The Nature of Literary Response

Five Readers Reading

Clark McPhail, Norman Holland

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351478892
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Théorie de la critique littéraire

In a rare fusion of literary sensibility with psychological research, Norman N. Holland brings to light important data showing how personality—in the fullest sense of character development and identity—affects the way in which we read and interpret literature. This book will show that readers respond to literature in terms of their own lifestyle, character, personality, or identity. By such terms, psychoanalytic writers mean an individual's characteristic way of dealing with the demands of outer and inner reality. Each new experience develops the style, while the pre-existing style shapes each new experience.

The sub-title of this book, Five Readers Reading, reflects the fact that the author, a distinguished literary critic, worked with five student readers, using a battery of psychological tests and extensive interviews to study the ways they reacted to classic short stories by Faulkner, Hemingway, and others. Combining his own interpretation of the stories with his understanding of the readers and their reactions, Holland derives four principles that inform literary response. He then goes on to show how these principles apply, not just to literary response, but to the way personality shapes any experience.

The book carries Holland's previous studies of creation and responsive recreation forward to a major theoretical statement. He rejects the artificial idea that one must think of a text (or other event) as separate from its perceivers, illustrating the dynamics by which perceiver and perceived mutually create an experience. For critics and students of the psychology of human behavior, this is challenging and seminal reading.

1
The Question: Who Reads What How?

The story was William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily,” and its one description of Miss Emily as a young girl was as clear as a description could be. The narrator, apparently one of the townspeople, says: “We had long thought of them as a tableau, Miss Emily a slender figure in white in the background, her father a spraddled silhouette in the foreground, his back to her and clutching a horsewhip, the two of them framed by the back-flung front door.” Faulkner has pictured the Griersons as exactly as a photographer would, but that precision quite disappears when the description passes over into the mind of a reader. It disappears even if the reader is as well trained and fairly experienced as the five students of English literature who are the subjects of this book. Sam, Saul, Shep, Sebastian, and Sandra (as I shall call them) all spoke about this “tableau.”

Good-natured, easygoing, dapper Sam singled it out as virtually the first thing he wanted to talk about in the story: “The father was very domineering. One of the most striking [sic] images in the book is that of the townsfolk looking through the door as her father stands there with a horsewhip in his hands, feet spread apart and between or through him you see a picture of Emily standing in the background, and that pretty much sums up exactly the kind of relationship they had.” Sam was stressing the father’s dominance and, in doing so, was positioning the townspeople so that they could see Emily between her father’s legs.

This was part of what he found highly romantic in the story. “The frailty and femininity that that evokes!” he sighed. “Just that one frail, ‘slender figure in white,’ just those words there really show us the Emily that was and the Emily that might have been.” Yet, almost at the same moment he was responding to this lacy, feminine Emily, he could say, “The word ‘tableau’ is important. While they [the townspeople] may be envious and while they may be angry at the way that these people act, they yet need it, it seems, they in a way like to have it, much as one is terrified at the power of a god and yet needing him so much and, you know, sidling up to him and paying homage to him and in the same way I think Emily comes to function as this god symbol.” A curious turnabout from frailty and femininity.

By contrast, Saul, a scholarly type, was circumspect. Sam, in his expansive way, trusted his memory, but Saul, when I asked him about that image, took out his copy of the story and read it over carefully to himself. “Ummm. I had remembered the word ‘tableau,’ and I had forgotten the rest of it. ‘Horsewhip’ there— rings— ‘spraddled silhouette.’ That seems right to me. That summarizes the relationship, I think. She’s in the back in white, of course. I think of these white gowns in the plantation balls. The father a ‘spraddled silhouette.’ He’s no longer stern and erect. He’s spraddled across the door.” Saul was seeing Emily’s father exactly the opposite way from Sam, as a weakened, sprawled figure, at least until he read over to himself the sentence with the horsewhip in it again. “A horsewhip suggesting all sorts of nasty, sexual, sadistic overtones,” but then he blurred that image. “Do they mean the horsewhip rather than his own stern demeanor? Or just the normal embodiment of his traditions suggests the decline like ‘spraddled’ does? And then ‘framed by the back-flung front door’ just completes the tableau. It’s a nice device. Faulkner makes that one work, too. That’s a nice emblem.” Well, maybe so, but Saul had so divided it up and dissolved it into questions and alternatives as to leave me quite puzzled about what he thought the thrust of the image finally was.

