Rembrandt, “Two Scholars Disputing (Peter and Paul)”
Friday
Yesterday, while my fellow Americans were celebrating Thanksgiving, I delivered a lecture on reader response theory to a University of Ljubljana literary theory class and then, in the early evening, attended a public interview with Irish novelist Roddy Doyle at Ljubljana’s annual book festival.
So that I wouldn’t entirely lose the holiday, however, former student Milan Mandeljc invited me over for a dinner of turkey, sweet potatoes, pumpkin soup, broccoli and brussels sprouts, and a wonderfully light persimmon mousse. His wife, children, mother, mother-in-law, and siblings were there as well, providing me with a surrogate family and prompting me to resort to my limited Slovenian. I got to be officially thankful after all.
For the lecture, colleague and friend Jason Blake asked me to focus on Stanley Fish and Hans Robert Jauss. Since Fish is most interested in who referees literary interpretation, I departed from my usual focus on how literature impacts human behavior. Instead, I talked mainly about who gets to decide whether an interpretation is right or not.
Because college students in America are writing end-of-the-semester essays at the moment, I share that part of my talk here.
Fish famously pushed the issue by asking, “Is there a text in this class?” If everyone has his or her own interpretation, can we ever arrive at agreement? Fish answered that it was indeed possible because we don’t in fact make individual interpretations but operate within interpretive communities, The community sets parameters on what we come up with, and interpretations can be judged within those parameters.
Although it’s a useful formulation, interpretive communities can themselves be problematic. In the 1950s, for instance, English departments consisted mainly of white middle class men who determined not only which interpretations were acceptable but which works were worthy of interpretation. Those who experienced works differently were simply not heard.
To be sure, this has always been the case. When Aristotle said that we experience cathartic pity and fear while watching great tragedies, he assumed that everyone shared his own reaction to Oedipus’s fall. When Elizabethan Sir Philip Sidney talked about literary satire shaming us into good behavior, he assumed everyone had his particular morals. Both men automatically assumed they speak for all audiences.
People began to question such claims of universality in the 18th century with the explosion of middle class literacy. If Henry Fielding’s narrator has a combative relationship with the imagined reader of Tom Jones, it’s because the author doesn’t know exactly who his audience is. As a result, the age witnessed the rise of the professional critic, above all Samuel Johnson, who instructed readers on how to read.
Matthew Arnold in the 19th century also regarded his task as ensuring that the working class, with his aid, would read proper literature. If they did so, they would be contented with their lot in life and not foment revolution. Shakespeare was acceptable reading but not, say, Blake and Shelley’s revolutionary poetry.
Throughout the 20th century, various movements began pushing against the reigning interpretive communities. Four illustrative examples are:
–Marxist Bertolt Brecht, who exposed “bourgeois drama” and opened our eyes to working class concerns;
–African American intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois, who made us aware of our racial biases while reading;
–feminist Judith Fetterley, whose Resisting Reader caused us to see American literature from a gendered perspective; and
–Chinua Achebe, the Nigerian novelist who called out Joseph Conrad’s stereotyped depictions of Africans.
Mainstream English departments resisted these conversations for as long as they could and, in fact, retreated into a formalism (the New Criticism) that insisted that author, reader and context were irrelevant. Only the text mattered. Beardsley and Wimsatt dismissed the author’s intention in “The Intentional Fallacy” and then dismissed the reader’s experience in “The Affective Fallacy.” At the height of New Criticism, one anthologist even published a literary collection with authors and dates removed.
Along with Marxism, feminism, and racial and post-colonialist criticism, reader response theory pushed back against New Criticism. Jauss was an important voice in that pushback, writing at one point,
Literature is not a monument that monologically reveals its timeless essence. It is much more like an orchestration that strikes ever new resonances among its readers and that frees the text from the material of the words and brings it to a contemporary existence.
Rather than strive for one definitive reading of a text, Jauss argued that interpretations are shaped by the “horizon of expectations” of the reader. By reconstructing what resonances the work struck at the time, we can make sense of past interpretations, which before we might have dismissed. In fact, we learn something new about the work.
I concluded this section of the talk by describing Jauss’s importance to me as a young scholar. By delving into the dialogue between a work and its first readers, I saw more clearly how literature is a dynamic, meaning-making process.
As a teacher, I told the Slovenian class, I look not only at how past eras have interacted with works but how my students do so as well. We each have our horizon of expectations, which shapes how we see the world, and works engage with that horizon. Those works that are light or “culinary” (to use Jauss’s descriptor) merely confirm the horizon. Great literature challenges it.
At this point I shifted from how we interpret literature to how literature changes our behavior. But that’s enough for now.
