The Marriage of Writers and Readers
There’s a branch of literary criticism that studies the role that readers play in determining or completing the literary work. You can talk, for instance, about how Jane Austen’s awareness the audience’s expectations might have helped to shape Emma. On the other end of the writer-reader alliance, you can talk about how the way readers are wired determines their understanding of a story or poem. In a wonderful novel by Italo Calvino, If On a Winter Night a Traveler, a character representing the reader constantly tinkers with the plot.
The critic Wolfgang Iser argued that all literary works contain “gaps” that must be filled either consciously or otherwise by readers. This line of speculation is influenced by a large volume of psychological and philosophical writing about perception, and fancy words such as “phenomenology” are batted back and forth. Below is my contribution to this discussion.
Lovely Reader,
I will say a poem to your eyes
someday when we are by a lake
and raindrops whisper secrets in the trees.
You will move me somewhere with your eyes,
perhaps a shore where small ships nod
and oceans breathe contentedly.
The poem will be summer wind in grass,
or sounds the insects make at night,
and it will walk the pathways of your eyes
To find the sea and board a ship
that journeys where the oceans roll
in eyes that make the poem whole.
June 9th, 2008 at 4:31 pm
Now, you know I only like the opening superlative chapter to that Calvino book, the rest is redundant tripe, in my high opinion (of myself)…so, you lost this ‘reader’ with that opening “wonderful novel” statement.
And then you went and wrote that cinnaminnamon-like word ‘phenomenology’…eeeh gads! My mind doesn’t even want to enunciate that, let alone my tongue.
So, thank goodness you lovingly went and sent my mind off to a peaceful spot by the lake and, then, set me adrift from all of this readerly work I was mired within.
June 9th, 2008 at 10:31 pm
You’re a tough person to educate, Skipster–I had roomfuls of you when I taught. But thanks for picking the right part of the blog to like!
June 11th, 2008 at 5:35 pm
I’m reading a booked called “Conversations with Kurt Vonnegut,” where he repeatedly discussed the importance of being constantly mindful of the reader. This is the first time I had any idea what he was talking about.
I, too, am nearly ineducable on this subject, but I think I’m starting to get it.
At least I know I love the poem.
June 11th, 2008 at 6:40 pm
Many kids arrive at their first college lit. class with the notion that a poem can mean whatever they want it to mean. We have nutjobs who say the same about the U.S. Constitution or the Bible, but usually we behave as though words mean what the speaker or writer intended.
In a book called Validity in Interpretation, E.D. Hirsch says that readers should try to discover that intention. When they do it well, they will agree about the meaning. On the other hand, readers may disagree about a book or poem’s significance, since we don’t all share the same values. I think the difference between meaning and significance is worth keeping in mind when we talk about books.