Shep presented himself as a rebel and radical, but his reading of the tableau seemed to me no more original or idiosyncratic than Saul’s or Sam’s. I read the passage to him, and he commented simply, “O.K. Protective image. That he’s defending Southern womanhood, perhaps, and defending it in that same sort of mindless way that says, ‘Well, now, we’ve got to defend it.’” He went on to decide that Southern womanhood might well have defended itself and then to make a suggestion quite opposite to “protective image.” “You could, I suppose, as an alternative interpretation say that the horsewhip is something which he’s also adept with indoors as well as outdoors, but I don’t think so. Maybe there’s overtones that Daddy is sadistic enough—horsewhips being pretty sadistic things to carry around when you’re greeting people, you know—that Daddy is sadistic enough where he wouldn’t mind taking a belt at Emily once in a while, but I don’t think they’re much more than overtones.” In talking about the tableau as such, he talked only about Emily’s father, and in this curiously alternative or opposed way. Earlier he had recalled Emily as a young woman (and the tableau is the only place she is so described): “I can see her as a very good-looking, dark-haired girl who had a penchant for wearing dark clothes.” Again, I sense in his substituting dark for white a will opposing the text, although at the same time, Shep said he liked this story very much.

Sophisticated, sardonic, somewhat cynical, a lapsed Catholic with aspirations toward aristocracy, Sebastian did not discuss the tableau as such, although he clearly remembered it in typing Emily as “the aristocrat of the Southern town, whose father is the original superego with a horsewhip, beating off suitors.” “He’s denying her access to suitable sexual partners.” Often, Sebastian tended to distance and type the characters this way and to flirt with the actual, physical details. Here he saw Miss Emily as “the aristocrat,” her father as “the original superego,” but converted the “suitors” to “sexual partners.”

Sandra, the fifth reader, was a tall, very attractive woman, gentle and subdued in her manner. She liked the story intensely, had read it several times, and had even, in her freshman year, written a term paper on it. Yet she recalled the tableau oddly: “They said they always had this picture of him standing, you know, sitting in the door with a whip in his hand.” As for Emily, “I see her as very young and dressed in white and standing up, I guess she’s supposed to be standing up behind her father, who would probably be looking very cross, say, if someone had come to call on her. No doubt, she would have a certain amount— Possibly fearful, but probably more regretful because she’s being, they even say, robbed of something at that point. . . . There would be a great amount of strain on her face because of her inability to do anything except just watch.” Sandra saw the emotional overtones in the tableau in a more subtle, empathie way than the four male readers did, so that she, too, had her own version of the image.

Indeed, one can say that each of the readers had a different version of Emily and her father. He was standing, sitting; erect, sprawled; domineering, weakened; sadistic, protective, and so on—sometimes even to the same reader. Emily was dressed in white, as for a plantation ball, or black; frail, but godlike; fearful, but “the aristocrat.” Some of these differences involve outright misreadings, but most do not. Conceivably, one could “teach” or coerce these five readers into consensus, but even so, whatever in each person’s character originally colored his perception of the tableau would go on coloring his perception of every other element in the story. What is that something, that ineffable effect of personality on perception? That is the issue this book explores.

As the late Stanley Edgar Hyman once said, “Each reader poems his own poem.” Yet we know very little—practically nothing—about such “poeming,” about the way a reader recreates the literary experience in himself. Today’s literary critics are expert in pointing out an essence for any literary work. Today’s psychologists—particularly the psychoanalytic psychologists—are equally adept at conceptualizing the essential dynamics of individuals. Yet we do not know how literature and readers interact.

