My reading took a more recreational turn as I tore through Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince to refresh my memory before the movie comes out later this month. I was struck by some distinct similarities to The Lord of the Rings, although I had been thinking that the books became less derivative as the series progressed. . . Mainly, the Inferii in the lake reminded me of the dead marshes, the link between Dumbledore and light and fire was conspicuous, and the last chapter, "The White Tomb" seemed reminiscent of a certain "white tower" and "white tree." I was a bit bothered, this read, by the seats all clustered around the "white table" on which Dumbledore's body was to be lain--it reminded me uncomfortably of an altar--and by Harry's being splattered with "water and blood" from his unintentional (almost) attack on Malfoy. Those scenes reminded me of certain charges of anti-Catholicism, though I wouldn't be prepared to go that far. I might attribute those examples to a misjudged appropriation of Christian imagery instead.
At the end of the book, I was struck by the blatant message of happiness and normalcy in the midst of fear and darkness, as well as the reminder that we should continually fight evil although there is no final defeat of evil--both themes of Lord of the Rings, rather more artfully communicated by Tolkien. The similarities led to the contrast--that Rowling seems much less trusting of her reader, and seeks to directly point to the meaning behind the events rather than letting readers ruminate on it. The only things we are left to speculate about are characters--specifics about the wizards and their world rather than the meanings communicated. Basically, when reading Harry Potter, one gets caught up in the characters and their world, the plot, the fantasy that is ordinary wizarding life. One does not get caught up in the great ideas, however many Rowling may have tried to sprinkle throughout the books. Contemplating big ideas--such as the nature of good and evil, and whether we are good or evil according to nature or according to the choices we make, for example--often leads to dead ends or uncomfortable conclusions in the Harry Potter books.
These dead ends stand in marked contrast to the other works I have been reading, notably the Graham Greene. His works are pointedly open--they create openings in theological questions to invite consideration of the nature of God and humanity, God's forgiveness and human frailty, understanding, and misunderstanding. I am rather obsessed with this idea of "opening up space" for contemplation of ideas, or for experience of spiritual crisis before renewal or despair. And this has a lot to do with the reader--the relationship that the author fosters between the reader, the work, and the subject matter of the work, in addition to how the author wishes the reader to act on the ideas transmitted by the work.
In an off-blog (on Facebook) follow-up discussion to my last Graham Greene post, Melanie (of the Wine Dark Sea blog) helped me toward a further development of this "Sacramental fiction" concept that I'm working through right now. Thinking about my analogy between the saint's "dark night of the soul" and the author's exploration of spiritual crisis, Melanie remarked that "the difference between the saint and the poet, I suppose is that the saint never despairs but even in the darkness is certain that there is light and grace. While the poet can get stuck in the dark and grace is more oblique." (Thank you, Melanie!!) This points in part to the nature of the different writers/personalities involved--the saint is heaven-bound, while the author is mucking around in this (human, secular) world. As one who has always enjoyed mucking around in the darkness--Existentialism, Symbolism, Decadence, Modernism--I couldn't help thinking about what it is in the darkness that I find so enlightening. As I remarked to Melanie, I think the interesting thing about getting stuck in the dark is that the reader has to search for the light and really contribute to making meaning by thinking his/her way through the darkness. Now, this is not true of all of the movements I mentioned--indeed, with Symbolism and Decadence, the whole point is to revel in the darkness and mock the light (been there, done that, grew up. . .) But thinking about the type of fiction (and poetry) I mentioned in my previous post, the kind that I find typified in Greene, T. S. Eliot, Tolkien, Auden, and Joyce, I'm led to think that the spiritual crisis--the darkness represented by authors who nevertheless leave some room for hope--is that the open-endedness of the fiction as well as the presentation of ideas about the nature of God and human nature make for a participatory model of fiction. And for a while, that's as far as I had gone with this idea.
For me, bringing the reader into the equation rather smacks of Reader Response Theory, which falls under the category of critical methodologies to avoid, since Reader Response Theory rather serves to deconstruct any idea of fixed meaning in a text, and I don't go there. Ever. Reader Response Theory is also rather a nightmare theory when considered from a teaching perspective since it rather feeds into students' assumptions that "anything goes" in terms of interpretation of texts. I spent the better part of the fall semester in a futile attempt to shake 33 or so education majors out of the assumption that literature is about the reader's impressions. I rather worry that a "participatory" mode of fiction might imply that the reader's participation in the meaning of the text creates the meaning itself, rendering meaning subjective. On the other hand, a well-articulated theory of "participatory" fiction might serve to bring the concept of the reader to the forefront in a way that validates the reader's role in fiction while contradicting the more subjective notion.
