Reading, Interpretation, Reception Glowinski

Reading, Interpretation, ReceptionAuthor(s): Micha Gowiski and Wlad GodzichSource: New Literary History, Vol. 11, No. 1, Anniversary Issue: II (Autumn, 1979), pp. 75-82Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/468871 .Accessed: 19/03/2013 21:08

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Reading, Interpretation, Reception

Micha] Gkowiniski

L ITERARY CRITICISM has only recently become interested in the category of reading, whether as an object of reflection or, in some measure, a descriptive tool. Recourse to it has been rather

aleatory, if we except the pioneering work of Roman Ingarden on the cognition of the literary work, in which he subjected the problem to exhaustive analysis.' However, even he stressed that which today does not appear to be of most interest. Ingarden's analysis of reading deals with questions which fall more within the purview of psychologists studying the behavior of the reader in the course of his contact with the literary text (e.g., the impact of reading interruptions upon the cognition of the text). But much of what is referred to by reading today is treated by Ingarden under another heading: concretization. As is well known, this category was introduced in the first and fundamental of Ingarden's studies on the construction of the literary work: Das literarische Kunstwerk (1931). Ingarden argued that, owing to a construction characterized by schematization and so-called loci of indeterminacy, every literary work requires the completion of its elements at the moment of reading, especially in the course of an aesthetic reading. And a work achieves full aesthetic status only when it has been concretized by a reader. Specific works require specific types of concretization, since the latter is neither optional nor arbitrary; the reader, however, does come to the work with diverse concretizing biases, dependent upon a great many variables, including historical and cultural conditioning. It can thus be said that, to use contempo- rary terminology, Ingarden's problematic of concretization is a problem of reading.2

I do not intend to either expound or criticize Ingarden's concepts. They do provide me, however, with a useful point of departure for further considerations. To be sure, the preoccupations of a psychol- ogy of reading (beginning with the perception of a piece of paper filled with signs, whether handwritten or printed) are immaterial to literary criticism. Criticism defines its concerns otherwise: its object is not to be found in the psychological properties of reading but rather in its historico-cultural aspects. In other words, it analyzes reading as a specific form of cultural activity, subject to certain norms, and sus-

Copyright 1979 by New Literary History, The University of Virginia


NEW LITERARY HIS'TORY

ceptible of differentiation according to the type of literary culture to which it belongs.3 This is a fundamental assumption, since it allows the work to be apprehended not as an autonomously existing phenomenon, limited to the text, and conceived of as an unvarying and stabilized structure, but rather it permits a consideration of the literary work as energeia, and not only as ergon, to use Humboldt's classical formulation.

Reading is, in a sense, an everyday activity, consciously controlled only to a rather small degree, and in this respect it is very much like everyday speech which, though rule-governed, does not require that these rules be brought to consciousness in daily linguistic practice; rather, they remain unconscious even when the subject of the practice is capable of conceptualizing them. Reading, accompanied by self- reflection, ceases to be reading in the ordinary sense; it begins to resemble the type of activity which characterizes the interpretation of literary works. The analogy with speech does not end there. From a spoken utterance one can reconstruct much of what has not been explicitly formulated, such as unstated assumptions and a complex of beliefs accepted as obvious and therefore not requiring verbalization. Each utterance unveils its presuppositions. The same occurs in reading: its specific presuppositions come to the fore.4 As Adorno reminds us, the interpreter is not a tabula rasa; he comes to the text with a certain set of beliefs and habits. This is particularly true of the "ordinary" reader, who is not in the business of interpretation and therefore does not have to subject his actions to rationalization. These beliefs cover the state of the world, its properties and construction; they also include a basic axiology and even the structure of the text. Beliefs dealing with the very value of the work are linked in multivaried ways to beliefs of the first order. This is apparent in the case of some common psychological representations alluded to in a work, and so relevant to the reception of narrative. In reading, beliefs cur- rently in circulation, and regarded as either obvious or natural, are actualized. This is neither a "sin" nor a flaw of reading, but rather its fundamental property. We cannot receive a work outside of the culture in which we live and whose elements we have interiorized. Reading introduces the work into our world, the world of our representations and values; it reduces the distance to the text.

One can look at this question from the opposite viewpoint: the perspective of the work itself. The orientation of the vectors is re- versed: in reading, we not only introduce the work to our world, we also introduce our world into the work; we impose our categories upon it; we perceive in it especially that which links it to our world. This appears to be a universal property of reading, actualized even

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when it is undertaken for primarily cognitive reasons, and should therefore be as free as possible of those factors which interfere with cognition or impede it. The basis of reading is the assumption of a common universe, divided between the reading subject and the work read. This hypothesis need not be explicitly signified in every in- stance; it formulates itself in the very act of reading. Literary culture constitutes the ground of this assumption; it makes it possible and defines it.

