Reading the Reader
We need to interpret interpretations more than to interpret things. –Michel de Montaigne (French philosopher, 1533-1592)
A bit of cultural theory
From the late 19th century up until the 1960s, studying and teaching literature in the West was dominated by Formalist theories. Like an entomologist examining a dead beetle, we were supposed to focus only on the structure and form of a literary work as an isolated and stagnant object. All other factors—such as the life of the author or the historical moment when the work emerged—were regarded as incidental, of little importance, even irrelevant. The task at hand was to dissect and describe the linguistic and structural features—the mechanics—of this one insulated item: the text.
In America, such an approach to literature took the shape of New Criticism. (Don’t get excited; it was new in the 1920s.) A batch of southern literary gentlemen (yes, you can read into this racist, elitist, and sexist) decided to play scientist by becoming “ontological critics.” This designation indicated that they were capable of discovering, via their technical-sounding procedures, the one-and-only true and universal and timeless Meaning of a text. (Yep, we’re back to monkeying around with Plato...)
According to New Critics, a text is a “verbal icon” that can only be studied at the level of the words on the page. All else is off limits. Within this methodology, the author is reduced to a mere “catalyst” of human experience when she writes her work. No attention must be paid to any meaning an author claims to have infused into a text; in fact, to pay heed to an author is to commit what New Critics called the “intentional fallacy.” Equally, any meaning a reader gets out of a text is to be shunned as the “affective fallacy.” Just what the hell do readers know about Timelessness and Universality?
As for bringing in any historical circumstances surrounding the text? Forget it. We cannot sully the Timeless and the Universal with the temporal and the physical. Only the Ontological Critic—and the Ontological Critic alone!—can locate the absolute Truth of the text’s Sole Meaning. Everyone else, back off!
Palpable stupid shit, to be sure. Yet New Criticism had a stranglehold on American college and high school English Departments until the cultural revolutions of the 1960s. Even then it continued to exert—and exerts even now—a persistent influence on American educational practices. The curricula of many college English Departments remain founded on New Critical precepts. Most primary and secondary teaching of literary texts—as well as texts of other kinds—follow the New Critical mantra. Namely, there is only one available meaning to be had from this text—and the teacher will supply you with that Lone True Meaning.
In my view, one big reason why college English Departments are dying out at colleges and universities around the country is the pernicious effect New Criticism has on students. Raised in the pre-college New Critical classroom, students tend to develop either a blind love or a bitter hate toward literature.
Those who fall in love with literature do so for limited and silly reasons. They buy into the snobby aesthete pose of the New Critics, imagining themselves to be great-souled connoisseurs of Universal Truth and Beauty. Those who fall in hate with literature not only sense when bullshit is being flung at them, but they balk at having their critical voices silenced. What fun and what use is being told by teachers how you should respond to a piece of literature?
As a result of this broadly bifurcated attitude toward literature, students miss out on the rich complexities of a text—and the window texts can offer into our lives within social formations. Literature, to them, becomes either a precious dilettante entertainment or an irrelevant waste of time. Yet exercising oneself in the many possible readings of a creative text—written or filmic—is among the most stimulating educational experiences I know.
With my small rant now concluded, we arrive at the bit of cultural theory on offer this week: Reader Response Theory. As you will see below, this approach to textuality is the antithesis of Formalism and New Criticism. One purpose of this post, then, is to serve as our second-to-last trek through the history of developments in cultural theory during the late 20th century. As much as Saussure’s and Derrida’s innovative thinking about the Word impacted the tenor of academic inquiry, thinking outside the text-only box proved equally crucial as the groundwork for many kinds of radical theories to come.
Our broader purpose here, therefore, is to take a look at the reading act itself. Just what’s going on when we read something? And not just words on a page or on a screen, but anything?
Applying this bit of cultural theory
Sometimes called Reception Theory, sometimes called Reader-Oriented Criticism, this approach to interacting with a text came to prominence in the 1970s. At that time, not only did it pose a challenge to the dominant theories of New Criticism, but Reader Response (hereafter RR) became instrumental in bringing about a wave of innovative methodologies in literary and cultural studies.
