What We Talk About When We Talk About Books
What is it that we talk about when we talk about books?
‘Talking about books’ covers such a wide range of different activities that it’s
impossible to begin answering that question without a concrete example.1 So here, from
James Thurber’s short story ‘The Macbeth Murder Mystery’, is a specific conversation
about a specific book:
‘Tell me,’ I said. ‘Did you read Macbeth?’
‘I had to read it,’ she said. ‘There wasn’t a scrap of anything
else to read in the whole room.’
‘Did you like it?’ I asked.
‘No, I did not,’ she said, decisively. ‘In the first place, I don’t
think for a moment that Macbeth did it.’
I looked at her blankly. ‘Did what?’ I asked.2
The two, who have only just met, are talking over tea in the hotel where they are both
staying. The (unnamed) narrator has just interrupted the (unnamed) woman who is trying
to ‘tell [him] the plot of a detective story’, asking her instead to talk about Macbeth, since
she has just mentioned that she recently bought a copy of the play in error. It seems that
he wants to talk about a book they have both read, rather than hearing about one he
doesn’t know. Yet when the conversation does move to a book they have in common,
the narrator is incapable of understanding, literally, the first thing the woman says about
it (‘Did what?’). Despite this initial incomprehension, however, when the woman goes on
to explain her reading of Macbeth, her interpretation proves so compelling that the
narrator has to borrow her copy of the book: ‘I don’t feel, somehow,’ he says, ‘as if I had
ever really read it.’
So the narrator begins the conversation believing that if they talked about a book
they had both read, they would be talking about the same thing: but this turns out not to
be the case. It is not until he re-reads Macbeth, this time according to the new set of rules
for interpretation that he has learned from the woman, that they have a common object.
1 Obviously, then, the choice of example is particularly important, because (as we’ll see) it sets the terms in which an answer is
possible. I chose ‘The Macbeth Murder Mystery’ for four reasons: (1) it juxtaposes high and popular culture, as the title makes clear; (2)
it is about 95% dialogue, and its plot and character development all proceed through talking about books, that’s really all that happens
in it; (3) it is both complex and familiar/everyday, in a way that beginning with theory would not be; and (4) its structure, which
moves from the physical existence of the book to the sharing of reading strategies with a view to future readings, mirrors the
structure of my own book. It’s thus a programmatic choice for my own answers to the question.
2 Thurber, James, ‘The Macbeth Murder Mystery’, in The Thurber Carnival (Harper & Brothers, 1945), pp.60-63, p.60. Future references,
given parenthetically in the text, are to this edition.
1
The woman’s rules for interpretation, as we’ll see in a moment, are the generic
conventions of the whodunnit. Within those conventions, the meaning of her statement
‘I don’t believe Macbeth did it’ is self-evident; the narrator’s incomprehension (‘Did
what?’) comes about because it has never occurred to him to bring these conventions
into relation with Macbeth, and so the question of who ‘did it’ doesn’t seem important to
him. Of course, the humour of the story depends on the fact that it (probably) hasn’t
occurred to Thurber’s readers to ask ‘who did it’ in Macbeth, either. The story is therefore
careful to specify the conditions within which it does occur to the woman to read in this
way – indeed, within which it seems obvious and natural to her to read it in this way.
Firstly, as the woman tells us at the very opening of the story, ‘[Macbeth] was on the
[railway kiosk] counter with the other Penguin books – the little sixpenny ones, you
know, with the paper covers – and I supposed of course it was a detective story. All the
others were detective stories. I’d read all the others. So I bought this one without really
looking at it carefully... I don’t see why the Penguin-books people had to get out
Shakespeare plays in the same size and everything as the detective stories’ (p.60). The
narrator points out that ‘they have different colored jackets’ (in fact the Penguin
Shakespeare series was red while Penguin Crime was green), but the woman says that she
‘didn’t notice that’ (p.60). For her, it is the similarity in format, rather than the difference
in colour, that is significant.
The cover, or the error over the cover, however, isn’t enough on its own to make
Macbeth a murder mystery: when the woman realizes what she has bought she is annoyed
precisely because she knows that Macbeth isn’t a murder mystery (‘I got real comfy in bed
that night and all ready to read a good mystery and here I had The Tragedy of Macbeth – a
book for high school students. Like Ivanhoe’ (p.60)); as we’ve seen, she would not have
read the book at all if there had been ‘a scrap of anything else to read in the whole room’.
