Explaining Literature: A Reflection on the Theoretical Contribution of Ralph W. Rader

In a series of essays published over some three decades, the late Ralph Rader developed a theory of literary explanation that was remarkable for a number of reasons. Among them were the clarity and hence intentional vulnerability of its hypotheses and its unembarrassed focus on the established classics of English literature. Rader drew his examples almost exclusively from the canon of the English and Irish novel, Defoe to Joyce, and of English lyric poetry from Gray to Eliot. This at a time when the larger enterprise of literary criticism was busily expanding if not dissolving the canons of the various national literatures and probing the boundaries between high literature and other modes of discourse. Rader’s concentration on the canon was, however, a direct and deliberate consequence of an extraordinary explanatory ambition. He aimed at nothing less than defining the essential nature of literary objects and, in the process, providing a basis in our shared experience for the explanation and resolution of interpretive controversy.

One of the impressive features of Rader’s theory is the complexity he generates out of a fairly small set of conceptual resources. This is easiest to see in his clearest and most comprehensive statement of the theory, his retrospective essay “Literary Constructs,” published in Poetics in 1989. The ambition mentioned above is evident in the paper’s abstract, where it is stated with characteristic precision, if also with a characteristically forbidding syntax and vocabulary:

The overall aim of the paper is to show how a single theoretical perspective can articulate and collaterally explain and illuminate both the micro-facts, the pre-analytical shared invariants of our immediate tacit reading experience of literary works, and the macro-facts of our collective experience. The most crucially significant of these macro-facts are patterns of agreement—and particularly disagreement—in the interpretations which have grown up around major works and rendered them critically problematical. It is in critical disagreement that the complexities of experience most perplexingly but also (potentially) most fruitfully manifest themselves, since the very limitation of understanding that such interpretive shortfall reflects provides a rich test for further explanatory inquiry if we appreciate the fact that patterns of disagreement are as specific as a spectrograph to individual works and therefore offer for decoding an implicit structural characterization of the works as objects of our experience.

(337)

The first premise—in many ways the key to Rader’s whole theory—is familiar from the early writings of Stanley Fish and other proponents of reader-response criticism: that readers share the same fundamental experience of the work, even if they follow different trajectories in interpreting what they have experienced. It follows that one should be able to work backwards along those trajectories, tracing the conflicting interpretations to their common source in the original experience.

Rader goes on to state a second major premise: that one’s hypothetical reconstruction of the experience produced by a single literary work can be both tested and expanded by applying the same hypothesis to other works in the same genre, with due attention to the evolution of genres through history. Or as he continues in the same abstract, “[e]xplanatory accounts of individual forms gain power the more their implications are extended to provide collateral and comparative accounts of other members of the same or related genres and, as possible, their historical development as well” (ibid.). This reciprocal relation, in Rader’s account, between the explanation of individual works and groups of related works underlies his clearest statement in this essay of his largest ambition, which is to turn the study of literature into (something like) a true science: “[t]he aim is one general to explanatory endeavor on the scientific model, to seek at once the greatest generality and the greatest particular[ity] of explanation on the basis of the most cogent set of assumptions for doing so” (339).

There is one final premise that does not appear in Rader’s abstract but arrives later in the article: that the form to which our experience of a work responds—at least in the case...