Positing a specific conceptual framework in the light of which a text
is understood, Reception theory examines how a work is received
by its audience. On the basis of changing communal responses
to the work and informed by intertextual placement, textual
positioning, economic and production factors, Reception criticism
examines the transforming interpretation of a work over time
as the ‘communal horizon of expectations’ of the audience
change and are informed by other readings. This is a methodology
which examines how a text is culturally positioned (by reviews,
critical interpretations, and intertext) and therefore read,
and how individual readings inform (or dictate) subsequent
readings. In many ways Reception methodology, at least in
its various mission statements, is more sensitive than Reader
Response to the pedagogical placement of the text. By asking
how it is that a text makes meaning, instead of the more New
Critically-oriented questioning of the text’s meaning to a
particular (and lest we forget) created notion of a reader,
Reception methodology makes the understanding of textual effect
far more amendable to political (including both feminist and
pedagogical) analysis.
Reader Response theory is a form of textual interpretation which generally
places far more emphasis upon the individual reader’s interaction
with text than does Reception’s notion of community. As a
methodology Reader Response problematizes the ontology of
textual production by examining the process of textual interpretation
itself: the completion of the polyphonic text by the unstable
subject. Positing the reader as an interactive responder to
text, Reader Response criticism is ostensibly ideologically
dependent upon recognizing the importance of the reader in
the interpretation of the text. Denying Booth’s New Critical
understanding that “a critic who denies the authority either
of author or text is trying to fly without a supporting medium,”
Reader Response questions this total reliance upon what it
construes as an easily problematized support mechanism (Booth
in Suleiman 42). Though specific Reader Response theories
are understandably limited by specific premises about the
constitution of a particular reader, Reader Response’s critical
approach defines part of its mandate as an investigation of
how a reader makes meaning, and, in the case of psychoanalytic
Reader Response theory, even delves into theorizing about
the subject which interacts with text. Reader Response theory
is based upon both the reader’s seemingly ‘individual’ and
idiosyncratic interpretations and a conceptualization of reading
methodologies to which the reader is party when selecting
a way of thinking about the text. Positing a reader who engages
cultural conventions or strategies on either an individual
or consensual level to structure an interpretation of the
text, Reader Response’s incorporation of (or by) reading strategy
operates both at the level of the linear progression of words
(syntactically or grammatically through the text, or narratively,
in a linear progression of the story through consciousness)
and the meanings which cultural conventions ascribe to the
text. Many Reader Response methodologies posit a reader who
is alert to the literary status of the text and interpret
according to the conventions of genre, pedagogical positioning
of the author, as well as the codes which are implicit within
communication, either ‘in’ the text or incorporated within
the ‘interpretive strategies of the reader’. Accordingly,
Reader Response and Reception are both methodologies which
undertake to examine diverse branches of knowledge which both
leads to their heterogeneity as well as complicates their
analysis.
Included as well under the spreading umbrella of Reader Response theory,
Psychoanalytic criticism focuses upon the reading subject
and the desire or pleasure with which this subject approaches
the text. Generally speaking, this is a theoretical position
which foregrounds the reader’s subjective response to the
text on the basis of his/her unconscious desire for a unified
narrative or the pleasure or discomfort which is realized
when particular reader expectations are either fulfilled or
frustrated. Using conceptions of need and desire, identity,
and the Other, psychoanalytic criticism finds the text in
the patterns of the reader reading and, in the case of Poststructuralist
psychoanalytic methodologies, finds the text which is the
reader inscribed in the structure of the narrative text.
In many ways the reasoning behind Reader Response’s subjective approach
to critical interpretation is its own best argument. Reader
Response’s mandate of placing the dependence of the critical
approach upon the reading subject (a stance which more traditional
methods of criticism would attempt to ignore but inevitably
hovers behind their work) uncompromisingly places the text
in the world from which it gains its meaning. By foregrounding
a self employed in interpretation, whether the implicit self
as interpreter of text, or the explicit speaker in the critical
work, Reader Response foregrounds a ‘readerly/writerly’ presence
in criticism which is its strength and vitality. This is a
positive view of a methodology, however, which because it
has been much criticized contains internal mechanisms of defence.
