Reading, Interpretation, Reception Author(s)_ Michal Glowinski

8/6/2019 Reading, Interpretation, Reception Author(s)_ Michal Glowinski

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Reading, Interpretation, ReceptionAuthor(s): Micha Gowiski and Wlad GodzichSource: New Literary History, Vol. 11, No. 1, Anniversary Issue: II (Autumn, 1979), pp. 75-82Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/468871

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Reading, Interpretation, ReceptionMicha] Gkowiniski

L ITERARY CRITICISMas only recently become interested in thecategory of reading, whether as an object of reflection or, insome measure, a descriptive tool. Recourse to it has been rather

aleatory, if we except the pioneering work of Roman Ingarden onthe cognition of the literarywork, in which he subjected the problem toexhaustive analysis.' However, even he stressed that which today doesnot appear to be of most interest. Ingarden's analysis of reading dealswith questions which fall more within the purview of psychologistsstudying the behavior of the reader in the course of his contact withthe literary text (e.g., the impact of reading interruptions upon thecognition of the text). But much of what is referred to by readingtoday is treated by Ingarden under another heading: concretization.As is well known, this category was introduced in the first and fun-damental of Ingarden's studies on the construction of the literarywork: Das literarischeKunstwerk 1931). Ingarden argued that, owing toa construction characterized by schematization and so-called loci ofindeterminacy, every literary work requires the completion of its ele-ments at the moment of reading, especially in the course of an aes-thetic reading. And a work achieves full aesthetic status only when ithas been concretized by a reader. Specific works require specific typesof concretization, since the latter is neither optional nor arbitrary; thereader, however, does come to the work with diverse concretizingbiases, dependent upon a great many variables, including historicaland cultural conditioning. It can thus be said that, to use contempo-rary terminology, Ingarden's problematic of concretization is a prob-lem of reading.2I do not intend to either expound or criticize Ingarden's concepts.They do provide me, however, with a useful point of departure forfurther considerations. To be sure, the preoccupations of a psychol-ogy of reading (beginning with the perception of a piece of paperfilled with signs, whether handwritten or printed) are immaterial toliterary criticism. Criticism defines its concerns otherwise: its object isnot to be found in the psychological properties of reading but ratherin its historico-cultural aspects. In other words, it analyzes reading as aspecific form of cultural activity, subject to certain norms, and sus-

Copyright 1979 by New LiteraryHistory,The University of Virginia


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ceptible of differentiation according to the type of literary culture towhich it belongs.3 This is a fundamental assumption, since it allowsthe work to be apprehended not as an autonomously existingphenomenon, limited to the text, and conceived of as an unvaryingand stabilized structure, but rather it permits a consideration of theliterary work as energeia, and not only as ergon, to use Humboldt'sclassical formulation.Reading is, in a sense, an everyday activity, consciously controlledonly to a rather small degree, and in this respect it is very much likeeveryday speech which, though rule-governed, does not require thatthese rules be brought to consciousness in daily linguistic practice;rather, they remain unconscious even when the subject of the practiceis capable of conceptualizing them. Reading, accompanied by self-reflection, ceases to be reading in the ordinary sense; it begins toresemble the type of activity which characterizes the interpretation ofliterary works. The analogy with speech does not end there. From aspoken utterance one can reconstruct much of what has not beenexplicitly formulated, such as unstated assumptions and a complex ofbeliefs accepted as obvious and therefore not requiring verbalization.Each utterance unveils its presuppositions. The same occurs in read-ing: its specific presuppositions come to the fore.4 As Adorno remindsus, the interpreter is not a tabula rasa; he comes to the text with acertain set of beliefs and habits. This is particularly true of the "ordi-nary" reader, who is not in the business of interpretation and there-fore does not have to subject his actions to rationalization. Thesebeliefs cover the state of the world, its properties and construction;they also include a basic axiology and even the structure of the text.Beliefs dealing with the very value of the work are linked in mul-tivaried ways to beliefs of the first order. This is apparent in the caseof some common psychological representations alluded to in a work,and so relevant to the reception of narrative. In reading, beliefs cur-rently in circulation, and regarded as either obvious or natural, areactualized. This is neither a "sin" nor a flaw of reading, but rather itsfundamental property. We cannot receive a work outside of the cul-ture in which we live and whose elements we have interiorized.

