Studies in the Spectator Role

Literature, Painting and Pedagogy

Michael Benton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351547536
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica generale

Michael Benton's book develops the concept of spectatorship as an answer to these questions. It explores the similarities and differences in our experiences of literature and the visual arts, and discusses their implications for pedagogy and their applications in cross-curricular work in the classroom.
Teachers will find that, while many of the visual and verbal texts may be familiar, the approaches to them offer fresh insights and a rich agenda for the classroom. Shakespeare, Fielding, Hogarth, Blake, Wordsworth, Constable, Turner, the Pre-Raphaelites, Wilfred Owen, Paul Nash, Stanley Spencer, Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney - the range of authors and artists discussed is both extensive and relevant to the National Curriculum and to post-16 and undergraduate courses.

Part I
Reading and viewing:

the spectator–participant role

1 The reader in the secondary world

The spectator–participant

Fictional worlds hold an enduring appeal; they entice us to enter by every conceivable means from gentle seduction to blatant shock tactics. Here, chosen pretty much at random, are six beginnings – invitations into new and potentially exciting worlds, starting with the most celebrated of all.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.

(Pride and Prejudice)

‘Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life.’

(Hard Times)

With a single drop of ink for a mirror, the Egyptian sorcerer undertakes to reveal to any chance comer far-reaching visions of the past. This is what I undertake to do for you, reader.

(Adam Bede)

Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo ….

(A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man)

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it.

(The Catcher in the Rye)

I did not kill my father, but I sometimes felt I had helped him on his way.

(The Cement Garden)

English teachers are used to discussing such beginnings – extended perhaps to photocopies of the opening pages – and to asking students about the sort of stories that are likely to follow. Typical questions that these narrative openings pose for their readers are:

• What sort of voice is addressing me and how am I meant to interpret this invitation into what appears to be a game of make-believe? The issues are of orientation, or reader stance, and of adjusting to texts that are invented fictions not matters of fact.

• Am I likely to enjoy the experience and what sort of reader am I expected to be – a sympathetic listener? A quasi-detective? A fascinated or amused or frightened observer? … These issues surround the role that the reader is required to play.

• What am I getting into here? What sort of secondary world is on offer? The questions here concern the plausibility of these fictions and the different genres they represent.

For young readers especially, success with the opening of a story is crucial. Practised readers develop a tolerance, a willingness to wait and trust the writer to engage their interest, where the less experienced may become impatient. ‘I couldn’t get into it’ is the common cry of readers baulked and disappointed by Chapter 1. Of course, novelists know this; hence, the variety of tactics they devise to draw us in. Having chosen to start a new fiction, the opening sentences make us an offer that, for a few minutes at least, we cannot refuse. Then, when we cross the threshold, we are aware of both giving ourselves up to the fiction, yet equally conscious of the process of doing so. We are required to be an involved participant and a detached spectator. Just how this doubling operates during reading is the subject of this chapter; it is approached through considering the three issues that the questions above suggest – the reader’s stance, role and world.

The reader’s stance

Differences in reader stance are easily overlooked, yet they raise fundamental questions. About reading across the school curriculum, we might ask:

• What are the differences between reading novels in English and reading text books in Science?

And, about reading within English:

• What are the differences between how we read fiction and how we read poetry?

And, about reading fictions:

• What are the different invitations we are offered by the six novel openings above?

The very fact of posing such questions indicates that the act of reading is a unique experience each time we engage in it. Clearly, the answers partly concern purpose (pleasure, study, information-gathering) and the context in which the reading occurs. But they are also to do with the stance the reader adopts towards the experience which, in turn, is decided by the interaction between what the reader brings (knowledge, frame of mind, mood …) and what the text signals (through its language, layout, mode of address …) about the way it should be read.

The most influential account of stance is that of Rosenblatt (1978: 22–47). ‘Aesthetic reading’ is Rosenblatt’s phrase to distinguish the stance readers adopt when engaging with literary texts; ‘efferent reading’ is her corresponding description of the stance readers take towards informational texts. In ‘aesthetic reading’, the reader’s concern is with the feelings and ideas being produced by the act of deciphering; the orientation is to savour what is being lived through at the time, the focus is upon the experience itself during the reading event. By contrast, in ‘efferent reading’, the reader’s concern is with what will be carried away from the act; the orientation is utilitarian, the focus is directed towards the relevance of the information to situations that lie beyond the reading event. The attention of the reader of literature is thus circumscribed by the present tense, captured by the world of story; that of the reader of a textbook is projected into the future tense, concerned about the usefulness of new information in the world we all share. Yet, having made this distinction, Rosenblatt then proceeds to soften its boundaries. She comments:

Actually, no hard-and-fast line separates efferent – scientific or expository – reading on the one hand from aesthetic reading on the other. It is more accurate to think of a continuum, a series of gradations between the nonaesthetic and the aesthetic extremes. The reader’s stance towards the text – what he focuses his attention on, what his ‘mental set’ shuts out or permits to enter into the centre of awareness – may vary in a multiplicity of ways between the two poles.