But she also knows that Shakespeare is considered a great writer, and that Macbeth
is considered a great book. Just as the narrator is unable at first to comprehend that the
question of ‘whodunnit’ might be relevant to Macbeth, so the woman is unable to
comprehend that a book might be considered great according to criteria other than those
which distinguish a good murder mystery; so, as she goes on (however reluctantly) to
read Macbeth, she does so with these criteria in mind.
Their conversation about Macbeth continues:
‘I don’t think for a moment that he killed the King,’ she said. ‘I don’t
think the Macbeth woman was mixed up in it, either. You suspect
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them the most, of course, but those are the ones that are never guilty
– or shouldn’t be, anyway.’
‘I’m afraid,’ I began, ‘that I—’
‘But don’t you see?’ said the American lady. ‘It would spoil
everything if you could figure out right away who did it. Shakespeare
was far too smart for that. I’ve read that people never have figured
out Hamlet, so it isn’t likely Shakespeare would have made Macbeth as
simple as it seems.’
I thought this over while I filled my pipe. ‘Who do you suspect?’ I
asked, suddenly.
‘Macduff,’ she said, promptly.
‘Good God!’ I whispered, softly (pp.60-61).
This is the moment at which the narrator first becomes able to enter into the woman’s
mode of reading, and consciously decides to do so.3 The woman’s statement that
‘Shakespeare was far too smart for that’ serves as the point of connection between the
narrator’s existing reading of Macbeth as a canonical tragedy and the woman’s reading of
Macbeth as a murder mystery, and enables the change in the narrator’s attitude. Before
this statement, the narrator seems about to disagree with and/or close down the
woman’s reading from outside (‘I’m afraid I—’); after it, and after the moment of silent
reflection which marks it as narratively significant (‘I thought it over as I filled my pipe’),
he is ‘suddenly’ able to ask a question which is meaningful within the terms of the
whodunnit, and thus to elicit a detailed account of the woman’s reading, rather than
simply ruling it incorrect, inadequate or illegitimate. And in this he is, or should be, a
model for literary critics and particularly scholars of reception.
In the conversation which follows, the woman explains the significance of events
and speeches in Macbeth with reference to the conventions of the detective story. When,
for example, the narrator asks her whether the King’s sons might be guilty of killing him,
since they fled immediately after the murder (which ‘looks suspicious’), she responds:
‘Too suspicious... Much too suspicious. When they flee, they’re never guilty. You can
count on that’ (p.61) In support of her theory that Macduff is the murderer, she cites the
speech he makes on discovering Duncan’s body: ‘“Confusion has broke open the Lord’s
anointed temple” and “Sacrilegious murder has made his masterpiece” and on and on
like that... You wouldn’t say a lot of stuff like that, offhand, would you – if you had
3 At this point, too, stylistic features characteristic of the whodunnit genre (or at least of popular fiction in general) begin to appear in
the narrative frame of the story: stronger verbs (‘demanded’, ‘whispered’) and adverbs begin to appear in the speech tags. As the
narrator agrees to play the game of reading Macbeth as a whodunnit, that is, the world around him begins to be described more and
more in the terms of genre, until the final line of the story: ‘I looked at her cryptically... and disappeared into a small grove of trees as
silently as I had come’. The last line must be from the point of view of a character other than the narrator, even though it remains in
first-person (the narrator cannot ‘disappear’ from his own perspective), registering the clash of genres (first-person, informal, realistic
story-telling vs whodunnit).
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found a body?... “My God, there’s a body in here!” is what an innocent man would say’
(p.61). A reading of Macbeth as an Elizabethan verse tragedy would understand the fact of
Macduff’s speaking in verse as formally conventional and thus not significant in itself;
but according to the murder mystery’s generic conventions, the highly artificial nature of
the speech can (or perhaps must) be understood as betraying the character’s duplicity
rather than the author’s poetic skill. Thus, reading according to the conventions of the
murder mystery not only changes the significance of events in the play, it even changes
which aspects of the play are considered to be significant, including stylistic and linguistic
features.
The woman is able to come up with coherent reasons for her reading, and to
answer all the narrator’s questions, fitting each significant element of the text (including,
as we have seen, characterization, narrative, and stylistic features) into her interpretation.
Her reading works, then, according to the criteria we have for evaluating readings.
Moreover, it works on a very pragmatic level: it provides an example which the narrator
is able to use not just to understand and replicate her own reading, but to generate a new
one of his own. Having borrowed her copy of Macbeth, he rereads it, applying the same
conventions and criteria to it as she has, but coming to a different conclusion (‘Macduff
is as innocent of those murders... as Macbeth and the Macbeth woman’, p.62). Like the
woman, he goes on to explain his reading with detailed reference both to the text (‘I
opened the copy of the play... and turned to Act II, Scene 2’, p.62) and to the ‘rules’ of
the detective story (‘“But,” said the lady, “you can’t have a murderer who only appears in
the story once. You can’t have that.” “I know that,” I said’, p.63). The story ends when
the two protagonists have moved from mutual incomprehension, not to agreement, but
to mutual understanding and a mutually thrilled sense of new possibilities: ‘Do you know
what I’m going to do now?’ asks the narrator. ‘Buy a copy of Hamlet... and solve that!’