Reading introduces the work into our world, the world of our repre-sentations and values; it reduces the distance to the text.One can look at this question from the opposite viewpoint: theperspective of the work itself. The orientation of the vectors is re-versed: in reading, we not only introduce the work to our world, wealso introduce our world into the work; we impose our categoriesupon it; we perceive in it especially that which links it to our world.This appears to be a universal property of reading, actualized even

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when it is undertaken for primarily cognitive reasons, and shouldtherefore be as free as possible of those factors which interfere withcognition or impede it. The basis of reading is the assumption of acommon universe, divided between the reading subject and the workread. This hypothesis need not be explicitly signified in every in-stance; it formulates itself in the very act of reading. Literary cultureconstitutes the ground of this assumption; it makes it possible anddefines it.

During the course of reading, not only beliefs concerning theworld, and the axiological attitudes bound to them, become ac-tualized. Similarly, whole complexes of beliefs about literature itself,its nature, properties, and functions, come into play and layer them-selves upon them. Another layer is then constituted by beliefs in whatis literature and what isn't, and, even further, what is good and badliterature. Reading is thus influenced by the literary taste of a period.We should also add beliefs in what is permissible and proper in acertain type of literary utterance, and not in another. Thus, thestereotypes of a given period play an associative role in reading; theyare frequently extracted from tradition, transmitted in schools, andgenerally subconscious. They are explicit in the evaluation and clas-sification of literary facts.

IIReading, obviously, lies at the root of all critical activities, especiallythose whose object is a single text, a concrete literary work. In otherwords, reading is particularly bound up with the complex of activitiescommonly referred to as interpretation. What is read is, clearly, aconcrete and unique work. The reconstruction of the principles ac-cording to which a given group of works has been constructed, or thediscovery of the conventions by which it is governed, constitutes, fromthis point of view, a secondary form of activities, still dependent uponreading but in not so direct a fashion."There is no question," writes Janusz Sjawinski in his study of themethodological problems of interpretation, "that the study of indi-vidual works is, methodologically speaking, the most troublesomecomponent of a history of literature."5 This statement may have the

appearance of a paradox, since the interpretation of individual worksmay well be considered to be one of the foremost concerns of thehistorian of literature. Among his undertakings, it is after all the mostamenable to empirical verification. The task of criticism is to describe,analyze, comment upon, and explain what is immediately given, par-ticularly individual works, and, above all, great works, whether past or

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present. In the course of these activities, does the critic remain an"ordinary" reader? In attempting to answer this question, we willlearn that we are not dealing with a paradox.Here is the basic problem: in what way is a critic, producing in-terpretations, different from a reader, who, in reading a text, is underno obligation to explain it or to comment upon it, does not have tomake clear what is important and significant about it, and generallysatisfies himself with a modest, unassuming comprehension, for hisown use and in his own measure. Slawinski reminds us that for thecritic, "the problematic nature of his expertise immediately poses it-self: he cannot-because it is not possible-separate his activities fromthe circumstances of'ordinary' reading and the concretizing processesattendant to it. He cannot, as a scholar, escape from a more elemen-tary role: the reader. His analytical, interpretive, and evaluative movescannot be divorced from the norms of reading prevalent in the com-munity to which he belongs."6 As a consequence, "the scholar wouldvery much like to stifle within himself the voice of the reader, todetach himself from the community of readers to which he belongs, toliberate his method from cultural and literary constraints of time andplace. It is a desire bound up with an internal antinomy: is it possibleto achieve a historyof literature, while rejecting one's own historicity?"7This is where the basic conflict specific to interpretation can bedrawn. Interpretation, to be true to itself, must, in order to justify itsexistence, overcome within itself that which would be but "ordinary"reading, delimited by a given culture and free of such obligations asverifiability and subordination to analytic methods constitutive ofliterary science. In addition, interpretation, to be itself, must take itfor granted that it will not be a repetition of previous readings. In"ordinary" reading, this is unimportant since we read for our own useand out of our own needs; reading is, after all, and in spite of itsanchoring in literary culture, a private and intimate undertaking.Impressionistic criticism attempted to resolve this conflict by definingits task as the recording of the impressions produced by the readingof masterpieces. This is but a poor and unsatisfactory solution since itnot only renounces all rigor for criticism but reduces it to the record-ing of acts of reading. Today such record keeping, sometimes in-teresting and even profound, is confined to diaries and lies outsidethe scope of criticism in the strict sense of the word.The conflict between interpretation and reading has another side:interpretation, in order to be itself, not only cannot completely over-come that which constitutes its basis in reading, understood as anactivity deeply anchored in literary culture, but it must in some waydiscount reading, and exploit it for its own ends. Interpretation,

