In Defense of Authors and Readers

Author(s): Edward Bloom, Wayne C. Booth and Wolfgang Iser

Source: NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction , Autumn, 1977, Vol. 11, No. 1 (Autumn, 1977), pp.
5-25
Published by: Duke University Press

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 In Defense of Authors and Readers

Edited by EDWARD BLOOM

On April 14 and 15, 1977, critics and novelists from widely scattered areas of the
United States and Europe met on the campus of Brown University, there to dis-
cuss the present state of fiction studies. They gathered in a series of panels-all
linked by the rubric "Towards a Poetics of Fiction"-each panel attended by
avid, vocal audiences numbering upward of 200. The conference was sponsored
by NOVEL, to help celebrate its tenth birthday, by the Brown Council of Languages
and Literature, by the Wetmore Lecture Fund, the undergraduate Literary
Board, and the Sarah Doyle Women's Center. The topics ranged from Ancient
and Medieval fiction to Structuralism and Marxism, from intention to realism.
At times the disagreements were ardent, but so also were the concords. For two
days clusters of students and critics, academics and townspeople were animated
participants in what was in effect the shop-talk of creativity. The novel obviously
continues to be quite alive and healthy.
In an effort to share this spirit with those unable to attend, the editors of NOVEL
have undertaken to publish some of the conference highlights. The transcripts of
the various sessions are so voluminous as to preclude more than a rich sampling.
The following observations represent a coupling of two panel discussions which
occurred on the first day: "In Defense of Authors" and "In Defense of Readers."
The principal proponent of the first is Professor Wayne C. Booth from the
University of Chicago, author of The Rhetoric of Fiction; and of the second,
Professor Wolfgang Iser from the University of Konstanz (Germany), author of
The Implied Reader. The mostly Brown supporting cast of "In Defense of Au-
thors" are Professors Hyatt H. Waggoner, specialist in Hawthorne and Faulkner;
and Frank Durand, who deals with picaresque and with Spanish and Latin
American fiction. The chairman is Edward Bloom, who writes about fictional
theory and practice and serves as Editor in Chief of NOVEL. The very able panelists
of "In Defense of Readers" are Professors Inge Crosman, authority on Proust
and literary metaphor; and Robert Crosman, of Tufts University and editor of
the newsletter Reader. The chairman-NOVEL Managing Editor Roger Henkle-
teaches nineteenth and twentieth century fiction and is author of the forthcoming
Reading the Novel.
Conclusions, we have no doubt, will continue to be debated and hence be
inconclusive. That is as it should be. Mutatis mutandis and all that. Finally
neither authors nor readers will ever have it all their own way. But in the spirit
of healthy priorities and compromise of a kind, we propose as an epigraph the
conclusion of The Rhetoric of Fiction: "The author makes his readers. If he

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6 NOVEL FALL 1977

makes them badly-that is, if he simply waits, in all purity, for the occasion
reader whose perceptions and norms happen to match his own, then his con
tion must be lofty indeed if we are to forgive him for his bad craftsmanship
if he makes them well-that is, makes them see what they have never s
before, moves them into a new order of perception and experience altogeth
he finds his rewards in the peers he has created."

For the Authors

WAYNE C. BOOTH: It is a strange cultural moment when a group of critics is

assigned the solemn task of defending authors. Has such a thing ever happened
before?-I don't mean before today but before we all found, somewhere in the
last ten years or so, that our left flank had been taken. While we battled about
the best road into the poem as poem and not another thing, while we quarreled
about whether to attend to the author outside the text as well as the author in the
text, while we barely tolerated Kenneth Burke with his steady reminders that
after the text's formal intentions had been discovered most of the interesting
questions remained, the wave of misreading struck.
I cannot take time to speculate about why it struck, or why it hit so many
critics so hard when it came, or what is good and what bad about its effects, or
who represents it well and who badly. But we cannot proceed effectively without
taking thought about the theory of combat implied by our various assigned titles.
Who needs defending, and against what? Why should anyone feel the need to
defend "the author"?
Until recently many critics seemed to feel that it was the other way round in
this jittery century-it was the reader who was on the defensive, while the
author, celebrating his own creativity and autonomy, happily dug his way into
deeper and richer mines of far-fetched allusions and irresolvable ambiguities.
As Mark Harris wrote, in 1957: "I write; let the reader learn to read" ("Easy
Does it Not"). Even as late as 1975, Wright Morris expresses the same assurance
that when misunderstanding arises between authors and readers, it is probably
the reader's fault (About Fiction).
Writing The Rhetoric of Fiction in the fifties, I thought it important to confront
such modernist cliches about the author's independence with a reminder that
authors generally get the readers they deserve-that they in fact make, among
other things, the readers who are capable of remaking the author's poem. It
never occurred to me that within a decade we would be flooded with what our
jargon now calls reader-criticism; that not only would we all soon be writing
"in defense of readers" but that many of us would decide to liberate the reader
and make him, first, the author's equal, and then, as the tide swept onward, the
author's superior. I had complained that some texts written by some authors
made the act of re-creation unnecessarily difficult for all readers, even the best
readers. Little did I dream-the melodrama of recent criticism leads me to such
language-little did I dream that I would live to see the day when many critics

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 AUTHORS VS READERS 7

would render my complaint meaningless by freeing the

wills of a text that has in turn been freed from the author's creative act-freed
in a sense never intended by those conservationists of meaning, Wimsatt and
Beardsley. In a recent MLA panel of reader-readers, the question arose as to
whether Norman Holland was right in drawing the line against a reader who saw
Miss Emily, in Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily" as an Eskimo, and Stanley Fish
opined that Norman Holland had sold out to authorial intention-as indeed he had.

