Art And Engagement

5. The Reader's Word

CHAPTER FIVE The reader's word IT IS ONE OF THE DISCOVERIES OF RECENT LITERARY CRITICISM, perhaps its most far-reaching claim, that a text does not stand alone. A text requires a cohort of critics and readers, a literary public, a linguistic system, all surrounded by a larger society with its conventions and beliefs, and all placed in an ordered historical perspective to be interpreted and understood. Gone is the illusion, now known to be naive, that a literary text possesses a self-sufficient integrity, an integrity that imposes its own demands on anyone who comes to it, whether as innocent reader or deferential student. Moreover for the semioticians, at least. the text has expanded indiscriminately to subsume every object. practice, and event that holds meaning, and meaning has likewise enlarged to accommodate every presumably cogent interpretation from any direction-linguistic, semiotic, Freudian, Marxist, formalist, feminist. political. until under the deconstructionists the text surrenders any claim to authority. What, then, remains of literature? The celebrated autonomy of the work of art, the regality of the masterwork have fallen before their interpreters and critics. With the expansion of the text and the multiplication of interpretations, we may yearn for Calvino's solution where, "putting behind you pages lacerated by intellectual analyses , you dream of rediscovering a condition of natural reading, Copyrighted Material 105 innocent, primitive."l Literature, moreover, is not unique in this fall from grace. We have already seen that its fate is shared by painting and architecture, a loss of self-sufficiency that we shall find in other arts as well. Yet what is in question is whether the arts ever possessed the autonomy with which we have been so accustomed to invest them and, in fact, whether this change in status might not signify their resurrection into a new and more vital life, recognizing a power and importance that had remained partially hidden under the protection of a mistaken self-sufficiency. Perhaps the salvation of literature does not lie in preserving the purity of the autonomous text but in identifying the locus of literature. But what is literature, if not a text? The identity of literature is no easy question in this age ofcompeting scholarships. Nor are the alternatives simple ones, for their subtle elaborations extend the focus beyond the apparent boundaries of author, text, and reader. Edges blur and domains merge in the different efforts of formalists, structuralists, subjectivists, readerresponse theorists, and deconstructionists to locate and comprehend literature. Yet the centers of these views are clear enough and the alternatives they offer sufficiently different to make it important to identify them and attempt to place them within a somewhat more inclusive perspective, for it is easy to mistake one domain for the world. Let us focus first, then, on some of these alternatives, not representing them fully but rather identifying their central points as poles of a larger conceptual structure. This will lead to the main purpose: pursuing the assimilation of the reader into the literary process. Centering the understanding of literature on the text alone is the clearest and most direct strategy. It has had a powerful appeal in this century because it offered a means of applying the presumably objective procedures ofscientific inquiry to the intangible and elusive art of literature. From different directions the New Critics, structuralists , linguists, and other formalists have taken the text as the object of inquiry, an object to be analyzed, divided, and unraveled, and then its meaning reconstructed in the clear daylight of reason. Among the most influential exemplars of this approach was the Russian formalist Roman Jakobson. Jakobson proposed a formula that identified two basic principles that organize speech: selection and combination. Selection rests on the capacity of language for metaphoric equivalence, either by similarity or dissimilarity. Thus 106 Engagement in the Arts Copyrighted Material the speaker chooses a subject for discussion from among possible synonymous alternatives, and this becomes the subject of the sentence . The speaker then selects what to say about it from other synonymous terms to establish the predicate. As an act of verbal communication , poetry employs the same scheme as every other function oflanguage, but it uses rhythmic, phonetic, and other forms ofequivalence along with structural ones in combining words as well as in selecting them. Furthermore, the focus in poetry is on the message for its own sake. The two principles of selection and combination form complementary axes here, leading...