The Poem as Event. Louise M. Rosenblatt. College English, Vol. 26, No. 2. (Nov., 1964), pp

Transcription

1 The Poem as Event Louise M. Rosenblatt College English, Vol. 26, No. 2. (Nov., 1964), pp Stable URL: College English is currently published by National Council of Teachers of English. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. The JSTOR Archive is a trusted digital repository providing for long-term preservation and access to leading academic journals and scholarly literature from around the world. The Archive is supported by libraries, scholarly societies, publishers, and foundations. It is an initiative of JSTOR, a not-for-profit organization with a mission to help the scholarly community take advantage of advances in technology. For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. Sat Aug 18 14:17:

2 THE POEM AS EVENT 123 duction to Shakespeare, a body of significant fiction that does not insult the adult and the free child intelligence, a body of rich and compelling poetry, and an introduction to the systematic study of our lovely noble language-this is what our elementary teachers not only need but want. The Poem as Event It Bids Pretty Fair The play seems out for an almost infinite run. Don't mind a little thing like the actors fighting. The only thing I worry about is the sun. We'll be all right if nothing goes wrong with the lighting. As PART OF AN INVESTIGATIOS of the processes involved in reading a poem, this quatrain by Robert Frost was presented to a group of readers. They were told to start writing as soon as possible after beginning to read the text, and they were asked to jot down whatever came to them as they read. In this way, although they undoubtedly did not report their very first responses, they presented at least some of the very early ones. Note that this differs from the procedure reported in Richards' Practical Criticism, in which the readers7 comments represent the end-result of repeated readings and reflections on the text. In the present study, the aim was rather to discover the paths by which these readers reached an interpretation. Their notes serve as "candid camera" glimpses into what happens as an unfamiliar text is encountered. The materials A member of the C.E.E.B. Commission on. English, Louise M. Rosenblatt, proferror of English Education at New York,University, is author of books on the art for art's sake movement and on the nature of the literary experience. This paper, which was read at the I963 NCTE meeting, is drawn from a book art critical theory that she is currently preparing. from which I shall draw were produced by a group of men and women, mainly high school teachers of English, who had thirty minutes with the text (which did not carry the author's name). Here are typical opening notes in two commentaries: (1) "This seems to me to be bits of conversation between people who are interested in moviemaking or a legitimate play." (2) "Sounds as if it could be producer of a play giving encouragement to backers." These notes reflect, u7e would say, a rudimentary literary response, yet they already represent a very high level of organization. To the literal sense of each word, there had clearly been added some idea about a framework into which to fit the meanings of the individual words and sentences. Who is speaking? Under what circumstances? To whom? are questions zlready assumed in these first tentative comments. The following note reveals another step or kind of awareness; it starts like the others, but quickly makes articulate the realization that this text is to be read as a poem: "This seems to be bits of conversation between people who are interested in moviemaking or a legitimate play. On second thought, the rhymes show it is a poem." his led to a ;ereading of the text for the purpose of paying attention to rhythm; the lines had evidently first been read as simple conversation, with no to sense a rhythmic pattern. One reader, who to be involved as a leading man in an amateur