We can find out, if you and I apply to what Sam and the other readers said, a combination of the close reading literary critics have so skillfully developed in the last decades and psychological methods of reading from language to personality. We shall move slowly—sometimes we shall seem to go word by word—but once we have put psychoanalytic interpretation together with the literary critic’s, we shall have established four principles that account for the way readers read to fit their personalities.

As of now, however, in the words of a recent book on the problem of literary response, “We know almost nothing about the process of reading and the interaction of man and book.”¹ In a manner all too common in the world of belles-lettres, however, the “almost nothing” we know tends to become complexity piled upon complexity, language explained by more language, authorities resting on other authorities—a splendid disguise of abstractions much like the emperor’s new clothes. “Scholars and critics,” Walter Slatoff writes, “who would distinguish carefully between various sorts of Neo-Platonism, or examine in minute detail the structure of a chapter or the transmutations of a prevailing metaphor, or trace the full nuances of a topical allusion, will settle happily for mere labels like distance, involvement, identification,”² labels that not only suffer from vagueness but deceive, creating the illusion that they refer to some real reaction people in fact shared and the critic in fact observed.

This tradition—assuming a uniform response on the part of readers and audiences that the critic somehow knows and understands—goes back to Aristotle’s concept of catharsis, and his notions about people’s apparently fixed responses to details of wording. Or this tradition might even have originated in Plato’s assertion that poetry debilitates. Although the Greeks observed the phenomena that they ascribed to audiences better than later theorists, the tradition flourished after them, reaching a peak with the “rules” of the lesser neoclassical critics. Early psychoanalytic writers on literature followed, rather uncritically, this collectivist view from the litterateurs. Thus we find Otto Rank defending his oedipal interpretations of myths because, “The people imagine the hero in this manner, investing him with their own infantile fantasies.”³ Freud himself assumed a collective response to Oedipus Rex in the letter of October 15, 1897, in which he reported to his confidant Fliess, “I have found love of the mother and jealousy of the father in my own case too, and now believe it to be a general phenomenon of early childhood.” “If that is the case, the gripping power of Oedipus Rex, in spite of all the rational objections to the inexorable fate that the story presupposes, becomes intelligible.” “Every member of the audience was once a budding Oedipus in phantasy, and this dream-fulfillment played out in reality causes everyone to recoil in horror, with the full measure of repression which separates his infantile from his present state.”⁴

Everyone recoils? Freud himself avoided this fallacy when he studied jokes as a kind of miniliterature; they have a “frame” and a text with especially sensitive formal balances and a response. What would one think of a theory of jokes that always concluded, “and so you laugh” or “and so you don’t laugh,” regardless of whether you did or didn’t in fact laugh? After all, someone might have heard the joke before; someone else might be depressed; a third person might have no sense of humor, and so on. Indeed, responses to jokes are so various that, for a time, researchers (at Yale) were exploring a “mirth response test,” trying to sort personality types by observing which cartoons they found funny.⁵ Should we then postulate that responses to tragedy, something so infinitely more subtle than a cartoon, are fixed? No, and for some decades now we have, in fact, known the contrary.

It was in the 1920s that I. A. Richards asked his Cambridge undergraduates for the protocols that led to his groundbreaking Practical Criticism.⁶ He asked his students “to comment freely in writing on” a series of poems, their authorship undisclosed. Richards found that these supposedly well-educated young Englishmen were evaluating very strangely indeed, misreading the plain sense of the poems, imposing cranky sets of preconceptions, responding in terms of stock sentimentalities, cynicisms, and other doctrines, as well as (perhaps) irrelevant memories. Richards, let us notice, was exploring his reader’s conscious, verbalized responses to literature. Interested in education, he tended to concentrate on those parts of literary response that could be taught, and, indeed, his analysis of misreadings helped to reform, root and branch, the teaching of literature over the next four decades. Today, even among schoolchildren, one finds more sophisticated reading than Richards found among his jazz-age Cantabrigians.⁷

