The Spectator in Drama/Drama in the Spectator

The Spectator in Drama! Drama in the Spectator UNA CHAUDHURI [A] text consists of multiple writings, issuing from several cultures and entering into dialogue with each other, into parody, into contestation; but there is one place where this multiplicity is collected, united, and this place is not the author, as we have hitherto said it was, but the reader. Roland BarthesI The theoretical maneuver by which the reader came to occupy the space vacated by the disappearing author did not remain unquestioned for long. The readerwhether it be the "mock-reader," the "model reader," the "implied reader," the "super reader," or even the "real reader (me)"2 - could hardly withstand the pressure exerted by contemporary literary theory upon any construct in which meaning can be grounded (or, as Barthes says, "collected, united"). The "multiple writings" which Barthes found playing through and pulverizing the once closed, organic, stable, objective, autonomous text ~ould hardly remain absent from the reader. They soon appeared, in the forms either of the institutional codes and conventions of semiotic theory (see Culler's "literary competence"3) or of "interpretive strategies," shared, cultivated and enjoined by the fact of one's membership in "interpretive communities."4 Barely installed as a literary fact, the autonomous reader was revealed as a critical fiction, the latest in a series that has included the autonomous author and the objective text. If the reader remains at all, it is as a psychologically unique individual (the actual person reading) imprinting private fantasies, desires and neuroses, in a radically personal way, upon the text.5 This reader is a construct oflittle theoretical use to literary study, though not without attraction to literary theologians desirous of justifying the existence of literature.6 Thus, from the denial of the reader (the affective fallacy) to the elevation of the reader (the affective fallacy fallacy7), criticism has arrived, in a few short decades, at the extinction of the reader (the affective fallacy fallacy fallacy?). UNA CHAUDHURI However, the explosion of this promising construct has not been concluded without considerable fallout. Reader-response criticism - a very mixed bag of critical writings sharing an orientation towards the role of the reader - has contributed greatly to the specification of the critical and pedagogical enterprises, generating a set ofterms and articulating a range ofissues that have had no less an effect than that ofirreversibly altering the path ofliterary studies. Preeminent among these issues is that of the locus and nature of literary meaning, with its attendant inquiry into the question ofhow such meaning can be apprehended and described. The most extreme response to this question is probably that of Stanley Fish, for whom meaning is reading, and vice versa. Defining meaning as an event rather than a content, Fish argues for a criticism that describes - in minute detail - the dynamics of this event, revealing the work's meaning as a response to the question: "what does this text do to its reader?" Thus the text is "no longer an object, a thing-in-itself, but an event, something that happens to, and with the participation of, the reader.,,8 The preponderance of words like "event," "participation" and "happens" in Fish's discourse, as well as that of words like "performance," "activity" and "process" in the discourse of reader-response criticism in general, would lead one to expect this criticism to be particularly suited to and productive in the study ofdrama. In fact, however, the drama is conspicuous by its absence from the concerns of reader-oriented criticism. Neither as literary type nor as theoretical model does drama enter here9 (in contrast, for instance, to its ubiquity as theoretical model in the social sciences10). This situation is already being remedied, no doubt, as testified by Patrice Pavis's recent essay on "The Aesthetics of Theatrical Reception: Variations on a Few Relationships."I I Pavis opens his discussion with a description of the present state of this line of inquiry, not neglecting to highlight the paradox of its paucity in the one field seemingly most suited to it: The theatrical work has always been subjected to a very detailed analysis of its working parts, an analysis which has described even the most insignificant mechanisms of...