Tag: Reader Response Criticism

The Interpretive Ring

By: Lucas Lenzi from unsplash.com

When you read a book, do you spend all of your time dissecting the intentions of the author, using his historical and cultural context? If you said no, you’re like most people. If you said yes, you’re probably in college.

Most people read books however they want.  They ignore the intentions of the author, historical and cultural context, and sometimes they can even ignore the other books surrounding the one book they are currently reading.  And to be honest, as long as someone isn’t going around and publishing their reviews while pretending to be some great scholar (though there are plenty of those people), I think that can be perfectly fine.  Why wouldn’t it be?  (Okay, sometimes people twist it and ignore the author’s intent entirely—cancel culture, anyone?—but I’m talking about benign reinterpretation.)  A book, article, or blog post has two sides to it: first, the author writing the thing, and then the reader, who has his own cultural and historical context.  No one has a brain exactly like the author, and because of that, no one will interpret his ideas exactly the same way.

Readers of generally similar backgrounds, however, will interpret things in generally the same way.  Students at secular universities might read The Iliad and decide that Achilles and Patroklus are gay, students at private Christian schools might read the same book and decide the relationship between the two men is platonic.  And then there might be a third party who doesn’t care about Achilles and his sexuality and just wants to get the darn book over with because if I have to read yet another horrible death sequence. . .

I digress. 

This brings me to our topic for today:  Reader Response Criticism and its (possible) pitfalls. 

When we last talked about Reader Response Theory, there was a pretty extensive discussion about Ideal/Informed Readers.  Today, we’re going to be talking more generally about something called an interpretive community, one of the main points in Stanley Fish’s Reader Response Theory. 

The basic idea of the interpretive community is that the readers, not the author, create the meaning of the text, because every single statement is contextual and will be interpreted different ways by different people.  Interpretive communities are made up of people who share the same general interpretation of a work of art. To illustrate, let’s take the following sentence:  “I never said she stole my money.”  This sentence can mean several different things if different words are emphasized, but it would easily be understood if it were read in the context of a conversation.  In the case of the interpretive community, it’s not the surrounding conversation that provides the context for specific works of art (e.g. novels and poems), but the reader’s own personal background and experiences.  Remember those Christian students who think the Achilles/Patroklus bond is platonic?  That’s right—they’re an interpretive community.  Those students who believe that Achilles and Patroklus are totally gay?  They’re an interpretive community too.   Interpretive communities can be very small, like a group of friends who discuss literature together (the Inklings comes to mind), or it can be as big as a university, and everyone is in one.

I hear an objection.  “Sometimes things are just easily understood without cultural context,” you say.  “You don’t need to always be in an interpretive community.”  After all, people of all kinds of different backgrounds tend to understand poetry written by soldiers in WWI—it doesn’t take any special ring of people to show you how that poetry is supposed to work.  Fair enough.  I may have been a bit misleading in my previous paragraph.  Interpretive communities can be very small, but they can also encompass an entire language.  Sure, these poems are easy enough to understand to the vast majority of people who can speak and write English.  That’s an interpretive community, too, since they actually do have a relatively homogeneous background (at least, the native English speakers do).  Obviously, there is diversity to this interpretive community, and it can become almost like a Russian nesting doll situation.  See, for me, I’m part of the English speaking interpretive community, then the American interpretive community, then into a further subset that I would call “Christian,” and then. . . well, you get the idea.  Basically, the communities have the potential to become concentric rings or venetian diagrams, with some bleed-through and overlap. 

And this is where I see the potential for a problem, but this is also where I have to ask you to hang tight while we discuss one more idea.  C.S. Lewis has an essay titled “The Inner Ring,” where he discusses the possible dangers of becoming exclusionary and closed off from others.  He explains that every person has a special ring of friends, but the everyday politics that go on between people can create rings inside rings.  Inside jokes and experiences can bond people in special ways, starting to make people feel like they belong to a special “club,” though the edges of the ring aren’t as defined as all that.  There is nothing wrong with having friends—and even, to some extent, having a closer circle of friends within that ring.  Besides, everyone wants to feel as if they belong.  The problem is introduced when that Inner Ring preys on that desire.  For a quick (and stupid) example (that Lewis definitely wouldn’t approve of, seeing as it’s way too obvious), in Mean Girls, Cady Heron becomes Regina George’s double.  Cady ditches khakis and starts wearing miniskirts in an attempt to fit in with the “Plastics,” the popular girls who supposedly run the school. She changes who she is and gives up essential parts of herself to be in that group, which is the biggest problem of the Inner Ring.  The ring of “Plastics,” however, is clearly defined.  With life, you rarely find circles that obvious.

