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Apr 09, 2013 | #1
Theory: The How's and Why's of Literature
So far, the literary theories we have been discussing are centered on one half of the reading encounter ... the text. Some of the earlier schools, like Russian Formalism and New Criticism, wanted to make the task of literary studies the analysis of texts, period, with no real consideration of other factors. Later theoretical approaches, like Feminism, Marxism, and Postcolonialism, wanted to open up the discussion of texts to considerations of gender, class, and culture. Deconstruction and other offshoots of Poststructuralism strove to unbalance all of the stable readings and meanings that the other theoretical approaches could provide, casting ultimate doubt on the inherent or objective truth value of critical or theoretical statements and evaluations. None of them, however, has brought the necessary agent of reading to the center of the discussion. This is where Reader Response theory comes in, and why, in part, it was developed.
Many of us tend to think of the study of literature as the examination of written words and the events, characters, and stylistic devices employed in their combination. Literature, it is acknowledged, can say something about a given society, a social group, and even provide some insight into the .big questions': Why do people act as they do? Why do good things happen to bad people? How can the just be punished while sinners are rewarded? There is no doubt that all of these considerations go into the study of literature. However, Reader Response theory also wants to include the act of reading in the consideration of how texts actually come to mean something to us. A central question of Reader Response is why people read, what motivates someone to pick up a book or a poem and engage with it in the first place. Another key consideration is how people read. How do I process the words on the page in such a way that I become involved in the story, and forget about the world around me for a time? What is it that a reader must bring to the table in order for a story to happen?
Part of the reason Reader Response theory came to be considered so late in the game (compared to other ways of looking at literature) is that the act of reading seems to happen so effortlessly. From the time we can remember anything at all, we have seen people reading. Here in the West, we begin reading before the age of five, and to not have the ability to read is considered a terrible impairment. We are surrounded with stories, poems, plays, and all manner of texts throughout the course of our lives. It is no wonder, then, that the act of reading seems too simple to bother investigating. After all, someone writes words on page, which create a story or image of some kind. I read the words, and I am able to know the story, image, and message that have been placed there. In this reckoning, reading and writing literary texts is a straightforward matter of communication. However, the reading process is just not this straightforward. Evidence for this exists in the wide individual variation in understanding, interpretation, and feeling readers have when engaging literary texts. Ask any five people what they thought of a given book, and you will get five different (though still related) responses. Clearly, if the process were as straightforward as one might think, there would be far less room for such divergences. It is in searching for the reasons behind these different experiences, which still retain a common core, that Reader Response theory proves its value.
Looking back through the history of literary theory, we can see several key figures who paid significant enough attention to the reader to warrant inclusion within the 'pre-history' of Reader Response theory. The first thinker most often cited in this context is Aristotle, whose Poetics still stands as the foundational document for literary studies in the west. Aristotle's primary concern in the poetics was the dominant literary art form of his time: the dramatic tragedy. Using Sophocles' Oedipus Rex (Oedipus the King) as a case study, Aristotle lays out a model structure for tragedy which takes account of the audience.
Although Aristotle goes to great lengths to specify the textual and rhetorical devices and structures that go into creating a dramatic work, all of these are important not simply for themselves, but because they contribute to an experience the audience undergoes while observing the spectacle. Unlike far more recent schools (like most of Russian Formalism, New Criticism, Structuralism, and Poststructuralism), Aristotle refused to keep separate the features of the texts he explored and the living presence they had in Greek society. Unless the various devices and methods discovered had correlates in the actual experience of people regarding the play, such technical description would fail utterly to account for what he believed was important in literature: the power to move people. The importance of the power of words and narratives to change people was central to another Greek discipline which Aristotle also had a lot to say about, namely, rhetoric. Rhetoric, by definition, is the art of persuasion through language and gesture.
The Greek's fascination with rhetoric supports the contention that they were far more interested in the reader, listener, and audience than almost any crop of thinkers which followed them. The study of rhetorical devices might seem highly technical to the contemporary student (indeed, some of the most challenging terms on the list we presented earlier come directly from Greek, and later Roman, rhetorical study), but note that rhetoric is impossible unless the listener, reader, or audience is taken into consideration. Given rhetorical devices are valuable and interesting in as far as they have effects on the listener. Separated from this purpose, rhetoric ceases to exist, and becomes an exercise in linguistics.
The centerpiece of Aristotle's audience-affect theory is catharsis, a term we have reviewed in a previous series, but which can be quickly re-identified as the experience of emotional release, of affective shift which takes a person into a powerful intensity and then opens them up to letting go this pent-up storm of feeling. It invites interaction and involvement with the drama, but also personal reflection and self-change. Indeed, this might have been one of the main social functions of Greek tragedy. Soldiers, long away from home in foreign wars would return to Athens for the annual drama festival. The featured plays provided a symbolic anchor which enabled the soldiers to understand how their dual roles as soldiers and citizens/family members meshed together, and invited them to consider the common significances every human being considers most important. In this way, the tragedies serve as a kind of group therapy, or even better, cultural attunement therapy. The common experience of the drama enabled the literal and symbolic re-integration of the soldiers into the life of the community. Further, the experience helped the men to find symbols and metaphors that could help them to identify and deal with the horrors they faced on the battlefield. Clearly, Greek tragedy was no 'art for art's sake,' but a powerful cultural force whose study, as Aristotle recognized, had to make the listener central.
Although many individuals and small movements within the world of literature and its study have adopted approaches which took some account of the reader after Aristotle (like the Romantic poet and critic Samuel Taylor Coleridge with his focus on imagination or fancy, or Modernist poet and critic T.S. Eliot with his previously discussed notion of the objective correlative), none have systematically investigated the role of the reader in the construction of textual meaning and experience until the middle of the 20th century, with the rise of Reader Response theory. Many figures, including Hans-Georg Gadamer, and his student Hans-Robert Jauss, pioneered the aesthetics of reception, and formed the foundation for a reader-focused literary theory. However, the most illuminating and comprehensible early figure in Reader Response theory is Jauss's classmate and Gadamer's student, Wolfgang Iser. By reviewing his central concepts, we can develop a strong grasp of the issues at stake for Reader Response theory in general.