"Miss Emily, we have noted, cannot be an Eskimo-at least without doing

violence to the text. The writer creates opportunities for projection but he also
sets constraints on what the reader can or cannot project in the words-on-the-
page and how he can or cannot combine them. The reader can violate these
stringencies of course, but if he does, he loses the possibilities of sharing his
reading with others and winning their support for his lovely and idiosyncratic
construct." 1

I need not tell anyone here that one man's idiosyncrasy is the next man's
respectful attention to the text, or that claims to free the reader and counter-
charges of irresponsibility fill the air. It takes no great schooling in the history of
rhetoric to see that such battles risk becoming meaningless when the defenders
of any one topic, readers, authors, or texts (auditors, orators, or orations) lose
sight of the others. It is always easy enough to prove that the true creator is the
author: no author, no text and no reader. Or that the true center is the text, since
we seldom have "the author," and even when we do we cannot trust him aside
from his text, and since we cannot trust our subjective responses except as they
accord with the text. Or, finally, that we have nothing really but our responses as
readers. As Holland says, "I cannot know 'A Rose for Emily' apart from my per-
sonal construction of it, nor can you apart from yours. Nor can anyone" (218).
Each of these three self-evidences is self-validating. Once I choose to defend
any one of the three I can easily show that the others are derivative. Nothing
could be more pointless, then, than to plump for authors and prove, for the
thousandth time, that they are after all our court of final authority in verbal
transactions. In any case, authors seem pretty generally to ignore us; valued texts
go on being written, and even read, regardless of pendulum swings among us
critics.
If it is not the author who needs defense, then, who does? I would say that the
reader does-whether the common reader, the rank amateur, or the professional
critic. And the defense we need is against the impoverishment of our own read-
ings, when they are not informed by a notion of the text as something extraor-
dinary made by an author with extraordinary gifts. In other words, the reader
must defend himself against himself, using weapons provided by the author's
text and resisting whatever temptations to prejudice or complacency are offered
by critics ancient and modern.
In short, it seems time for a rediscovery of what some texts, the great texts,
offer us that we cannot provide for ourselves. The trick is: how can we avoid
1 5 Readers Reading (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975), pp. 219-20.

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8 NOVELIFALL 1977

simply another pendulum swing? Can we treat the great texts as great, as the
richest resource we have for the enhancement of our own lives, without repudiat-
ing anything important that the reader-critics (including Booth) have said about
the author's dependence on and responsibility to readers? It is obvious that I am
in many senses, for good and ill, master of every text that falls into my hands;
I can maim or destroy it, re-make it, even find an access of bliss as I make it obey
my will. Can we find a useful language for describing the dangers in such mastery,
the losses I incur when I refuse to let the text master me?

II

An easy answer is that it all depends on which text. Give me a genuine classic
and I shall treat it respectfully; give me a work by Mickey Spillane and I shall
feel free to use it for my purposes, which are more valuable than his. Milton is
my master, but I shall treat many another author with the contempt he deserves.
Such an answer is obviously too easy. How do I distinguish in advance the
authors who will feed me from those who need my kindly or cruel offices of
correction? And besides, every critic who defends the reader's free impositions or
re-creations of the text believes that they are as important when dealing with
Milton as with Mad Magazine.
Indeed, the mistake in much traditional talk about the classic was precisely in
the assumption that one could know in advance which authors would best feed
which readers, and that works labeled canonic must be granted a special reveren-
tial touch. Canons either liberate or kill, depending on the attitudes or habits of
mind of the readers who construct and honor them. But what habits should those
be? The habits of the slave? The apprentice? The friend (the reader Coleridge
pleads for)? The crony or conspirator? The schoolmaster? The rival? The killer?
Surely we must say much more about such choices than that "it all depends."
It is here that a law of rhetoric, first formulated, so far as I know, by Dionysius
of Halicarnassus, can come to our rescue. Dionysius called it, somewhat preten-
tiously, the Law of Non-Isorropic Psychopoetic Powers, but I think we can make
do with a simpler name, "the law of disparate giftedness." It goes like this. In any
act of interpretation there is a strong probability that the speaker has more gifts
to offer in the exchange than the listener. That's why the listener is listening.
The speaker is speaking and the listener listens because they both know in their
bones that more is likely to happen in the rhetorical transaction that way than
the other way round.
The law applies most strongly, of course, whenever the speaker has taken the
trouble to write the oration down and to transmit it as something worth preserv-
ing. This is a simple corollary of the law itself: it means that speakers, and
especially writers, know more on the whole about what they mean and care more
about it and take more pains with it than listeners, and that profit in the exchange
will depend on the listener acknowledging this probability before he in turn
offers to become an authority. A second corollary goes like this: "Most inter-
pretations will be, as human achievements, relatively inferior to the texts they

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 AUTHORS VS READERS 9

interpret. Interpretations of those interpretations wil

further down the line of human quality, and so on, ad inf
There are two reasons for the law's near universality.
The first is obvious, not worth mentioning if it were not
writers who come to our attention do so because they have
listeners or readers, to be of the kind that command our
authority because they are unusually gifted.
Each reader has every temptation to doubt 'that this is
feel inferior as he picks up a given text. After all, is t
dependent on him? And of course there are exception
William Shakespeare is the reader of Holinshed's Chron
reads Fanny Burney, or Marshall McLuhan and Roland Ba
ments.

It is true that we are surrounded by millions of texts whose authors may b

less gifted than critic x, y, or z. But the texts we choose to discuss in public h
for the most part been subjected to a winnowing far more rigorous than we ha
ourselves undergone. The chances of my being able to offer Charles Dickens o
Virginia Woolf as much as they can offer me, in this exchange, are in fact infi
tesimal.
The second reason becomes very important here. It is not just that ma
authors are in fact my natural superiors. It is also that most authors we want
interpret, even those who are naturally no more gifted than their interprete
have spent more time and creative energy on what they choose to publish th
the interpreter is able or willing to spend. The author has made himself
authority on the material in hand. Mark Twain has lived with Huck Finn
years; George Eliot knows Middlemarch, both the world and the novel, better
than any reader ever will; Yeats has lived with each volume of poems for yea
before releasing it to the world. Thus each of them has more to offer on thi
subject, on how this text should be read, on what I must become to read it, tha
I do. As someone once said, the author makes his readers, and when he makes
them well-that is, makes them see what they have never seen before, moves th
into a new order of perception and experience altogether-he finds his reward
the peers he has created. The law says woe unto those readers who assume tha
they are already peers or superiors.
The law holds even with authors we think of as quite ordinary, or with autho
who write in great speed and seeming lack of revision, like Georges Simenon
Frank Kermode. Even those we consider hacks often expend themselves extra
agantly in their works, packing more in than we ever recover. And it is n
uncommon, in fact it is the norm, for authors we find worth discussing to sp
a year to five years of daily labor on a book, three or more hours a day, packin
in, as it were, what we then think we can unpack between now and the deadl
for the next issue of Diacritics.
In other words, the author earns his authority by coming to know his work
with great intimacy as he writes it, to know its demands upon him, to know how
much of himself has had to be purged if he is to serve the work and thus his