How does this relate to the interpretive community?  Interpretive communities are pretty harmless, yeah?  Well, usually.  In my four years in college, though, I did pick up on a very subtle hint of “inner ringedness” while combing through scholarship and even when talking with friends.  Scholars always tend to pontificate as if they’re right, which makes sense considering all the research and time it took to get where they are.  The problem is, there are a few strains of academia that have difficulty with criticism, and the pesky thing about humans is they seem to have problems with criticism in general. Those kids who assume Achilles and Patroklus are gay?  They’re missing out on an analysis of platonic friendship.  Those Christian kids who argue they’re just friends?  Well, they’re ignoring the fact that the Greeks didn’t mind a bit of homosexuality.  Perhaps they aren’t so much interpretive communities as an interpretive ring.

But does that mean that every single person who belongs to multiple interpretive communities has to pay attention to what everyone else?  No, of course not.  To paraphrase G.K. Chesterton:  don’t be so open-minded your brains fall out.  There are going to be some interpretations that are more correct than others, and there are going to be some interpretations that are so wrong that they should be dismissed completely.  There’s no reason to accept everything everyone else says.  How can one person go about being a part of an interpretive community and avoid the interpretive ring that begins to form later? 

Perhaps we can pull a solution from Jordan Peterson, a popular psychologist and author.  In his book 12 Rules for Life, Rule 9 states:  “Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don’t.”  This approach acknowledges that each person has their own preferences for their very own ideas and with the people who agree with them.  It does, however, leave a bit of wiggle room for new thoughts—the small epiphany of, “Oh, I hadn’t thought of that before.”  Inner rings are basically inevitable and can be relatively benign, or they can force people to change their souls in order to be considered part of the group.  Interpretive rings can be the same way, but with the added academic veneer. If they are allowed to form, interpretive rings can encourage people within to gaze sneeringly on the people without, as if they are too stupid to understand the “correct” point of view.

Now, obviously, the interpretive ring doesn’t exactly exist in scholarship.  As far as I know, most people don’t pay much attention to Reader Response Theory, so they’re not very inclined to apply the ideas elsewhere.  This might be completely misguided, but I have noticed a growing trend to close oneself off from people with whom they disagree, especially among the upper echelons of academia.  In my own mind, this signals a shift from communities to rings, and it seems nearly inevitable.  Don’t fall prey to the Inner Ring—there is no need to change your soul for others who don’t want to accept you.  But don’t fall prey to the Interpretive Ring, either, by looking down on others and their ideas.  Part of being human is being a lifelong learner. 

Even if you dismiss others’ ideas outright, at least you know they exist now.  In order to avoid shutting oneself off from other people and their ideas, it would be wise to listen to their arguments as arguments; don’t just listen in order to strengthen your own ideas. Remember, there’s no reason to stifle yourself just because the world wants you to remain inside an echo chamber. You’re just one person, after all, and it’s very unlikely you’re right about everything.

Why I hate English

I once had a teacher who gave the excellent advice: Seldom affirm, seldom deny, always distinguish. This advice works well in most circumstances, especially in debates where both sides have a lot of nuance. But there are two places where this doesn’t work particularly well: YouTube thumbnail titles and headlines. So, apologies for the unnecessarily dramatic headline. But if it got you reading, it worked.

And actually, to be perfectly fair, the title of this post isn’t entirely untrue. I do hate English–at least, I hate the conventional way English and literature is taught in schools. I abhor the kind of English that kids complain about in high school. That kind of English has become an internet joke:

Book: “The curtains were blue.”

English Teacher: “The blue is meant to symbolize Thomas’ deep inner sadness and desperation.” (Or insert something else completely made up here)

What the author meant: “The curtains were blue.”

Yeah. That English. The kind where a high school kid can pick up a copy of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (a medieval poem that cannot be read by modern English speakers without a translation), see the word “gay,” and assume it means homosexual. (I mentioned translation, right? And…medieval?) We live in a world where students can make up whatever they like, and teachers absolutely eat it up. Which is why today we’re going to be talking about the pitfalls of a school of thought called “New Criticism.” Before we do that, though, we’re going to talk about target audience.

