Being in Others: Empathy from aPsychoanalytic Perspective,” European Journal of Philoso-phy 12 (2004): 244–264.

10. A. W. Price, “Three Types of Projectivism,” in Psy-choanalysis, Mind and Art: Perspectives on Richard Woll-heim, ed. James Hopkins and Anthony Savile (Oxford:Blackwell, 1992), pp. 110–128, at p. 116.

11. Malcolm Budd, “Wollheim on Correspondence, Pro-jective Properties, and Expressive Perception,” in RichardWollheim on the Art of Painting: Art as Representation andExpression, ed. Rob van Gerwen (Cambridge UniversityPress, 2001), pp. 101–111, at p. 109.


12. For a fuller discussion on this, see Peter Kivy, SoundSentiment (Temple University Press, 1989), pp. 226–228.

13. Budd, “Wollheim on Correspondence, ProjectiveProperties, and Expressive Perception,” p. 108.

14. Daniel Herwitz, “The Work of Art as PsychoanalyticObject: Wollheim on Manet,” The Journal of Aesthetics andArt Criticism 49 (1991): 137–153, at p. 137.

15. Although I shall not develop this point in the arti-cle, I am also inclined to take Frank Sibley’s line regardingaesthetic properties. If the relationship between aestheticproperties and nonaesthetic properties of works of art arenot rule governed, then a normal observer may see all thenonaesthetic properties of a painting while she “sees” noneof its aesthetic ones. Thus aesthetic seeing may require, butit is not reducible to, ordinary seeing.

16. William Wordsworth, “Prefaces to the Second Edi-tion of Several of the Foregoing Poems Published, with anAdditional Volume, under the Title of ‘Lyrical Ballads,’” inWordsworth: Poetical Works, ed. Thomas Hutchinson (Ox-ford University Press, 1904), p. 740.

17. James A. W. Heffernan, “Wordsworth and Dennis:The Discrimination of Feelings,” Proceedings of the ModernLanguage Association 82 (1967): 430–436, at p. 431.

18. Heffernan cites a passage from Wordsworth’s note-book, where he writes that “he could excite his own mindby recalling a past impression ‘to yet a second and a secondlife’” (“Wordsworth and Dennis,” p. 431). Of “I WanderedLonely as a Cloud,” Heffernan also notes that “Wordsworthcomposed the poem in 1804, some two years after the expe-rience which inspired it” (p. 433).

19. Although such similarities are strengthened by think-ing about a descriptive poem as though it were a kind of in-terior landscape painting, seen with the “mind’s eye” ratherthan with the literal eye, we must be careful not to drawtoo strong a connection between a painted scene, which canliterally be seen in the painting, and a poetic description,which, even if it conjures up visual imaginings, is not a caseof visual perception.

20. Wordsworth: Poetical Works, p. 149.21. In the case of Wordsworth, there is good evidence to

identify the poet with the speaker of the poem, an identi-fication we would not make when reading, say, Browning’sdramatic monologues.

22. Shakespeare’s sonnet 30, “When to the session ofsweet silent thought,” also contains a multilayered emo-tional experience; the poet’s current sadness summons up

“remembrance of things past” and reminds him of past sad-ness, which he then reexperiences in the light of his currentemotions.

23. Wordsworth: Poetical Works, p. 214.24. J. Hillis Miller, “The Still Heart: Poetic Form in

Wordsworth,” New Literary History 2 (1971): 297–310, atp. 304.

25. Hillis Miller, “The Still Heart: Poetic Form inWordsworth,” pp. 305–306.

26. Hillis Miller, “The Still Heart: Poetic Form inWordsworth,” p. 307.

27. I have, however, been at pains to avoid import-ing much biographical information into my reading ofWordsworth’s poems. Although I am in agreement withWollheim’s intentionalism, the aims of this article are tomake a defense of expressive perception that can be gener-alized to other literary works. This, I maintain, is possible,even when we do not know much about the poet’s personallife: expressive perception is enabled by formal literary ele-ments.

28. Peter Fonagy, Gyorgy Gergely, Elliot Jurist, andMary Target, Affect Regulation, Mentalization, and the De-velopment of the Self (New York: Other, 2004), p. 3.


30. Bud, “Wolheim on Correspondence, ProjectiveProperties, and Expressiev Perception,” p. 109.




34. Peter Kivy, “Feeling the Musical Emotions,”The British Journal of Aesthetics, 39 (1991): 1–13, atp. 10.

35. Aaron Ridley, “Musical Sympathies: The Experienceof Expressive Music,” The Journal of Aesthetics and ArtCriticism 53 (1995): 49–57, at p. 49.

36. This article was originally presented at the con-ference “Mind, Art and Psychoanalysis: Perspectives onRichard Wollheim,” at Heythrop College, University ofLondon, June 2008. I thank Derek Matravers, Louise Brad-dock, and the other conference participants for helpful com-ments. I also thank Daniel Herwitz for discussion on anearlier draft of this article.

Documents

Projective Properties and Expression in Literary Appreciation