For Iser, literature should not be studied in terms of what it is, or even what it means (in the sense of interpretations or paraphrases of its content) but rather in terms of what it does. Thinking back to the Greeks, we can see that Iser shares their concern with the functions of a text in the context of actual human experience. In order to find out what a text does, it is not sufficient (or even particularly helpful) for a literary scholar to perform a detailed interpretation of a literary text; this is merely an attempt to explain the text in its own terms, or to make explicit the meanings and themes that are not explicitly stated or connected in the text itself. While these kinds of readings may be interesting for some, or may illuminate some aspect of the text in question, they tell us very little about the effects the text has on its readers. For Iser, this is equivalent to studying rhetoric without regard for its ability to persuade or change listeners. Literature cannot be properly considered out of its experienced context, because literature, by definition, can not exist in the absence of a reader. This is stronger than the simple claim that we would not know literature existed unless people read it. Rather, the words on the page do not constitute literature until a constituting consciousness takes them in. Words are signals and instructions prompting us to create situations, feelings, and meanings. This is what literature does, and further, does in such a way that my very self can change in the encounter.
It is the idea of encounter that most powerfully sets Iser (and Reader Response theory in general) apart from other ways of considering literary art. For most schools of thought, the literature itself, the text itself, or the words on the page are the objective entity which is primary focus of literary studies. It contains everything it needs to be considered a work of literature, and its various sections cohere in a meaningful structure. Further, every text is the same for everyone who reads it, which means that literary critics can evaluate their arguments with reference to an objectively stable body. This is said to give a grounding and validity to literary study. Even for Deconstruction, it is the text itself which is full of the holes and contradictions which cause its clear meaning to collapse under the weight of its inescapable meaning deferral. In either case, while the conclusions differ, the target is the same. The reader is simply an accident, a perfunctory eavesdropper who never manages to know enough, and whose experience is so utterly subjective that nothing he or she could say would be of any value to a scholar concerned with literature.
Unlike the text-focused model, however, Iser prefers a model that focuses on the encounter, or interface, between text and reader. To focus primarily on the text, as we have seen, is standard literary practice, and would provide nothing new or interesting. The other alternative, a focus squarely on the reader at the expense of the text, would be almost equally dangerous. In fact, if the literary text moves away from a place of central concern, you have moved out of the realm of literary studies, and into another discipline altogether. You can do a psychology, sociology, or even a history of reading without much concern for specific literary texts, but you cease to do literary studies when the reader becomes your sole concern.
Thus, Iser and other Reader Response theorists have to do a careful balancing act between the text and reader, accounting for each at each stage of the reading process, and never elevating one above the other. With this important balance in mind, we can outline some of Iser's most important distinctions without falling into the trap of believing that any of them tells the whole story of the interactive reading process.
A concept at the heart of Iser's concerns is what he refers to as the repertoire. This consists of all the familiar things that we find in a literary text, including social norms, and literary norms. Social norms are the aspects of the social world in the literary text that regulate how individuals interact with each other. Most of the time, the social norms of the text are highly comparable to our own, unless the text is set in a time in the distant past (or, as in science fiction, in the distant future). Even in these cases, the social norms presented are seldom so strange to us that we cannot make any sense of them. In the case of ancient Greek literature, although it was composed by and about people more then 2500 years ago, we still grasp what is going on, and what is at stake, even if we wouldn't react the same way to similar situations today. So, when Agamemnon the king is forced to decide between failing as a king and breaking his word, and failing as a father by sacrificing his daughter, we can understand the dilemma because the social norms in play are still valid for us today. He chooses to honor his duty as king above his duty as a father, and while many of us might not do the same, the norms in play are comprehensible.
Literary norms, on the other hand, include those elements of literature which we have become familiar with over time. An excellent example is genre. If, for instance, you read the following line in a story: 'Seventy million identical steel smiles shocked the planet into submission' you'd likely have no trouble deducing that you were in the midst of a science fiction tale. Like the social norms present within a literary work, the literary norms are also present within the work - in both instances, the text provides the necessary elements to allow a familiar structure to emerge. I cannot arbitrarily decide that the text is science fiction unless the repertoire of the text allows for that possibility. Note, however, that the fact Iser belies the repertoire is located within the text does not mean that the reader has no role in constructing it. On the contrary, without the reader, the textual constructions remain inert. Only the realization of the reader can bring them to life.
Iser's term for the reader's activating or 'bringing to life' the various elements present in the textual repertoire is realization. It is obvious that while a text emulates a world, it does not present a coherent reality. The text, after all, consists of words on a page that are meaningless outside the context a reader brings to them. In the act of reading, the reader makes a text real, makes its world live, and in so doing, sets it alongside the actual world to be compared and contrasted. It is the reader's task (although it isn't usually very conscious, difficult work) to put all of the elements of the repertoire of the text together in a meaningful, coherent way. This will often be a very automatic process, but note that every text allows itself to be read in different ways, which means that readers take the same textual elements of the repertoire and combine them in different ways, all of which still manage to make sense. In this way of thinking, although it is possible to talk about a single text, it is impossible to talk about the 'right' reading. Since realization occurs in each reading encounter, and since every text affords multiple valid, coherent realizations, there simply cannot be a single 'right' reading.
An example will serve to make the relationship between repertoire and realization more clear. In the story I am reading, a man is driving across the prairies in search of his missing horse. He is a cowboy, and he drives a ford truck. Along the way, he buys a pack of chewing tobacco and eats a meal at a diner. Finally, he arrives at the Stampede, and a woman he meets in a bar leads him to his horse. He shoots the men who have stolen it, and rides it off into the sunset, leaving his car for the woman who helped him.
