What Is a Literary Experience like?

Abstract

Y SHIFTING focus of critical attention from meaning of text itself to experience of reader, reader-response criticism offers an exciting alternative to traditional interpretive approaches which ignore reader's experience and emphasize translation of texts into conceptual terms of some metaphysical or cultural or psychological reality which they presumably imitate or reflect or express. But what exactly are we turning to when we turn from text itself to experience of reader? The reader-response paradigms that are competing for our attention today represent literary experience in two different ways, neither of which offers a very satisfactory answer to this question. In majority of these paradigms literary experience is narrowly identified with experience of interpreting texts (the making and revising of assumptions, rendering and regretting of judgments, coming to and abandoning of conclusions, giving and withdrawing of approval, specifying of causes, asking of questions, supplying of answers, solving of puzzles).' But interpretation, even when it is redefined in experiential terms, is only one part of literary experience, and not always most important part. We not only read texts, after all; we reread them; and we continue to reread them long after we have settled interpretive questions to our own satisfaction. The principal alternative to this mode of representing literary experience is a psychoanalytic one in which literary experience is defined in terms of psychological processes such as unconscious fantasies, defense mechanisms, projection, introjection, identification, and so forth.2 I have no desire to challenge considerable explanatory powers of these terms, but I would like to insist that they do not enable us to describe our concrete experiences of literature. It may be, for example, that my enjoyment of Macbeth's Tomorrow and and tomorrow soliloquy is caused by simultaneous gratification of my unconscious impulses to witness and yet not to witness primal scene, evoked by strutting and fretting and by extinguishing of candle, which Norman Holland characterizes as the tense, terrible sexual imaginings of night.3 But this is not what my experience is like. But what is my experience like? The difficulty of answering this 0028-6087/82/140105-11$1.00/0