(Rosenblatt 1978: 35)

The idea of a continuum creates as many difficulties as it solves. For Rosenblatt is attempting to conceptualise the reading state in a metaphor that uncomfortably combines the mobility of the continuum with the specificity of particular terms. Conscious of this problem, perhaps, Rosenblatt retreats from the extremes of the efferent–aesthetic continuum and locates most readings as ‘hovering’ somewhere near the middle (p. 37). Yet the metaphor is useful in disentangling the orientation of a literary reading from that of other readings. We now need to acknowledge another aspect of reader stance – its relationship to our perceptions of everyday life.

Drawing upon Dewey, Rosenblatt stresses that an aesthetic experience is ‘simply the stuff of ordinary day-to-day experience defined, heightened, complete’ (Rosenblatt 1978: 37). In particular, she argues, the ‘play of attention’ between the efferent and aesthetic ‘is undoubtedly much more characteristic of our daily lives than is usually acknowledged’.

Surprisingly, Rosenblatt makes no explicit mention of D.W. Harding’s theory of the psychological processes in the reading of fiction which also stresses the continuity between art and life, especially that between gossip and the novel – or what has been glossed by Meek et al. (1977: 73) as the relationship between the lower-case ‘storying’ we use to shape everyday living and upper-case ‘Stories’ between the covers of novels. Saki (‘The Storyteller’), Mary Norton (‘Paul’s Tale’) and Jan Mark (‘Nothing to be Afraid Of’) have all written stories which play upon the boundary lines in this relationship. The assumption of continuity behind these stories and Meek’s formulation are the same: the status of literary fictions and the stance we adopt towards them are refinements of the narrative imagination that we use daily to make sense of our actual environment and experiences. The corollary is that we read words in much the same way as we read worlds, a phenomenon that Auden celebrates in his sonnet ‘Words’, a poem that exemplifies what it argues (Auden 1966: 320–1). Such a statement requires an account of the role the reader adopts within literary experiences and of the fictional worlds that are evoked during these experiences. We turn now from issues of stance to those concerned with the reader’s persona, in particular, that of the spectator–participant role.

The reader’s role

The concept of a ‘role-playing reader’ incorporates two fundamental ideas: the notion of taking on a persona for the duration of a reading, and the view of this activity as ‘participating in a game of make-believe’ (Walton 1990: 190). But, immediately, questions arise. How do we reconcile the reader taking part in a game with the familiar theory of the reader’s role (Harding 1937, 1962; Britton 1970, Britton et al. 1975; Applebee 1985) as that of a spectator not a player? And, lying behind this question – how is either of these personae constructed? How much by the author via the text, as Henry James suggested when he claimed that the author makes ‘his reader very much as he makes his characters’ (James 1866: 485)? How much by the real reader’s psychological makeup as, for example, the work of Holland (1975) and Bleich (1978) argues? There are questions lying behind these questions too. As the Fish–Iser (1981) debate highlighted, why must we assume that there is such a thing as the given text and that the act of reading involves this interplay of determinate and indeterminate elements? And since, for Fish, nothing is given, and the reader supplies everything, how can Henry James or anyone else speak of ‘making the reader’ a quasi-character?