One would expect the giant entertainment corporations, with millions riding on each reel of celluloid, to have studied response far more carefully than impoverished English teachers could. But the published research in this field remains rather elementary.⁸ There are many studies of effect, but they move casually back and forth between the transfer of information, the fulfillment of individuals’ needs (for example, to escape), the impact on morality (typically delinquency), and immediate reactions of “like” and “dislike.” Indeed, the industry has developed machines—the Lazarsfeld-Stanton program analyzer, the Cirlin Reactograph—with which an audience can indicate its fluctuating likes, dislikes, and indifferences. Of course, such a device cannot sort out variables—one cannot tell, for example, whether a member of the audience is disliking the whole movie or just the “bad guy” in it. In general, this one-dimensional quality carries over to the analysis of the content of films. The most sophisticated scheme I have seen only gets to issues like “Main story type,” that is, “Is it a Western or a gangster movie?”, “Marital status and changes of leads A, B, and C,” “Sports (type and prominence),” or “Importance of part and characterization of unskilled labor.” I understand that much research in this field is kept secret because of its commercial value. If what has been published is an accurate sample, there would seem to be little reason to do so.

Such simple categories show that a study of audience response demands at least one thing: some sensibly subtle way of analyzing the texts, both the text the artist creates and the text of what the audience says. I. A. Richards had that, with his marvelous sense of language, but his experience showed a second tool one must have to understand audiences. Without a psychology adequate to explain individual responses, one does not know what to do with them except pass judgment on them. “We rarely concern ourselves, for example,” says Walter Slatoff, surveying the post-Richards critical scene, “with the problem of individual differences among readers. . . . On the few occasions we do entertain such questions we speak as though they were settled by reducing response to two categories—appropriate and inappropriate.”⁹ Thus, although Richards avowed a concern to maintain differences of opinion, he shifted the problem of evaluating poems to a much harsher dogmatism: passing judgment on “the relative values of different states of mind, about varying forms, and degrees, of order in the personality.”¹⁰

Had Richards had a usable psychology of individuals, he would have been able, presumably, to see how his protocols were reflecting personality at all levels, not just the teachable surface of consciousness. Indeed, David Bleich has recently done just that: shown how some of Richards’s protocols reveal the unconscious themes his Cantabrigians were projecting into the texts as part of their response.¹¹ “It has become a matter of course that any item of human behavior shows a continuum of dynamic meaning, reaching from the surface through many layers of crust to the ‘core’ “—thus, Erik Erikson,¹² articulating with his customary eloquence one of the most basic and widely confirmed of psychoanalytic discoveries. Freud’s earliest case histories showed it and so did this morning’s experience in hundreds of clinics and consulting-rooms. I know, for example, how the style and subject and method of this book stem from very early experiences of my own and my whole present character, including various half-conscious wishes and fears. Although these unconscious and infantile sources are by no means the only ones, if so conscious an act as writing an experimental and theoretical book has strong buried components, I find it hard to believe that responding to a play, a movie, or a poem does not. And, of course, it does.

As the remainder of this book will show, readers respond to literature in terms of their own “lifestyle” (or “character” or “personality” or “identity”). By such terms, psychoanalytic writers mean an individual’s characteristic way of dealing with the demands of outer and inner reality. Such a style will have grown through time from earliest infancy. It will also be what the individual brings with him to any new experience, including the experience of literature. Each new experience develops the style, while the pre-existing style shapes each new experience. And this style can be described quite accurately (but not, of course, impersonally).

In short, psychoanalysis offers a powerful theory of individual responses to literature, and it has done so ever since Freud’s 1905 study of jokes. (Interestingly, in that very early study, he also showed how social and economic factors would affect the pattern of inhibitions an individual brought to a joke and so affect h...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• fmchapter
• fmchapter
• preface
• 1 The Question: Who Reads What How?
• 2 What? “A Rose for Emily,” For Example
• 3 How? The “Experiment”
• 4 Who? The Five Readers
• 5 The Answer: Four Principles Of Literary Experience
• 6 The Evidence: Sam, Saul, Shep, Sebastian, and Sandra Read Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily”
• 7 The Terms of Subjectivity
• 8 From Subjectivity to Collectivity
• 9 Knowing