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10 NOVELjFALL 1977

readers. The critic who chooses to remake the work c

in the same way: by respecting the author's inherent
the author proves that he does not deserve it. Som
writing and reading than others; some works are bette
To pretend that my easy reworkings of the works of
my having to earn my way is to produce a criticism
worst senses: egalitarian, reductionist, self-indulgent,
To pretend that whatever comes into my head abou
simply because it is mine, as the author's own concepti
is after all at best a hypothesis. And unless I happen t
than the author, it is likely to be a self-destructi
hypothesis-that the author's various "readings," a
revisions and the decision to abandon the text to my h
will not always be confirmed, of course, by my "inves
all I have lost is time and labor, and I have not really
have stretched myself even in discovering the author
that I am already at least as big and rich and deep an
hand ensures that regardless of its actual quality, I w
ment about the same size as when I went in.
Some reader-critics, on the contrary, claim to free us from the enslaving
conviction that a poem is capable of being encompassed in a single logical
formulation. But is there anyone who really wears those chains? No one in fact
defends the notion that a single set of propositions will serve as the equivalent of
any poem. What is more, we are threatened by far more serious forms of enslave-
ment, particularly the conviction now growing among our students that criti-
cism is at best the reduction of the work to my own size and at worst simply the
flinging of Greek-fed, polysyllabic bullshit.
Fortunately, we all know from experience how the law can work on our
behalf. We have all discovered, on subsequent readings, that what is there, what
has been put there by the author, is grander stuff than we were able to see on first
reading. What was wrong with me, I wonder, when as a college student I tossed
aside Nostromo as unintelligible? Where was I, I ask, when I dismissed Herodo-
tus as a boring primitive? Well, where I was was where I was, and if I had
believed then what I am told now, that whatever I claimed to find was as
important as what the authors actually offered, I might have stopped there.
The law applies, of course, even to flesh-and-blood authors returning, after
the heat of creation has passed, to interpret their own texts. One result of the
way texts get written is a kind of paradox: authors are more gifted than people.
Implied authors, invented in what used to be called moments of inspiration, are
almost always more gifted than the people who invent them (how much we gave
up when we decided no longer to talk of the muse!). One major act in the creation
of any great text is the author's successful effort to slough off his own ordinari-
ness, and his often surprised, "inspired," discovery of a new and superior self.
No human being was ever as witty and profound and generous-spirited as the
imagined geniuses who give us the works of Shakespeare or Jane Austen or

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 AUTHORS VS READERS 11

Flaubert or Henry James.2 Witty and profound and gen

the flesh-and-blood authors no doubt really were, even w
groceries. Regardless of how drab their words were as th
or Brussels sprouts, it seems unlikely that they were as
be at such moments. But to say so much is simply to
there are imaginative geniuses in our world. All of these
energies to making concentrated versions of an already un
life-to distil an essence of wit or profundity or imaginati
and-blood person was ever as marvelous as is the implied
Austen collected her moments of marvelousness from man
Flaubert shows us in his letters that he could not regularly
miraculous second self he creates when choosing the hun
signs of authority he offers in the finished Madame Bova
For these reasons, then, the law holds: the speaker I
version, spoken or written, is likely to be immeasurably
occasion than I am.
There is nothing to prevent my making in turn another occasion, another tex
on which I shall in turn be a genuine authority-nothing, that is, except the fac
comforting or damning, about how the first reason applies to me. The explici
effort of some new new critics to rival the works they criticize is not inevitab
foredoomed. I become a bit suspicious, though, when I see the rivalry conduct
by tearing down or simply ignoring the rival's edifices. Only the critic who is first
as imaginatively gifted as his subject; who does, secondly, spend as much tim
and creative energy on the work as the author did; and who is, finally, a
capable as the author of purging the ordinariness that in all lives threatens to
engulf all special gifts-only such an interpreter can survive a public jousting.
All this being so, what greater disservice can a critic perpetrate than to fee
my complacency, flatter my capacity to turn out a hasty reader-centered readin
a poor thing but my own, freed of the author's authority, limited only by m
own pre-existing limits, limits that must unfortunately reveal me as a prisoner
my past experience.
Besides flesh-and-blood geniuses and implied super-authors there are oth
"authors" we might want on occasion to attack or defend. There is, for examp
what we might call the "career-author"-the sustained succession of impli
authors we meet in a series of works as a career develops. Relations betwe
such implied career-authors and the flesh-and-blood authors are as diverse
those between the implied authors of particular works and their actual creato

2 Testimony to this distilling process can be found in many forms throughout the history of literature. Hazlitt
for example, arguing that "no really great man ever thought himself so," uses as one argument the fact th
every genius knows too much about himself to think himself great. "Besides, every one must be sensible
a thousand weaknesses and deficiencies in himself; whereas Genius only leaves behind it the monuments
of its strength. A great name is an abstraction of some one excellence; but whoever fancies himself an
abstraction of excellence, so far from being great, may be sure that he is a blockhead, equally ignorant of
excellence or defect, of himself or others. Mr. Burke, besides being the author of the Reflections, and the
Letter to. a Noble Lord, had a wife and son; and had to think as much about them as we do about him."
("Whether Genius is Conscious of its Powers?")

