Invisible Audience: Peter J. Rabinowitz's "Truth in Fiction"

Abstract

In a critical climate increasingly dominated by a vogue for subjectivist styles of interpretation-the oracular psychohistory of Harold Bloom, the affective stylistics of Stanley Fish, the deconstructivist criticism that is the latest continental importation of J. Hillis Miller-I suppose Peter Rabinowitz must been seen as standing on the side of the angels, if only because his Truth in Fiction' tries to get us thinking again about the ontological status of the literary work-or, what is the same thing, about interpretation as objective knowledge. So far as he begins from a concept of long ago developed by theorists of the intrinsic or objective mode (Walker Gibson, W. K. Wimsatt, and, more recently, Walter J. Ong), Rabinowitz is at least attempting to consider the literary work as a state of affairs or object of inquiry in interpretation. The major problem in his discussion arises, however, when he leaves that concept behind and begins to multiply audiences needlessly. Rabinowitz's audience model has all the explanatory power, all the rich suggestiveness for later speculation, as the theory of four elements: given enough time and ingenuity, there is almost nothing one could not do with it. Yet it is open to the same sort of objection: three of Rabinowitz's four audiences (actual audience, authorial audience, ideal narrative audience) do not exist. Do not exist, that is, when we consider literary interpretation as a set of meaningful and verifiable propositions about literary meaning. Actual audiences of course exist, but it was the point of Wimsatt and others that their existence has no relevance to