A/N: Draws heavily from the book Falling Into Theory: Conflicting Views on Reading Literature (which I highly recommend).
Two Way Mirrors
An Essay Discussing Various Reading Models &Their Implication
Unlike Gerald Graff, who only acquired an appreciation for reading once he developed a taste for thinking and talking in an analytical way about novels like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Richter, 41-48), I was among the demographic who immediately took to literature as an expression of beauty and a method of escapism. In fantasy novels I found a world more flexible than my own, in classics I found voices not my own, and in poetry I found words that transcended paper and ink into a realm of concrete emotion yet captured. Until studying literature at the university level, I was thus more concerned with what literature could do for me, instead of what I could do to enhance literature, or even interact with it. In fact, I was unaware that there was an ethical way of approaching a text, and, for better or worse, the idea of referring to fiction or poetry as “text” was an abhorrence. A book is unquestionable in its fiction, but a text, on the other hand, is something that is to be approached, dissected, and even rejected on various ideological, aesthetic and formal planes. By studying literature at the university level, I have been alerted to various reading models and the search for authorial intention, which aided me in becoming more attuned to the roles and responsibilities claimed by author and reader. More specifically, in examining formalism, discussions regarding the institution of the canon, ethical readership, and literature as an ideology, I have been made more finely aware of interpretive possibilities and new approaches to the formal properties of various texts.
Perhaps the reading model which was initially so difficult for me to accept as a viable form of literary interpretation—but which I eventually adopted as a truly viable approach—was formalism, as espoused in Falling Into Theory by Stanley Fish. Fish describes an experience he had in the classroom, in which he tricked a group of students into interpreting an assigned reading list for another class as a fully-fledged poem with an implicit central meaning. As a result of the experiment, he came to the conclusion that “all objects are made and not found” that “interpretation is not the art of construing but the art of constructing. Interpreters do not decode poems; they make them” (Richter, 271). This was a fascinating concept to me, because it broke down the heretofore eminence and godhood of the author, putting basically all creative power in the hands of the reader. For Fish, it does not matter what the author intended, or even if the author would consider what he wrote a literary offering; rather, the only real, tangible meaning arose from the individual biographies, psychology and biases of the reader. As in all cases of dethroned gods, my initial reaction to this reading model was to name it as cheap, unfair and overly academic—and perhaps it is, but I eventually grew to identify somewhat with this formalist approach. Of course, if the author is successful, his basic intentions will be grasped, and a formalist critic's interpretation will hit near to the mark.
This redistribution of interpretive power under the formalist reading strategy can be inserted into the conversation on art itself, and how art may be defined using the formalist model. By its very nature, art is a public forum. Once a concept leaves an artist’s mind and is made physically manifest, it seems to me that it no longer belongs solely to its creator, at least not in the same way. After all, when I listen to a piece of music, what I appreciate most about it is not what it says about the singer-songwriter, but what it says about me—what memories are attached to it, how it makes me feel. Art, then, is selfish on two counts. On the count of the creator, art is a form of catharsis, wholly originating from the self and for the benefit of the self. On the count of the audience, art is only valuable to the degree by which it relates to the individual, and how it can help them achieve a similar, if not unrelated, catharsis. Perhaps this is a bastardization of the formalist reading model, but I found value in the idea that once a text falls into the hands of the reader, it is owned by them, completely disassociated from author. The author should be shut out of the picture because the only important reality is the reader's, the critic's. Using the basic structure of the words, plot and tone provided by a text, the reader then comes to the only conclusions that matter—conclusions about themselves.
