Reader Response Criticism

Reader Response Criticism

                                                Dr. S. Sree Kumar

Additions

►   Wolfgang Iser—exponent of reception theory—the text is a site for the production and proliferation of meaning. This view owes much to the phenomenology of Husserl.

►   Phenomenology stresses the centrality of consciousness in all investigations of meaning.

►   Iser says that the experience of reading literary texts is a uniquely valuable consciousness raising activity.

►   Reading literature, he says, “gives us the chance to formulate the unformulated”.

Dynamic nature of the work.

►   If the reader were given the whole story, and there were nothing left for him to do, then his imagination would never enter the field, the result would be the boredom which inevitably arises when everything is laid out cut and dried before us. Reading is a pleasure only when it is active and creative. If the text goes too far, boredom will be the result. If the text does not go far enough, overstrain may be the result. Boredom and overstrain form the boundaries beyond which the reader will leave the field of play.

►   Preintentions—the individual sentences not only work together to shade in what is to come; they also form expectations in this regard. Husserl calls this expectation “preintentions”.

►   Expectations are never completely fulfilled in a work. The more a text confirms our expectations, the more we become aware of its didactic purpose. The very clarity of such texts will make us want to escape from its clutches. The expectations raised by sentences in literary texts are continually modified as one reads.

Reading and Kaleidoscope

►   The activity of reading can be characterized as a sort of kaleidoscope of perspectives, preintentions and recollections. Every sentence contains a preview of the next and is a viewfinder for what is to come and this in turn changes the ‘preview’ and becomes a viewfinder for what has been read. This is a process of anticipation and retrospection.

Hiatus / Blockage

►   Ingarden uses the term ‘Satzdenken’ –- sentence–thought –to describe the connection between one sentence and another. The process of reading goes effortlessly forward by connecting the thought in one sentence with the thought in the next. But if by chance the sentence has no tangible connection, a blockage comes in the stream of thought. This blockage is called hiatus. The blockage must be overcome if the reading has to flow once more.

►   Ingarden sees hiatus as a flaw. Yet literary texts are full of unexpected twists and turns and frustrations of expectations. Even in the simplest story there is some kind of blockage. No tale can be told in its entirety. It is only through inevitable omissions that a story will gain its dynamism. Whenever the flow is interrupted and we are led of in unexpected directions, our own faculty for establishing connections is employed for filling in the gaps left by the text itself.

►   The gaps are filled in different ways. One text is potentially capable of several different realizations. No reading can ever exhaust the full potential. Each individual reader will fill in the gaps in his own way, thereby excluding the various other possibilities. Thus the reader implicitly acknowledges the inexhaustibility of the text. With traditional texts this process was unconscious. Modern texts exploit the inexhaustibility deliberately. 

►   Modern texts are very fragmentary. The reader is occupied with the search for connections between the fragments. Interpretation becomes a basic element in the reading process. The potential text is far richer than any of its individual realizations. We may say that the second reading produces a different impression than the first. This is not to say that the second reading is ‘truer’ than the first. They are quite simply different.

The Uses of the unwritten part of the text.

♣    If one sees a mountain, one can no longer imagine it. Hence the art of seeing the mountain, presupposes its absence. Similarly with a literary text one can picture things which are not there. The written part of the text gives us the knowledge. But it is the unwritten part that gives us the opportunity to picture things. Without the elements of indeterminacy, the gaps in the text, we should not be able to use our imagination.

♣   Illustration: When we read a novel like Tom Jones we have a clear conception of how the hero looks like. But when we see the film most of us would say “That’s not how I imagined him”. The reader uses his imagination to visualise the hero. But in the film the possibilities are narrowed down to one complete and immutable picture. The imagination is put out of action and we feel cheated.

Search for Consistency

Readers group together different parts of the text and project onto them the consistency which they require. It is not given by the text. It arises from the meeting between the unwritten text and the individual mind of the reader.

Illusion vs. the polysemantic nature of the text.

·         Illusion means the ‘desire’ to picture. Without the formation of illusions the ‘unfamiliar’ part of the text would remain ‘unfamiliar’. Through illusions the experience offered by the text becomes accessible to us.

·         The text provokes certain expectations which in turn we project onto the text in such a way that we reduce the polysemantic possibilities into a single interpretation. The polysemantic nature of the text and the illusion-making of the reader are opposed factors. If the illusion were complete, the polysemantic nature would vanish. If the polysemantic nature were all-powerful, the illusion would be totally destroyed. Both extremes are possible. But in the individual literary text there is always a balance between the two.

Interpretation

A As we read a text we see our interpretation of it constantly shifting. We see the characters; events and backgrounds seem to change their significance. Other possibilities emerge strongly. It is this shifting of perspectives that makes the novel ‘true to life’.

  Process of Recreation

♫    The process or recreation is steered by two main structural components within the text: first, a repertoire of familiar literary patterns and recurrent literary themes; second, there does arise a participation as one reads; one is certainly drawn into the text in such a way that one hs the feeling that there is no distance between oneself and the events described.

♫    This feeling is thus summed up by a critic:   

 We took up Jane Eyre one winter’s evening. [He is angry at the praise showered on the book and vows to be very critical of it]. But as we read on we forget both commendations and criticism, identified ourselves with Jane in all her troubles, and finally married Mr. Rochester about four in the morning.

Poulet’s observations on the reading process.

Books take on their full existence on the reader.

They consist of ideas thought out by someone else, but in reading the reader becomes the subject and does the thinking.

The subject-object division disappears. Reading is put on a unique position as regards the possible absorption of new experiences.

If reading removes the subject-object division, it follows that the reader will be occupied by the thoughts of the author. This will create new ‘boundaries’. Text and the readier do not become object and subject. The division takes place within the reader. As we read there occurs an artificial division of our personality.

When reading we operate at different levels—the alien ‘me’ and the real, virtual ‘me’. These two are never cut off from each other. Every text we read draws a different boundary within our personality. The real ‘me’ will take on different forms according to the theme of the text concerned. This is the dialectical structure of reading.