Imagining the Tyger The Role of Mental Images in the Interpretation of Poetry

Abstract

Imagining the Tyger is a study of readers' imaginings about Blake's poem and its central figure, the Tyger. It examines how these imaginings might relate to textual images. In the course of doing this, it explores how useful it is to apply the term "image" to text features, and whether it can be given more than a fuzzy, pragmatic definition. Imagining is a term that refers to a variety of activities. The Tyger is likely to be imagined as much by re-enacting, through reading, the physical processes of its making, as through a visualization of it in an imagined "world." An analysis of how readers might respond to Blake's poem suggests that reading is more than a form of mental cinema, in which readers supplement and fill in the gaps in a narrative by their own imaginings. This view arises from an identification of imagining with visualizing, together with a confusion between the process of reading and more studied reflection upon a text. This study draws on information from psychology and philosophy about imagining and text comprehension. It argues that this material has been overlooked by literary critics, who have relied on the intuitions provided by "folk psychology" and their own introspections. This has been particularly evident in the work of reader-response critics and has led to mistaken ideas about what happens during reading and how people arrive at literary judgments. Blake's poem is studied because almost every critic who has written about Blake has had something to say about "The Tyger." These two hundred years of commentary on this poem provide much of the data for the present analysis. The principal finding is that commentators very often present complex "imaginative realizations" of Blake's words. These go far beyond the usual limits of paraphrase and are elaborative inferences that are highly personal. Although their authors may attempt to explain them by giving reasons for them they cannot be regarded as inferences that any reader might make from the text. "Imaginative realizations" are expressions of the imaginings provoked by Blake's lines. They are often presented as though they are self-evident and it is only upon examination that it becomes clear that they are personal and elaborative. However, it is argued here that such responses are subtle forms of interpretation that bring together reactions to many aspects of a poem in a single, complex judgment. Whether other readers find them satisfying will depend on whether they are given enough context for them to attempt to "realize" the words in a similar fashion themselves. Reader-response and deconstructionist theorists may acknowledge that readers impose meanings on texts or texts themselves are indeterminate in meaning. In practice, however, analyses that come from these perspectives are closely bound to the words themselves. In this study, by contrast, it is argued that significant literary judgments may not be able to be related to identifiable text features. The criteria for satisfaction with such judgments are also ill-specified and are likely to remain so. This is demonstrated by a consideration of the Tyger. Because it is a symbolic figure, any "imaginative realization" of its role will always fall short of completeness, though other readers may find such "realizations" more or less satisfying. Like all judgments that are a form of paraphrase, "imaginative realizations," even Blake's own illustration for "The Tyger," are launched from another unstable version, the poem itself