As you can see, although there is story material to work with here, there are multiple ways this material (the repertoire) can be realized in a given reading encounter. For instance, a reader from a large eastern American city might read this story as a classic western, set in America during the first half of the 1900s. The social norms which make this reading possible include 1) the validity of 'cowboy' as a regular occupation 2) horses as worth killing for 3) limited technology at work- Ford (an American company) has been making trucks for decades 4) people interact in a casual, unsophisticated way that fits my idea of early 1900s farm culture.
The literary norms at play here include 1) the cowboy and his horse, staples of the old western 2) disputes are settled with gun-violence, the good-guy winning out 3) the hero rides off into the sunset to end the story happily. So, the social and literary norms present in the text are combined by me into a coherent structure that makes sense of everything in light of everything else. The social and literary norms, keep in mind, are not separated in my realization of the story. In fact, they work into each other. I imagine the story set in the early 1900s, not only because of the various social roles and technologies portrayed, but also because I know that westerns are usually set in this period or before, as a literary convention. Based on my combination (realization) of the raw social and literary materials (the repertoire) presented, a reading emerges that both adheres to the text, and still remains uniquely my own.
One might object at this point that, given the limited about of material described about the story (a tiny repertoire indeed), no other basic readings seem likely, or even possible. In some cases, I admit, you have to look at relatively fine details in the story to find where differences in realizations come from. In this one, however, even though you have only been given a paragraph's worth of the repertoire, it is easy to come up with a very compelling alternate realization that accounts for all of the aspects of the text presented.
Imagine, this time, that instead of a reader from a major city in eastern America, the same story is being read by a contemporary rural farmer in north-western Canada. First of all, he is likely to set the story in western Canada, since there is a vast stretch of prairie there, and it is known for its cowboys. Also, the 'Stampede' will very likely be seen as 'The Calgary Stampede,' which is the major western cultural event of the year. Further, the time of the story is likely to be reported as the present day, or the very near past (even the very near future is a possibility!), since the lifestyle, norms, and technologies represented are consistent with contemporary farm life. Finally, even the literary categorization of 'Western' isn't left in its secure certainty. After all, we are more likely to refer to a story that describes the world we now live in as 'realistic fiction,' or at least a modern adventure, romance, or action story. As this example makes clear, regardless of the repertoire presented by the text, each reader will bring a different, and not necessarily less coherent, realization to bear in order bring it to life.
How is it that a text, which seemingly creates a story and a coherent world by itself, can be read in such different ways? The preceding example shows that the perception we have of a text as a coherent and closed simulation of reality is false, or better, is true only within perception, where our cognitive and affective faculties take up the affordances provided by the text and structure them into a patterned whole. Think for a moment about the incredible thickness of reality: at every moment, there is more going on than a single person could possibly take into consideration, and there is more going on in a given person's consideration than one could ever hope to (or for that matter want to!) record in a text. A literary text, then, far from being a self-sufficient whole, is simply a very thin slice of reality, and even then, each segment of the slice is not always connected to the one next to it. The reason a text can seem like a whole (as it does when we read it) is that we bring an entire world to bear on the scanty information we are presented with by the text. We enter the text by assuming, from the outset, that the world it presents is the same as our world. Of course, it never is, but we persist in this belief until we are directed to believe otherwise by the text. This is known as the Principle of Minimal Departure (Marie Laure Ryan coined this useful term), and it is the default assumption that allows us to flesh out the repertoire of the text.
Any reading encounter must take the facts of the text into account. For instance, in the example we have been using, the protagonist is a cowboy. This is not up for debate, and in anyone's reading, the hero will be identified with that kind of character. However, Iser points out, as we did above, that the text is not complete unto itself, and it leaves many gaps which the reader must fill in or jump across. The most obvious kind of gap is the left-out linking plot detail. For example, we are told our cowboy hero tracked down his horse and shot the thieves. Now, how did he do this? Well, we have been told he has a car, so we can assume he drove to where they were. Of course, if it was nearby, he could have walked. Unless, of course, the helpful girl drove him there herself?. As you can see, the story often leaves these details to the imagination. Strictly speaking, even the shooting of the thieves leaves a gap for us to fill. What did he shoot them with? We assume that, his being a cowboy, he used a gun. However, the text says nothing about this. Technically, he could have finished off his foes with a crossbow.
Of course, you might be objecting, these gaps are either unimportant (who cares how he got to the thieves?) or unmistakably obvious (of course he used a gun!). I will gladly grant both points, so long as we keep in mind that the reader is doing the filling, or realizing, and that different readers will diverge at different gaps. Another kind of gap, which is far more likely to produce differences between readers, and generate interest, is ambiguity. Take, for instance, the following lines: 'Henry's eyes fixed too-wide on the shadowy figure moving above him. The other guests, startled by his trance, squinted into the ceiling but could only conclude that the old man was delirious or epileptic. Except for Molly. She smiled up at her mother floating gently over the party.' Clearly, the ambiguity here is thick.
We begin, by default, with Henry's perspective. Without any evidence to the contrary, we likely believe he is actually seeing something real. Some of us, very skeptical even in literary worlds, might immediately suspect the man is simply imagining what he is seeing. Depending on our stance during the first line, the next sentence comes in to affirm or weaken it. The other guests, though they can clearly see Henry is transfixed in the presence of something, cannot see what it is, or even that there is anything to look at. This clearly affirms the 'hallucination' reading. However, this position is sabotaged by the next line, where Molly (who, for some reason, I take to be a little girl) also sees something gliding across the ceiling. So, who's right? What's your interpretation? Is this question even decidable based on the information given?