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which would want to liberate itself wholly of reading factors (as theyare understood in this essay), would be simply incomprehensible-isthere need to add that such total liberation is impossible? It woulddirectly conflict with notions current in the culture, whether on thesubject of the world or the work. It would be received as an eccentric-ity, a testimony to the interpreter's aberration, without any verifiablebasis with respect to its object. Insofar as it were possible at all, an actof interpretation which would bracket off all the contribution ofreading would appear as a sort of critical fantasy.How then to solve this conflict? Can it be resolved? Yes, undoubt-edly so, within a certain meaning of reading, although this solutionrequires many additional assumptions and has so many limitationsthat it produces results only in single cases, and thus fails to providethe data for devising either a goal or an ideal toward which interpre-tive practice in general should strive. This conflict is avoided whenreading is understood as a primarily hermeneutic activity, which at-tempts to achieve the greatest proximity, or even, in optimal cases,congruence, between cognizing subject and cognized object. In itshermeneutic or even merely radically hermeneutic version, the veryact of reading is already an act of interpretation; reading and in-terpretation merge. From the point of view of reading, the workbecomes the only point of reference; the literary culture within whichthe act of reading takes place is not taken into consideration. This iswhat appears to take place in the critical practice of Georges Poulet; atleast, such seems to be his conception of reading. I have in mind theprogrammatic essay "Criticism and the Experience of Interiority,"which is a phenomenological account of the act of reading, and also itsgrandiloquent eulogy.8 In the work of a master reader such as Poulet,such an approach leads to excellent results, but its inherent weaknesslies in the impossibility of its generalization and dissemination; it isbeyond the kind of conceptualization required for further develop-ment. Such practices are, like poetry, questions of individual talent.They obviously cannot resolve the conflict at hand.There is a perspective from which the relationship of reading tointerpretation need not be conflictual at all. Reading is not limited tointroducing banalities and hackneyed judgments within the compassof interpretation; nor does it merely constrain it to prevailing norms,which need not live up to the standards of critical description. In asense, it is also a controlling factor of interpretation; it imposes limitsupon it, frequently limits of common sense. Interpretation cannot beeither the domain of free choice or the result of the ingenuity of thecritic-which would lead to what I earlier called critical fantasy. Thebasic impediment to such gestures is the text itself-on condition that

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one grant that interpretation should be adequate to it, that it notconflict with it, and, therefore, that it not impose meanings upon itwhich are obviously foreign to it. The text, however, does not seemcapable of playing this role single-handedly. It cannot do so, since, forordinary reception and for description, it does not exist indepen-dently; it functions in the realm of literary culture, which always in-cludes some representations concerning literary works in general,specific types of works, and, finally, the concrete work beinginterpreted-particularly in the case of a known, valued, andwidely read work which has become an object of social judgment.This is where reading comes in: it is reading which places interpreta-tion in literary culture and imposes limits upon it; it is reading whichinsures that there exists a certain area of intersubjectivity in interpre-tation. One of the functions of reading is, therefore, to exert an in-fluence upon the legibility of interpretation, and thus upon its socialfunctioning.

IIIInterest in the tensions between reading and interpretation tran-scends the methodological questions posed by the analysis of literaryworks. Their importance becomes apparent when the center of interestis shifted to what German scholars have been calling Rezeptionsiisthetik,and which, in Polish studies, has been referred to as the poetics ofreception.9 Here too, the relations of reading and interpretation raisemethodological issues, but in a somewhat different vein. Reading isproblematized, not as a precondition of interpretation, but as the

object of reconstruction and analysis. Interpretation now becomes thefactor which makes this reconstruction possible. It does so because itcontains residues of reading, that is, elements which are not derivativeof methodological decisions or produced by the instruments of criticaldescription. From this perspective, interpretation is a conveyer ofreading. Interpretation is to be treated then as a witness to a reading,so that elements of reading can be brought to the fore.'1 Interpreta-tion can be such a witness to a greater extent than other statementsabout literature because its object is the individual work, and obvi-ously we read concrete texts and not literature.Stylesof reception,susceptible of general application, can be recon-structed through proper analyses of interpretation. The student ofstyles of reception is not interested in that which occupies a historianof literary science, e.g., the development of analytic methods and theevolution of methodology. Quite the contrary, the object of his in-