During the course of reading, not only beliefs concerning the world, and the axiological attitudes bound to them, become actualized. Similarly, whole complexes of beliefs about literature itself, its nature, properties, and functions, come into play and layer them- selves upon them. Another layer is then constituted by beliefs in what is literature and what isn't, and, even further, what is good and bad literature. Reading is thus influenced by the literary taste of a period. We should also add beliefs in what is permissible and proper in a certain type of literary utterance, and not in another. Thus, the stereotypes of a given period play an associative role in reading; they are frequently extracted from tradition, transmitted in schools, and generally subconscious. They are explicit in the evaluation and clas- sification of literary facts.

II

Reading, obviously, lies at the root of all critical activities, especially those whose object is a single text, a concrete literary work. In other words, reading is particularly bound up with the complex of activities commonly referred to as interpretation. What is read is, clearly, a concrete and unique work. The reconstruction of the principles according to which a given group of works has been constructed, or the discovery of the conventions by which it is governed, constitutes, from this point of view, a secondary form of activities, still dependent upon reading but in not so direct a fashion.

"There is no question," writes Janusz Sjawinski in his study of the methodological problems of interpretation, "that the study of individual works is, methodologically speaking, the most troublesome component of a history of literature."5 This statement may have the appearance of a paradox, since the interpretation of individual works may well be considered to be one of the foremost concerns of the historian of literature. Among his undertakings, it is after all the most amenable to empirical verification. The task of criticism is to describe, analyze, comment upon, and explain what is immediately given, particularly individual works, and, above all, great works, whether past or

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present. In the course of these activities, does the critic remain an "ordinary" reader? In attempting to answer this question, we will learn that we are not dealing with a paradox.

Here is the basic problem: in what way is a critic, producing interpretations, different from a reader, who, in reading a text, is under no obligation to explain it or to comment upon it, does not have to make clear what is important and significant about it, and generally satisfies himself with a modest, unassuming comprehension, for his own use and in his own measure. Slawinski reminds us that for the critic, "the problematic nature of his expertise immediately poses itself: he cannot-because it is not possible-separate his activities from the circumstances of'ordinary' reading and the concretizing processes attendant to it. He cannot, as a scholar, escape from a more elemen- tary role: the reader. His analytical, interpretive, and evaluative moves cannot be divorced from the norms of reading prevalent in the community to which he belongs."6 As a consequence, "the scholar would very much like to stifle within himself the voice of the reader, to detach himself from the community of readers to which he belongs, to liberate his method from cultural and literary constraints of time and place. It is a desire bound up with an internal antinomy: is it possible to achieve a history of literature, while rejecting one's own historicity?"7

This is where the basic conflict specific to interpretation can be drawn. Interpretation, to be true to itself, must, in order to justify its existence, overcome within itself that which would be but "ordinary" reading, delimited by a given culture and free of such obligations as verifiability and subordination to analytic methods constitutive of literary science. In addition, interpretation, to be itself, must take it for granted that it will not be a repetition of previous readings. In "ordinary" reading, this is unimportant since we read for our own use and out of our own needs; reading is, after all, and in spite of its anchoring in literary culture, a private and intimate undertaking. Impressionistic criticism attempted to resolve this conflict by defining its task as the recording of the impressions produced by the reading of masterpieces. This is but a poor and unsatisfactory solution since it not only renounces all rigor for criticism but reduces it to the recording of acts of reading. Today such record keeping, sometimes in- teresting and even profound, is confined to diaries and lies outside the scope of criticism in the strict sense of the word.

The conflict between interpretation and reading has another side: interpretation, in order to be itself, not only cannot completely overcome that which constitutes its basis in reading, understood as an activity deeply anchored in literary culture, but it must in some way discount reading, and exploit it for its own ends. Interpretation,

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which would want to liberate itself wholly of reading factors (as they are understood in this essay), would be simply incomprehensible-is there need to add that such total liberation is impossible? It would directly conflict with notions current in the culture, whether on the subject of the world or the work. It would be received as an eccentric- ity, a testimony to the interpreter's aberration, without any verifiable basis with respect to its object. Insofar as it were possible at all, an act of interpretation which would bracket off all the contribution of reading would appear as a sort of critical fantasy.

