Susan R. Suleiman

Introduction: Varieties of Audience-Oriented Criticism

Some revolutions occur quietly: no manifestoes, no marching and singing, no tumult in the streets; simply a shift in perspective, a new way of seeing what had always been there. New words enter the vocabulary, old words suddenly take on new meaning: proletariat, ego, structure. Or they retain their meaning but their position changes: the peripheral becomes central, the walk-on becomes the hero of the play.

For the past few years, we have been witnessing just such a change in the field of literary theory and criticism. The words reader and audience, once relegated to the status of the unproblematic and obvious, have acceded to a starring role. A little over ten years ago, the authors of an influential study on the nature of narrative could self-confidently affirm that narrative literature was "distinguished by two characteristics: the presence of a story and a story-teller." The fact that all stories are implicitly or explicitly addressed to an audience, whose presence is as variable and as problematic as that of the storyteller, escaped their notice or was considered too trivial to mention. Today, one rarely picks up a literary journal on either side of the Atlantic without finding articles (and often a whole special issue) devoted to the performance of reading, the role of feeling, the variability of individual response, the confrontation, transaction, or interrogation between texts and readers, the nature and limits of interpretation — questions whose very formulation depends on a new awareness of the audience as an entity indissociable from the notion of artistic texts.

One could adduce many reasons for this shift in perspective, and I shall discuss some of them in this essay. Even at first glance, however, it is obvious that the current interest in the interpretation, and more broadly in the reception, of artistic texts — including literary, filmic, pictorial, and musical ones — is part of a general trend in what the French call the human sciences (history, sociology, psychology, linguistics, anthropology) as well as in the traditional humanistic disciplines of philosophy, rhetoric, and aesthetics. The recent evolution of all these disciplines has been toward self-reflexiveness — questioning and making explicit the assumptions that ground the methods of the discipline, and concurrently the investigator's role in delimiting or even in constituting the object of study. Such self-reflexiveness, which has its analogue in the principles of relativity and uncertainty as they emerged in physics early in this century, necessarily shifts the focus of inquiry from the observed — be it defined as text, psyche, society, or language — to the interaction between observed and observer. Claude Lévi-Strauss's Tristes Tropiques is, like so many of his works, exemplary in this respect.

As concerns the increasingly interrelated disciplines of linguistics and literary theory, the general move toward self-reflexiveness has been accompanied by more specific or local evolutions tending toward the same results. In linguistics, generative grammar, with its emphasis on linguistic competence and performance, has tended to displace the older (and in its own day revolutionary) Saussurean linguistics, whose emphasis was primarily on the static system of language. The Chomskyan project is not to describe the system of relations that constitute a given language (langue), but to state the general rules that account for the production of the potentially infinite number of utterances (parole) considered grammatically acceptable by speakers of a language. Moreover, generative grammar has itself been challenged by generative semantics and by the theory of speech acts, which attempt to take into account not only the syntactic and phonological rules of sentence formation but also the semantic and contextual rules that govern actual speech situations.

In literary theory, there has been a parallel movement away from the formalist and New Critical emphasis on the autonomy of "the text itself" toward a recognition (or a re-recognition) of the relevance of context, whether the latter be defined in terms of historical, cultural, ideological, or psychoanalytic categories. This does not mean a return to traditional historical or biographical criticism, and it would be a pity if the current fashion of using the New Criticism as a whipping boy — or as a discredited father — made us forget the very significant contributions of both the New Critics and their predecessors, the Russian Formalists, to modern literary theory and criticism. The same must be said of the Czech and French structuralists, whom it has become de rigueur in some circles to reject, either in the name of a newly discovered semiotics or in that of Derridean "post-structuralism." Semiotics has nothing to disdain in structuralism, for as I shall show later the two are continuous, often overlapping enterprises. As for "post-structuralism," the very term implies what its most distinguished exponents (beginning with Jacques Derrida himself) acknowledge: namely, that it could not have existed without structuralism and constitutes not so much a rejection of the latter as its dépassement.