The charges of vulgar relativism such evocative, ambiguous,
and (in Barthes’ sense of the word) ‘playful’ theory opens
itself to have been handled a number of ways, ranging from
a rousing concurrence to attempts upon the part of Reader
Response theorists to ground and limit their seemingly relativistic
stance by citing specific requirements of readerly competence
and certification (under the auspices of the theory) a reader
must maintain.
Although the attempt on the part of such theory to de-mythologize the
process of textual understanding, influence, and interpretation
is commendable, it leaves any reader discussing the methodology
in the difficult position of having to re-examine and problematize
his/her own reading and interpretation. Making a reading of
literary values which transcend a merely textual interpretation
(and are instead incorporated by the interpreting body of
practice) is a process which demands that the reading itself
remain aware of its own interpretive values. Bearing this
mandate in mind I feel a need, if I am going to rationalize
the use of these interpretive tools, to utilize them in my
own work. By way of example, I cannot speak of political,
pedagogical, or textual interpretation without addressing
my own suspect textual position. I cannot in all conscience
begin an exposé of audience interpretation, without speaking
about my own audience, the text that I am writing, and the
untenable position that I am in ideologically. I understand
that this type of academic throat-clearing is often associated
with any ‘theoretical’ or Poststructuralist account, but it
also addresses a concern with self-reflexivity which--though
this questioning rarely extends beyond the introduction of
the paper--needs to be addressed and re-addressed throughout
such a work’s entire structure. I have no fear that this critically
self-reflexive attempt will make my argument either more objective
or stronger, but it is an important way of positioning myself
(especially given my analysis of Reader Response) in correspondence
not only to an absence of a transcendental truth value, but
in reference to a theorizing whose premises are flawed by
an appeal to such verities. This description of the subjective
flaws and weaknesses in the argument, the impossible chimera
of objectivity (regardless of academic trappings), with its
hopes of promoting further analysis (and thus conveniently
preserving and perpetuating such academic work) works to foreground
both the endlessness of analysis and the self-problematizing
nature of Reader Response. Whether or not a theoretical stance
is explicit, it has theoretical underpinnings which, to be
self-reflexive (or ‘honest’ in the ancient nomenclature still
in use), it must admit the ownership. Furthermore, there is
a tremendous irony in discussing what text does in the world
when the question of my own text’s performance remains a pertinent
and unexamined question.
This determination
to be as critically self-conscious as possible, however, causes
me to greet this work with a great insecurity. I find myself
continually re-examining the text to reiterate, or otherwise
confine an endlessly sliding signifier whose vague surface
constantly eludes. I have become increasingly conscious of
the various stances and positions which affect my relationship
to the work which I am undertaking, how ‘written’ I am, and
of the manifold self-serving motivations with which I approach
this work and which (institutionally) support research of
this type. My status as a student in a specific pedagogical
position (under the demand of thesis completion to affirm
my certification, entrance into the fellowship of English
studies, and the continuation of my income), my work within
an institution implicated in capitalist practice, my choice
of text and methodology which to interpret, and my position
relative to these texts, all work to undermine narrow notions
of objectivity or free agency, which analysis from the Romantics
on have touted, and Poststructuralist practice has deeply
problematized. Inevitably and irredeemably culturally-written,
my historical, cultural frame of reference, as well as personal
and public repertoires have a meaning which, I am beginning
to see, confines my exclusive perception to its narrow self.
This is a meaning which constructs not just what I perceive,
but what I thought of as my notion of how it is that I perceived
it. Even the staid and academic approach to a text, however,
which seems to be controlled, scientific, and for which I
have received certification,[ii] is an undertaking which is fraught
with ideological implications.
Never free from ideology, and having no faith in a concept of innocent
reading which compounds from a shared experience and yet remains
untouched by political ideologies, I gingerly approach my
text with a vision of having the tools of my craft fully in
sight, and my intentions as clear as possible (or in terms
of the unconscious) as clear as I wish to make them. I believe
a full examination of this untenable position fully befits
the entrance into a Reader Response/Reception examination
of text.