Here, we have a gap that must be filled by any reader who reads this story. It is impossible not to notice the competing perspectives, and settling on one or the other (at least until new information makes the old perspective less believable) is inevitable for any reader. The constant revision and correction in the face of this demanding gap is what powers the reader's experience of the story, and it is in this way that the author, by leaving gaps in specific, important places, can draw readers in without determining which way they eventually decide to go. Indeed, one could argue that the gaps in literary works are what make them most enjoyable: imagine a story that tried to fill in as many gaps as it could, so that as far as possible, one main reading would have to be followed. This would make a good technical manual, but a terrible story.
It is obvious that there is an interaction taking place between individual readers and given texts - as we have been discussing, the interface between the text's repertoire and the reader's realization takes place within the gaps every text must leave to be filled. However, not all texts, and not all readers, are created equal. Shakespearian Tragedy is not Classic Western, and James Joyce is not J.K. Rowling. Personally, I love modernist prose and poetry. My friend enjoys romance novels. Clearly, aside from the specific gaps a reader must fill in a given text, there is a pattern or style of response that characterizes what sorts of text a person will want to read in the first place, and how that person will realize the text.
Texts that are termed 'difficult' are ones that leave large gaps full of ambiguities that the reader must work through. Such literature resists easy assimilation to previously established patterns of meaning, and challenges us to make sense of everything. A classic example is the often cited novel Ulysses by James Joyce. Because of its experimental form, it requires the reader to do a great deal of work. Another example is William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, where the first chapter especially, narrated from the perspective of a mentally challenged man, presents great difficulties for a reader striving to construct a coherent narrative.
On the other side of the coin, we have creative genres that most often do not present much ambiguity, which means that there are fewer and smaller gaps to be filled by the reader. Much popular genre fiction fits this bill, tending to extend itself into book series that run into the dozens. Romances, mysteries, westerns, detective fiction, and sci-fi all lend themselves to reading experiences that present few challenges to the reader, but which provide for a smooth and rapid reading experience.
The sort of literature a given reader prefers is largely determined, according to Iser, by their tolerance for ambiguity. If I tolerate and even enjoy a great deal of ambiguity, I'll gravitate toward forms that give me opportunities to fill in large gaps. If, on the other hand, I dislike ambiguity, I'll stick primarily with texts that take a smoother, less gappy course. When a reader feels he or she is not being given enough to do by the text, as when a high-ambiguity-tolerance reader is given a very straightforward text to read, Iser calls this situation, appropriately enough, boredom. When a reader feels he or she is being given too much to do, as when a low-ambiguity-tolerance reader is given a very gappy, challenging text, the result is overstrain.
The task of the writer, in the face of the boredom-overstrain restrictions they face when their texts are confronted by readers, is to pitch their work somewhere between the extremes of the two poles. A work which is incredibly taxing will be little read. A work which is completely untaxing is unlikely to be enjoyed. A further implication that arises is that literary works will not necessarily remain in a stable position on the continuum. What was second nature for Homer's or Shakespeare's audience is almost baffling for contemporary readers. On the other side of this coin, when T.S. Eliot originally published his long poem The Waste Land, or when Coleridge published The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, readers did not know what to make of them. Now, they both seem far more accessible, and given time, may begin to seem very easy. By considering the audience, Reader Response criticism reveals that no literary work can remain completely stable over time, because readers, who form one half of the reading encounter, are in cultures which are constantly on the move.
A concern for readers is shared by another prominent critic and theorist, Stanley Fish, who is contemporary with Wolfgang Iser. While they often disagree about specifics, their focus on the reader in the construction of the meaning of the text puts them firmly together in the field of Reader Response theory. To compare them in the broadest strokes for ease of understanding where they diverge from each other, Iser attempts to create a reading model that gives equal weight to the text and the reader. For Fish, the 'little black marks on the page' are obviously necessary, but the real creative power, and the real interest for literary studies, rests with the reader.
One of Fish's most powerful ideas is known as the principle of interpretive closure. This principle states that readers will attempt to construct a stable, complete interpretation as quickly as possible during the reading process. An example from poetry will illustrate this most clearly. Imagine you are beginning a poem, and read the following line: 'The last jackhammers of the dawn persist' The strange image suggests that the jackhammers continue hammering through the dawn. There may not be many of them left (they are the last ones, after all), but they show no sign of stopping the noise they are creating. One can imagine the complete irritation of the nearby inhabitants who, after what was likely a sleepless night, are forced to listen to the terrible hammering through their morning coffees.
Of course, the poem then continues as follows, on the next line: 'in silence, an empty sunrise laying mute the sky.' Well, weren't we wrong in our original take on the opening situation! Rather than persisting as we would normally expect, with noise, the jackhammers are persisting in silence. This suggests an image of the jackhammers laying unused, perhaps at a vacant construction site at the beginning of the day. It also implies that, far from being sleepless, the inhabitants living nearby were not kept up at all by the noisy hammering we originally imagined. The scene, in the space of a couple of words, shifts radically from a cacophony of epic proportions to an almost eerie stillness. By following my natural inclination for interpretive closure as soon as the text seems to permit it, I have unwittingly constructed a scene that I must now completely revise.
Of course, as you might have guessed, Stanley Fish is not suggesting that readers are generally fools who rush into texts inappropriately, and who should take more measured steps so that they do not make mistakes which will only lead to confusion. Instead, Fish believes that poets are aware of the ways readers move quickly to interpretive closure (because they are readers who do this themselves!), and as a result, they exploit this very natural tendency to create meaning in their works. In short, the poem takes advantage of your natural tendency in an effort to make you slip up.
You might be asking why in the world an author would attempt to confuse his or her readers with these kinds of devices. Well, think about what the poet is attempting to do. He or she is not merely attempting to convey, unambiguously, some facts or information to the person who is reading the poem. If that were the case, they could simply write a quick newspaper-like article which captures the gist. Instead, the poem is attempting to lay down a text that provides opportunities for readers to engage in a certain kind of rich experience that goes far beyond the transfer of knowledge. The poet uses whatever tools are at his or her disposal to affect the reader.
