Reading, Interpretation, Reception

Author(s): Michał Głowiński and Wlad Godzich

Source: New Literary History, Vol. 11, No. 1, Anniversary Issue: II (Autumn, 1979), pp. 75-82
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/468871
Accessed: 31/03/2010 13:04

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. 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
http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=jhup.

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.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

The Johns Hopkins University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to
New Literary History.

http://www.jstor.org
 Reading, Interpretation, Reception

Micha] Gkowiniski

L ITERARY CRITICISM has only recently become interested in the

category of reading, whether as an object of reflection or, in
some measure, a descriptive tool. Recourse to it has been rather
aleatory, if we except the pioneering work of Roman Ingarden on
the cognition of the literary work, in which he subjected the problem to
exhaustive analysis.' However, even he stressed that which today does
not appear to be of most interest. Ingarden's analysis of reading deals
with questions which fall more within the purview of psychologists
studying the behavior of the reader in the course of his contact with
the literary text (e.g., the impact of reading interruptions upon the
cognition of the text). But much of what is referred to by reading
today 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 literary
work: Das literarischeKunstwerk(1931). Ingarden argued that, owing to
a construction characterized by schematization and so-called loci of
indeterminacy, 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 it
has been concretized by a reader. Specific works require specific types
of concretization, since the latter is neither optional nor arbitrary; the
reader, however, does come to the work with diverse concretizing
biases, dependent upon a great many variables, including historical
and cultural conditioning. It can thus be said that, to use contempo-
rary terminology, Ingarden's problematic of concretization is a prob-
lem of reading.2
I do not intend to either expound or criticize Ingarden's concepts.
They do provide me, however, with a useful point of departure for
further considerations. To be sure, the preoccupations of a psychol-
ogy of reading (beginning with the perception of a piece of paper
filled with signs, whether handwritten or printed) are immaterial to
literary criticism. Criticism defines its concerns otherwise: its object is
not to be found in the psychological properties of reading but rather
in its historico-cultural aspects. In other words, it analyzes reading as a
specific form of cultural activity, subject to certain norms, and sus-

Copyright© 1979 by New LiteraryHistory, The University of Virginia

76 NEW LITERARY HIS'TORY

ceptible of differentiation according to the type of literary culture to

which it belongs.3 This is a fundamental assumption, since it allows
the work to be apprehended not as an autonomously existing
phenomenon, limited to the text, and conceived of as an unvarying
and stabilized structure, but rather it permits a consideration of the
literary work as energeia, and not only as ergon, to use Humboldt's
classical formulation.
Reading is, in a sense, an everyday activity, consciously controlled
only to a rather small degree, and in this respect it is very much like
everyday speech which, though rule-governed, does not require that
these rules be brought to consciousness in daily linguistic practice;
rather, they remain unconscious even when the subject of the practice
is capable of conceptualizing them. Reading, accompanied by self-
reflection, ceases to be reading in the ordinary sense; it begins to
resemble the type of activity which characterizes the interpretation of
literary works. The analogy with speech does not end there. From a
spoken utterance one can reconstruct much of what has not been
explicitly formulated, such as unstated assumptions and a complex of
beliefs 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 reminds
us, the interpreter is not a tabula rasa; he comes to the text with a
certain 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. These
beliefs 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 case
of 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, are
actualized. This is neither a "sin" nor a flaw of reading, but rather its
fundamental 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: the
perspective of the work itself. The orientation of the vectors is re-
versed: in reading, we not only introduce the work to our world, we
also introduce our world into the work; we impose our categories
upon it; we perceive in it especially that which links it to our world.
This appears to be a universal property of reading, actualized even
READING, INTERPRETATION, RECEPTION 77

when it is undertaken for primarily cognitive reasons, and should

therefore be as free as possible of those factors which interfere with
cognition or impede it. The basis of reading is the assumption of a
common universe, divided between the reading subject and the work
read. This hypothesis need not be explicitly signified in every in-
stance; it formulates itself in the very act of reading. Literary culture
constitutes the ground of this assumption; it makes it possible and
defines it.
During the course of reading, not only beliefs concerning the
world, 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 what
is literature and what isn't, and, even further, what is good and bad
literature. Reading is thus influenced by the literary taste of a period.
We should also add beliefs in what is permissible and proper in a
certain type of literary utterance, and not in another. Thus, the
stereotypes of a given period play an associative role in reading; they
are frequently extracted from tradition, transmitted in schools, and
generally subconscious. They are explicit in the evaluation and clas-
sification of literary facts.