3 124 COLLEGE ENGLISH play at his school, and who had been having trouble with a temperamental leading lady, focused initially on the second line: "At first, it seemed a somewhat cynical statement about the nature of the theatre (my own experiences somehow forcing me mainly to envision the squabbling)." Some of the readers became involved with ideas called up by the first two lines, and neglected the rest. But for most readers, the third line, with its reference to the sun, created the necessity for a revision in some way of the tentative response to the first two lines. In comment after comment, there occurs a phrase such as "on second thought," "a second look," "another idea." One reader spells out the problem: "The third line seems most confusing. If I stick to my theory of producer talking to backers it really makes no sense." Many of the readers, having called up such a vivid notion of a director or producer talking about a play, immediately attempted to adapt this to a situation in which there might reasonably be a concern about the sun: "I am reminded of the Elizabethan theatre open to the skies, which indeed was dependent upon the sun (good weather) "; "Seems to be about life in a summer stock theatre"; "Is it a summer theatre? But then there would be worry about the rain, rather than the sun." Within the brief time given for reading and comment, a number of the readers never freed themselves from the problem of finding such a practical explanation for a play's success being dependent on the sun. One comment ends on this realization: "I'm afraid this is a very literal reading." Others more quickly became aware of the need for another level of interpretation: "However, after a moment or two, the implied stage begins clearly to represent the world, and the actors, the world's population"; "On second thought, play metaphor-'all the world's a stage7 -Life goes on in spite of quarreling, but it won't if the 'lighting' (moral? spiritual?) fails... Anyway, war, disagreement, etc., don't matter so much-so long as we still have the 'light7 (sun-source of light-nature? God?)." Several readers were alerted, evidently, by the contrast between the word "infinite" and the colloquial tone of the rest of the line. When they were led to wonder about the kind of play for which the sun provides lighting, the notion of infinity evidently had prepared them to think of the great drama being played out through the ages by mankind on this planet. Some, however, felt it necessary to pack in as much symbolism as possible and tried in addition to find another level of meaning for the sun. A few readers sensed the Olympian remoteness of the "I" who could find it possible to view man's life on this planet in the light, almost, of eternity, and who was thus able to see as "little things" such momentous episodes as wars. The following notes illustrate the range covered in one commentary: "Sounds as if it could be producer of a play giving encouragement to backers... I just got another idea: First line- the world will always be here. Second line-there will always be fighting. We shouldn't worry too much about it. Third line-worries about H-bomb." (Here we see how the reader's fears of an atomic catastrophe were activated by the reference to "worry" about the sun.) For another reader, the reference to something happening to the sun awakened a recollection of Burns7, "Till a' the seas gang dry" as another image of boundless time. This led to a feeling that the persona's "worry" was ironic, a belittling of human conflicts when viewed against the background of the life of the sun. Recall that we are not here concerned with evaluating the responses to this text,

4 THE POEM AS EVENT 125 since these commentaries were not presented as finished interpretations. The notes quoted are rather to be considered snapshots or "stills" of stages in a slowmotion picture of the ongoing process by which a reader arrives at an interpretation of such a quatrain. The readers had been invited to make articulate the very processes that are often ignored or forgotten by the time a satisfactory reading has been completed. For the very experienced reader, such arousal and rejection of irrelevant or inadequate responses may be almost automatic. Certain points emerge clearly from even these few excerpts. First of all, the reader is active. He is not a blank tape registering a ready-made message. He is actively involved in building up a poem for himself out of the lines. He must select from the various referents that occur to him in response to the verbal symbols. He must find some context within which these referents can be related. He must be ready to reinterpret earlier parts of the poem in the light of later parts. Actually, he has not fully read the first line until he has read the last, and interrelated them. There seems to be a kind of shuttling back and forth as one synthesis-one context, one persona, etc.-after another suggests itself to him. NIoreover, we see that even in these rudimentary responses the reader is paying attention to the images, feelings, attitudes, associations that the words evoke in him. It is true that what looks like a certain amount of reasoning went on in the effort to fix on a kind of "~lav" that L, would de~end on the sun. Actuallv.,, however, the notes indicate that, for example, the feeling for the "play" as metaphoric for the life of mankind, and the "sun" as suggesting the backdrop of space and time against which to view it, seems to have been arrived at largely by paying attention to qualities of feeling due to such things as literary associations or tonal variations created by the diction. Notions of mankind as a whole, war, or astronomical time, were part of the readers7 contribution to the "meaning." As the reader's attention plays over the sequence of words, he seeks, then, more or less consciously, for cues that will enable him to organize the elements of thought and feeling-the images, feelings, ideas, aroused by the text-into some kind of structure or meaning. He can respond to the words only out of the substance of his own past experience and present preoccupations. The selection and organization of cues will to some degree hinge on the assumptions, the sense of possible structures, that he brings out of the stream of his life. But the test may also lead him to be critical of those assumptions and associations-as was the reader with too vivid a recollection of an actor's quarrel, or the reader fearing the H-bomb. He may discover that he has projected on to the text aspects of his past experience not relevant to it, which are not susceptible of coherent incorporation into it. Or he may have failed for various reasons to respond at all to some of the cues offered by the text. The specific means by which the reader can hope to make himself increasingly capable of sensitive and sound literary experiences cannot be enlarged on here. Most important is the fact that the reader's creation of a poem out of a text must be a self-ordering and self-correcting process. The text is a unique pattern of words, providing a context which regulates what should be in the forefront of consciousness in response to any one of its words. Hence we have seen how the interpretation even of a brief quatrain did not proceed line by line, block by block, but consisted in a subtle adjustment and readjustment of meaning and tone, to achieve a unified and coherent synthesis. Thus the text itself leads the reader toward this self-corrective process.