Reader Response Theory
So far, the literary theories we have been discussing are centered on one half of the reading encounter ... the text. Some of the earlier schools, like Russian Formalism and New Criticism, wanted to make the task of literary studies the analysis of texts, period, with no real consideration of other factors. Later theoretical approaches, like Feminism, Marxism, and Postcolonialism, wanted to open up the discussion of texts to considerations of gender, class, and culture. Deconstruction and other offshoots of Poststructuralism strove to unbalance all of the stable readings and meanings that the other theoretical approaches could provide, casting ultimate doubt on the inherent or objective truth value of critical or theoretical statements and evaluations. None of them, however, has brought the necessary agent of reading to the center of the discussion. This is where Reader Response theory comes in, and why, in part, it was developed.
Many of us tend to think of the study of literature as the examination of written words and the events, characters, and stylistic devices employed in their combination. Literature, it is acknowledged, can say something about a given society, a social group, and even provide some insight into the .big questions': Why do people act as they do? Why do good things happen to bad people? How can the just be punished while sinners are rewarded? There is no doubt that all of these considerations go into the study of literature. However, Reader Response theory also wants to include the act of reading in the consideration of how texts actually come to mean something to us. A central question of Reader Response is why people read, what motivates someone to pick up a book or a poem and engage with it in the first place. Another key consideration is how people read. How do I process the words on the page in such a way that I become involved in the story, and forget about the world around me for a time? What is it that a reader must bring to the table in order for a story to happen?Part of the reason Reader Response theory came to be considered so late in the game (compared to other ways of looking at literature) is that the act of reading seems to happen so effortlessly. From the time we can remember anything at all, we have seen people reading. Here in the West, we begin reading before the age of five, and to not have the ability to read is considered a terrible impairment. We are surrounded with stories, poems, plays, and all manner of texts throughout the course of our lives. It is no wonder, then, that the act of reading seems too simple to bother investigating. After all, someone writes words on page, which create a story or image of some kind. I read the words, and I am able to know the story, image, and message that have been placed there. In this reckoning, reading and writing literary texts is a straightforward matter of communication. However, the reading process is just not this straightforward. Evidence for this exists in the wide individual variation in understanding, interpretation, and feeling readers have when engaging literary texts. Ask any five people what they thought of a given book, and you will get five different (though still related) responses. Clearly, if the process were as straightforward as one might think, there would be far less room for such divergences. It is in searching for the reasons behind these different experiences, which still retain a common core, that Reader Response theory proves its value.
Looking back through the history of literary theory, we can see several key figures who paid significant enough attention to the reader to warrant inclusion within the 'pre-history' of Reader Response theory. The first thinker most often cited in this context is Aristotle, whose Poetics still stands as the foundational document for literary studies in the west. Aristotle's primary concern in the poetics was the dominant literary art form of his time: the dramatic tragedy. Using Sophocles' Oedipus Rex (Oedipus the King) as a case study, Aristotle lays out a model structure for tragedy which takes account of the audience.
Although Aristotle goes to great lengths to specify the textual and rhetorical devices and structures that go into creating a dramatic work, all of these are important not simply for themselves, but because they contribute to an experience the audience undergoes while observing the spectacle. Unlike far more recent schools (like most of Russian Formalism, New Criticism, Structuralism, and Poststructuralism), Aristotle refused to keep separate the features of the texts he explored and the living presence they had in Greek society. Unless the various devices and methods discovered had correlates in the actual experience of people regarding the play, such technical description would fail utterly to account for what he believed was important in literature: the power to move people. The importance of the power of words and narratives to change people was central to another Greek discipline which Aristotle also had a lot to say about, namely, rhetoric. Rhetoric, by definition, is the art of persuasion through language and gesture.
The Greek's fascination with rhetoric supports the contention that they were far more interested in the reader, listener, and audience than almost any crop of thinkers which followed them. The study of rhetorical devices might seem highly technical to the contemporary student (indeed, some of the most challenging terms on the list we presented earlier come directly from Greek, and later Roman, rhetorical study), but note that rhetoric is impossible unless the listener, reader, or audience is taken into consideration. Given rhetorical devices are valuable and interesting in as far as they have effects on the listener. Separated from this purpose, rhetoric ceases to exist, and becomes an exercise in linguistics.
The centerpiece of Aristotle's audience-affect theory is catharsis, a term we have reviewed in a previous series, but which can be quickly re-identified as the experience of emotional release, of affective shift which takes a person into a powerful intensity and then opens them up to letting go this pent-up storm of feeling. It invites interaction and involvement with the drama, but also personal reflection and self-change. Indeed, this might have been one of the main social functions of Greek tragedy. Soldiers, long away from home in foreign wars would return to Athens for the annual drama festival. The featured plays provided a symbolic anchor which enabled the soldiers to understand how their dual roles as soldiers and citizens/family members meshed together, and invited them to consider the common significances every human being considers most important. In this way, the tragedies serve as a kind of group therapy, or even better, cultural attunement therapy. The common experience of the drama enabled the literal and symbolic re-integration of the soldiers into the life of the community. Further, the experience helped the men to find symbols and metaphors that could help them to identify and deal with the horrors they faced on the battlefield. Clearly, Greek tragedy was no 'art for art's sake,' but a powerful cultural force whose study, as Aristotle recognized, had to make the listener central.
Although many individuals and small movements within the world of literature and its study have adopted approaches which took some account of the reader after Aristotle (like the Romantic poet and critic Samuel Taylor Coleridge with his focus on imagination or fancy, or Modernist poet and critic T.S. Eliot with his previously discussed notion of the objective correlative), none have systematically investigated the role of the reader in the construction of textual meaning and experience until the middle of the 20th century, with the rise of Reader Response theory. Many figures, including Hans-Georg Gadamer, and his student Hans-Robert Jauss, pioneered the aesthetics of reception, and formed the foundation for a reader-focused literary theory. However, the most illuminating and comprehensible early figure in Reader Response theory is Jauss's classmate and Gadamer's student, Wolfgang Iser. By reviewing his central concepts, we can develop a strong grasp of the issues at stake for Reader Response theory in general.
