Reader-Response Criticism and the Comedia: Creation of Meaning in Calderon's La cisma de Ingalaterra

READER-RESPONSE CRITICISM AND THE COMEDIA: CREATION OF MEANING IN CALDERÓN'S LA CISMA DEINGALATERRA SUSAN L. FISCHER, Bucknell University Influenced by the teachings of the so-called New Critics, Hispanists over the years have tended to subject Golden Age plays to close scrutiny in an effort to free literary criticism from the impressionism and emotionalism of the earlier tradition and from the positivistic intentionalism of literaryhistorical scholarship. One cannot deny the contributions of Cleanth Brooks in the practical dissemination of new critical theory. Fundamentally Brooks stressed the impersonality of the critic-an unwillingness to impose one's own personality between the reader and the work-and he also saw a need for technical analysis. The text, he felt, must provide the ultimate sanction for the meaning of the work, but in no sense is a close textual reading to be conceived of as a sort of «verbal piddling.» «Words,» wrote Brooks, «open out into larger symbolizations on all levels-for example, into archetypal symbol, ritual, and myth. The critic's concern for 'language' need not be conceived narrowly, even if his concern leads to an intensive examination it can be extended into the largest symbolizations possible. »(1) Brooks' qualifications notwithstanding, it would appear from the foregoing that New Criticism, philosophically speaking, operates largely in the framework of what has been termed «realism.» Richard E. Palmer, in his book on hermeneutics,(2) makes the following observation about realistic conceptions of perceiving and interpreting in England and America: It [literary interpretation] tends to presuppose, for instance, that the literary work is simply «out there» in the world, essentially independent of its perceivers. One's perception of the work is considered to be separate from the work itself, and the task of literary interpretation is to speak about the «work itself». ... A typical modern interpreter generally defends the «autonomy of being» of the literary work, and sees his task as that of penetrating this being through textual analysis. The preliminary separation of subject and object, so axiomatic in realism, becomes the philosophical foundation and framework for literary interpretation , (p. 5) Palmer offers a critique of this so-called realistic mode of interpretation; in general he claims that we have forgotten that the literary work is not a manipulatable object 109 110Bulletin of the Comediantes completely at our disposal; it is a human voice out of the past, a voice which must somehow be brought to life. Dialogue, not dissection, opens up the world of a literary work. Disinterested objectivity is not appropriate to the understanding of a literary work. . . . Literary works are best regarded .... not primarily as objects of analysis but as humanly created texts which speak, (p. 7) Palmer's criticisms here reflect the growing disenchantment with formalism in the past several years. Many critics, while building on the foundations laid by their predecessors, have called into question the notion of a literary work as an «object» and have begun to view it instead as an «event.» Ralph Cohen, in his excellent essay, «On a Shift in the Concept of Interpretation, »(3) points out that New Criticism, with its emphasis on interpretation as explication, «has come under severe attack for its view of the literary work as well as its view of language, of history, and of the reader» (p. 61). Recent literary criticism has emphasized readers and the act of reading. The term «reader-response criticism» has been used to describe a multiplicity of different approaches that focus on the reading process, all of which adhere to the phenomenological assumption that it is impossible to separate the knower from the known, the perceiver from the perceived, the subject from the object. Steven Maillot, in attempting to place one reader-response critic, Stanley Fish, in the context of four others-David Bleich, Norman Holland, Wolfgang Iser, and Jonathan Culler-makes some useful generalizations about a reader-oriented critical approach: . . . the text's autonomy, its absolute separateness, is rejected in favor of its dependence on the reader's creation or participation. Perception is viewed as interpretive; reading is not the discovery of meaning but the creation of it. In reader-response criticism, examination of a textin -and-of-itself is replaced...