While attractive in its purity and plainness, the formalist reading model inadequately reconciles the impulse that readers have to grasp authorial intention and the impulse which authors have to communicate to their readers a specific concept or idea. This model would be all well and good if all poems were similar to the example provided by Fish (“Jacobs—Rosenbaum /Levin /Thorne /Hayes /Ohman (?)” (Richter, 268)) but the truth is that literature is not written arbitrarily, independent of all origin or intention. Formalism, which includes examining a text apart from authorial biography, psychology, canon or intention, respects a text wholly for what it is and what it offers in the moment—what it can communicate detached from other sources. In class, we examined this approach by reading and interpreting the poetry of Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon and A Good Man Is Hard To Find by Flannery O'Connor. With Clief-Stefanon's poetry, we were asked to read one of her poems and proceed to interpret meaning and close read the formal properties used to convey particular concepts and ideas. Particularly rife with intended meaning was the poem “Poem for Amadou Diallo”, which we discussed in class. The very title of this piece suggests that the divination of meaning would require some kind of background knowledge regarding this Amadou fellow; indeed, the poem was an elegy for a young man gunned down by policemen (presumably) due to his race. A majority of readers will google Diallo's name, learn what there is to know about him, and thus contextualize the poem. However, this method of obtaining meaning has the author leaning on the crutch of outer sources (e.g.: Diallo, the quote from Lucille Clifton, names like 'Bronx' and 'Wheeler Street', even the race of the author herself) to help do their job. A formalist critic would ignore these factors and concentrate on the text, which inevitably would produce a different reading. Here, however, is where my enthusiasm for formalism breaks down. All readers instinctively want to grasp authorial intention, just as all authors wish to convey specific intentions to the audience, and thus, in its utopian state, literature is dialogue between author and audience in the sense that something is being transmitted and received. Again, this brings up questions regarding the nature of art. Is art this accurate communication of ideas, or is it an internal affair, involved in awakening and unlocking certain facets of the self? In other words, is it possible that art can exist solely for the individual?
Regardless of problems inherent to the formalist reading model, I believe that the dialogue between reader and author must remain open-ended at all costs, unlike Flannery O'Connor's approach to own her short story, A Good Man Is Hard To Find, in which she does exactly what formalism protests against and stamps out non-authorial critical interpretation. After writing the story, O'Connor writes an essay entitled “On Her Own Work: The Element of Suspense in A Good Man Is Hard To Find”, in which she proceeds to disembowel certain critical responses, elevating her own authorial intention over anything organically composed on the reader's part. In writing, “...I can only say that there are perhaps other ways than my own which this story could be read, but none other by which it could have been written”, O'Connor makes it evident that she is the supreme voice—that because the story is hers, she has the right to dictate what is taken away from the story and what is not. I, for one, am doubtful of this authorial infallibility. Many times, I think that the author can learn a thing or two about their own work from a reader's interpretation, because if art is any form of communication, it is dialogue, as opposed to the monologic approach espoused by O'Connor. The very concept of an author or artist having to explain or clarify their work after the fact (as O'Connor does in her article) is ridiculous to me, because it means that they have poorly executed their task as story-teller, meaning-maker, puzzle-forger. A dialogue between author and reader should exist, and meaning should be communicated, but the dialogue about a particular piece should not continue between the two parties outside of the work itself—otherwise, there can be no meaningful intimations between reader and text.
Just as literature should be intimate, it must also apply broadly the general population, reinforcing social and cultural values and communicating a greater human theme through canons of literary establishment. Many literary critics attack the traditional canon as an old, exclusive, and non-representative institution, and the back-and-forth debate between supporters and opponents of a Great Canon is another reading model that has set the tone for how I view literature, especially literature's reflection on society. Before entering this discussion, I was unquestioning as to the value of the canon. After all, classics like Huckleberry Finn, Moby Dick or Hamlet must have stood the test of time for some reason—whether that reason be aesthetic or comprehensive. However, articles like “What We Read” or Lillian Robinson's vicious denunciation of the canonical mainstream make it evident that there are many barriers imposed by the canon, and that perhaps the very concept of one over-arching canon is unfair to readers, authors, and thinking citizens alike. After all, as posed by Eagleton, literature is nothing less than “the supremely civilizing pursuit, the spiritual essence of the social formation” (Richter, 55), or in other words, a powerful quasi-religious ideology. If this is the case, the canon is a kind of conclave, specifically tasked with structuring society and society's minds.
From this sublimating perspective of literature, it is easy to view a reigning, exclusive canon as a hindrance to ideological revolution, and antifoundationalists work tirelessly to admit various political, humanistic, and cultural agendas into the canon, or at least to fragment the canon into myriad sub-sections. Gilman's short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” illustrates the kind of literature which would be included in an antifoundationalist canon geared toward feminism. By celebrating certain minority groups or by emphasizing their miserable state, texts like this underscore the satellite nature of such sub-canons. The woman is oppressed in this story—oppressed to the point of insanity, to complete yielding to the female persona trapped within the yellow wallpaper and within the walls of her own mind in a struggle against the white male establishment. You can see a similar underdog approach in A Streetcar Named Desire, which hinges upon the tragic, homosexual figure of Alan Grey and his unintentional destruction of Blanche DuBois, as equally as it hinges upon sexism and a potential element of racism. In these cases, just as their characters scream to be included, queer theory and feminism both clamor at the door of the canon, asking to be admitted beside the old, white greats. By interpreting a text like A Streetcar Named Desire through multiples lenses of queer theory, feminism, or even “africanism” (as coined by Toni Morrison) we deconstruct the canon in the sort of fashion advocated by Robinson, which is an “emphasis on alternative readings of the tradition” (Richter, 155). However, she writes “at its angriest, none of this reinterpretation offers a fundamental challenge to the canon as canon; although it posits new values, it never suggests that, in the light of those values, we ought to reconsider whether the great monuments [of the canon] are really so great, after all” (Richter, 156).