For Iser, literature should not be studied in terms of what it is, or even what it means (in the sense of interpretations or paraphrases of its content) but rather in terms of what it does. Thinking back to the Greeks, we can see that Iser shares their concern with the functions of a text in the context of actual human experience. In order to find out what a text does, it is not sufficient (or even particularly helpful) for a literary scholar to perform a detailed interpretation of a literary text; this is merely an attempt to explain the text in its own terms, or to make explicit the meanings and themes that are not explicitly stated or connected in the text itself. While these kinds of readings may be interesting for some, or may illuminate some aspect of the text in question, they tell us very little about the effects the text has on its readers. For Iser, this is equivalent to studying rhetoric without regard for its ability to persuade or change listeners. Literature cannot be properly considered out of its experienced context, because literature, by definition, can not exist in the absence of a reader. This is stronger than the simple claim that we would not know literature existed unless people read it. Rather, the words on the page do not constitute literature until a constituting consciousness takes them in. Words are signals and instructions prompting us to create situations, feelings, and meanings. This is what literature does, and further, does in such a way that my very self can change in the encounter.
It is the idea of encounter that most powerfully sets Iser (and Reader Response theory in general) apart from other ways of considering literary art. For most schools of thought, the literature itself, the text itself, or the words on the page are the objective entity which is primary focus of literary studies. It contains everything it needs to be considered a work of literature, and its various sections cohere in a meaningful structure. Further, every text is the same for everyone who reads it, which means that literary critics can evaluate their arguments with reference to an objectively stable body. This is said to give a grounding and validity to literary study. Even for Deconstruction, it is the text itself which is full of the holes and contradictions which cause its clear meaning to collapse under the weight of its inescapable meaning deferral. In either case, while the conclusions differ, the target is the same. The reader is simply an accident, a perfunctory eavesdropper who never manages to know enough, and whose experience is so utterly subjective that nothing he or she could say would be of any value to a scholar concerned with literature.
Unlike the text-focused model, however, Iser prefers a model that focuses on the encounter, or interface, between text and reader. To focus primarily on the text, as we have seen, is standard literary practice, and would provide nothing new or interesting. The other alternative, a focus squarely on the reader at the expense of the text, would be almost equally dangerous. In fact, if the literary text moves away from a place of central concern, you have moved out of the realm of literary studies, and into another discipline altogether. You can do a psychology, sociology, or even a history of reading without much concern for specific literary texts, but you cease to do literary studies when the reader becomes your sole concern.
Thus, Iser and other Reader Response theorists have to do a careful balancing act between the text and reader, accounting for each at each stage of the reading process, and never elevating one above the other. With this important balance in mind, we can outline some of Iser's most important distinctions without falling into the trap of believing that any of them tells the whole story of the interactive reading process.
A concept at the heart of Iser's concerns is what he refers to as the repertoire. This consists of all the familiar things that we find in a literary text, including social norms, and literary norms. Social norms are the aspects of the social world in the literary text that regulate how individuals interact with each other. Most of the time, the social norms of the text are highly comparable to our own, unless the text is set in a time in the distant past (or, as in science fiction, in the distant future). Even in these cases, the social norms presented are seldom so strange to us that we cannot make any sense of them. In the case of ancient Greek literature, although it was composed by and about people more then 2500 years ago, we still grasp what is going on, and what is at stake, even if we wouldn't react the same way to similar situations today. So, when Agamemnon the king is forced to decide between failing as a king and breaking his word, and failing as a father by sacrificing his daughter, we can understand the dilemma because the social norms in play are still valid for us today. He chooses to honor his duty as king above his duty as a father, and while many of us might not do the same, the norms in play are comprehensible.
Literary norms, on the other hand, include those elements of literature which we have become familiar with over time. An excellent example is genre. If, for instance, you read the following line in a story: 'Seventy million identical steel smiles shocked the planet into submission' you'd likely have no trouble deducing that you were in the midst of a science fiction tale. Like the social norms present within a literary work, the literary norms are also present within the work - in both instances, the text provides the necessary elements to allow a familiar structure to emerge. I cannot arbitrarily decide that the text is science fiction unless the repertoire of the text allows for that possibility. Note, however, that the fact Iser belies the repertoire is located within the text does not mean that the reader has no role in constructing it. On the contrary, without the reader, the textual constructions remain inert. Only the realization of the reader can bring them to life.
Iser's term for the reader's activating or 'bringing to life' the various elements present in the textual repertoire is realization. It is obvious that while a text emulates a world, it does not present a coherent reality. The text, after all, consists of words on a page that are meaningless outside the context a reader brings to them. In the act of reading, the reader makes a text real, makes its world live, and in so doing, sets it alongside the actual world to be compared and contrasted. It is the reader's task (although it isn't usually very conscious, difficult work) to put all of the elements of the repertoire of the text together in a meaningful, coherent way. This will often be a very automatic process, but note that every text allows itself to be read in different ways, which means that readers take the same textual elements of the repertoire and combine them in different ways, all of which still manage to make sense. In this way of thinking, although it is possible to talk about a single text, it is impossible to talk about the 'right' reading. Since realization occurs in each reading encounter, and since every text affords multiple valid, coherent realizations, there simply cannot be a single 'right' reading.
An example will serve to make the relationship between repertoire and realization more clear. In the story I am reading, a man is driving across the prairies in search of his missing horse. He is a cowboy, and he drives a ford truck. Along the way, he buys a pack of chewing tobacco and eats a meal at a diner. Finally, he arrives at the Stampede, and a woman he meets in a bar leads him to his horse. He shoots the men who have stolen it, and rides it off into the sunset, leaving his car for the woman who helped him.