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12 NOVELlFALL 1977

Some careers are planned and relatively unified; we might say

life is quite close (though obviously not identical) to the life of
Some authors, as a forthcoming work by Lawrence Lipking wi
work as hard at planning the trajectory of their artistic careers
construction of individual works. Criticism has paid very little
"works," and I know of hardly anything useful that has be
critic's responsibility to write in such a way as to nourish the a
There is also the public figure, the fictitious hero created and
author and public, independently of an author's actual works.
word for this is "image," but "character" in the old sense of r
closer to what I have in mind.) The author as public figure is a
Aristophanes' public satire against the "character" of Socrat
highly important with the invention-was it really only with S
Shandy?-of the best-seller promoted by the public shenanigans
playing out roles popularized in the work. Dickens making a
aloud from his novels (that is, dramatizing a carefully selected p
Mark Twain becoming famous for anecdotes many of whic
Norman Mailer enacting the public's notion of "the writer"-
degree fly free from the actual written work of the author.
Attention to either of these two "authors" can lead to critica
can also lead to critical disaster, if the critic's picture of the c
public figure is allowed to obscure particular achievements.
wants to make something new, he may very well find the const
or of a public that loves that past, impossible to shatter. Peopl
their heroes to repeat their past performance, and performan
viewed in types; we cannot even take in an artistic work witho
some sense of a recognizable genre. Yet an author may see his
creating something quite different from whatever he has done
On the other hand, the reception of a given new work ma
aided, at least for a time, by the public's love for the career-aut
Trollopian, the character of "Trollope" does not suffer much ev
nods. The reader imports into a given feeble novel some of the
strong ones. This is not simply the same as my forgiving Shak
blotting his thousand bad lines on the grounds of his being a g
that the "bad lines" are themselves "Shakespearian"; the late wo
the juvenilia of Jane Austen, the weaker essays of Goldsmith o
Faulknerian and Austenian and Goldsmithian and Agneaue
authors all the more for the relatively weak attempts.
In our criticism of any author who creates a career-author o
bestows in addition an independent "character," there comes a
monplaces about the last two can blur the perception of any on
ment: the critic misreads or misjudges the work because it sus
the preferred character.3
3 One would think that this kind of attempt at semantic discrimination would pr
attacks on our key terms. Which of many notions of "the reader," for example, will

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 AUTHORS VS READERS 13

III

Here is a sequence of sentences extracted from a modern author. Can you tell me,
first, what they mean; second, who probably wrote them; and third, whether they
are brilliant, average, or poor?
"I'll go away if you wish me to."

"Are you married? . . "

"No, I'm not married."

". . . But if you go shan't I see you again?"

"Do you like to see me?"
Obviously these extracted sentences can carry an indefinite number of mean-
ings, most of them utterly banal. Which is to say, they are almost meaningless.
They could have been written, indeed have been written, by hundreds of authors,
and spoken by hundreds of thousands. You have no way of knowing who wrote
them, and you see that as they stand they carry no brilliance whatever.
Now here's another sentence from the same short novel that yielded those
banalities:

They lost themselves, these words, rare and exquisite, in the wide bright general
medium and the Sunday stillness, but even while that occurred and he was
gaping for it she was herself there, in her battered ladylike truth, to answer for
them, to represent them, and, if a further grace than their simple syllabled
beauty were conceivable, almost embarrassingly to cause them to materialize.

Ah, now we feel more comfortable-some of us: Henry James! We begin to

know something of where we are. We are in the realm of the Jamesian. Perhaps
even the late Jamesian. Now we can predict, without seeing the text, that those
Hemingwedgian banalities we just quoted were probably after all subtleties, not
flat words of cliched romance but words of simple "syllabled beauty," "rare and
exquisite." But what, then, is meant here in this long sentence by "almost
embarrassingly to cause them to materialize?" Reference to notions like Jamesian
or late-Jamesian will not help us here. The dictionary, Greek, Latin, English can
do no more than get us started. And reference to no single category of interpreta-
tion in my own mind will help-except one: follow the author. Without the
author, I haven't a clue even about whether this elaborate sentence is a good one
or a poor piece of self-parody. Those who prefer to defend "the text" may of
course substitute it for "the author" in these sentences, provided we define the
text as a created whole that ordinates the choices of the parts, both delimiting and
enriching them.
Unless we want to take an absurd refuge in a decision not to care whether a
distinctions among four "readers" see Peter Rabinowitz, "Truth in Fiction: A Re-Examination of Audiences,"
Critical Inquiry 4 [Autumn 1977]). Which notion of the text? Each of our labels thus conceals a great
variety of actual positions, and some defenders of "the text" or "the reader" have more in common with
this defense of "the author" than with other critics who seem to travel under the same banner.

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14 NOVELIFALL 1977

sentence packs a great deal of literary value skillfully or simply gives us a sloppy
general invitation to speculate, we are thus forced to look further at the context.
I inform you now that the story we are quoting is not just late James but late
late James: "The Bench of Desolation," one of the last stories he wrote. Those
simple sentences-"Are you married?" "No, I am not married"-are, just like
that fussy long one, late late James. And like the long fussy sentence, they are
all used as part of a marvelous strange comic plot of a shape and effect that I
think no other author has even attempted, before or since. To show why this is
so would require a leisurely analysis of the whole tale. Here I can give only a
hint at the great difference between what you or I would probably do with those
banalities and fussinesses, and what the author did. As you might expect, the
full delights of this unique story have been largely overlooked in published
comment; critics have substituted instead a reduction to whatever dim lights
were cast by predetermined categories.
To see how this works, observe how Leon Edel pursues a general criticism
imposed by a pre-textual category derived from his knowledge of the flesh-and-
blood Henry James and the career-author found in many late tales: "the aging,
disillusioned James." Edel subdues the story into just one more example of the
"sad," final tales, full of "sacred rage," in which James "sets aside. ... his good
humor and howls, like Lear." "The Bench of Desolation" is one more late example
dealing "with human waste, mistaken lives, wrong decisions, lost opportunities."
"Henry James could sail to no Yeatsian Byzantium. For him, in his old age, there
seems to have been only the cold bench and the desolation of the metropolitan
jungles. There is terror behind the melodrama and the coincidences of these
tales." 4
Now it happens that Edel's thematic summary does apply nicely to some of the
last tales-most obviously to the last of all, "A Round of Visits." But it bears
only the most remote connection to "The Bench of Desolation." The pre-existing
categories of the reader-in this case an expert on the author's life and art-have
dictated a reading which the inventive author quite clearly repudiates. Instead of
expressing bitter howls of rage, "The Bench of Desolation" shows ....
Ah, but what does it show? It is in fact a most extraordinary story, one of a
kind. And the kind naturally has no recognized name. It is as different from most
of the other late tales as Cymbeline from Titus Andronicus.
The only adequate demonstration of such a claim would be, as the common-
place goes, a complete reading of every word. Short of that, suppose we look
again at the sentences we have already quoted. Each of them is, in itself, undis-
tinguished, and the overtly "Jamesian" one could, as I said, be a piece of sad
self-parody. Torn out of the context provided by James's new form, each of
them could mean almost anything, including the reverse of its seeming intent
(one can easily invent a context in which "No, I am not married" would mean
"Yes, I am married," or would be a lie, or an invitation to a seduction, or a
4 The Complete Tales of Henry James, ed. Leon Edel, Vol. XII (New York: 1965), pp. 7-11. It is quite probable
that I am unfair to Leon Edel here. Needing an introduction to many tales, he could hardly do justice to
peculiar qualities in each tale. But the fact remains that he gives no hint of the comedy in this story.

