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The Reader and the Romantic Preface Scott Simpkins University ofNorth Texas I am sensible that my associations must have sometimes been particular instead of general, and that, consequently, giving to things a false importance, I may have sometimes written upon unworthy subjects; but I am less apprehensive on this account, than that my language may frequently have suffered from those arbitrary connections of feelings and ideas with particular words and phrases, from which no man can altogether protect himself. Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads (Prose Works 153) Wordsworth articulates, perhaps inadvertently while discussing "faulty expressions" in his Preface, the actual source of the problems that plague linguistic expression. For it is not necessarily the poet's fault when poems fail. Readers play what is perhaps the most significant role in the production ofthe text, and it is often their use— or, more likely, misuse—of inherently polysemous language that causes so many problems. Although Coleridge praised "the blessed machine of Language," he also knew that it is a decidedly mixed blessing when the reader is taken into account (The Friend 73). After all, readers often mutilate the text, seemingly unaware of, or unconcerned with, the numerous transgressions involved—a situation that led to what Charles Rzepka, while referring specifically to Wordsworth, identifies as a particularly Romantic "audience anxiety" (Self 51). Admittedly, the discrepancy between thought and the usually inferior linguistic means of expressing it, in addition to the poet's lack of skill, can contribute substantially to poor poetic transference. Yet the reader is undoubtedly the weakest link in the chain of signification. It is clear from the proliferation oftextual supplements used by the English Romantic poets that they harbored an intense concern with the vagaries of the reader's response. These devices betray the Romantics' attempts to supplement the linguistic text, to make it something more—and thus, through this overdetermination, to create a greater probability of reaching their desired textual goal.1 "The 'transfer' of text to reader is often regarded as being brought about solely by the text. Any successful transfer, however, though initiated by the text, depends on the extent to which this text can activate the 17 18Rocky Mountain Review individual reader's faculties of perceiving and processing," Wolfgang Iser suggests (107). "If communication between text and reader is to be successful, . . . the reader's activity must be controlled in some way by the text" (167). This is most certainly the type of control the Romantics had in mind when they employed prefaces and other devices designed to influence reading decisions. Both Roland Barthes and Umberto Eco contend that a manipulative program ofthis nature leads to inflexible, one-dimensional, superficial texts which produce more problems and less satisfaction for the reader than densely coded, deliberately ambiguous texts do. The contrasting principles behind writerly and readerly texts (Barthes) or open and closed texts (Eco) seem to refute the potential for success of supplements. But this is not the case. The text that provides additional information for readers (through prefaces or similar devices) actually assists their free production of the text, rather than hindering it, by providing useful guidance for the reading process. Prefaces can backfire, however. After all, they are vulnerable to the same sort of problems that besiege the texts they preface. Elise Gold observes, for instance, that in Shelley's case, "the prefaces become at times as much obstacles as aids to comprehension" (72). As many critics have noted, the discrepancies between "Alastor" and its Preface reinforce this contention. The problems attending the publication of the Preface to Lyrical Ballads offer an even more painful example of this potential dysfunction. In Chapter IV of Biographia Literaria, Coleridge asserts that Wordsworth's Preface provoked many negative responses that probably would not have arisen otherwise. The strategic omission of "less than an hundred lines," he claimed, "would have precluded ninetenths ofthe criticism on his work." With this deletion, "the lines and passages which might have offended the general taste, would have been considered as mere inequalities, and attributed to inattention, not to perversity ofjudgement" (150). Blake's annotation to Wordsworth's Poems suggests that Coleridge was right. "I do not know," he remarked, "who wrote these...

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