Foremost, RR destroys the old belief in the passivity and unimportance of the reader. Pushed aside is the traditional Formalist notion of “art for art’s sake.” Only considering static, quarantined words on a page does not result in the miraculous discovery of a single, ethereal, set-in-stone MEANING. Instead, RR proposes this dynamic and untidy formula:
Reader + Text = Meaning
New Critics swooned at the notion of the Verbal Icon mingling with the unwashed masses. (Oh my stars!) But such a collaboration of reader and read-material is what inevitably happens anyway. Let’s get real. RR theorists set about investigating that inescapable alliance.
When analyzing what is and what happens during the reading process, there are two fundamental elements to consider. First, look at what and at how a text gives a reader something to do—that is, inspect the structure and the rhetoric of the text. Second, describe what a reader does by way of responding to the prompts of a text—that is, what meaning results from this interaction. Sounds simple enough, right? But it’s not. Tons of questions start popping up. Here are a few.
How does a text shape a reader’s response to it? Does the context of a reader (personal, social, historical) shape her interpretation of a text? Just what or who in the hell is the reader anyway? Are there such categories as actual or implied or ideal readers? Are some readers better than others? Are some readings better than others? For both questions, if so, how and why?
Are there only so many readings available from a text—or is meaning endless? Does the context of the text (when it was created, how it’s been transmitted, when it is being read) shape a reader’s interpretation of it? Why do many readers have similar responses to the same text (e.g. Hamlet)? What impact, if any, does the author of a text have on its meaning? Does RR theory promote mere interpretive chaos? Or is the study of context—of the reader, of the text, of the author—a limiting factor to interpretation?
All of these are big questions. As theorists wrestled with them since the 1970s, three general groups or types of RR theory have emerged. I’ll sketch them out.
1) Social RR: text over reader
This view of the reader-text relationship sees the power of meaning-making resting more with the text. That is, the text giving the reader something to do is the more important factor in the relationship.
We’ve run across this approach to reading already when we discussed Structuralism in an earlier post (see “Signs, Structures, and Myths,” 22 March 2023). You may recall how the literary critic Northrop Frye theorized four major categories or genres of narrative, each having its own distinct plotline, character types, and outlooks. As a society of readers who understand these structures and conventions (hence the name Social RR), we are directed by each genre into receiving certain meanings from our reading experience of it. Narratology is a similar field of study that deals with the structure and function of narrative.
Applying this text-heavy approach to Beowulf, for example, would lead the reader inevitably into an inspiring tale of heroic triumph.
Well...
2) Subjective RR: reader over text
This view of the reader-text relationship is the opposite of the first. Now it’s the reader who holds sway over the text, so much so that the text nearly disappears as an object of interest. If Social RR focuses our attention on the functioning of the text, Subjective RR focuses our attention on the reactions of the individual reader.
Here we come to the quote from Montaigne at the top of this post. According to Subjective RR theory, interpreting things, such as a text, is far less important than interpreting someone’s interpretation of that thing. Think about it. Any reader of Beowulf will bring—unavoidably—her own personal qualities and envelope of circumstances to a reading of that text. Thus, how a reader reacts to Beowulf tells you a whole lot about that reader. Does she like hero sagas, or is she (like me) into ferreting out tragic underdog stories? Does the make-up of northern European tribal society strike her fancy, or is it the role and plight of women within that patriarchal culture that catches her responsive eye?
In short, reading the reader brings into view a person’s social experience, environment, education, identity, time period, and more. Within this theory of reading, the reader becomes an object of study every bit as important—or more so—than the text.
3) Transactive RR: reader and text equal
This view of the reader-text relationship combines the two approaches discussed above. That is, reader and text are co-equal partners in creating meaning. The text is certainly important and gives the reader many interesting things to do, but the reader is just as important in bringing all of her personal and social context to the table. So study closely both text and reader.