If one may safely affirm that a preoccupation with audience and interpretation has become central to contemporary American and Continental theory and criticism, one encounters a major difficulty in citing names or examples. Even a partial list of American critics most closely associated with this mode must include names as apparently incompatible, for theoretical reasons, as Jonathan Culler and Norman Holland, Stanley Fish and Wayne C. Booth, E. D. Hirsch, Jr., and J. Hillis Miller, Walter J. Ong and Paul de Man; if one complicates the list by French and German additions — Roland Barthes, Gérard Genette, Jacques Derrida, Tzvetan Todorov, H. R. Jauss, Wolfgang Iser, to name only the most eminent — one fully realizes what one is up against. Audience-oriented criticism is not one field but many, not a single widely trodden path but a multiplicity of crisscrossing, often divergent tracks that cover a vast area of the critical landscape in a pattern whose complexity dismays the brave and confounds the faint of heart. I intend to map here, however tentatively, the principal tracks in the landscape — not in order to simplify them or minimize their diversity (although some simplification is inevitable because of the ordering and selection that the enterprise requires), but to help the reader through the essays in this book. Such a mapping of the ground — or rather the background — seems essential, since the volume itself is not a didactic anthology of previously published and therefore familiar texts. What unites these essays, aside from the common concern indicated by the title of the volume, is precisely their exploratory character, the authors' willingness to venture into little-traveled territories.

We may distinguish, for the sake of the exposition, six varieties of (or approaches to) audience-oriented criticism: rhetorical; semiotic and structuralist; phenomenological; subjective and psychoanalytic; sociological and historical; and hermeneutic. These approaches are not monolithic (there is more than one kind of rhetorical or hermeneutic criticism), nor do they necessarily exclude each other. As several of the essays in this volume show, a critic may have recourse to more than one approach. The vitality of audience-oriented criticism depends precisely on the realization that various dimensions of analysis or interpretation are possible, and that a combination of approaches is not a negative eclecticism but a positive necessity. This does not mean, of course, that one should overlook or attempt to eradicate real differences and incompatibilities between the theoretical assumptions of individual critics or critical schools. One of our aims must be to pinpoint those issues on which no theoretical consensus is possible, issues which, in W. B. Gallie's phase, designate the presence of "essentially contested concepts."

I

One thing the rhetorical approach shares, even if only implicitly, with the semiotic and structuralist one is a model of the literary text as a form of communication. According to this model, whose most sophisticated formulation was proposed by Roman Jakobson, the author and the reader of a text are related to each other as the sender and the receiver of a message. The transmission and reception of any message depend on the presence of one or more shared codes of communication between sender and receiver. Reading consists, therefore, of a process of decoding what has by various means been encoded in the text.

The communicative model allows for a variety of different emphases in critical practice, and it is in terms of critical emphasis and vocabulary that the rhetorical critics may most readily be distinguished from the semioticians and structuralists. To the rhetorical critic — at least the kind of rhetorical critic who shall chiefly concern us here and of whom Wayne Booth may be considered an exemplary representative — what matters primarily is the ethical and ideological content of the message. He seeks not only to formulate the set of verbal meanings embedded in the text, but above all to discover the values and beliefs that make those meanings possible — or that those meanings imply. The values and beliefs that underlie and ultimately determine the meaning of a work are attributed to the "implied author," whom Booth defines as the actual author's "second self": the shadowy but overriding presence who is responsible for every aspect of the work and whose image must be constructed (or rather, reconstructed) in the act of reading.

The implied author in Booth's scheme has a counterpart in the "implied reader." Just as the former differs from the actual author in that he exists only in a given work and is coextensive with it, so the latter differs from an actual reader in that he is created by the work and functions, in a sense, as the work's ideal interpreter. Only by agreeing to play the role of this created audience for the duration of his/her reading can an actual reader correctly understand and fully appreciate the work. As Booth puts it: "Regardless of my real beliefs and practices, I must subordinate my mind and heart to the book if I am to enjoy it to the full. The author ... makes his reader as he makes his second self, and the most successful reading is one in which the created selves, author and reader, can find complete agreement."