I'm not really sure where along the lines I became enamored of the reader, but it must have happened in the course of my investigation of representations of literacy in fiction, which followed on the heels of my interest in narrative theory, which theorizes the "implied" and "actual" reader. The implied reader is a textual construct; the real/actual reader can not be categorized, as the audience of a work of literature is shifting and unpredictable. Studying literacy theory, the literate individual (or, more often, the literate culture or society) is more often the subject than the piece of writing, and what I generally look for is the representation of the reader in the work of literature, to get an idea of what vision of "the reader" or "the literate individual" more generally is presented in the work of fiction. My overarching question is what theories about the uses of literacy do literary texts project? By extension, I might ask, what do we as readers learn about literacy from works of literature? -or- What are various consequences of reading and writing, according to literary texts from various time periods and authors? The goal, of course, is for the individual reader to better understand how reading operates on his/her own consciousness. Yeah, it's pretty much justification for being a bookworm and devoting one's life to studying literature.
So I find that my fascination with the reader has grown and expanded into different places, but still relates to the purpose of literature, and how literature acts on the consciousness of the individual. I think at root, that the acknowledgment that literature acts on the consciousness of the individual in abstract ways and concern with how it does so is very un-academic, at least in terms of literary study. At least, that is how I fear it will be perceived. I think my theories are very great-books-y, which I think is great, since I have always admired a great-books approach to liberal arts education, but that model is outdated and rejected by most universities these days. So much for that digression.
A few years ago now, I read the introduction to an anthology of contemporary Catholic poetry edited by a professor of mine. At the time, I was trying to understand, basically, various Catholic concepts related to the term "Sacrament." Not being raised Catholic, and having attended various Protestant churches, there was a lot for me to wrap my mind around! I had recently read Andrew Greeley's book The Catholic Imagination, the gist of which seems to have been, if you've been influenced by Catholicism culturally, you know about Catholicism indirectly--or all that you need to know. It was very much a divorcing of Catholic culture from the Catholic Church and the practice of the Catholic Faith, which is a common gesture in popular culture. But I think there must have been something theoretically interesting in the Greeley book, since it is linked in my mind to the anthology of poetry that I mentioned at the beginning of this meandering paragraph. If I'm remembering it correctly, the anthology's introduction discusses the idea that literature can be "sacramental," not "sacramental literature" as in "literature relating to the Sacraments," or literature used directly for prayer or lectio divina, but rather, literature that can act like a sacramental--a visible sign that reminds us of God and propels us toward Him. Again, not a very "academic" line of reasoning. But can it be?
I was reaching toward a concept of "Sacramental fiction" when I wrote my earlier Graham Greene post. But I want a theory that does not limit itself to Catholic authors writing determinedly Catholic works--such as Greene or Tolkien. Even in my previous discussion of Greene, I mention non-Catholic writers whom I feel participate in this mode of literature, and even Joyce, who was raised Catholic but repudiated it. Clearly, these are not writers who intend (bad, evil word for literary critics) to write Catholic literature. But can they nevertheless tap into something larger? A discourse, perhaps, on the nature of God that involves the reader directly? And if so, how do they do so?
So I turn from the abstract theorizing of audience, reader, and text, from the realm of theorizing the nature of literature that propels humanity toward God, to the very tangible realm of rhetorical theory, grounded in words and situations, about which I am presumed to know more than I actually do.
I think that the concepts I'm reaching toward--this authorial linking of audience with subject matter in a way that encourages "audience participation"--can be discussed in terms of "triangulation." This "triangulation" is a nautical metaphor used in rhetoric to describe authorial use of rhetorical appeals to align the reader's position with his/her own in relation to a subject of interest to both (Killingsworth, Appeals in Modern Rhetoric p. 3-4):
"The act of navigation . . . depends upon triangulation. Sailors navigate by the stars. The ship goes from launch to landing, but the direction is guided by the stars. Appeals go from author to audience but their success may well be determined by some association the author forms with a third entity, the metaphorical equivalent of the stars." (Killingsworth 3)
The importance of rhetorical theory, here, is that seeing the fictional work as a piece of rhetoric implies movement of author and audience from disparate positions to positions that are closer together--that is, there is the movement, not just of plot, but also of the reader, of whom the writer/text demands action. However, the plot is what inspires the movement in the case of fiction--makes the appeal to the reader, in rhetorical terms--and in the specific case that I'm considering, the spiritual crisis, the Dark Night of the Soul, is the appeal that the author makes to the reader, asking the reader to join in the journey to reach--somewhere else. In the case of the saint, the "somewhere else" would be God. For the character in the novel, the "somewhere else" might be death, despair, Salvation, but that is not where the author wants the audience/reader to go. Rather, the author wants the reader to enter into a deeper consideration of the questions that are raised by the action of the literary work.