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 AUTHORS VS READERS 15

lament, or a boast, or a confession of love, or a revelat

But who except a literary critic would ever dream of
James's context? Read where it belongs, each stroke r
step-not a step in illustration of late James's anger an
the wonderfully wry "comedy" of Herbert Dodd and K
I call it a comedy not because the word is very apt bu
the tale differs from Edel's terms. Consider the event
sentence about those "rare and exquisite words." We
selves that the words, in their "simple syllabled bea
precise sum to be transferred from Kate Cookham to
twelve hundred and sixty pounds, to be definite," the
middle-aged Herbert, once her fiance, "but I have it a
and you've only to draw" (417).
Now we know why, after Herbert Dodd has savored
words" in the bright genial medium and the Sund
embarrassingly is used when the words are almost cau
least we know when we read her next words: "Yes, she
little reticule hang as if it bulged, beneath its clasp, w
sum, and he felt himself glare again at this vividest o
might have been ready, on the spot, to open the store
or . . . to impose on his pauperized state an accept
unprecedented in the annals of street charity. Nothing
however. ... as the short, rich, rounded word .
draw?' Yes, he gaped it as if it had no sense; the fact
did so he was reading into her use of the [banking] ter
word in the language had ever had for him" (418).
Here we have, I submit, the materials of what might
account of a greedy male's encounter with a woman wh
wants in life, hard cash. You and I, readers and critics
much of that. We could ransack our experience in life
scenes in which terms of hard cash sound beautiful to
you and I could not have done is build a story in whic
much rich and complex meaning and emotion as Jame
gives us.
But again, to see that, we must return the scene to it
high time to remind ourselves of the outlines of this w
story:
Vain and pretentious Herbert Dodd, shabby genteel proprietor of a failing
second-hand book and print shop, proposes marriage to Kate Cookham, the first
woman entering the shop who "appeals to him ... by her apparently pronounced
intellectual side." Offended later by the sight of her getting off a train with
another man, he writes a letter breaking off the engagement. She threatens to
sue, confirming his sense that she is vulgar and thus a fate well escaped. He takes
up with another woman, Nan Drury, pretty but stupid. When Kate does sue, he
proudly bankrupts himself to pay what he can, then marries Nan, who "promptly"

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 NOVELIFALL 1977

-it actually takes but a sentence or two to cover ten years-bears and buries two
children and then dies herself, killed, in Herbert's view, by the poverty Kate has
forced on him.
Living in self-pitying but proud resentful poverty, spending his leisure sitting
in his accustomed place on what he calls his bench of desolation, he discovers
one day that the handsome ladylike woman observing him is Kate Cookham.
She is no longer the least bit vulgar. In the ensuing conversations, which con-
stitute three-fifths of the whole novella, Kate reveals that she has come to give
him the money she has earned by using his breach-of-promise payments as capital.
She has done what she could to save him, and she tells him that if he had fought
the suit he would have had to pay nothing.
He wrestles ineffectually with his pride, grasps at the money, but at the same
time begins to see her genuine qualities. Finally, arriving at a new level of self-
knowledge, he accepts her and her-that is-his money, and the story ends with
the two middle-aged characters joining their lives on the bench of desolation.
Now that is a peculiar human experience, a marvelously unlikely combination
of rich comedy and melancholic wisdom. It is a pattern of experience which
neither you nor I could have invented, and it surrounds those original words
with a serio-comic radiance that could only have been made by James.
Suppose we look only at the final two short sentences I quoted, but now at
last in their context. Herbert Dodd has almost accepted the money she has
offered him-is in fact playing with the envelope in his hand as they have what
looks like their final conversation.
Now attend closely:

She had gathered herself in; after giving him time to appeal she could take it
that he had decided [to accept the money] and that nothing was left for her to
do. "Well then," she clearly launched at him across the broad walk-"well
then, good-bye."
She had come nearer with it, as if he might rise for some show of express
separation; but he only leaned back motionless, his eyes on her now-he kept
her a moment before him. "Do you mean that we don't-that we don't-?"
But he broke down.
"Do I 'mean'-?" She remained as for questions he might ask, but it was
well-nigh as if there played through her dotty veil an irrepressible irony for that
particular one. "I've meant, for long years, I think, all I'm capable of meaning.
I've meant so much that I can't mean more. So there it is."
"But if you go," he appealed-and with a sense as of final flatness, however
he arranged it, for his own attitude-"but if you go shan't I see you again?"
She waited a little and it was strangely for him now as if-though at last so
much more gorged with her tribute than she had ever been with his-some-
thing still depended on her. "Do you like to see me?" she very simply asked.
At this he did get up; that was easier than to say-at least with responsive
simplicity; and again for a little he looked hard and in silence at his letter;
which, at last, hozoever, raising his eyes to her own for the act, while he masked

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 AUTHORS VS READERS 17

their conscious ruefulness, to his utmost, in some ai

into the inner pocket of his coat, letting it settle th
wonderful." But he frowned at her with it as never in
come from?"
"The wonder of poor me?" Kate Cookham said. "It c
He shook his head slowly-feeling, with his letter th
such a new agility, almost such a new range of in
money-so extraordinarily much."

The full concentration of emotion and meaning in tha

I as reader have made. It is what James, what Henr
guage" could not do it, not even language as perfect
Henry James. "Writing" did not give those sentenc
critics seem to suggest. The English language, the resou
enterprise of writing-all these are necessary but not s
Bench of Desolation." The equally necessary but equally
work of this reader did not give those words their po
made something you and I could not have made, an
maiming to pretend that our blissful improvisations o
themes can equal the value of his making.
It is self-evidently true that the transaction is com
reader recreates James's comic poem. It is also true th
subtract some elements or effects that yours will subt
experienced the unique form, I may want to move to so
the text's intentions, judging it according to various no
cal, religious, sexual, whatever. Pursuing such differenc
of criticism as discovering the core of agreements on w
the reader-critics were content to exhort us to a fully
only good in them. But we all know that they often in
saying that the authority of genius simply does not ex

Most of us most of the time make banalities. That's w

by average folk produce: banalities. Most of us most o
out. Life would be impossible if that were not so,
Roland Barthes' naughty mistake of talking as if comm
same as falsehoods or stupidities. But we should surely
are the unique uncommonplace gifts every recognized
from the banalities, the common places, the topoi of ou
experience as it would never occur to us to shape it.
Let us, by all means, attempt to rival or surpass them
of literature depends on our nurturing among us those
in the anxiety of influence or the exhilaration of gra
themselves into the kinds of authorities I have describe
of all our encounters if the challenged fathers are fir
playthings.