It is evident from the above that reader-response criticism has left unresolved (and perhaps unresolvable) issues which centre on the role of the reader as a virtual construct. The range of such constructs from Gibson’s ‘mock reader’ (1980) to Brooke-Rose’s ‘encoded reader’ (1980) scarcely needs rehearsing. They populate the pages of the various overview books of reader-response criticism. Some are obliquely parodied in the half-a-dozen readers that the protagonist in Italo Calvino’s novel If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller (1982) meets in the great library at the end of that book. The seventh reader, one who is struck by the newness rather than the familiarity of re-readings, concludes that ‘reading is an operation without object; or that its true object is “itself ”’ (p. 203). In saying this, he points to the favourable conditions that breed these putative readers: the fact that reading collapses the subject–object division of conventional perception (cf. Wallace Stevens 1965: 90, ‘The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm’). By becoming ‘lost in a book’ the reader becomes an insider; text and reader no longer face each other as object and subject, so that if one asks the absorbed reader, ‘Where were you during your reading?’ the significant reply is not ‘in an armchair’ or ‘in bed’, but as a description of themselves as ‘a ghostly watcher’ (Harding 1967: 12) or as someone who is ‘invisible and walking around unseen with the things or people in the book ….’(Holland 1975: 65). Perhaps the most powerful extended account of the interiority of fictional experience is that of Georges Poulet (1972, in Tompkins 1980: 41–9); more simply, 14-year-old Claire’s description of her reader’s role offers a memorable personification that combines the detachment of spectatorship and the dynamism of playing the fictional game.

It’s as if I’m a sort of dark watcher, who is there at the scene, but none of the characters pays any attention to me. I’m like a power, as if everything is happening because I’m there.

(Fox 1979: 32)

If we listen to what Claire and other young readers tell us about the nature of literary experience (there are similar insights in Fry (1985)), their reflections suggest a role more in line with the collaborative activity anticipated by novelists from Sterne (1767) to Fowles (1977) than that which the extremes of post-war criticism have assigned them. On one side, as Freund (1987: 151) has argued, Fish’s view that nothing is given leads into a logical cul-de-sac: without ‘something’ to be interpreted no act of interpretation can occur. On the other, the inclination of the earlier generation of New Critics to ignore the reader reflects the views of neither novelists nor the readers themselves. Those concepts that do suggest a plausible interior role for the reader, and help to elucidate Claire’s experience, are ones that draw their character from both the text and the reader. The two principal ones are ‘the reader as spectator’ (Harding 1962; Britton 1971) and the ‘implied reader’ (Booth 1961; Iser 1974).

Both are controversial and, in some respects, ill-defined constructs whose imprecision arises from the inevitable diversity of the answers to the questions raised above, especially the degree to which such constructs owe their virtual existence to the text and to the real reader. One source of confusion may be diagnosed in the fact that these apparently singular, unitary terms disguise a dual persona, a split self, partly constructed by and alive within the fiction, partly detached from and observing the fictional events; yet, as Claire suggests, always in control. Another arises from the suspicion of illegitimacy over the birth of the terms. Britton’s appropriation of the term ‘spectator’ from Harding for his own purposes, as Goodrich (1995: 47–60) has recently argued, distorts the idea of its original; and, correspondingly, Iser’s extrapolation of ‘the implied reader’ from Booth’s ‘implied author’, as the latter has pointed out (Booth 1989: 58), means different things at different places in Iser’s writing. Both the double role the reader plays and the vocabulary used to convey it require clarification. As will emerge, however, there are sufficient similarities between the constructs of the spectator and the implied reader for the idea of ‘the reader as spectator–participant’ to be regarded as a concept that encompasses both. In order to establish this, the two constructs are critically examined in turn.

The two articles that summarise Harding’s concept of spectatorship are ‘The role of the onlooker’ (1937) and ‘Psychological processes in the reading of fiction’ (1962). The former argues for the continuity between the role of the detached onlooker who watches actual events and the spectator at a play or the reader of a novel who is offered representations of events. The latter stresses the creative participation of the reader. Harding says:

The imaginary spectatorship of fantasy and make-believe play has the special feature of allowing us to look at ourselves, ourselves as participants in the imagined events. … In spite, however, of seeing himself as a participant in the story, the daydreamer or the child engaged in make-believe remains an onlooker, too; in all his waking fantasy he normally fills the dual role of participant and spectator.

(Harding 1962: 136)

In Harding’s account, the reader’s role comprises a double figure: the spectator aspect entails detached evaluation; the participant aspect involves imaginative sharing. Harding seems to regard these hierarchically: imaginative participation is regarded as ‘elementary’. In fact, it is the main source of pleasure in reading and the essential prerequisite for literary interpretation as Squire (1964), among others, has shown. It is important to establish the spectator role as a portmanteau concept that encompasses spectator–participant activities. Harding (1962: 67) and Rosenblatt (198...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Reading and viewing: the spectator–participant role
• Part II Words and images
• Bibliography
• Index