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vestigations is premethodological; it is the culturally given whichconstrains an interpretation, frequently unbeknownst even to theinterpreter. In fact, anything that proceeds from methodological deci-sions must somehow be set aside; only then can the ground of readingbe uncovered.Many different elements combine at this premethodological level:the level of reading. This is where everyday notions about the worldbelong, sometimes directly, most often already in some literary cloth-ing, e.g., in the form of notions about what is verisimilar and whatisn't," or what is true and what isn't. Next come commonplace ideasabout literature itself, and about what is proper in one type of textand not in another. The concept of decorum may have been de-veloped in classical theories of aesthetics, but it has not disappearedwith them; it still is at play, though in different guise. Then comes thevast and multivaried realm of evaluation and assessment. Interpreta-tion cannot be isolated from this large sphere of everyday beliefsabout literature. However, the very features of an interpretationwhich diminish its value as a critical act attempting to achieve intel-lectual rigor, originality, and methodological explicitness are impor-tant vehicles of the reading, which the student of styles of reception isattempting to reconstruct.12 I distinguish seven such fundamentalstyles: mythical, allegorical, symbolic, instrumental, mimetic, expres-sive, and aesthetic.One final remark: the goal of the reconstruction of styles of readingthrough the study of the interpretations of individual works is not toapprehend how a given scholar read concretely, e.g., how Spitzer readRacinian tragedy in his masterful interpretation, "Le Recit deTheramene"; what imports is the account of the general properties of

reading specific to a given literary culture or even a given period.Methods of reading are, to a much greater extent than methods ofinterpreting, a communal good. It is possible that this type of recon-struction will help reading to take its place among the full-fledgedobjects of literary history. Literary history would then be concernednot only with the laws of creation of literary works, but also with thelaws of their functioning.INSTITUTE OF LITERARY RESEARCH,WARSAW

(Translated by Wlad Godzich)

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82 NEW LITERARY HISTORYNOTES

1 Roman Ingarden, On the Cognition of the LiteraryWork, tr. Ruth Ann Crowley andKenneth R. Olson (Evanston, Ill., 1973). A significantly enlarged version is available inGerman: Vom Erkennen des literarischenKunstwerkes(Tubingen, 1968).2 Wolfgang Iser proceeds from Ingarden's theory in his study "The Reading Process:a Phenomenological Approach," in New Directions n LiteraryHistory,ed. Ralph Cohen(London, 1974). Cf. also my article "On Concretization," in Roman Ingarden and Con-temporaryPolish Aesthetics,ed. Piotr Graff and Saaw Krzemiefi-Ojak, tr. Graff et al.(Warsaw, 1975).3 Cf. Janusz S)awifiski, "O dzisiejszych normach czytania (znawc6w)" [On contempo-rary (scholarly) reading norms], Teksty,No. 3 (1974).4 Theodor W. Adorno states that whoever understands a text imports in it a greatmany presuppositions and much of his knowledge. See his quoted remarks in LucienGoldmann et la sociologiede la litterature(Brussels, 1974), p. 37.5 Janusz Slawifiski, "Analiza, interpretacja i wartosciowanie dziela literackiego"[Analysis, interpretation, and evaluation of the literary work], in Problemymetodologicznegowspolczesnego iteraturoznawstwa[Methodological problems of contem-porary literary science], ed. H. Markiewicz and J. S)awinski (Krakow, 1976), p. 100.6 Ibid., pp. 100-101.7 Ibid., p. 101. S)awifiski accepts the dichotomy of reading and interpretation. JeanOnimus in his essay "Lecture et critique,"Reflexionset recherches e nouvellecritique(Nice,1969), introduces a third term. Alongside reading for consumption and for schol-arship, he adds critico-hermeneutic reading, which is not a conflation of the two previ-ous types. This is the reading which Onimus values most of all because it is most humanand leads to the union of reader and read.8 Georges Poulet, "Criticism and the Experience of Interiority," in The Languages ofCriticismand the Sciencesof Man, ed. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato (Baltimoreand London, 1970).9 See, for example, Edward Balcerzan, "Perspektywy poetyki odbioru" [Perspectivesof a poetics of reception], in Problemyocjologii iteratury,ed. Janusz Slawiiiski (Wroclaw,1971).10 I write at greater length about the problems raised in the last part of this article inthe book Styleodbioru[Styles of reception] (Krakow, 1977). See also my "Literary Com-munication and Literary History," Neohelicon, 3-4 (1976).11 A special issue of Communications No. 11, 1968) was devoted to verisimilitude.12 Obviously, interpretations are not the only evidence of reading we have. There aremany other types of evidence, ranging from notes in a diary to the results of sociologicalstudies of reading methods.

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Reading, Interpretation, Reception Author(s)_ Michal Glowinski