(p.63)
So what are the narrator and the woman talking about, when they talk about
Macbeth? They are, clearly, talking about Macbeth itself: they refer closely to events in the
plot and quote from the text verbatim. And yet at the same time they are, at least at first,
talking about quite different things: the reason the narrator feels that he has ‘never really
read’ the book the woman is talking about is that, in a way, he hasn’t. He has read The
Tragedy of Macbeth; he has never read The Macbeth Murder Mystery. Although these two texts
are both Macbeth – they consist of the same words in the same order – what happens in
them is different. For example, in The Tragedy of Macbeth, Macbeth sees the ghost of
4
Banquo and Lady Macbeth walks in her sleep, while in The Macbeth Murder Mystery ‘there
wasn’t any ghost’ (‘A big strong man like that doesn’t go around seeing ghosts, especially
in a brightly lighted banquet hall with dozens of people around’, p.62) and Lady Macbeth
‘wasn’t asleep. She was acting guilty to shield Macbeth’ (‘Do you remember where it says
“Enter Lady Macbeth with a taper”?... Well, people who walk in their sleep never carry
lights’, p.62).
What I love about Thurber’s short story, and why I’ve chosen it as the
programmatic example for talking about books here and in several other contexts, is that
it succeeds in elaborating a model of reading which is both familiar and complex. Several
of the features of the story which I have (not coincidentally) picked out as being
particularly worthy of notice echo important statements about reading and interpretation
made by literary critics and theorists of reading in the last fifty years. Its narrative
structure – the move from mutual incomprehension to a situation where the readers
understand one another but do not necessarily agree – prefigures by twenty years the
central argument of Stanley Fish’s classic manifesto for reader-response criticism, ‘Is
There A Text In This Class?’, in which he argues that there is no such thing as
misreading, but only misprereading: we read according to shared rules for interpretation,
but we may bring the ‘wrong’ set of rules to bear on a given text; readers who are reading
the ‘same’ text according to different rules or ‘prereadings’ cannot understand each other
unless they succeed, as Thurber’s characters do, in stepping back and communicating the
rules for their ‘prereadings’.4 The dramatic setting of the story – conversations over tea –
recalls Heather Dubrow’s characterization of genre as a ‘social code’, rather than a set of
formal criteria, which exists between readers and authors rather than in texts.5 The story’s
insistence that meaning is not created immediately by the text but by a set of rules
guiding our attention to different features and determining their significance recalls both
Roland Barthes’ claim that ‘“only-the-text” does not exist’ and that ‘reading... is... a game
played according to certain rules’,6 and James Smith Allen’s model of the rules or
conventions according to which the reader constructs the meaning of a novel, including
‘notice’ (what details are significant or relevant?); ‘significance’ (who is speaking, and
should we believe them?); ‘configuration’ (how do we predict that the story will
4 Stanley Fish, ‘Is There A Text In This Class?’, in Is There A Text in this Class? The Authority of Interpretative Communities (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press), 1980, pp. 303-21, eg p.311: ‘He has not misread the text, but mispreread the text, and if he is to
correct himself he must make another (pre)determination of the structure of interests from which her question arises’.
5 ‘One of the closest analogies to the experience of reading [a text within a known genre] is that of operating within a social code:
genre, as many students of the subject have observed, functions much like a code of behaviour established between the author and
his reader’. Heather Dubrow, Genre (London and New York: Methuen [Critical Idiom series], 1982), p.2.
6 Roland Barthes, ‘Writing Reading’, in The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 1986), pp.29-31, p.31.
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develop?); and ‘coherence’ (how will all the details and events of the plot hang together
into a unified whole?).7 The narrator’s feeling that he has ‘never really read Macbeth’
echoes the way in which Pierre Bayard calls into question the whole notion of reading:
given that you can have a very good idea of what happens in a book and what kind of
thing it is without ever having opened it, and conversely that you can read every word on
the page without ‘understanding’ it (as happens with me and the Kipling short story
‘Regulus’), and/or that you can read every word on the page and understand it fully and
still never have read the book that another person reads when they read that book...