A thesis exists as, and for, many (and some of them blatantly contradictory)
reasons. As a document it is ideologically presented as an
attempt to analyze a particular subject whose explication
will prove valuable to, it is implied, a number of people,
or more generously, the world. A thesis with its ideological
and pedagogical constraints, authoritative stance, substantiation
through its appeal to other authorities recognized by the
discourse, however, works only to support, or more strongly,
enforce, the ideological position of the very discourse it
pretends to question (with source material from the same discourse)
and ultimately undermine. This document’s status as an unpublished
and generally disregarded (see the conspicuous absence of
MA theses in the MLA database by way of authoritative example)
text which is commonly only read by an audience of three (the
three readers on my committee who are partially responsible
in its outcome and therefore collude in its status as an the
ideological rite of passage) undermines its pedagogical and
ideological positioning. Existing to prove student certification
and as a task for the completion of which one is to enter
into the academy, a thesis endures for a score of reasons
institutionally which have little to do with a disinterested
search for knowledge. This position is amply demonstrated
by the ‘Regulations and Guidelines for the Preparation and
Submission of Graduate Theses and Reports,’ a text which delivers
to me the vaguely threatening message that it is to my “advantage”
to follow its instructions, without which it claims, my work
is “substandard, . . . unsound” and cannot be received by
the academic community (1). The presentation of the enterprise
itself is such ideologically that I write under a pretence
of, and faith in, a scholarly interest that I have no reason
to expect or meet. Thus my textual address refers not just
to the vague limits of ‘good scholarship,’ but also my ideological
position of completion of this rite of passage to prove my
certification (to my audience of three) in the closed and
subjectively validated discourse of English Letters. Bearing
this somewhat negative impression of the enterprise in mind
I vacillate between a reading of this work as “largely wasted
energy which postgraduate students are required to pour into
obscure, often spurious research topics in order to produce
dissertations which are frequently no more than sterile academic
exercises, and which few others will ever read” and an ideologically
untenable position that this little-read document is, in some
sense, monumental (Eagleton, Literary Theory 213).
Psychologically, this thesis is an attempt to prove my proficiency
in a practice so alienating that its little account of my
presence defines hypocritically and traditionally that I must
write as a generic we, instead of privileging (provisionally
as I later discuss) my fictive existence with the shifter
pronoun ‘I’. I employ this discourse, and this is common to
academic writing, to write myself cohesive and unified, and
parade that ‘implied author’ as a ghost before the text, although
some of the theoretical work in which ‘I’ discuss the subject
or ‘I,’ deeply problematizes such notions. The hypothetical
and politically-aware stance that I am required to maintain
must also remain aware that any proficiency in this particular
discourse could well be turned against me, and that my careful
and academically-accepted flaunting of the conventions of
traditional criticism, and the highly artificial work which
is the traditional construction of a thesis, could thus level
against my theoretical technique those critical methodologies
for which there are no real answer.
I offer this self-reflexive back-pedalling as a way in which the ‘implied’
readers of this text (my 3 committee members) may understand
my ideological position in relation to the work which I have
undertaken and how this influence alone precludes any chance
of academic objectivity in any absolute sense. A way in which
to discuss this dilemma of objectivity and ideological positioning
is to examine my(?) choice of text and my position relative
to it.
Though the selection of a methodology seems straightforward (in the sense
that it is a choice which is easily, in Barthes’ sense of
the term, naturalized), I would argue that an examination
of my motivations and reasoning concerning the selection of
the text through which to read Reader Response may (though
in a complicated manner) both inform and problematize selection
of methodology and text in general. My choice of text through
which to read this methodology is much more (and paradoxically
less) difficult to rationalize and comprehend than the choice
of methodology itself. In this instance, selection of text
is a decision which may inform our understanding of the pedagogical
function of theoretical interpretation itself. I choose The
Mad Trapper deliberately (in a academic sense), for reasons
which are both definable (in the sense that they can be supported
by some sort of reasoned or traditionally-understood argument)
and never to be articulated (and thus proceed by an almost
unconscious determination). The easily supportable (in the
sense that orthodox interpretive technique regards and recognizes
these methods as valid) academic reasons for a choice of this
text are many, especially for an analysis which is concerned
with audience and cultural-dependent research.