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 NOVELJFALL 1977

FRANK DURAND: The question may well be asked of a panel such as this one, why
an author should be defended or from whom? In the recent past he has needed
to be defended from the critic who has divorced the creator from his work, and
from the critic who has taken the author's stated, conscious intention too seri-
ously, thus denying the unconscious, intuitive intent within the artistic frame-
work of the novel.

One of those "defended" by Professor Durand was Jose Donoso, author of

The Obscene Bird of Night.

Donoso, a Chilean writer, began his literary career with clearly recognizable
traditional novelistic traits. But his master work, The Obscene Bird of Night,
represents not only a fragmentation of reality, but a total fragmentation of the
narrative voice itself. . . . The whole novel is a paradox. It's a novel that has,
essentially, no characters; it has many narrative voices, and it has no narrative
voice. It involves the objective presentation of the inner self of Jose Donoso, and
the novel is, in itself, the very process of creation. In The Obscene Bird of Night
one character is many characters: a female, a child, a bundle that is discarded,
the novelist who tells the story which he never verbalizes for he is telling the
story to another character who is a projection of himself. He is simply thinking
the process out. What we have is the world in continuous metamorphosis. What
we have is chaos and disharmony and total disorder; a view of the grotesque
and the monstrous; a depiction of Chilean realities; a world of negative paral-
lelisms.

QUESTION FROM THE FLOOR: How, then, can we as readers come to understand
whether the intention of fragmentation and chaos is to recreate it or to bring it
together in some order or form?

FRANK DURAND: I don't know that I can answer the question. It's a very compli-
cated novel and there are many different interpretations to it. ... My inter-
pretation is that the entire novel cannot be explained simply in terms of meta-
morphosis or in Kafkaesque terms. I said that I believed the whole work is a
metaphor and is a metaphor for the self. In other words, the novel is matter and
anti-matter. It is the very process of creation because Donoso doesn't know
where he is going and he is searching for himself; he is scared that he is every
man and no man. The first-person narrator involves absolutely all of the charac-
ters because he changes, and he can't speak because one of them is a novelist-in
fact, two of them are novelists-and they are telling us this novel which they
think but cannot articulate. So it seems to me that we are led directly into the
very process of creation, into the author's mind.

WAYNE BOOTH: It seems to me that you have done exactly the right thing in
trying to answer the much more general question in terms of a specific novel. . .
There is no general rule about how you decide whether a novel is going to be

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 AUTHORS VS READERS 19

finally chaotic, or finally harmonized. It sounded to me, in

harmony were brought forth in the creation of a new imp
a second self immeasurably superior to the one Donoso sta
the unity might be found there. . . . You can't have a poet
can have poetics, I think, of some kinds of novels. . . .
been to attack rules and the possibility of rules, and get p
unique, particular achievement of individual works.

HYATT WAGGONER: Professor Durand talked about authors

mention, and was more specific than I expect to be. In effe
is to issue a kind of protest, or make a kind of protest, aga
tualism, or rationalism-if you prefer-in thinking about th
and also about the interpretation of works of literature. Th
against being too theoretical about the novel. ... I say th
act remains a mystery, meaning, we don't understand
remains a mystery despite all the efforts that have been
the more truly creative the act is, the more mysterious it is
and I'll take my stand there. If, indeed, we really could un
creativity, presumably we could then predict it and also p
physicists who understand the behavior of atomic particle
and produce an atomic bomb and do other things now.
Every attempt to do that seems to me to have failed, and w
to me to have failed. That doesn't mean that there is no u
For example, I find that a Freudian approach-using the ter
quite a bit of light on Hawthorne and Faulkner. It illumin
us something about why certain themes seem to recur cons
certain authors; why the author is likely to fail at some t
others; and so on. The Freudian approach illuminates,
creativity.
Responding to a question from the floor:
My intention was to say that any form, any theory of cre
reader in a position of being superior to the author, I w
stressing the unconscious, I tried to make it clear, and Prof
in the end, that I was not proposing that as the answer. I
different ways, or at different times in their careers they wor
. . . No, I would surely not put the reader in the superior
be the last straw as far as I'm concerned. The straw that b

For the Readers

WOLFGANG ISER: When I was honored by the invitation to participate in this

conference, I wasn't really aware in which way the reader needed to be defended;
so what I have to say probably consists of two points. The first is a very trivial

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20 NOVEL FALL 1977

and blatant one because I thought we could all agree that the reader is to be
defended; the second, more crucial aim, is to give a brief description of how
control, which is to be exercised in the reading process by the text, can be
described or even assessed. This second point, I'm afraid, is terribly Teutonic,
and so will doubtless spread a certain amount of obscurity; but I thought that the
obscurity might then be cleared up in discussion, if there is a chance for that.
Well, let me get to the first point, and, as a consolation, I can tell you that my
statement will be very brief. Interpretation, as all of you know, is beginning to
discover its own history. At least we are becoming aware of it. That is, we are
increasingly conscious of the limitations of the norms operative in interpretation,
and of all those factors which could not have come to the light as long as the
traditional norms of interpretation held sway. The most important of these factors
is, without doubt, the reader himself who, after all, is the addressee of the text.
So long as the focus of interest was the author's intention or the contemporary,
the psychological, social, or historical meaning of the text, or the way in which
it was constructed, it scarcely seemed to occur in some kinds of literary criticism
that the text could have meaning only when it was read. Of course, this was
something everyone took for granted. And yet, we know surprisingly little of
how much we are taking for granted. One thing of which we can be sure is that
reading is the essential pre-condition for all processes of literary interpretation,
and I'll give you a very familiar quotation on that, by Walter Slatoff, who
remarked in his book With Respect to Readers: "One feels a little foolish having
to begin by insisting that works of literature exist, in part at least, in order to be
read, that we do in fact read them, and that it is worth thinking about what
happens when we do. Put so blatantly, such statements seem too obvious to be
worth making, for after all, no one actually denies that readers and reading
actually do exist and even those who have most insisted on the autonomy of
literary works, and the irrelevance of the reader's responses themselves, do read
books and respond to them. Equally obvious, perhaps, is the observation that
works of literature are important and worthy of study essentially because they
can be read and can engender responses in human beings."
Central to the reading of every literary work of art is what I consider to be
the interaction between its structure and its recipient. This is why modern
theories of art, specifically of a phenomenological branch which I'm trying to
advocate, have emphatically drawn attention to the fact that the study of a
literary work should not concern only the actual text, but also, and in equal
measure, the actions involved in responding to the text. The text itself, put in a
very simple manner, offers a sequence of schematized views, as Ingarden once
said, containing the subject matter or, as I would rather call it, the "aesthetic" or
"imaginary" object. I prefer this designation for something which the text
projects and the reader is actually made to assemble. It is something in which
the aesthetic object of the work can be produced whilst the actual production
takes place through and during the reading process. From this assumption we
may conclude that the literary work has two poles, one the "artistic" and the
other the "aesthetic." The artistic pole is the author's text and the aesthetic is