Booth's notion of the implied reader has important consequences for the aims and practice of criticism. If a successful reading experience requires (1) a correct identification of the implied reader's values and beliefs — which are by definition also those of the implied author — and (2) an identification with the implied reader to the extent of "completely agreeing" with his values, then the critic's task must be not only to show how such identifications are invited by the rhetoric of a given work, but also to explore, in some problematic works, why such identifications may be difficult or even impossible to achieve by an actual reader. For example, a reader may be unable to "agree," even for the duration of his/her reading, with the values of the implied reader, and thus may refuse to play the role that the work demands. Conversely, certain modern texts make it impossible to identify (much less identify with) the role one is asked to play, because the implied author refuses to give directions — in Booth's words, to "take a stand." This happens in what he calls "infinitely unstable" ironic texts like those of Beckett, where "the author ... refuses to declare himself, however subtly, for any stable proposition, even the opposite of whatever proposition his irony vigorously denies." The result is that the implied reader's image becomes itself unstable, and the actual reader is left with "no secure ground to stand on" (p. 248). Texts that produce this kind of instability make Booth extremely uncomfortable, for he sees in them a sign of nihilism: "Since the universe is empty, life is empty of meaning, and every reading experience can finally be shaken out into the same empty and melancholy non-truth" (p. 269). At this point, rhetorical criticism opens out onto the field of metaphysics and morals. It also opens out, as we shall see, onto the most problematic concepts of contemporary literary theory: validity, meaning, authority, intention, text.

I would not wish to suggest that Booth's kind of rhetorical criticism is the only pertinent one for audience-oriented critics, nor even that the notions of implied author and implied reader, which Booth's work has put into currency, need be tied to ethical and axiological considerations. Any criticism that conceives of the text as a message to be decoded, and that seeks to study the means whereby authors attempt to communicate certain intended meanings or to produce certain intended effects, is both rhetorical and audience-oriented. Stanley Fish's pioneering work on Paradise Lost fits into this category; so does the recent application of speech-act theory to the study of literature, especially the study of literary genres, to which speech-act theory has given a new and welcome impetus. Finally, one must mention the quasi-polemical extension of the term rhetoric in the work of French structuralist critics like Gérard Genette and Michel Charles, who have impressively argued against the tendency to consider rhetoric as a mere study of tropes, and in that of the American critic Paul de Man, for whom rhetoric seems to be synonymous with all self-reflective (that is, creative or artistic) use of language.

As for Booth's notions of implied author and implied reader, it would be a mistake to overlook their continued relevance for audience-oriented criticism by associating them too closely with Booth's own ethical concerns as a critic. The fact that Booth emphasizes what he calls the moral interest of the communication between implied author and implied reader does not exclude the possibility of other emphases. The usefulness of these notions becomes especially clear if one considers a fact that Booth is aware of but whose implications he is perhaps unwilling to pursue: namely, that the implied author and the implied reader are interpretive constructs and, as such, participate in the circularity of all interpretation. I construct the images of the implied author and implied reader gradually as I read a work, and then use the images I have constructed to validate my reading. The full recognition of this circularity does not render the notions of implied author and implied reader superfluous, but it does relativize them. They become no more — and no less — than necessary fictions, guaranteeing the consistency of a specific reading without guaranteeing its validity in any absolute sense. Where specific readings are concerned, one can never escape the dilemmas and paradoxes of interpretation.

This may be one reason why semioticians and structuralists generally do not attempt to "read" texts in the sense of interpreting them or assigning them a meaning, but seek to analyze, rather, the multiple codes and conventions that make possible a text's readability. As Roland Barthes defined it in one of his early essays, the aim of "structuralist activity" (which is synonymous, in this context, with the activity of the semiotician) is not so much to assign "full meanings" to the objects it discovers as to understand "how meaning is possible — at what price and along what tracks." The structuralist, according to Barthes, does not interpret a work; he describes it, in such a way as to make its rules of functioning — its system — manifest. His description is a simulacrum whose purpose is not to copy the original but to make it intelligible (p. 215). Barthes's own activity has evolved since he wrote those words, and if one considers them as a program for criticism it is doubtful that he would still fully subscribe to it. That need not deter us, however, from using his formulation as a starting point, for it gives as succinct and accurate a definition of the aims and general method of semiotic and structural analysis as any that has been proposed.