Intriguingly complicated by its diverse status as a historical document
for the Canadian public, historical narrative, high and low
cultural text, The Mad Trapper is a text which is rich
in its cultural, historical and popular associations. As a
blending of history and narrative (what Hutcheon terms Historiographic
Metafiction), high art and the sub-literary ‘northern adventure’
or detective story, this text is shot through with such widely
diverse texts as polemic newspaper articles, nostalgic childhood
memories, popular songs, and other Mad Trapper texts including
Wiebe’s own topical essays and stories, the tall tale and
adventure genre, and even the ideological placement of the
RCMP in Canadian society. Operating on the boundaries of literature,
The Mad Trapper’s reading as history and document is
also informed by the other modes in which the narrative is
found: filmic versions and easily saleable narratives, all
of which undermine and inform the text, and I would argue
have a particular placement (for identifiable reasons) in
the Canadian cultural milieu. The Mad Trapper labours
under so many influences that it becomes difficult to pin
it to one reading, and thus provides an endlessly fluid (though
embracing elements of Reader Response methodology would require
this reading of all text) text for interpretation. Examining
this text’s conditions of production, and analyzing the treatment
that the same narrative receives by other works upon the topic
(for example, Thomas Kelly’s Rat River Trapper, Dick
North’s The Mad Trapper of Rat River, Thomas York’s
Trapper, as well as the filmic version, Death Hunt)
is to examine the cultural positioning of what has been (strangely)
a very neglected work, and ambitiously, is to make a reading
of a culture and how that culture produces and understands
texts.
Using an unavoidably individualistic ‘repertoire’ of reading (which,
I would argue is an inevitable, though unannounced trait of
all readings), as well as strategies proposed by genre, intertext,
pedagogical assumptions, symbolic structures and cultural
conventions, my readings of this culturally-implicated text
will each inform and reread the text in the context of a given
theoretical technique. By this method I hope to displace the
‘authoritative’ text, as well as problematize the function
of interpretation as a pedagogical convention.
Another academic (in the sense that this reasoning can be substantiated
within academic discourse) function of selecting one text
to access a body of otherwise diverse analysis is a blatant
appeal to particular ‘readerly’ conventions of academic discourse.
Using a specific text in such a structural fashion combines
what otherwise are the discontinuous and unharmonious group
of elements of which Reader Response is constituted. The choice
of one text through which to conduct an analysis has the narrative
advantage of offering continuity, and thus operates as an
obvious and device-baring (though the device is only bared
to those who understand the convention being parodied or read
a break in the convention as parody, which I am sure my three
readers do) attempt to offer a form of artificial unity to
a seemingly disparate text. The choice of text is always implicated
by its correspondence to what is it that we wish to study
and the ease with which it fits to the methodology, though
that by no means exhausts the possible reasons for choice
of text. This is a way of theorizing the place of subjective
choice in the impossible objectivity of textual analysis.
We find, in Fish’s sense of ‘interpretive strategies,’ only
what those strategies allow, permit, and define for us to
find. I would argue that this little-admitted academic constraint
or controlling gesture is one to which we (my three readers
and I) are all party and that this seemingly menace of classic
objectivity (by exposing its technical function) is an unavoidable
function of a Reader Response analysis.
Academic constraints are not the only ones which support this hypothetically
objective task, however. Insidiously I (and I theorize all
readers) have reasons which are less easily rationalized (and
this reveals the crux of my argument about selection of text)
either academically or objectively.