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 AUTHORS VS READERS 21

the actualization or the realization accomplished by th

polarity, it is clear that the work itself cannot be iden
its actualization in the reading process proper, but mu
in between. Inevitably, as Professor Henkle has just
work must be virtual in character, as it cannot be red
written text or to the subjectivity of the reader; from
derives its dynamics.
As the reader passes through the various perspective
relates the different views, schemata, and patterns to
work in motion and so sets himself in motion too. If t
between text and reader, its actualization is clearly
action between the two. Consequently, exclusive conce
the author's techniques or the reader's psychology, wi
really happens in the reading process. This is not to de
each of the two poles looked at separately. Let us insist
sight of their relationship, we lost sight of what I consider
Despite their usefulness, separate analyses of the ar
would have only limited value if the relationship be
transmitter and receiver. As if, that is, we were to pr
insuring the accurate communication of a message tra
literary works, however, the message is transmitted i
reader receives it by composing it. That is no common
say that a common code may rise in the course of the
Starting from this assumption, then, we must searc
enable us to describe basic conditions of interaction, fo
to gain some insight into the potential effects inheren
tures must be of a complex nature for, although contain
fulfill their ultimate functions until they have affect
every discernible structure in fiction has this two-sid
verbal and the affective. The verbal quality guides the
from becoming arbitrary. The affective aspect is the
has been prestructured by the language of the text. An
action between the two must therefore incorporate bot
which lies in the text, and that of response, which
reader. Now, in order to avoid the impression that what
but a sweeping statement, I would like to draw your at
or perhaps only to one feature, by which text and read
are interlocked in the reading process.
Let's assume that a piece of fiction can be considered
tives. For the novel, as you know, is not just the autho
rather, an assembly of different perspectives, in that
can be fulfilled only when the aesthetic object can be
there are four perspectives which form the framework
narrator, that of the characters, that of the plot, and p
what I would call the fictitious reader. Naturally, narra

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22 NOVELIFALL 1977

the full range of these different orientations. Now, if the function of the d
perspectives is to bring about the production of the aesthetic object, o
prefer, the "meaning" of the text, it follows that this aesthetic object
totally represented by any of those perspectives. And, while each pers
narrator's, fictitious reader's, characters', and so forth-offers a partic
of the object intended, it also opens up a view on the other perspectiv
text. The interaction between perspectives is continuous, because, as y
they are not separated distinctly from one another; nor do they r
parallel lines. Authorial comment, dialogue between characters, develop
plot, and the position marked out for the fictitious reader, all these are inte
in the text and offer a constantly shifting constellation of use. So the
arises: "In which way is the wandering viewpoint of the reader, when
through the text, regulated by the interacting segments of the differen
tives in fiction?"
In order to describe this structure, perhaps we might borrow-at least I have
done so-a pair of terms from Alfred Schiitz, who used to be a student of
Husserl. Schiitz, who taught for quite some time at the New School of Social
Research in this country, has written importantly on the theory of relevance. As
part of his critical speculations, he links a pair of terms called "theme" and
"horizon" which bear upon the present discussion. Because perspectives, in the
sense that I have outlined them, are continually interweaving and interacting, the
reader cannot possibly embrace all of them at once. As a result, the view he is
involved with at any particular moment is what constitutes for him the theme.
The immediate theme, however, stands always before the horizon of the other
perspective segments which had previously situated the reader in the time-flow
of his reading. Now, the horizon, far from being purely optional, is made up of
all those segments which had supplied the themes of the previous faces of read-
ing. Suppose, for instance, that the reader is at present concerned with the
conduct of the hero which is the articulate moment of this particular time, and
which is therefore in this particular moment the theme. The reader's attitude will
then be conditioned by the horizon of past attitudes towards the hero from the
point of view of the narrator, or the other characters, the plot, the hero himself,
etc. This is how the structure of theme and horizon organizes the attitudes of
the reader and, at the same time, builds up the perspective system of the text.
It is this structure that constitutes the basic rule for combining textual strategies
and, of course, the effects are manifold. I confine myself to pointing out two of
them. First, the structure organizes the relationship between text and reader that
is essential for comprehension. As an author's perspective view of the world, the
text clearly cannot claim to represent the reader's view. The gap cannot be
bridged just by a willing suspension of disbelief, because the reader's task is not
simply to accept but to assemble for himself that which is to be accepted. The
manner in which he assembles is dictated by the continual switching of perspec-
tives during the time-flow of his reading. This in turn provides the theme-and-
horizon structure, which enables the reader gradually to take over the author's
presumably unfamiliar view of the world on the terms laid down by the author.