How then to solve this conflict? Can it be resolved? Yes, undoubt- edly so, within a certain meaning of reading, although this solution requires many additional assumptions and has so many limitations that it produces results only in single cases, and thus fails to provide the data for devising either a goal or an ideal toward which interpretive practice in general should strive. This conflict is avoided when reading is understood as a primarily hermeneutic activity, which at- tempts to achieve the greatest proximity, or even, in optimal cases, congruence, between cognizing subject and cognized object. In its hermeneutic or even merely radically hermeneutic version, the very act of reading is already an act of interpretation; reading and interpretation merge. From the point of view of reading, the work becomes the only point of reference; the literary culture within which the act of reading takes place is not taken into consideration. This is what appears to take place in the critical practice of Georges Poulet; at least, such seems to be his conception of reading. I have in mind the programmatic essay "Criticism and the Experience of Interiority," which is a phenomenological account of the act of reading, and also its grandiloquent eulogy.8 In the work of a master reader such as Poulet, such an approach leads to excellent results, but its inherent weakness lies in the impossibility of its generalization and dissemination; it is beyond the kind of conceptualization required for further development. Such practices are, like poetry, questions of individual talent. They obviously cannot resolve the conflict at hand.

There is a perspective from which the relationship of reading to interpretation need not be conflictual at all. Reading is not limited to introducing banalities and hackneyed judgments within the compass of interpretation; nor does it merely constrain it to prevailing norms, which need not live up to the standards of critical description. In a sense, it is also a controlling factor of interpretation; it imposes limits upon it, frequently limits of common sense. Interpretation cannot be either the domain of free choice or the result of the ingenuity of the critic-which would lead to what I earlier called critical fantasy. The basic impediment to such gestures is the text itself-on condition that

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one grant that interpretation should be adequate to it, that it not conflict with it, and, therefore, that it not impose meanings upon it which are obviously foreign to it. The text, however, does not seem capable of playing this role single-handedly. It cannot do so, since, for ordinary reception and for description, it does not exist indepen- dently; it functions in the realm of literary culture, which always in- cludes some representations concerning literary works in general, specific types of works, and, finally, the concrete work being interpreted-particularly in the case of a known, valued, and widely read work which has become an object of social judgment. This is where reading comes in: it is reading which places interpretation in literary culture and imposes limits upon it; it is reading which insures that there exists a certain area of intersubjectivity in interpretation. One of the functions of reading is, therefore, to exert an in- fluence upon the legibility of interpretation, and thus upon its social functioning.

III

Interest in the tensions between reading and interpretation tran- scends the methodological questions posed by the analysis of literary works. Their importance becomes apparent when the center of interest is shifted to what German scholars have been calling Rezeptionsiisthetik, and which, in Polish studies, has been referred to as the poetics of reception.9 Here too, the relations of reading and interpretation raise methodological issues, but in a somewhat different vein. Reading is problematized, not as a precondition of interpretation, but as the object of reconstruction and analysis. Interpretation now becomes the factor which makes this reconstruction possible. It does so because it contains residues of reading, that is, elements which are not derivative of methodological decisions or produced by the instruments of critical description. From this perspective, interpretation is a conveyer of reading. Interpretation is to be treated then as a witness to a reading, so that elements of reading can be brought to the fore.'1 Interpreta- tion can be such a witness to a greater extent than other statements about literature because its object is the individual work, and obviously we read concrete texts and not literature.

Styles of reception, susceptible of general application, can be recon- structed through proper analyses of interpretation. The student of styles of reception is not interested in that which occupies a historian of literary science, e.g., the development of analytic methods and the evolution of methodology. Quite the contrary, the object of his in-

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vestigations is premethodological; it is the culturally given which constrains an interpretation, frequently unbeknownst even to the interpreter. In fact, anything that proceeds from methodological decisions must somehow be set aside; only then can the ground of reading be uncovered.

Many different elements combine at this premethodological level: the level of reading. This is where everyday notions about the world belong, sometimes directly, most often already in some literary cloth- ing, e.g., in the form of notions about what is verisimilar and what isn't," or what is true and what isn't. Next come commonplace ideas about literature itself, and about what is proper in one type of text and not in another. The concept of decorum may have been de- veloped in classical theories of aesthetics, but it has not disappeared with them; it still is at play, though in different guise. Then comes the vast and multivaried realm of evaluation and assessment. Interpreta- tion cannot be isolated from this large sphere of everyday beliefs about literature. However, the very features of an interpretation which diminish its value as a critical act attempting to achieve intel- lectual rigor, originality, and methodological explicitness are important vehicles of the reading, which the student of styles of reception is attempting to reconstruct.12 I distinguish seven such fundamental styles: mythical, allegorical, symbolic, instrumental, mimetic, expres- sive, and aesthetic.