Through family connection I have been thoroughly inscribed in different
readings, ‘tellings’ of this same general narrative of the
mad trapper story. Although I (and upon this ground all is
conjecture) may not be taking upon this project to bring psychic
closure to the multiple reading I received during sporadic
visits by Earl Hersey’s (as one of the principle players in
this northern drama) folk rendering of this narrative offered
to me as a child, this early indoctrination means that I cannot
hope to approach the text innocently, despite all best possible
intentions. I do not use my lack of innocence in my interaction
with the text to woefully regret a position which might otherwise
be refreshingly objective, but to foreground instead a lack
of innocence in all reading. The incapacity of analysis to
thoroughly guard itself against such subjective influence,
or conversely, uncritical objective posturing has driven me
to discuss a text for which I cannot claim innocence, but
about which I am so thoroughly guilty, that I may foreground
the function of the ‘guilt’ with which I am party as technique
and explication. I have chosen therefore a text which has
meanings for me on so many levels that I cannot claim, as
indeed none of us can ‘truly’ claim, any form of innocent
interpretation, but conversely expect that my pre-written
interactions with the text, problematize, if not deconstruct
my analysis. My position in reference to this particular text
offers me a way to foreground my lack of innocence in such
a way that we may come to discuss (and not to achieve a super
or meta-objectivity) the thorough ‘writtenness’ or subjective
screen through which both objectivity and analysis is misunderstood
or deformed. In many ways (as perhaps is proper in an reading
of Reader Response theory) it is the status of objective that
is on trial here (not that this discussion of personal and
ideological and thesis-dependent constrictions exhausts the
possibilities of my thorough ‘writtenness’) not textual interpretation
itself or (insidiously and inevitably) subjectivity.
This endless re-evaluation which is the function of such an analysis
may even, and must be, employed on the level of language.
For example, even the use of the word ‘text’ to describe the
particular work I am examining implies a host of discursive
preconceptions with which I view the work and are implicit
in the inherent hypocrisy of the academic method--that modern
discourse now contains both the reality-contaminated language
of language as referent, and a meta-discursive shell of poststructural
ontological disruption. The effect of such an argument supposes
that we work within two discourses now. By example, I am writing
to you in a traditional academic method, trusting to the transparency
of the signifier and the stable relationship of signified
and signifier, while all the time writing of the inherent
instability of my language and discursive structure.
Caught in the conundrum of theory production, and deeply implicated by
present academic practice, I cannot help but be aware that
I, to maintain a competitive position in this practice, must
publish (assure it is topical) and otherwise jockey for position
in the academic institution.
Striving to be aware,
both of the demands of the structure in which I have enclosed
myself (MA degree and thesis) and the highly ideologically-suspect
institution which attempts to perpetuate itself in a world
in which its capitalist use-value grows quickly questionable
is to write on many levels at once. I undertake an enterprise
(MA Thesis, interpretation, theory) with an understanding
that it is deeply inscribed in cultural, capitalist and ideological
practice, and strive to keep aware of the task at hand and
the ideological implications that I work inside, through,
and perhaps overwhelmingly, against. I thus position this
work as an example of text as well as theory, created and
utilised for a host of reasons, in some senses with a strong
sense of my specific audience in mind (my three readers as
well as the more sloppy academic understanding that this is
for all academics and addressed accordingly) and having my
own pedagogical and political reasons for its creation, reception
and eventual, although limited, dissemination in the world.
Left as though a ‘frog under a coconut shell’[iii]
with no hope of ever penetrating to the essence of a world
which is beyond my scope and which I cannot hope to understand,
I am left with only the responsibility and perhaps mandate
of identifying the shell which encloses me and upon which
I base my concept of the world.
[i] For the purposes of this analysis, I interpret Reception theory to be a study
of the rules governing audience interaction with text and
not the rather limited alternative definition it receives
at the hands of rigorous historical readings such as Richard
Holub’s survey of classical Reception theory: Reception
Theory: A Critical Introduction, a work which concentrates
solely upon those theorists associated with the German Konstance
school of self-declared and organized Reception theorists.
[ii] In the form of MA thesis proposal acceptance.
[iii] A Thai figure of speech (kob ni ka la krob) used to describe a chronic
narrowness of vision.