II

Reading, obviously, lies at the root of all critical activities, especially

those whose object is a single text, a concrete literary work. In other
words, reading is particularly bound up with the complex of activities
commonly referred to as interpretation. What is read is, clearly, a
concrete and unique work. The reconstruction of the principles ac-
cording to which a given group of works has been constructed, or the
discovery of the conventions by which it is governed, constitutes, from
this point of view, a secondary form of activities, still dependent upon
reading but in not so direct a fashion.
"There is no question," writes Janusz Sjawinski in his study of the
methodological problems of interpretation, "that the study of indi-
vidual works is, methodologically speaking, the most troublesome
component of a history of literature."5 This statement may have the
appearance of a paradox, since the interpretation of individual works
may well be considered to be one of the foremost concerns of the
historian of literature. Among his undertakings, it is after all the most
amenable 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
78 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

present. In the course of these activities, does the critic remain an

"ordinary" reader? In attempting to answer this question, we will
learn 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 under
no obligation to explain it or to comment upon it, does not have to
make clear what is important and significant about it, and generally
satisfies himself with a modest, unassuming comprehension, for his
own use and in his own measure. Slawinski reminds us that for the
critic, "the problematic nature of his expertise immediately poses it-
self: he cannot-because it is not possible-separate his activities from
the circumstances of'ordinary' reading and the concretizing processes
attendant to it. He cannot, as a scholar, escape from a more elemen-
tary role: the reader. His analytical, interpretive, and evaluative moves
cannot be divorced from the norms of reading prevalent in the com-
munity to which he belongs."6 As a consequence, "the scholar would
very much like to stifle within himself the voice of the reader, to
detach himself from the community of readers to which he belongs, to
liberate his method from cultural and literary constraints of time and
place. It is a desire bound up with an internal antinomy: is it possible
to achieve a historyof literature, while rejecting one's own historicity?"7
This is where the basic conflict specific to interpretation can be
drawn. Interpretation, to be true to itself, must, in order to justify its
existence, overcome within itself that which would be but "ordinary"
reading, delimited by a given culture and free of such obligations as
verifiability and subordination to analytic methods constitutive of
literary science. In addition, interpretation, to be itself, must take it
for granted that it will not be a repetition of previous readings. In
"ordinary" reading, this is unimportant since we read for our own use
and out of our own needs; reading is, after all, and in spite of its
anchoring in literary culture, a private and intimate undertaking.
Impressionistic criticism attempted to resolve this conflict by defining
its task as the recording of the impressions produced by the reading
of masterpieces. This is but a poor and unsatisfactory solution since it
not 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 outside
the 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 an
activity deeply anchored in literary culture, but it must in some way
discount reading, and exploit it for its own ends. Interpretation,
READING, INTERPRETATION, RECEPTION 79

which would want to liberate itself wholly of reading factors (as they
are understood in this essay), would be simply incomprehensible-is
there need to add that such total liberation is impossible? It would
directly conflict with notions current in the culture, whether on the
subject of the world or the work. It would be received as an eccentric-
ity, a testimony to the interpreter's aberration, without any verifiable
basis with respect to its object. Insofar as it were possible at all, an act
of interpretation which would bracket off all the contribution of
reading 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 solution
requires many additional assumptions and has so many limitations
that it produces results only in single cases, and thus fails to provide
the data for devising either a goal or an ideal toward which interpre-
tive practice in general should strive. This conflict is avoided when
reading 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 its
hermeneutic or even merely radically hermeneutic version, the very
act of reading is already an act of interpretation; reading and in-
terpretation merge. From the point of view of reading, the work
becomes the only point of reference; the literary culture within which
the act of reading takes place is not taken into consideration. This is
what appears to take place in the critical practice of Georges Poulet; at
least, such seems to be his conception of reading. I have in mind the
programmatic essay "Criticism and the Experience of Interiority,"
which is a phenomenological account of the act of reading, and also its
grandiloquent eulogy.8 In the work of a master reader such as Poulet,
such an approach leads to excellent results, but its inherent weakness
lies in the impossibility of its generalization and dissemination; it is
beyond 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 to
interpretation need not be conflictual at all. Reading is not limited to
introducing banalities and hackneyed judgments within the compass
of interpretation; nor does it merely constrain it to prevailing norms,
which need not live up to the standards of critical description. In a
sense, it is also a controlling factor of interpretation; it imposes limits
upon it, frequently limits of common sense. Interpretation cannot be
either the domain of free choice or the result of the ingenuity of the
critic-which would lead to what I earlier called critical fantasy. The
basic impediment to such gestures is the text itself-on condition that
80 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

one grant that interpretation should be adequate to it, that it not

conflict with it, and, therefore, that it not impose meanings upon it
which are obviously foreign to it. The text, however, does not seem
capable of playing this role single-handedly. It cannot do so, since, for
ordinary 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 being
interpreted-particularly in the case of a known, valued, and
widely 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 which
insures 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 social
functioning.