5 126 COLLEGE ENGLISH In addition, seeing what others have made of the text, seeing others' interpretations, will enable him to discover elements of the text that he has ignored or exaggerated. Or he mav learn that what he brought to the tekt-either in knowledge of language and literature, or in experience of life-was inadequate, that the text demanded of him more than he ~ossessed. We have been exploring some of the phases of the process-lived-through in the evocation of the poem, of that which is felt to be the referent of the text. hnother important part of the actual literary Drocess is the reader's awareness of a stream of attitudes and ideas aroused in him by this evocation itself. This phase was present in the responses to the quatrain, but perhaps it will be simpler to identify this level of response in the drama or novel. The reader will conjure up, say, the characters of Oedipus he King, and share in their acts, their uttered thoughts, and their emotions. But that is not all. He will also probably be aware of his own feelings of foreboding and tension as he lives through his evocation of the fate of Oedipus. Similarly, the wily Iago may be called forth with great vividness, yet the reader may at the same time be aware of strong feelings toward this character, and even perhaps be conscious of skepticism about the consistency of the behavior and motivations with which the text permits him to be endowed. Even the fragmentary responses to Frost's quatrain enabled us to see clearly the two functions of the unique pattern of words which constitutes the text. First, the text is a stimulus activating elements of the reader's past experience-his experience with literature and with life. Secondly, the text serves as a "control," a blueprint, a guide for a critical reworking and ordering of what has been called forth into the reader's consciousness. "The poem" is what the reader, under the guidance of the text, crystallizes out from the stuff of memory, image, thought, and feeling which he brings to it. To do this, he does not erase his own past experience or his own present personality. Under the magnetism of the ordered symbols of the text, he marshalls his resources, and from them brings forth the new order, the new experience, which he sees as the Doem. The reader is engaged in a creative process at once intensely personal, since the poem is something lived-through, and intensely social, since the text, as a "control," can be shared with others. Assessment of the relative validitv of different individual interpretations is hence possible, as we have seen, in terms of their greater or lesser relevance to the text. Thus, A4aud Bodkin explains precisely what she has been analysing in her dis- cussion of H~mlet.~ She has not, she says, been speaking of the character of Hamlet as though he were an actual man; n?r has she been analysing "the intention in the mind of Shakespeare." "Our analysis," she says, "is of the experience communicated to ourselves when we live in the art of the play attending with all the resources of our own minds to the words and structure of the drama that Shakespeare has given us." A poem, then, must be thought of as an event in time. It is not an obiect or an ideal entity. It is an occurrence, a coming-together, a compenetration, of a reader and a text. The reader brings to the text his past experience; the encounter gives rise to a new experience, a poem. This becomes part of the ongoing stream of his life, to be reflected on from any angle important to him as a human being-aesthetic, ethical, or metaphysical. Much confusion in current critical theory would be eliminated by a semantic revision which would make a clear distinction between the text and the lit- larchetypa1 Patterns in Poetry 19581, p (New York,