given all this, when can you say that you have, really, read a book?8 The woman’s
interpretation of key points in the plot – whether Lady Macbeth actually sleepwalks,
whether Macbeth really sees a ghost – calls into question Todorov’s otherwise useful
distinction of ‘signification’ (what happens in a story) from ‘symbolization’ (what it
means). Todorov writes (of Benjamin Constant’s Adolphe):
Ellenore's trip to Paris is signified by the words in the text. Adolphe's ultimate
weakness is symbolized by other factors in the imaginary universe, which are
themselves signified by words. For example, Adolphe's inability to defend
Ellenore in social situations is signified; this in turn symbolizes his inability to
love. Signified facts are understood: all we need is knowledge of the language in
which the text is written. Symbolized facts are interpreted; and interpretations
vary from one subject to another.9
In fact, however, our interpretations (on the level of symbolization) often condition or
even determine our understanding (on the level of signification): Jerome McGann in The
Textual Condition points out that the ‘text-itself’, the words on the page in front of us, is
not pure data which can be used as a basis for interpretation: rather the ‘text-itself’ is the
result of interpretative decisions taken by an editor, who decides which words should be
printed on the page in light of her understanding of the text as a whole.10 (An obvious
example would be the fairly common typo now/not, which reverses the literal meaning of
a sentence, but which we can all usually detect: and this can only be because our
interpretation of the text overrides the very ‘physical data’ which is supposed to be the
origin and basis of our interpretation).
7 James Smith Allen, ‘Reading the Novel’, in In The Public Eye: A History of Reading in Modern France, 1800-1940 (Princeton: Princeton
UP, 1991), pp.275-302.
8 Pierre Bayard, How To Talk About Books You Haven’t Read, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (London: Granta, 2008).
9 Tzvetan Todorov, ‘Reading as Construction’, in Suleiman & Crosman (eds), The Reader in the Text: Essays in Audience and Interpretation
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press), pp.67-82, p.73.
10 Jerome McGann, The Textual Condition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991).
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So ‘The Macbeth Murder Mystery’ deals with a number of the central questions
about reading, interpretation, and reception that have interested literary and cultural
critics and theorists, and that this book will also deal with. But Thurber’s story places
these questions in a familiar and everyday setting, reminding us that the questions about
reading which can seem so esoteric – and which do, indeed, raise complex, important
and sometimes divisive epistemological, philosophical, cultural and social issues –
actually arise from commonplace situations and everyday practices. Two people talking
about their holiday reading, or – to take an example I’ll talk about in my book – London
teenagers talking about Neighbours:11 what could be more ordinary? But mapping the
interrelating (and often invisible) forces and structures, from many different domains of
human experience, which make those ordinary conversations possible: this turns out to
be a surprisingly complicated and challenging task. As we saw in Thurber’s story, reading
Macbeth as a murder mystery is so natural and inevitable for the woman reader that she
never even questions her presuppositions, but that very ‘natural’ reading is only made
possible by multiple factors which mediate between reader and text: the material and
visual properties of the physical book (‘the same size and everything as the detective
stories’); the reputation of a book and its author (‘I’ve read that people never have
figured out Hamlet, so it isn’t likely Shakespeare would have made Macbeth as simple as it
seems’); the scene of reading (‘high school students’ read The Tragedy of Macbeth in the
classroom, while the woman reader is ‘real comfy in bed and ready for a good mystery’
and thus produces The Macbeth Murder Mystery); and, of course, generic conventions or
interpretative strategies. This is not meant to be an exhaustive list, but rather to suggest
the many different factors which contribute to the production of an interpretation of a
text. All these factors – and others, which we’ll see in the course of this book – have
been thought about by scholars and critics: the properties of the book and authorial
reputation are ‘paratexts’, according to Gerard Genette,12 while the importance of the
scene of reading has been studied by cultural studies scholars and anthropologists (for
example by John Carey in terms of the ‘ritual’ qualities of television watching13); genre is
a key term not only for literary theory but also for some social-
11 See Marie Gillespie, Television, Ethnicity and Cultural Change (London: Routledge, 1995), extracted in Brooker & Jermyn (eds) The
Audience Studies Reader (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), pp.315-21. Gillespie shows how a community of young British
Asian people in Southall in the 1990s alternated between talk about ‘real life’ and ‘soap talk’, the two being used to make sense of each
other, to negotiate or solve problems, and to collaboratively produce meanings.
12 Gerard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
13 See, canonically, James W. Carey, ‘A Cultural Approach to Communication’, in Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society
(Winchester, MA, and London: Unwin Hyman, 1989), pp.13-36.