III

Interest in the tensions between reading and interpretation tran-

scends the methodological questions posed by the analysis of literary
works. Their importance becomes apparent when the center of interest
is shifted to what German scholars have been calling Rezeptionsiisthetik,
and which, in Polish studies, has been referred to as the poetics of
reception.9 Here too, the relations of reading and interpretation raise
methodological issues, but in a somewhat different vein. Reading is
problematized, not as a precondition of interpretation, but as the
object of reconstruction and analysis. Interpretation now becomes the
factor which makes this reconstruction possible. It does so because it
contains residues of reading, that is, elements which are not derivative
of methodological decisions or produced by the instruments of critical
description. From this perspective, interpretation is a conveyer of
reading. 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 statements
about literature because its object is the individual work, and obvi-
ously we read concrete texts and not literature.
Styles of reception, susceptible of general application, can be recon-
structed through proper analyses of interpretation. The student of
styles of reception is not interested in that which occupies a historian
of literary science, e.g., the development of analytic methods and the
evolution of methodology. Quite the contrary, the object of his in-
READING, INTERPRETATION, RECEPTION 81

vestigations is premethodological; it is the culturally given which

constrains an interpretation, frequently unbeknownst even to the
interpreter. In fact, anything that proceeds from methodological deci-
sions must somehow be set aside; only then can the ground of reading
be uncovered.
Many different elements combine at this premethodological level:
the level of reading. This is where everyday notions about the world
belong, sometimes directly, most often already in some literary cloth-
ing, e.g., in the form of notions about what is verisimilar and what
isn't," or what is true and what isn't. Next come commonplace ideas
about literature itself, and about what is proper in one type of text
and not in another. The concept of decorum may have been de-
veloped in classical theories of aesthetics, but it has not disappeared
with them; it still is at play, though in different guise. Then comes the
vast and multivaried realm of evaluation and assessment. Interpreta-
tion cannot be isolated from this large sphere of everyday beliefs
about literature. However, the very features of an interpretation
which 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 is
attempting to reconstruct.12 I distinguish seven such fundamental
styles: mythical, allegorical, symbolic, instrumental, mimetic, expres-
sive, and aesthetic.
One final remark: the goal of the reconstruction of styles of reading
through the study of the interpretations of individual works is not to
apprehend how a given scholar read concretely, e.g., how Spitzer read
Racinian tragedy in his masterful interpretation, "Le Recit de
Theramene"; 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 of
interpreting, a communal good. It is possible that this type of recon-
struction will help reading to take its place among the full-fledged
objects of literary history. Literary history would then be concerned
not only with the laws of creation of literary works, but also with the
laws of their functioning.

INSTITUTE OF LITERARY RESEARCH,

WARSAW

(Translated by Wlad Godzich)

82 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

NOTES

1 Roman Ingarden, On the Cognition of the LiteraryWork, tr. Ruth Ann Crowley and
Kenneth R. Olson (Evanston, Ill., 1973). A significantly enlarged version is available in
German: VomErkennen des literarischenKunstwerkes(Tubingen, 1968).
2 Wolfgang Iser proceeds from Ingarden's theory in his study "The Reading Process:
a Phenomenological Approach," in New Directionsin 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 great
many presuppositions and much of his knowledge. See his quoted remarks in Lucien
Goldmann 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 Problemy
metodologicznegowspolczesnegoliteraturoznawstwa[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. Jean
Onimus in his essay "Lecture et critique," Reflexionset recherchesde 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 human
and leads to the union of reader and read.
8 Georges Poulet, "Criticism and the Experience of Interiority," in The Languages of
Criticismand the Sciencesof Man, ed. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato (Baltimore
and London, 1970).
9 See, for example, Edward Balcerzan, "Perspektywy poetyki odbioru" [Perspectives
of a poetics of reception], in Problemysocjologiiliteratury,ed. Janusz Slawiiiski (Wroclaw,
1971).
10 I write at greater length about the problems raised in the last part of this article in
the book Style odbioru[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 are
many other types of evidence, ranging from notes in a diary to the results of sociological
studies of reading methods.