Monday
To save time as I near completion of my current book project, I have been sharing chapters rather than writing new blog posts. I promise that this will be the last time I do so since the revisions are almost done. Today you get to hear about Hans Robert Jauss, who has had a significant influence on me. I wrote about Jauss a couple of years ago but have revised a number of my thoughts about him since then.
We have seen lofty claims for the changes that literature can bring about, from Percy Shelley’s contention that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world to Matthew Arnold’s assertion that literature can forestall class warfare to Brecht’s belief that it can bring about class warfare. In 1967 Hans Robert Jauss of the University of Konstanz earned his 15 minutes of scholarly fame by giving us a way to see literature-caused change in action. Look at how a great work disturbs readers, he said, and you will see audiences on the cusp of significant transformation.
Jauss (1921-77) was a member of the so-called Konstanz School, which pioneered innovative approaches to studying literature. Jauss had a dark past, spending two years on the Russian front during World War II as a youthful member of the SS, a fact he managed to keep hidden until shortly before his death. After the war, he fled from his past by immersing himself in French literature, and his belief that great literature can rewire its readers in a progressive direction may owe something to his own transformation from Nazi to scholar. The momentous power that Jauss ascribes to literature is what attracts scholars like myself to his theory.
During Jauss’s Konstanz career, he and his colleague Wolfgang Iser called their approach Reception Theory, which changed the way we see readers engaging with literary texts. Iser argues that readers essentially collaborate with the author in the realization of the work—they fill in gaps left by the author—while Jauss contends that great works change the reader’s horizon of expectations so that one can become a different person following immersion in a masterpiece. Potentially, one emerges with a broader and more complex framework through which to view the world.
Jauss is most interested in works that confront or unsettle audiences, his assumption being that readers resist change and therefore will kick back against works that demand it of them. In this he owes a debt to Bertolt Brecht’s theories about confrontational theatre and also to avant garde art, which in the 1920s judged itself by how thoroughly it scandalized the bourgeoisie. Jauss’s horizon, like Brecht’s “Weltanschauung” or world view, feels comfortable because it’s familiar whereas a great new work causes a commotion by challenging readers to change their horizon. Perhaps the work is roundly attacked because its vision demands that people abandon traditional modes of thinking and embrace new and broader ones.
Jauss looks at a work’s reception to chart its dialogue with readers: how does it challenge them and how do they push back? To determine this back and forth, one resorts to everything from personal diaries to published reviews to (in certain cases) trial transcripts and political attacks. The literary historian should also check book sales and other indirect ways of assessing impact. Finally, one can find implicit acknowledgement of the author-reader dialogue in future works by the author—how has he or she changed as a result of audience reactions?—as well as in works by his or her contemporaries.
As for literature that does not challenge readers’ horizons, Jauss calls it “culinary.” Culinary works do not stretch readers’ vision of what the form or genre could accomplish but merely satisfy what people expect. It’s as though culinary authors provide a literary Big Mac to readers who have ordered a Big Mac. More to the point, readers who come expecting a certain kind of, say, crime novel experience will be irritated if they are served anything different. Imagine their distress, or at least confusion, if after ordering Agatha Christie’s enjoyable but lightweight Partners in Crime they are instead served with Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment.
A great work may challenge readers in ways they cannot perceive. By focusing on horizon changes, Jauss’s theory resembles Thomas Kuhn’s influential idea of paradigm shifts, found in his landmark work Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). Because people see reality in a certain way, Kuhn says, they cannot accept new ideas, even when faced with compelling scientific evidence. For the longest time, Europe could not accept the ideas of Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo about the solar system because the reigning paradigm had humankind at the center of creation. Only with incessant challenges did the paradigm eventually change. Jauss’s horizons are his version of Kuhn’s paradigms. Great artists like great scientists hammer away at our understanding of reality until we come around to seeing things through their eyes.
Jauss’s major example of a horizon-changing work is Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857), which was brought up on charges of indecency. At first glance, Jauss says, the charges don’t make sense. After all, another work with a similar treatment of adultery appeared the same year to a dramatically different reception. Georges Feydeau’s all-but-forgotten novel Fanny was a smash success, going through 13 editions.
A lengthy account of Jauss’s Madame Bovary example is warranted given the insight it provides into literature’s reality-changing potential. Both Flaubert’s and Feydeau’s novels, Jauss says, “understood how to give a sensational twist to the conventional, rigid triangle which in the erotic scenes surpassed the customary details.” In Flaubert’s novel, the wife of a provincial doctor has a sordid affair with a local landowner and commits suicide after he dumps her. Feydeau, meanwhile, “has the youthful lover of [a 30-year-old woman] becoming jealous of his lover’s husband, although he has already reached the goal of his desires, and perishing over this tormenting situation.” Despite the similarities, however, Madame Bovary shook the very foundations of French society whereas Fanny did not.
