When Intention Meets Response: Affective and Objective Reading

Abstract

When Intention Meets Response:Affective and Objective Reading Roderick McGillis (bio) Steig, Michael . Stories of Reading: Subjectivity and Literary Understanding. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1989. I like the title of this book: Stories of Reading. The conjunction of a process—reading—with the results of a process—a story—is neat. Each story is a process and each story gives rise to further stories; in other words, stories as completed narratives participate in an ongoing narrative and consequently are never completed. One aspect of that ongoing narrative is the actual reading of the stories by actual readers. When readers read, they almost invariably are prepared to tell a willing listener about their reading, and when they do they must produce stories of their reading. These stories, like the original stories which the readers have read, have a truth value based not on the scientific accuracy of statement but on the rhetorical force of the telling. For Michael Steig, the truth that lies in an honest story of reading has pedagogic and humane value as well as rhetorical force: "there are also personal modes of understanding literary texts based on individual experience, which, when communicated, can enrich others' understanding and can move from the state of subjectivity for the individual to that of a gained, rather than prior, intersubjertivity for the social group" (xiii). Steig's intention, then, is to account, as ingeniously as he can, for his responses to several texts which are literary in both a primary and a secondary sense. He offers his response to the writing of critics (including himself) and students as well as to familiar and less familiar works of literature. The intention behind this acceptance of student writing as equal to professional academic writing and of children's books as equal to canonized works of literature is a healthy subversion of hierarchies. Steig notes at the outset that he hopes to "offend against both the traditional canon of English literature and the concept of 'great' literature." Many concerned with the study of children's books will perk up when he adds: "the distinction between children's and adults' books [is] merely a matter of intellectual snobbery" (xvii). And finally, Steig's intention is to demonstrate how extrinsic information is useful even in a subjective response to a work of literature; readers inevitably "construct" an author and any biographical or historical information available helps the reader build this construct. At some point in the reading and interpretive process reader and author meet, and this meeting leads to understanding. In short, Steig's laudable and heroic struggle in Stories of Reading is to reconcile subjective and objective approaches to literary understanding. Let me recount a brief story of my own which encourages me to accept Steig's sensible account of the relevance of personal experience to literary understanding. A few years ago a student of mine handed in a remarkable essay on C. S. Lewis's The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. I must say right away that I knew something of this student's personal background because she had told me much concerning her earlier life prior to the time she wrote the essay. She was and had been a victim of child abuse, and she began about the time I am speaking of to edit a newsletter for other victims of incest. Still I was not prepared for the long and intensely felt piece of writing she handed in. Over some eighteen single-spaced typed pages, this student expressed her revulsion towards Lewis's fantasy. She was candid and courageous in setting forth her feeling that this book presented in a thinly veiled form a violent attack on the child—both the child in the book and the child who reads it. For this student, Lewis clearly both disliked children and at the same time felt sexual pleasure in their company. She examined, among other things, Lucy's entrance into Narnia and noted the genital implications, both male and female, of the wardrobe and its contents; her incipient psychoanalytic reading was sharp enough to notice the "two mothballs" which dropped from the wardrobe when Lucy opened it (Lewis 12). She also...