As you can see, although there is story material to work with here, there are multiple ways this material (the repertoire) can be realized in a given reading encounter. For instance, a reader from a large eastern American city might read this story as a classic western, set in America during the first half of the 1900s. The social norms which make this reading possible include 1) the validity of 'cowboy' as a regular occupation 2) horses as worth killing for 3) limited technology at work- Ford (an American company) has been making trucks for decades 4) people interact in a casual, unsophisticated way that fits my idea of early 1900s farm culture.
The literary norms at play here include 1) the cowboy and his horse, staples of the old western 2) disputes are settled with gun-violence, the good-guy winning out 3) the hero rides off into the sunset to end the story happily. So, the social and literary norms present in the text are combined by me into a coherent structure that makes sense of everything in light of everything else. The social and literary norms, keep in mind, are not separated in my realization of the story. In fact, they work into each other. I imagine the story set in the early 1900s, not only because of the various social roles and technologies portrayed, but also because I know that westerns are usually set in this period or before, as a literary convention. Based on my combination (realization) of the raw social and literary materials (the repertoire) presented, a reading emerges that both adheres to the text, and still remains uniquely my own.
One might object at this point that, given the limited about of material described about the story (a tiny repertoire indeed), no other basic readings seem likely, or even possible. In some cases, I admit, you have to look at relatively fine details in the story to find where differences in realizations come from. In this one, however, even though you have only been given a paragraph's worth of the repertoire, it is easy to come up with a very compelling alternate realization that accounts for all of the aspects of the text presented.
Imagine, this time, that instead of a reader from a major city in eastern America, the same story is being read by a contemporary rural farmer in north-western Canada. First of all, he is likely to set the story in western Canada, since there is a vast stretch of prairie there, and it is known for its cowboys. Also, the 'Stampede' will very likely be seen as 'The Calgary Stampede,' which is the major western cultural event of the year. Further, the time of the story is likely to be reported as the present day, or the very near past (even the very near future is a possibility!), since the lifestyle, norms, and technologies represented are consistent with contemporary farm life. Finally, even the literary categorization of 'Western' isn't left in its secure certainty. After all, we are more likely to refer to a story that describes the world we now live in as 'realistic fiction,' or at least a modern adventure, romance, or action story. As this example makes clear, regardless of the repertoire presented by the text, each reader will bring a different, and not necessarily less coherent, realization to bear in order bring it to life.
How is it that a text, which seemingly creates a story and a coherent world by itself, can be read in such different ways? The preceding example shows that the perception we have of a text as a coherent and closed simulation of reality is false, or better, is true only within perception, where our cognitive and affective faculties take up the affordances provided by the text and structure them into a patterned whole. Think for a moment about the incredible thickness of reality: at every moment, there is more going on than a single person could possibly take into consideration, and there is more going on in a given person's consideration than one could ever hope to (or for that matter want to!) record in a text. A literary text, then, far from being a self-sufficient whole, is simply a very thin slice of reality, and even then, each segment of the slice is not always connected to the one next to it. The reason a text can seem like a whole (as it does when we read it) is that we bring an entire world to bear on the scanty information we are presented with by the text. We enter the text by assuming, from the outset, that the world it presents is the same as our world. Of course, it never is, but we persist in this belief until we are directed to believe otherwise by the text. This is known as the Principle of Minimal Departure (Marie Laure Ryan coined this useful term), and it is the default assumption that allows us to flesh out the repertoire of the text.
Any reading encounter must take the facts of the text into account. For instance, in the example we have been using, the protagonist is a cowboy. This is not up for debate, and in anyone's reading, the hero will be identified with that kind of character. However, Iser points out, as we did above, that the text is not complete unto itself, and it leaves many gaps which the reader must fill in or jump across. The most obvious kind of gap is the left-out linking plot detail. For example, we are told our cowboy hero tracked down his horse and shot the thieves. Now, how did he do this? Well, we have been told he has a car, so we can assume he drove to where they were. Of course, if it was nearby, he could have walked. Unless, of course, the helpful girl drove him there herself?. As you can see, the story often leaves these details to the imagination. Strictly speaking, even the shooting of the thieves leaves a gap for us to fill. What did he shoot them with? We assume that, his being a cowboy, he used a gun. However, the text says nothing about this. Technically, he could have finished off his foes with a crossbow.
Of course, you might be objecting, these gaps are either unimportant (who cares how he got to the thieves?) or unmistakably obvious (of course he used a gun!). I will gladly grant both points, so long as we keep in mind that the reader is doing the filling, or realizing, and that different readers will diverge at different gaps. Another kind of gap, which is far more likely to produce differences between readers, and generate interest, is ambiguity. Take, for instance, the following lines: 'Henry's eyes fixed too-wide on the shadowy figure moving above him. The other guests, startled by his trance, squinted into the ceiling but could only conclude that the old man was delirious or epileptic. Except for Molly. She smiled up at her mother floating gently over the party.' Clearly, the ambiguity here is thick.
We begin, by default, with Henry's perspective. Without any evidence to the contrary, we likely believe he is actually seeing something real. Some of us, very skeptical even in literary worlds, might immediately suspect the man is simply imagining what he is seeing. Depending on our stance during the first line, the next sentence comes in to affirm or weaken it. The other guests, though they can clearly see Henry is transfixed in the presence of something, cannot see what it is, or even that there is anything to look at. This clearly affirms the 'hallucination' reading. However, this position is sabotaged by the next line, where Molly (who, for some reason, I take to be a little girl) also sees something gliding across the ceiling. So, who's right? What's your interpretation? Is this question even decidable based on the information given?