Ethical questions concerning the replacement of authors or ideas in the canon merely based merely on racial, cultural or religious cues are raised in opposition, especially by critics like Harold Bloom, who wrote that great works are sufficient for canonicity not as representatives of cultural and national interests, but rather “because they possess the power of contamination, and contamination is the pragmatic test for canon formation” (Richter, 229). In exemplifying authors like Shakespeare and Dante, Bloom suggests that what sets a work like Hamlet apart from any other canonical candidate is to what degree it has infiltrated and influenced literature following it. In a kind of lineage of literary begets, Bloom believes that the visible and high-profile ancestors of modern literature are the only authors worth considering canonical. Of course, this perspective nullifies any objection to dead white men being the major literary shareholders because dead white men were simply the only authors being published at the time of such canonical conception. No western author can avoid the gravity of Shakespeare, black or white, male or female. Perhaps this current clamor to disband the canon is a jealousy rising from a kind of literary adolescence and the teenage horror inherent in being compared to one's sock-and-sandal-wearing parents. Regardless, it is evident to me that while the canon may be exclusive, Bloom deals a successful counter-blow to Robinson’s argument, demonstrating that instead of ideological emphasis on canon, we should be focusing on and emphasizing the canon's aesthetic genealogy.
As a result of these questions regarding the canon and its relative value, I approach a text from a few new perspectives, including to what degree a text is valuable in reflecting current social values, and to what degree it has influenced literature following it. This is a particularly important idea to consider as one reads modern literature. Obviously, books like Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (published in 2005) are still in stages of literary infancy, and since their potential canonicity is difficult to foresee, Bloom's canonical model (if we assume that canonical texts are comprehensive of the best literature which has to offer) would consider such novels to be insignificant. I would argue that modern literature is important to read for two reasons—the first being to establish the canonicity of previous “contaminating” texts, and secondly, to gain a perspective regarding aesthetic and thematic trends taken by modern literature and society as a whole. Novels like Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close are valuable because they reveal new methods of interacting with preceding texts, trauma, and changing cultural perceptions. As society changes, so does literature, and we must conjure new ways of dealing with the world as it changes in response. We cannot meaningfully interact with significant world events and themes unless we change our approach to story-telling, as attempted by Foer in his approach to the events and emotion clouding September 11th.
The final reading model which I found helpful in establishing critical and interpretive fluency concerns the relationship between reader and audience—a reading model which opposes formalist strategies by placing greater emphasis on the responsibilities of reader and author. These perspectives are voiced primarily by Booth and Nussbaum, as they champion a responsibility implicit in the very act of reading. Booth points out the selfishness inherent in the deconstructed formalist perspective as he proposes that we as readers have more responsibility to the author than a mere “avoidance of plagiarism”. Rather, we have the responsibility to “honor and author's offering for what it is, in its full 'otherness' from us, and take an active critical stance against what seem to us its errors or excesses” (Richter, 350). Booth suggests that in reading a text we are in fact immersing ourselves in the being of another person, and that to view a story or a poem dispassionately, “to remain passive in the face of the author's strongest passions and deepest convictions is surely condescending, insulting, and irresponsible”(Richter, 350). This is a much more empathetic reading model that allows us to be wholly changed by what we read. For the formalist model I described before, a piece of literature does not necessarily “change” us, in the sense of introducing us to something new; rather, it reflects us and introduces us to parts of ourselves that we were merely not aware of before. In opposition to this concept, Nussbaum chimes in with the consequences of this anti-formalist reading model, as she discusses the novel as a morally controversial form—a medium which “inspires distrust of conventional pieties and exacts a frequently painful confrontation with one's own thoughts and intentions” (Richter, 359). While formalism does not allow us to be changed at all, Booth and Nussbaum's model requires us to be changed completely—at least for a little while. She writes, “good literature is disturbing in a way that history and social science writing frequently are not. Because it summons powerful emotions, it disconcerts and puzzles. Literary works that promote identification and emotional reaction cut through those self-protective stratagems” (Richter, 359). For Nussbaum and Booth, literature is valuable because it shocks us out of ourselves, instead of causing a 'formalist' inward turning.