A particular benefit of this Transactive method is that it tends to involve, more distinctly than the other two methods, a close look at the context of both the text and the reader. For example, consider the following statement:
I broke my bridge.
What does it mean? Well, as you can see, that depends entirely on who is saying it and in what situation. Hence, as readers, we must consider both the speaker of the text and the particular setting in which it occurs. Is this the lament of an incompetent civil engineer who screwed up her project? Is this the grouse of a string instrument player who just discovered she damaged the piece on her banjo or violin that keeps the strings taut? Is this the grimacing mumble of a rugby player sitting in the dentist chair at her orthodontist explaining the result of an injury sustained in a scrum? It depends. The statement could mean any of those things—as well as some other speaker-setting situations that can be imagined.
Equally, as readers, we may be better or less able to understand any of these possible statements. Not only do we need to understand the circumstances of the speaker, but we may not be entirely familiar with the context in which those occur. For example, we may not know what a “bridge” is in the string-instrument world or in the practice of orthodonture. Hence another impediment to understanding meaning: our context as a reader might be quite different from the context of the speaker and of the statement. Thus, all kinds of investigation might be necessary on our part in order for us to respond meaningfully (pun intended) to a text.
When dealing with a work of literature, this multidimensional consideration of contexts leads to many interesting things to think about as well as many possible avenues for analysis. For instance, listeners to Beowulf in 5th-century Denmark no doubt formulated different meanings of the tale than listeners to it in 9th-century Britain. What might those differences be and what might that tell us about those peoples and cultures? Or expert Anthropologists and Medievalists reading Beowulf in late 18th-century England no doubt assessed the significance of that tale differently than undergraduates reading it in an early 21st-century American classroom. What insights into higher education might that reveal?
In short, Transactive RR brings History to the interpretive party. The history of you, of the text, of the author. Instead of bare black words on a stark white page, as the New Critics would set your limit, the whole world is now in front of you to ponder.
So what?
In practice, these three modes of reading don’t necessarily stay separate. When we read something, we tend to mix and match these approaches depending on the kind of text we’re reading. What’s important to keep in mind, however, is that when we put any manner of RR theory to use, we’re doing more than just inserting ourselves into the exciting game of textual interpretation. Far more significantly, we’re stepping into the wider arena of interpreting the world.
A bombastic statement on my part?
Only if you’re not interested in understanding and interpreting the world. Only if you’d rather either moon over Beowulf as some kind of immutable hunk of Timeless Truth and Unspeakable Beauty or whine about Beowulf as just one more boring and unrelatable piece of shit your idiot professor makes you read for class.
When it comes to Meaning, RR theory—involving as it does the complexities of textual context and authorial context and reader context—opens up for our necessary deliberation the entire messy dynamic of social context. That is to say, exactly what the authoritarian regime of the New Critics works so hard to eliminate.
In many ways, then, RR theory is the foundation for all postmodern cultural and critical theories—those methodologies, I should say, that seek to expose the abuses of power and to widen the scope of social justice. Because make no mistake, when I use the word “text,” I don’t just mean works of literature such as Beowulf or a film such as Avatar or the Math book you’re handed in high school.
When I say “text,” I mean everything. Literally, everything is a text to be read. Not just words on a page or pixels dancing on a screen, but everything in the cosmos that exists outside of your brain is something to be read.
That person sitting next to you is a text to be read. The job you find yourself in is a text to be read. The city street you walk down is a text to be read. The economic system encircling you is a text to be read. That sabertooth tiger stalking your ancestor thousands of years ago was a text—emphatically—to be read.
And, by the way, your poor brain is but a mash of neurons desperately trying to make sense of the flood of bodily sensations sent to it every second of every day. And, by the way, your poor brain—as a means and as a filter to try to make sense of it all—has only the slippery contrivance of language and the inhibiting bubble of culture to work within. And both of those things, by the way, are not only dodgy but mere accidents of birth.
That’s a whole lot of happenstance for a brain to manage.
Humans are creatures doomed to read or die. So, quite obviously, your best bet is to be as smart and as aware a reader as possible.