First, we have the idea of an “Ideal/Implied Reader.” (For those who care, this is terminology pulled from reader-response criticism.) The words sound esoteric, (and they are, welcome to academia) but it’s basically a person who shares roughly the same assumptions as the author. In laymen’s terms, it’s the target audience. The Ideal Reader of a Shakespeare play is the person watching it in Shakespeare’s day; they have roughly the same cultural mindset, and the audience member would understand all his jokes without needing footnotes. Even YouTubers have “Implied Viewers.” If you follow one YouTuber for any length of time, you’ll notice that their videos start to become more niche, and they might even have inside jokes with their audience that new viewers might not understand. That YouTuber knows who his Ideal Viewers are, and he caters to them and their expectations.

The second (and related) concept is the “Informed Reader.” The Informed Reader is the person who is not a part of the target audience, but someone who can do the leg work and figure out what’s going on. That typically means doing a little bit of research–for example, to be able to judge a Shakespeare play, sometimes you need to read the footnote that explains a joke. (It’s probably sexual, by the way. Basically half of Shakespeare is sex.) The Ideal Viewer of one of those sappy Christian movies is a Christian, but that doesn’t mean an atheist can’t watch one and critique it. If the atheist were an Informed Viewer, he’d do a bit of hunting around to see why Christians thought that way.

Do those two concepts make sense? Good. Forget about them for now; we’ll come back to them later. We’re going to be talking about New Criticism. Obviously, I can’t cover everything in one blog post, but I’m going to do my best to boil down the Most Important Idea. Today, I’m going to be pulling from an essay called “Criticism as Pure Spectulation” by John Crowe Ransom, one of the most influential New Critics.

The most basic part of New Critics is this equation: Literature=fact+”x”. This may sound strange, but the equation actually works very well. The “fact” is the subject matter. For example, the “fact” in Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Raven” is that there is a man standing in his doorway, a raven flies into his study and keeps saying “Nevermore,” and the raven freaks him out. The “x” is all the fancy stuff–the meter that makes the poem sound all creepy, the word choice, and the repetition that simply doesn’t work in outside of poetry. A teacher once told me that the “x” is what’s lost in translation; try as you might, if you translated this poem into Spanish or German, you’d lose part of what makes this poem this poem. No matter how good the translator is, there is no way he can capture the essence of a poem in its native language. They can get the “fact” part across all right, but the “x” eludes them. This is what distinguishes literature from things like science and essays. (This blog post, for example, could be translated into another language with very few problems, but poems are a different ball game entirely.) Because literature is so distinct, (it’s the only discipline that has an “x,” after all) usually New Critics analyze only the text itself.

This is the way most people are trained to “do English,” whether they realize it or not. English teachers have their students identify the “fact” (What is this story/poem about? What happens?) and then, they have students analyze the “x” (What type of meter is this, and how does it contribute to the poem? Do the color of the curtains add to the story, and if so, how? What is the tone of this poem, and what words indicate this?).

Obviously, this is an oversimplification of New Criticism, but this idea is one of their core tenants. And their equation is actually very useful, as far as it goes. Applied correctly, New Criticism works pretty well for modern people reading modern things–Americans can read and understand things written in the colonial era and beyond with very little explanation. As an American, the ideas of freedom and liberty just make sense to me. I don’t really need any context for Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense.” I can read poems written in modern English and separate the “fact” from the “x” to write a poetry analysis, and that’s a skill I have thanks to New Criticism. And it works really well for literature where I already have a basic understanding of the history.

The problem is that this system easily lends itself to abuse. Remember our Ideal and Informed Readers? New Critics can very easily fall into the trap of assuming that they are always the Ideal Reader, no matter what. After all, if you take the text all by itself, you’re allowed to assume the book means whatever you’d like it to mean. You don’t have to do any research into why or how the book came about. This is why that teacher is able to say those curtain symbolize Thomas’ inward depression spiral. She doesn’t have to figure out why the book is that way; she can make the book however she wants.

Obviously, no one should judge a system only by the abuse of that system. Most people don’t judge playgrounds for being dangerous if one child climbs to the highest point and then jumps off of it. But if multiple kids start to climb up and jump off, the question is eventually asked: What is it about this playground that makes children want to jump off of it? Why is this playground easily abused? Maybe it’s because it’s too easy to get to the top, or maybe it’s because the playground is too boring and kids want to make it more exciting. New Criticism doesn’t exactly encourage people to get whatever they like out of the text, but there don’t appear to be any barriers either. They don’t force a reader to take history into account, nor should they, but gentle encouragement might be helpful.

To illustrate, in the beginning of the movie “Hitch,” Hitch explains that 60% of human communication is body language, 30% is tone, and 10% is words. Imagine if all you ever got was the words. While Hitch is probably exaggerating, the point stands: Text matters, but context is everything.