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studies/rhetoric/discourse analysis scholars studying the ways in which we make
meanings in everyday life.14
In this book, I want, like Thurber, to map out the factors that influence
interpretation – both opening it up, enabling it, and closing it down, constraining it. And
I want do so, like Thurber, in a way which can account for the everyday complexities and
paradoxes of reading. It’s my contention in this book that to be adequate, a model of
reading must be adequately complex and adequately familiar. It should be able to account
as best as possible for all the disparate activities that are covered by the phrase ‘talking
about books’, from complaining about the conservative sexual politics of a contemporary
popular series for teenage girls which the complainer has not in fact read, to the
publication of a monograph-length interpretation of the formal and aesthetic features of
a canonical poem. There are a number of reasons why I make this claim, which I hope
will become clearer throughout this book, but for the moment ‘The Macbeth Murder
Mystery’ can go on serving as an example. Because one of the other things that I think
‘The Macbeth Murder Mystery’ shows is that the moves that produce illegitimate or
aberrant readings (after all, Macbeth is not a murder mystery, not really) cannot be strictly
distinguished from the moves that produce legitimate, conventional, normative or
‘correct’ readings. The problem is surely not that the woman reads according to genre
conventions: if we did not read The Tragedy of Macbeth according to the conventions of
Elizabethan tragic drama, we would not be able to understand why some characters
speak in poetry and others in prose. Is the problem, then, that the woman brings the
conventions of popular fiction to bear on Shakespeare’s work, which is high art? But as
Levine shows in his book Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), at certain points in history it has been
usual and legitimate to understand Shakespeare as part of popular culture, rather than as
high art. So is the problem simply that the woman brings the wrong genre conventions to
bear on Macbeth, which is, after all, a tragedy and not a murder mystery? But many literary
critics have successfully argued for a change in the genre classification of literary works.
This can even be the case when the new genre postdates the writing of the work: many
critics, perhaps most famously Jauss, have argued that Flaubert’s Madame Bovary could
not be successfully read at the time of its publication because its contemporary audience
did not have the correct interpretative strategies to cope with its new narrative
14
See Freedman & Medway (eds), Genre and the New Rhetoric (London and Bristol, PA: Taylor & Francis, 1994).
8
strategies.15 Why shouldn’t Macbeth be another example of a text which is not adequately
understood until a new set of interpretative strategies and conventions for reading has
been evolved?
I am not arguing that Macbeth is a murder mystery; but I am arguing that if it is
not a murder mystery, it is also not a tragedy. Because for every feature of the woman’s
reading of Macbeth that makes it ‘wrong’, an example can be found of a reading which
works along exactly the same lines but which we find unexceptionally or even brilliantly
‘right’. And whenever we try to find the limits of interpretation of a text, to come up
with an interpretation which is absurdly, self-evidently, completely, wrong, we can usually
invent a context in which that interpretation would be right.16 A high school student
would be wrong (or at least ill-advised) to write an essay proceeding from the assumption
that Macbeth was a murder mystery; but Thurber’s detective-story fan is right, or at least
successful – and, I think, admirable – in the creative act by which she gets to read a
murder mystery without leaving her comfy bed in a room where there isn’t a scrap of
anything to read but The Tragedy of Macbeth, and thus rescues the pleasure of her holiday
evening.17
What ‘The Macbeth Murder Mystery’ shows is that it is possible to read Macbeth as a
murder mystery, even though we all know that it isn’t one, and that what makes it
possible to do so are what might be considered external factors – conventions, rules,
contexts, readerly motivations – which do not derive directly from the words on the
page. What is in a book – even at the apparently simple or literal level, the level of the
events which make up the plot, of what happens in a narrative – is not a simple question,
then. It cannot be answered simply with reference to the ‘words on the page’, not only
because those words themselves are the end product, not the origin, of interpretative acts
(as we saw Jerome McGann arguing a moment ago), but also because in order to become
meaningful, these words need to be interpreted, and they are interpreted according to
particular conventions or rules which cannot be extrapolated from the ‘text itself’, from
the words on the page: these rules come from outside the text.18 A lot of what a book is
is not in the book, but in its context, or in its readers.19
15 See Hans Robert Jauss, ‘Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory’, in Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. Timothy Bahti
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), pp.3-45.
16 See Fish’s discussion of the phrase ‘the air was crisp’, drawing on E. D. Hirsch, in ‘Is There A Text In This Class?’, pp.309-310.
When I gave this paper at the Classics departmental seminar at Bristol in October 2012, we ended up talking a lot about Nabokov’s
Pale Fire, too.
17 On reading as ‘clearancing’ or ‘readerly karaoke’, see Lynne Pearce, