Shaped by Stories: The Ethical Power of Narratives

Notes

197 Notes Y chapter one Reading for Life 1. For my birthday a few years ago a good friend of mine, having read this chapter in an early draft, presented me with a copy of Smoky the Crow, which he purchased from an online company specializing in hard-to-find and out-of-print books. Those of you who share with me vivid recollections of your first reading experiences can imagine my pleasure at seeing this simple and innocent little book again after all these years, its institutional green cover with black and white illustrations looking exactly as I remembered it from my childhood. In rereading Smoky, however, I was chagrined to see how much of the book’s contents I had forgotten over the decades. chapter three For Good or Ill 1. The New York commuter who hops on the subway every day is not much different in this regard from the Amazon hunter who takes his bow and poison-tipped arrows into the jungle every day to make a living. Both lives, and everyone else’s as well, are mostly a matter of doing the same things today that we did yesterday and mostly in the company of the same people. chapter four Stories and the Ethics of Experience 1. I’m not failing to recognize that the characters in stories are very often disorganized, disoriented, and sometimes mad. It is not stories’ ­characters who convey to us an image of unity, but the work of narrative art itself: a good story about boring people is not a boring story, and a good story about haplessly disorganized schlemiels is not thereby a haplessly disorganized story. chapter five Judgment that Bites, Assent that Risks 1. According to some of the prevailing theories in literary criticism, we were facing a nonproblem. Deconstruction (first advanced by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida) was new in 1973 but already gaining great steam, and from Derrida’s point of view the signifiers (words and phonemes) making up the texts in Mellie’s anthology were in constant motion, never coming to rest, and no determinate meaning could therefore be attributed to or derived from the story. According to deconstruction, then, we had no worry as parents about what our daughter might take these (objectionable) stories to mean, for they didn’t, and couldn’t, “mean” anything at all. Needless to say this view—highly exciting at the time to intellectuals doing rarified theorytalk at literary conferences far removed from children’s nurseries—didn’t seem helpful to us as parents trying to solve a perennial problem in practical psychology. At another level deconstruction seemed, frankly, untrue, but its truth status is not the issue here. If our problem was a nonproblem to deconstructionists, it was also a nonproblem to advocates of certain versions of reader response theory, who, like deconstructionists, were also insistent on the indeterminacy of textual meanings. In these theories, however, nonmeaning is not a function of the indeterminate properties of language (as in deconstruction), but a function of the emotional needs of the reader. This is an interesting proposition. According to this view, readers reconstitute, or rewrite, texts according to their emotional needs. A reader’s emotions “take over” a text in imperial ways, colonizing it with whatever meanings the reader “needs.” Basically this view says that ­readers simply rewrite each text more or less in their own image as they read. The text has no objective reality about it and thus exerts no demands on the reader. Therefore Mellie would make out of the text whatever she wanted to make—not to worry. But since we wanted Mellie to grow up able to read a textbook or a newspaper or a Shakespeare play and see something besides her own reflection, reader response theory seemed no more helpful than deconstruction. 198 Note to Page 65 Twootherversionsofcontemporaryliterarycriticismsupportedourview that we had a problem, but we did not like the solutions these theories offered us. Certain feminist theories, for example, offered a solution succinctly defined five years later by Judith Fetterley in a book called The Resisting Reader (1978). The idea here is that women readers should approach every literary text with their antagonistic defenses powered up like some kind of force field in a science fiction movie. The point to women reading this way is to resist being molded into traditional female roles and attitudes by the reigning patriarchal values subtly advanced...