These ideas murmur ominous and unwitting support for Eagleton and his claim that literature is the new, stultifying religion, though it is evident to me that this anti-formalist assimilation of “new selves” is necessary in order accept full responsibility of readership in the Booth-Nussbaum model. According to Eagleton, if we read a novel as suggested by Booth and Nussbaum, we can expect “to be distracted from immediate commitments, nurtured with a spirit of tolerance and generosity, so ensuring the survival of private property” (Richter, 51). This rather Orwellian view of literature obliges me to pause and consider literature's effect on me as a reader. In truth, literature, like any other form of media, carries with it a dosage of propaganda. By espousing Booth and Nussbaum, I would be willingly ingesting not only the “new selves” offered by the author, but also the author's prejudice and biases—their own special brand of subliminal messaging, whether intentional or not. Do I allow myself to be changed so easily? It seems to me that Booth and Nussbaum advocate a disposal of inhibition in order to responsibly approach a text and fulfill predetermined roles in the author-reader symbiosis. Is literature meant to be a force of change on me, or am I meant to be a force of change upon literature? It is easy for me to accept the latter, in the formalist vein, because the self is a private and quiet manor, and the trauma described by Nussbaum can be uncomfortable and may lead to ideological confusion and indecision. On the other hand, literature would be quite dull indeed if it never shocked, provoked, or frightened—mere technique and mathematics distilled on a page. Booth denounces the formalist reading model (which is “turned to the service of unthinking individualism”) as he writes “even when we resist a story, even when we view it dispassionately, it immerses us 'the thoughts of another,' unless we simply stop listening” (Richter, 353). If we refuse to be immersed in the consciousness of the author, as the formalist is loathe to do, Booth believes that we are not listening to a text and that we cannot hope to interact with a text as it is meant to be interacted with. As unavoidable as the assimilation of new (and potentially harmful) selves may be in the Booth-Nussbaum model of reading, I believe that it is important to give ourselves up to a text to a degree. We may carry the non-art of the author, his biography and his psychology in with us, but his consciousness is inextricably bound up whatever poem, play, or novel we have turned ourselves to. In this literary transaction, by bringing ourselves to a piece of literature, we can more easily take something from it—for remaining in stasis for so long may cause an inability to respond to the changes in literature, changes in society—thus, changes within ourselves.
These various reading models have moved me beyond mere topical appreciation of a text, allowing me new inward and outward perspective. After studying literature at the university level, I am hypersensitive to strategies used within a text to produce meaning, whether this meaning is manufactured organically, or is provided directly by the “authorial self”. The concept that a text may be approached from many different perspectives (whether that be through feminism or queer theory), using the aforementioned models as lenses and scaffolds, has had particularly violent ramifications upon how I read. What does Huckleberry Finn offer the feminist, the racial theorist, the ecocritic? What do these approaches say about the author, or about me, or about humankind? I no longer see literature as a tool by which escape can be achieved; rather, literature is something to be confronted, regarded, prodded, and analyzed until it relinquishes its kept secrets, its quieter tones, its windows into the self and the world.
Works Cited
Foer, Jonathan Safran. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2005. Print.
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. The Yellow Wallpaper, Boston: Small & Maynard, 1899.
O'Connor, Flannery. "Suspense in A Good Man Is Hard to Find." Faculty Web Sites. Web. 17 Apr. 2011. <http://faculty.deanza.edu/mullerworthtrudi/stories/storyReader$19>.
Richter, David H. Falling into Theory: Conflicting Views on Reading Literature. 2nd ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2000. Print.
Williams, Tennessee. A Streetcar Named Desire. New York: Signet, 1974. Print.
Van Clief-Stefanon, Lyrae. "Poem for Amadou Diallo." From the Fishouse. Web. 17 Apr. 2011. <http://www.fishousepoems.org/archives/lyrae_van_cliefstefanon/poem_for_amadou_diallo.shtml>.
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