Here, we have a gap that must be filled by any reader who reads this story. It is impossible not to notice the competing perspectives, and settling on one or the other (at least until new information makes the old perspective less believable) is inevitable for any reader. The constant revision and correction in the face of this demanding gap is what powers the reader's experience of the story, and it is in this way that the author, by leaving gaps in specific, important places, can draw readers in without determining which way they eventually decide to go. Indeed, one could argue that the gaps in literary works are what make them most enjoyable: imagine a story that tried to fill in as many gaps as it could, so that as far as possible, one main reading would have to be followed. This would make a good technical manual, but a terrible story.
It is obvious that there is an interaction taking place between individual readers and given texts - as we have been discussing, the interface between the text's repertoire and the reader's realization takes place within the gaps every text must leave to be filled. However, not all texts, and not all readers, are created equal. Shakespearian Tragedy is not Classic Western, and James Joyce is not J.K. Rowling. Personally, I love modernist prose and poetry. My friend enjoys romance novels. Clearly, aside from the specific gaps a reader must fill in a given text, there is a pattern or style of response that characterizes what sorts of text a person will want to read in the first place, and how that person will realize the text.
Texts that are termed 'difficult' are ones that leave large gaps full of ambiguities that the reader must work through. Such literature resists easy assimilation to previously established patterns of meaning, and challenges us to make sense of everything. A classic example is the often cited novel Ulysses by James Joyce. Because of its experimental form, it requires the reader to do a great deal of work. Another example is William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, where the first chapter especially, narrated from the perspective of a mentally challenged man, presents great difficulties for a reader striving to construct a coherent narrative.
On the other side of the coin, we have creative genres that most often do not present much ambiguity, which means that there are fewer and smaller gaps to be filled by the reader. Much popular genre fiction fits this bill, tending to extend itself into book series that run into the dozens. Romances, mysteries, westerns, detective fiction, and sci-fi all lend themselves to reading experiences that present few challenges to the reader, but which provide for a smooth and rapid reading experience.
The sort of literature a given reader prefers is largely determined, according to Iser, by their tolerance for ambiguity. If I tolerate and even enjoy a great deal of ambiguity, I'll gravitate toward forms that give me opportunities to fill in large gaps. If, on the other hand, I dislike ambiguity, I'll stick primarily with texts that take a smoother, less gappy course. When a reader feels he or she is not being given enough to do by the text, as when a high-ambiguity-tolerance reader is given a very straightforward text to read, Iser calls this situation, appropriately enough, boredom. When a reader feels he or she is being given too much to do, as when a low-ambiguity-tolerance reader is given a very gappy, challenging text, the result is overstrain.
The task of the writer, in the face of the boredom-overstrain restrictions they face when their texts are confronted by readers, is to pitch their work somewhere between the extremes of the two poles. A work which is incredibly taxing will be little read. A work which is completely untaxing is unlikely to be enjoyed. A further implication that arises is that literary works will not necessarily remain in a stable position on the continuum. What was second nature for Homer's or Shakespeare's audience is almost baffling for contemporary readers. On the other side of this coin, when T.S. Eliot originally published his long poem The Waste Land, or when Coleridge published The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, readers did not know what to make of them. Now, they both seem far more accessible, and given time, may begin to seem very easy. By considering the audience, Reader Response criticism reveals that no literary work can remain completely stable over time, because readers, who form one half of the reading encounter, are in cultures which are constantly on the move.
A concern for readers is shared by another prominent critic and theorist, Stanley Fish, who is contemporary with Wolfgang Iser. While they often disagree about specifics, their focus on the reader in the construction of the meaning of the text puts them firmly together in the field of Reader Response theory. To compare them in the broadest strokes for ease of understanding where they diverge from each other, Iser attempts to create a reading model that gives equal weight to the text and the reader. For Fish, the 'little black marks on the page' are obviously necessary, but the real creative power, and the real interest for literary studies, rests with the reader.
One of Fish's most powerful ideas is known as the principle of interpretive closure. This principle states that readers will attempt to construct a stable, complete interpretation as quickly as possible during the reading process. An example from poetry will illustrate this most clearly. Imagine you are beginning a poem, and read the following line: 'The last jackhammers of the dawn persist' The strange image suggests that the jackhammers continue hammering through the dawn. There may not be many of them left (they are the last ones, after all), but they show no sign of stopping the noise they are creating. One can imagine the complete irritation of the nearby inhabitants who, after what was likely a sleepless night, are forced to listen to the terrible hammering through their morning coffees.
Of course, the poem then continues as follows, on the next line: 'in silence, an empty sunrise laying mute the sky.' Well, weren't we wrong in our original take on the opening situation! Rather than persisting as we would normally expect, with noise, the jackhammers are persisting in silence. This suggests an image of the jackhammers laying unused, perhaps at a vacant construction site at the beginning of the day. It also implies that, far from being sleepless, the inhabitants living nearby were not kept up at all by the noisy hammering we originally imagined. The scene, in the space of a couple of words, shifts radically from a cacophony of epic proportions to an almost eerie stillness. By following my natural inclination for interpretive closure as soon as the text seems to permit it, I have unwittingly constructed a scene that I must now completely revise.
Of course, as you might have guessed, Stanley Fish is not suggesting that readers are generally fools who rush into texts inappropriately, and who should take more measured steps so that they do not make mistakes which will only lead to confusion. Instead, Fish believes that poets are aware of the ways readers move quickly to interpretive closure (because they are readers who do this themselves!), and as a result, they exploit this very natural tendency to create meaning in their works. In short, the poem takes advantage of your natural tendency in an effort to make you slip up.
You might be asking why in the world an author would attempt to confuse his or her readers with these kinds of devices. Well, think about what the poet is attempting to do. He or she is not merely attempting to convey, unambiguously, some facts or information to the person who is reading the poem. If that were the case, they could simply write a quick newspaper-like article which captures the gist. Instead, the poem is attempting to lay down a text that provides opportunities for readers to engage in a certain kind of rich experience that goes far beyond the transfer of knowledge. The poet uses whatever tools are at his or her disposal to affect the reader.