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 AUTHORS VS READERS 23

The structure of theme and horizon constitutes the vital link between text and
reader. That is so because it actively involves the reader in the process of synthe-
sizing an assembly of constantly shifting viewpoints, which not only modify
one another, but also influence past and future syntheses in the reading process.
Second point: The continual interaction of perspectives throws new light on all
positions linguistically manifested in the text. For each position is set in a fresh
context with the result that the reader's attention is drawn to aspects hitherto
not apparent. Thus, the structure of theme and horizon transforms every perspec-
tive segment of the text into a two-way glass in the sense that each segment
appears against the others, and is therefore not only itself, but also a reflection,
and an illuminator of those others. Each position is thus expanded and changed
by its relation to the others, for we view it from all the perspectives that con-
stitute the shifting horizon. In this respect the literary text avails itself of a
mechanism that regulates perception in general: what is observed changes when
it is observed in accordance with the particular expectations of the observor. In
the case of the reader, these expectations are conditioned by the preceding
perspective segments of the text in the time-flow of reading. The individual
segments then take on their significance only through interaction with other
segments. If we bear in mind the fact that all the perspectives-narrator, hero,
the fictitious reader, plot development, and so forth-represent something deter-
minant and that these determinant elements are transformed by their interplay,
it is obvious that the "ultimate meaning," so called, of the text, or, what I
would prefer to call the aesthetic object, transcends all the determinant elements.
Furthermore, every position incorporated into the text becomes an object of
observation, and as such is inevitably changeable. And, if these positions repre-
sent selections, let's say, from the social or literary world outside the text, it
follows that the reader, as he produces the aesthetic objects along the lines laid
down by the text, may react to the world incorporated into the text. In other
words, he may see the selected norms of the text in a new light.
Now this, I consider to be the ultimate function, perhaps, of the aesthetic
object. It establishes itself as a transcendental viewpoint for all the positions
linguistically represented in the text. These are the positions from which the
aesthetic object is actually compiled and which it always sets up for observation.
It should be clear that if a literary text represents a reaction to the world, as
Gombrich rightly said, the reaction must be to the world incorporated into the
text. Formation of the aesthetic object therefore coincides with the reader's
reaction to the position set up and transformed by the structure of theme and
horizon in the text. As we have seen, that structure allows all positions lin-
guistically manifested in the text to be observed, expanded, and changed in a
controlled manner. Our attitude towards each theme is influenced by the horizon
of past themes, and as each theme itself becomes part of the horizon, during the
time-flow of reading, so it too exerts an influence on subsequent themes. Each
change denotes not a loss, but an enrichment, as attitudes are at one and the
same time refined and broadened. The resultant accumulation of equivalences
constitutes the aesthetic object. The system of equivalences is therefore not to be

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24 NOVELIFALL 1977

found in any one of the positions or perspectives of the text and is not formulated
by any one of them. On the contrary, it is the formulation of that which has not
yet been formulated although prestructured, and, as such, the system offers the
reader a transcendental vantage point from which he can see through all the
positions, potentially, that have been formulated in the text.

INGE CROSMAN: I too feel that we should focus on the reading process as we are
reading sequentially, if we want to find out what the activity of reading is all
about. I have used the word interaction as you have, between text and reader.
. . .If we want to actualize a text fully, and if we want a pertinent reading, there
are some structures, some things that are prestructured in the text that any
capable reader-one who knows the language and literary conventions-can
perform. Some built-in decoding structures already exist in the text and these
are relevant to the image of the "implied" or "ideal" reader. Now I realize that
"implied" probably needs definition, for it is used in different contexts by differ-
ent critics. By "implied" or "ideal" I mean the sort of image of the reader that is
projected by the text and which, as we read, we can reconstruct. It's a sort of
audience that the author seems to have in mind as he is writing his work; and
this sort of audience will to an extent dictate the choices that he makes as he
creates the work of art. ... A structure in which readers participate-and
Professor Iser has touched on that-is one in which the reconstructed world is
presented. That is, something is going on in the novel; it provides a degree of
coherence; and as we read we try to reconstruct this novel world-this story
universe. . . . Since the reader has to use his own judgment and imagination to
come up with his own mental image of the text's overall design, I think this is
the stage at which the reader's creativity is most called on. He uses his imagina-
tion and his judgment, as I said, and this is certainly the part of the text that is
unwritten.

ROBERT CROSMAN: I am pleased that reader criticism is associated with rhetorical

and ethical approaches to literature, that it's not presented as a system which
some of the new critical dispensations aspire to be, but rather as a point of view
aspiring to be not a science but an art. Since critics often mean different things
by the word "reader," however, perhaps the most useful beginning would be to
sketch out a rough typology of readers as they occur in current criticism. ...
First there is what I shall call the "ideal" reader, that is, the image in the literary
text of the reader as the author desires him. . . . The critical project of discover-
ing the "ideal" reader in various texts has been given memorable expression in
The Rhetoric of Fiction: "It is only as I read that I become the self whose beliefs
must coincide with the author's." . . . Second, there is the "historical" reader.
Critics often hypothesize that readers of a particular century or period read in a
particular way, under the influence of a Zeitgeist, of common values or paradigms,
or just of a particular stage in the evolution of literary conventions. Examples
of this "historical" reader are everywhere in the literary criticism of pre-twentieth
century texts. The reader in Stanley Fish's Surprised by Sin is often an "histori-

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 AUTHORS VS READERS 25

cal" reader. Professor Iser in The Implied Reader sketche

that varies by centuries. . . . My objections to the "ide
readers can be put in this way: the idea of a reader be
when he is an independent entity, autonomous, free i
degree to make his own choices; when he is not just the
bondage to literary tradition. . . . The third type is t
described in Professor Iser's book. Unlike the "ideal" a
he has considerable freedom. He looks forward, he l
decisions, forms expectations, muses, accepts, rejects
dynamic process of recreation. ... In theory, whatever cr
plied" reader at the moment seems sure that the latter is
as he is. But if you were to read ten different investi
reader in the same text, you would doubtless find ten di
ers reading in ten different ways. And as choices multipl
and creativity grows and there seems really less and less
definite way about the "implied" reader.

In discussions among the panel and with the audience, th

issue: whether, in taking the more extreme positions of
could be such a thing as a "wrong" reading. It led to this

ROBERT CROSMAN: Misreading, I take it, applies to so

framework in which it's possible to say: this reading wa
and this reading was performed incorrectly, as it were, i
some sort of omniscience. Yes, God, or his delegated a
tenured professor. So, in that sense, no, there is not such

ROGER HENKLE: To say that there is no such thing as a m

deny the professors their rights, but, it seems to me, als
objectives. The reason why I raised with Professor Iser t
and attitudes that are completely different from those th
to have-as when someone reads a novel that is intended to
if it were non-comic or non-ironic-or readings [that are
that are necessary for the interpretations and the world
wants us to reach, is that, I think, we work on the assump
that they are moving us toward a set of values, toward
saying there is no such thing as misreading, you are deny
author.

WOLFGANG ISER: It is a question of competence.

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