Jauss locates the difference in the way the stories are told. Fanny might depict immoral actions in a titillating way, but the reader is aware of what’s right and what’s wrong and, more importantly, knows that the author knows it as well. While social rules get broken, the underlying moral structure remains intact. Because Fanny makes no real demands upon the reader’s value system—it has just provided a temporary illicit thrill before returning the reader to familiar moral grounds—the novelis a comfortable, culinary read. No horizon having been challenged, none is expanded.
Flaubert, by contrast, disturbs readers with a new style of storytelling, called “impersonal telling” or “le style indirect libre.” Instead of signaling a value system by which to judge the action, the author appears to have absented himself. Accustomed though we are to this style now (think Ernest Hemingway), it challenged the 1857 horizon of expectations. One can see why Flaubert was taken to court by examining how the prosecution responded to Emma’s ecstasy over having a lover. Here’s the offending passage:
But when she saw herself in the glass she wondered at her face. Never had her eyes been so large, so black, of so profound a depth. Something subtle about her being transfigured her. She repeated, “I have a lover! a lover!” delighting at the idea as if a second puberty had come to her. So at last she was to know those joys of love, that fever of happiness of which she had despaired! She was entering upon marvels where all would be passion, ecstasy, delirium.
As the prosecutor saw it, Flaubert seems to be glorifying adultery:
The prosecuting attorney regarded the last sentences as an objective description which included the judgement of the narrator and was upset over this “glorification of adultery,” which he considered to be even more dangerous and immoral than the misstep itself.
When we read the passage today, we know that this is not Flaubert’s opinion but Emma’s belief. We know the author has taken us into her mind. The defense in fact made exactly this argument. Readers of the time, however, were not accustomed to having the responsibility thrown upon them.
In earlier novels, omniscient authors make clear how we should assess characters and events. To cite a random example, Charles Dickens intrudes to reassure readers following the heartbreaking death of Little Nell at the conclusion of The Old Curiosity Shop (1841):
Oh! it is hard to take to heart the lesson that such deaths will teach, but let no man reject it, for it is one that all must learn, and is a mighty, universal Truth. When Death strikes down the innocent and young, for every fragile form from which he lets the panting spirit free, a hundred virtues rise, in shapes of mercy, charity, and love, to walk the world, and bless it. Of every tear that sorrowing mortals shed on such green graves, some good is born, some gentler nature comes. In the Destroyer’s steps there spring up bright creations that defy his power, and his dark path becomes a way of light to Heaven.
The issue with Flaubert is more than a new storytelling technique. If that’s all it was, then there would probably have been no trial. Indirect style, however, appeared to undermine society’s moral guardians as it shifted power to the reader. Without an author to guide them, Flaubert’s readers felt as though they were wandering in an amoral world. Looking at the case through the prosecutor’s eyes, Jauss asks,
To what authority should the case of Madame Bovary be presented if the previously valid standards of society, “public opinion, religious beliefs, public morals, good manners,” are no longer sufficient for judging this case?
As with the scientific breakthroughs that challenge Thomas Kuhn’s paradigms, masterpieces don’t change horizons all at once. For a while, novelists continued to write as they had the past. Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, which appeared five years after Madame Bovary, features an author who regularly intrudes to comment on the action and draw moral lessons. Nor did a significant mass of French citizens stop looking to society’s reigning social guardians for guidance in how to live their lives. But wheels had been set in motion for significant changes, both in the way stories were told—showing rather than telling eventually became all the rage—and in the way traditional institutions were seen.
Whether Madame Bovary made French lives better depends on who’s making the judgement. The court, tasked with upholding public morality, agreed with the prosecution that the novel undermined prevailing social standards. Without these, it feared, society was slide into Matthew Arnold’s anarchy.
On the other hand, if those institutions had become so problematic or debased that society, to renew itself, needed citizens capable of thinking outside the prevailing horizon of expectations, then we can regard Madame Bovary as a force for social progress. We’ve seen Herbert Marcuse praising the novel for exposing one-dimensional capitalism, challenging readers through its “great refusal” not to settle for less but to keep imagining the possibilities for a more fulfilling society. If Flaubert prods people to address in a substantive way the underlying causes of Emma’s longings, then he has made lives better.
Jauss’s model doesn’t work for all literature since not all works create a ruckus, let alone make court appearances. It does, however, provide insight into those works that do. Whenever one encounters a reading controversy, one can ask about the horizon of expectations that is being challenged. Even when one doesn’t agree with the attackers, one can construct their horizon to make sense of their responses. If Jauss is right that great literature changes the behavior of readers, then such reading is indeed akin to playing with dynamite.