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The Ideal Reader: A Critical Fiction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

Robert De Maria Jr.
Robert De Maria Jr.*
Affiliation:
Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York
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Abstract

Critical writings may be seen as fictions about literature and reading and writing. One hero of these fictions is the ideal reader. The sort of ideal reader a critic creates indicates the literary form of his criticism. Dr. Johnson's ideal reader is an everyman, and Johnson's criticism imitates allegorical epic literature in its concern with mankind in general. Dryden's division of readers into classes, headed by “the most judicious,” is an aspect of the dramatic form of his critical literature. Coleridge's lyrical mode of criticism centers on a reader so close to his author that he becomes his tautegorical representative. Northrop Frye's criticism is a kind of comic romance leading to an apocalypse in which his heroic ideal reader redeems cultural history and experiences it as part of his present life. The criticism of these four writers embodies and imitates, as it asserts, a vision of literature.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 93 , Issue 3 , May 1978 , pp. 463 - 474
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1978

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References

Notes

1 For the “extinction” of authors and literary objects see, for example, Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in The Discontinuous Universe, ed. Sallie Sears and Georgianna W. Lord (New York: Basic Books, 1972), pp. 7-12; Stanley Fish, “Literature in the Reader: Affective Stylistics,” New Literary History, 2 (1970-71), 123-62: “the objectivity of the text is an illusion” (p. 140); Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1971): speaking about the criticism of Blanchot, de Man says, “The literary work is given no objective status whatever” (p. 64). There is a phenomenological bent in most reader-based criticism, but it is most explicit in Georges Poulet, “Phenomenology of Reading,” New Literary History, 1 (1969-70), 53-68, and Wolfgang Iser, “The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach,” New Literary History, 3 (1971-72), 279-99. Norman Holland, most recently in 5 Readers Reading (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1975), and David Bleich, Readings and Feelings: An Introduction to Subjective Criticism (Champaign, Ill.: National Council of Teachers of English, 1974), are among the many writers working on the psychology of reading. According to Richard Howard, Roland Barthes gives us a poetics of reading in S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Farrar, 1974), and an erotics of reading in The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Farrar, 1975): see Howard's introduction to The Pleasure of the Text, pp. vii-viii. Susan Sontag also speaks of the erotics of reading in Against Interpretation (New York: Farrar, 1966). Richard Poirier spoke about the necessity for a prudery as well as an erotics of reading in an English Institute section on Reading chaired by Stanley Fish (1976). “The aesthetics of reception” is an important phrase for, among others, Hans Robert Jauss; in “Levels of Identification of Hero and Audience,” New Literary History, 5 (1973-74), 283-317, Jauss makes up a taxonomy of reader response that corresponds to one of Northrop Frye's taxonomies of literary presentation (p. 298). For a discussion of literary competence, its source in the language of linguistics, and its relevance to the notion of the ideal reader, see Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1975), esp. pp. 113-30. The “experience” of reading is crucial in Fish's theoretical essay cited above and in his practical criticism, Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost (New York: St. Martin's, 1967) and Self-Consuming Artifacts (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1972). Some other practical critics who focus on the reader are Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1974); John Preston, The Created Self: The Reader's Role in Eighteenth Century Fiction (London: Heinemann, 1970); Michael Riffaterre, “Interpretation and Descriptive Poetry,” New Literary History, 4 (1972-73), 229-56. Interesting arguments about the identity of the reader appear in the whole issue of College English entitled “The” Reader, and Real Readers, 36 (1975), and in Robert Crosman, “Some Doubts about ‘The Reader of Paradise Lost,‘” College English, 37 (1975), 372-82. Criticism that talks about other criticism by examining the nature of its implied reader is closest to my work here; Poulet in “Phenomenology of Reading” and Fish in “Literature in the Reader” (both cited above) engage in some of this sort of characterization. Geoffrey Hartman is one critic who speaks about himself in order to introduce some of his readings: “The Interpreter: A Self-Analysis,” New Literary History, 4 (1972-73), 213-27; rpt. in The Fate of Reading (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1975), pp. 3-19.

2 Like most other lines of critical thinking, the affective approach can find a root in Aristotle's Poetics; the important part of the Poetics in this regard would, of course, be the notion of catharsis. Walter J. Ong, S.J., provides some interesting hints toward a history of readers in “The Writer's Audience Is Always a Fiction,” PMLA, 90 (1975), 9-21: “A history of the ways audiences have been called on to fictionalize themselves would be a correlative of the history of literary genres and literary works, and indeed of culture itself” (p. 12). For a correlation to the history of genres, see Tzvetan Todorov, “The Origin of Genres,” New Literary History, 8 (1976-77), 159-70.

3 Quotation from Alfred North Whitehead used by Paul Fussell as the epigraph to the second part of The Rhetorical World of Augustan Humanism (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965); in my approach to literary criticism I owe a pervasive debt to Paul Fussell's teaching. Among the many critics who speak about reading criticism as literature I should like to mention Cary Nelson, “Reading Criticism,” PMLA, 91 (1976), 801-15, and “The Paradox of Critical Language: A Polemical Discussion,” Modern Language Notes, 89 (1974), 1003-16; Geoffrey Hartman, “The Fate of Reading,” in The Fate of Reading, esp. p. 268; Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight, esp. pp. 110, 136; and Eugenio Donato, “The Two Languages of Criticism,” in The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man, ed. Richard Macksey and Donato (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1970), pp. 89-97; Donato, like de Man, talks about the literary nature of criticism as an idea related to the ideas of structuralist writers like Michael Foucault and Jacques Derrida.