One final remark: the goal of the reconstruction of styles of reading through the study of the interpretations of individual works is not to apprehend how a given scholar read concretely, e.g., how Spitzer read Racinian tragedy in his masterful interpretation, "Le Recit de Theramene"; what imports is the account of the general properties of reading specific to a given literary culture or even a given period. Methods of reading are, to a much greater extent than methods of interpreting, a communal good. It is possible that this type of reconstruction will help reading to take its place among the full-fledged objects of literary history. Literary history would then be concerned not only with the laws of creation of literary works, but also with the laws of their functioning.

INSTITUTE OF LITERARY RESEARCH, WARSAW

(Translated by Wlad Godzich)

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NOTES

1 Roman Ingarden, On the Cognition of the Literary Work, tr. Ruth Ann Crowley and Kenneth R. Olson (Evanston, Ill., 1973). A significantly enlarged version is available in German: Vom Erkennen des literarischen Kunstwerkes (Tubingen, 1968). 2 Wolfgang Iser proceeds from Ingarden's theory in his study "The Reading Process: a Phenomenological Approach," in New Directions in Literary History, ed. Ralph Cohen (London, 1974). Cf. also my article "On Concretization," in Roman Ingarden and Con- temporary Polish Aesthetics, ed. Piotr Graff and Saaw Krzemiefi-Ojak, tr. Graff et al. (Warsaw, 1975). 3 Cf. Janusz S)awifiski, "O dzisiejszych normach czytania (znawc6w)" [On contempo- rary (scholarly) reading norms], Teksty, No. 3 (1974). 4 Theodor W. Adorno states that whoever understands a text imports in it a great many presuppositions and much of his knowledge. See his quoted remarks in Lucien Goldmann et la sociologie de la litterature (Brussels, 1974), p. 37. 5 Janusz Slawifiski, "Analiza, interpretacja i wartosciowanie dziela literackiego" [Analysis, interpretation, and evaluation of the literary work], in Problemy metodologicznego wspolczesnego literaturoznawstwa [Methodological problems of contem- porary literary science], ed. H. Markiewicz and J. S)awinski (Krakow, 1976), p. 100. 6 Ibid., pp. 100-101. 7 Ibid., p. 101. S)awifiski accepts the dichotomy of reading and interpretation. Jean Onimus in his essay "Lecture et critique," Reflexions et recherches de nouvelle critique (Nice, 1969), introduces a third term. Alongside reading for consumption and for scholarship, he adds critico-hermeneutic reading, which is not a conflation of the two previous types. This is the reading which Onimus values most of all because it is most human and leads to the union of reader and read. 8 Georges Poulet, "Criticism and the Experience of Interiority," in The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man, ed. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato (Baltimore and London, 1970). 9 See, for example, Edward Balcerzan, "Perspektywy poetyki odbioru" [Perspectives of a poetics of reception], in Problemy socjologii literatury, ed. Janusz Slawiiiski (Wroclaw, 1971). 10 I write at greater length about the problems raised in the last part of this article in the book Style odbioru [Styles of reception] (Krakow, 1977). See also my "Literary Com- munication and Literary History," Neohelicon, 3-4 (1976). 11 A special issue of Communications (No. 11, 1968) was devoted to verisimilitude. 12 Obviously, interpretations are not the only evidence of reading we have. There are many other types of evidence, ranging from notes in a diary to the results of sociological studies of reading methods.


Article Contentsp. [75]p. 76p. 77p. 78p. 79p. 80p. 81p. 82

Issue Table of ContentsNew Literary History, Vol. 11, No. 1, Anniversary Issue: II (Autumn, 1979), pp. 1-210Front Matter [pp. 40-146]The Current Situation of Literary Theory: Key Concepts and the Imaginary [pp. 1-20]Literature and Art as Ideological Form [pp. 21-39]Marxism and Historicism [pp. 41-73]Reading, Interpretation, Reception [pp. 75-82]An Interview with Hans Robert Jauss [pp. 83-95]Genre and the Literary Canon [pp. 97-119]Allegory and Satire: A Rhetorical Meditation [pp. 121-132]Literary Theory in Discussions of Formae Tractandi by Medieval Theologians [pp. 133-145]Rousseau's Happy Days [pp. 147-166]Thinking of Emerson [pp. 167-176]Self-Evidence and Self-Reference: Nietzsche and Tragedy, Whitman and Opera [pp. 177-192]History Talking to Itself: Public Personality in Recent Memoir [pp. 193-210]Back Matter

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Reading, Interpretation, Reception Glowinski