The image of steering by the stars is very important in this construct. When the author is writing the work of fiction that will form the appeal to the reader, s/he navigates by a set of ideas or values--the "stars" in the navigation metaphor, or the "position of authority or value" in rhetorical terms (Killingsworth 3)--that leads to the destination. The vehicle by which the author steers is the plot itself. But considering the literary text is that vehicle (boat), and exists in different space for each reader than it does for the original author, it stands to reason that the geography in which the reader sails with the text as vehicle (to a destination analogous to--though not exactly the same as--that reached by the author) is different from the original geography--and so the stars that shine down on reader and text are different than those by which the author navigated. Here, rhetorical theory falters a bit, and Reader Response theory stands ready to pounce, because in fiction the appeals may be more oblique or ambiguous, metaphorical rather than literal, indirect rather than direct. And the geography in which the boat sails anew in the hands of each new reader--isn't that the collective experience of the reader that contributes to his/her subjective interpretation of the text?
Rhetoric assumes, at least in part, that the author and audience share some context, or works to foster that impression. Fiction does not assume a shared context, but asks the reader to enter into a setting and set of experiences on the author's terms. Not everything in the reader's experience can be left behind, of course, but more importantly, the reader does not necessarily bring with him/her the luggage that the trip requires. To stop mixing metaphors, the reader often starts from someplace completely different, and so the context from which the writer was working is lost. In a good work of literature, the author and reader do not need to share every context. The fact that the author has studied his Montaigne makes no difference to the reader, who may not catch every specific reference, but nevertheless gets the gist of the ideas involved. How specifically the reader is able to identify the author's context, however, is determined by the shared experience of author and reader. It's the difference between identifying the elves' lembas as "spiritually sustaining food" vs. "the Eucharist." All this goes to say that the extent to which literature is "Sacramental" depends on not only the stars by which the author steers, and the seaworthiness of the vehicle, but also on the geography from which the reader embarks, or, if you prefer, the luggage that accompanies him/her. The importance, then, is the ability of the work to propel the reader into consideration of common ideas--the nature of God, etc. The author starts the process--gets the reader to share a set of common questions (and that is the shared destination)--but the reader's geography determines in what direction the reader's questions tend, or even if s/he is interested in pursuing the questions.
The point, here, is that the reader is a participant. In a closed work of fiction, the author has wrapped plot and worldview in a neat package, and the reader is invited to accept the truth of what the work concludes--or not. I am thinking of the difference between the Chronicles of Narnia and The Lord of the Rings. In a "closed" work, such as the former, there is no further action required of the reader other than to pick up the text and read, then to close the text and regard it as something experienced, perhaps, but a completed experience. It can be revisited, but it doesn't ask anything of the reader--the reader is not expected to act in any way in order to complete the reading process. It might be worth noting that my two "closed" examples--Narnia and Potter--were written explicitly for child audiences.
Here, I want to give a very different example--that of Arthur C. Clarke's "The Star." Clarke's story of a Jesuit priest and scientist who travels with an expedition to a distant planet only to discover that the civilization that inhabited the planet was annihilated by the very star that illuminated the path for the magi to find Christ invites theological questioning. Indeed, only extreme intellectual laziness stands as an excuse for not turning the matter over in one's mind: What kind of God would allow such an event? The question implies criticism. According to Clarke's worldview, it should imply criticism and questioning--of God. But the very presence of a Jesuit priest begs the question--is the only possible conclusion the inhumanity of God? The reader is invited to contribute to the meaning of the story, but if the reader is starting from a position of faith rather than atheism or agnosticism, that faith may be able to reconcile the speculative scenario presented in the story. The point is not so much the conclusion reached, but the common questioning--that the reader participates in the meaning of the story--extends that meaning past the boundaries of the story--and moves toward some greater understanding of God (or the nature of the universe, if you prefer).