4 Lives of the English Poets, ed. G. B. Hill, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1905), iii, 246-47; hereafter, quotations from Johnson cited only by volume and page numbers are from this edition.

5 Idler 3, The Idler and The Adventurer, ed. W. J. Bate, John M. Bullitt, L. F. Powell, Vol. ii of The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1963), p. 12; this volume is hereafter cited as Yale ii.

6 In The Achievement of Samuel Johnson (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1955), p. 217, W. J. Bate sees Johnson as the opposite of Mr. Tradition.

7 An Essay concerning Human Understanding, ed. John W. Yolton, 2 vols. (London: Dent, 1965), i, xxxii-xxxiii.

8 “A Defense of An Essay of Dramatic Poesy,” Of Dramatic Poesy and Other Critical Essays, ed. George Watson, 2 vols. (London: Dent, 1962), i, 121; hereafter, quotations from Dryden cited only by volume and page numbers are from this edition.

9 Crites interrupts Eugenius (i, 42) and offers a moderation that is “pleasing to all the company” (i, 43); Eugenius immoderately censures the ancients for their primitive and inadequate treatment of love (i, 41-42).

10 Dryden's Classical Theory of Literature (London: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1975), p. 49.

11 François Hédelin, abbé d'Aubignac, “The Whole Art of the Stage” (1657), trans. anonymously (London, 1684); selections included in The Continental Model, ed. Scott Elledge and Donald Schier, rev. ed. (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1970), p. 99.

12 Quotation from Anima Poetae used by J. Isaacs in “Coleridge's Critical Terminology,” Essays and Studies by Members of the English Association, 21 (1936), 86.

13 Lay Sermons, ed. R. J. White, Vol. vi of The Collected Works (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1972), pp. 36-37.

14 Shakespearean Criticism, ed. T. M. Raysor, 2 vols. (1907; rpt. London: Dent, 1960), i, 220-21; see also ii, 39 and n. 1; hereafter cited as SC.

15 Biographia Literaria, ed. J. Shawcross, 2 vols. (1907; rpt. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1973), n, 120; hereafter cited as BL.

16 The Friend, ed. Barbara Rooke, 2 vols., Vol. iv of The Collected Works (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1969), throughout; i, 14, 23; i, 55; i, 21. Coleridge poses as the reader's tutor throughout Aids to Reflection.

17 Ed. Seth B. Watson (Philadelphia: Lea and Blanchard, 1848), p. 18.

18 Inquiring Spirit, ed. Kathleen Coburn (London: Routledge, 1951), p. 110.

19 Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit, ed. H. St.J. Hart (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Univ. Press, 1957), p. 53; hereafter cited as CIS.

20 Miscellaneous Criticism, ed. T. M. Raysor (London: Constable, 1936), p. 244; cited hereafter as MC.

21 Quoted by I. A. Richards in Coleridge on Imagination (1934; rpt. Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1960), p. 84.

22 SC, ii, 181-82; the reporter replied that the lecture was not a satire but rather an elegy on the lecturer himself.

23 As Coburn points out in the introduction to her Inquiring Spirit, p. 18.

24 Anima Poetae, ed. E. H. Coleridge (Cambridge, Mass.: Houghton, 1895), p. 168.

25 Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1957), p. 132; hereafter cited as AC.

26 Fearful Symmetry (1947; rpt. Boston: Beacon, 1962), pp. 427-28; hereafter cited as FS.

27 The Critical Path (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1973), p. 125.

28 “Quest and Cycle in Finnegans Wake,” James Joyce Review, 1 (1957); rpt. in Fables of Identity (New York: Harcourt, 1963), pp. 263-64.

29 “The Road of Excess,” Myth and Symbol: Critical Approaches and Applications, ed. Bernice Slote (Lincoln: Nebraska Univ. Press, 1963); rpt. in The Stubborn Structure (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1970), p. 164.

30 Specimens of the Table Talk of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. H. N. Coleridge (New York: R. Worthington, 1884), pp. 278-79; rpt. in Inquiring Spirit, p. 165; Table Talk hereafter cited as TT.

31 On Dryden's Essay of Dramatic Poesy, Univ. of Michigan Contributions in Modern Philology, No. 16 (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1951), p. 23.

32 Rambler 125, The Rambler, ed. W. J. Bate and A. B. Strauss, Vols. iii-v of The Yale Johnson (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1969), iv, 300.

33 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1975), p. 124.

34 “Competent Readers,” Diacritics (Spring 1976), p. 24.

35 “Learned,” “sensible,” “average,” “today's,” and “more conscious” are adjectives applied to the reader by Michael Riffaterre, “Interpretation and Descriptive Poetry,” New Literary History, 4 (1972-73), 229-56. The “mature” reader is a construction of Ronald Wardhaugh that Stanley Fish mentions, along with the “competent” reader, in discussing the development of his “informed reader”: “Literature in the Reader: Affective Stylistics,” New Literary History, 2 (1970-71), esp. pp. 141-46.

36 Science and the Modern World (1925; rpt. New York: New American Library, 1948), p. 25.