6 THE POEM erary work-the poem, the play, the novel: Text should designate a set or series of signs interpretable as verbal symbols. (This, of course, has been produced at a particular time and place, usually by a particular author.) Poe~rz should designate an involvement of both reader and text. This distinction will prevent the confusion of talking about the relationship of a reader to "a poem" when what is meant is a relation to "a text." We cannot simply look at the text and predict the poem. For this, a reader or readers with particular attributes must be postulated: e.g., the author-as-reader as he is creating the text, or as he reads it years later; a contemporary of the author with similar or different background of education and experience; other individuals living in specific places, times and milieus. Both test and reader are essential aspects or components, one might say, of that which is manifested as the poem. The text, we have seen, delimits and patterns, but it ultimately functions like a chemical element: it itself is merged in the synthesis with other elements to produce, in this instance, a particular event-a poem. The view that the poem is a special kind of experience lived through by a reader arouses the fear of fostering an irresponsible impressionism or dogmatic subjectivity. The reader, we know, must eliminate from the center of awareness all that does not cohere within the network of the text. This has been made the basis for ignoring altogether the reader's contribution. He is counseled simply to "surrender his own meanings," to become, as he indeed never can become, a blank page, a wraith-like receptor of an alien message. The New Critics, building on one facet of Richards' work, did much to rescue the poem as a work of art from earlier confusions with the poem as a biographical document or as a document in intellectual and social history. But in their AS EVENT 127 reaction from vague impressionistic criticism, they fostered the notion of an impersonal or objective criticism which neglects the role of the reader. The text is assumed to be the poem, or at any rate "the poem" is treated as an object, like a machine, whose parts can be described without reference to the observer, or reader. T. S. Eliot, in his 1956 lecture, "The Frontiers of Criticismln2 indicated that the reaction against "the subjective and the impressionistic," which he had done so much to generate three decades before, had probably gone too far. He warned, among other things, against the "danger... of assuming that there must be just one interpretation of the poem as a whole, that must be right." Eliot continues: I suspect, in fact, that a good deal of the value of an interpretation is-that it should be my own interpretation. There are many things, perhaps, to know about this poem, or that, many facts about which scholars can instruct me which will help me to avoid definite misunderstandings; but a valid izterpretation, I believe, must be at the same time an interpretation of nzy ow?z feeling when 1 read it. (p. 127, my italics) Ultimately, the critic's notions of the nature of that which he criticizes will affect the criteria he applies. The teacher, too, is perhaps even more decidedly affected both in his selection of literary materials and in his techniques of teaching. Even so admirable a work as Welleli and Warren's Theory of Literature3 has evidently reinforced the reluctance to recognize the role of the reader. The authors do actually affirm that a poem can be known only through individual experiences, but their predominant concern is to counter this with a view of the "existence" of the work as a set of 'In On Poetry nqzd Poets (New York, 1957), pp. 113 ff. "New York, 1949.) See especially chapter 12.

7 128 COLLEGE ENGLlSH norms which are independent of the experience of any particular reader and which will remain incompletely and imperfectly realized. "The poem" would then exist somewhere as an object, separate and complete like the moon, if only partially seen at any time by any one reader. This neglects the fact that the various levels or norms-sound, syntax, fictional situations, images, metaphysical implications-must be synthesized by some, at least hypothetical, reader with a particular set of values. The untapped possibilities of the various levels of the text do not add up to a single absolute structure never to be realized. Instead, they represent the broad limits within which the text, say, of Othello or The Divine Comedy, presents the potentialities for a whole gamut of related yet differing interpretations. The possibility of ever-new evocations of a work argues, not for the existence of a single unattainable ideal conception of it, but only the fact that new readers, with different personalities, bringing to the text different sets of values and experiences, will within its limits fashion new syntheses, new interpretations. Another extremely influential work, Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism, also may foster critical neglect of the reader's creative activities. Because the direct experience of the work is personal and "incommunicable," because "the original experience" cannot be recaptured, Frye excludes it from the realm of criticism and relegates it to something called the history of taste. He narrows the sphere of criticism too much in making this absolute division. Critical activity, no matter how rudimentary, is implicated in the reader's actual evocation of the literary work. What he makes of the text will be conditioned by his literary expectations, his sense of literary modes, his awareness of criteria of sound interpretation or relevance to the text. Criticism begins with the reader's reflection on one or more aspects of the process: the poem-as-evoked, the accompanying reactions to it, the text, and the reader's contribution. This event in time, this intensely complex and evanescent web of ideas, feelings, sensations, attitudes, which he weaves between himself and the text, is the critic's primary subject-matter. No matter how impersonal and objective may seem his critical interests, he must deal with such events, report them, compare them, explain and defend or attack, in short evaluate, them. The critic goes astray when he loses sight of "the poem" as a doing, a making, a combustion fed by both a particular personality and a particular text. The poem as an event in the life of a reader, as embodied in a process resulting from the confluence of reader and text, should be central to a systematic theory of criticism. This would make it possible to avoid oversimplified aestheticism or crude didacticism, dogmatic absolutes or chaotic relativisms. Reader, like author, would be acknowledged a creator, with his own skills, disciplines, and responsibilities. Thus criticism and literary study will be freed from the temptation of analysis for its own sake. Poems will not be chosen for study mainly because they lend themselves especially to what Eliot has called the "lemon squeezer" method of criticism. The student reader will be helped to handle critically his own responses to the text. He will be led to the self-ordering and the self-criticism which should usually precede the technical analysis, the labeling, classifying activities which often are made substitutes for poetic experience. As he proceeds to relate his poetic experience to his ongoing life, a systematic critical framework will make room for parallel applications of aesthetic, ethical, social, or metaphysical considerations. We may thus be saved from the sterility of a critical orthodoxy which threatens both the criticism and the teaching of literature.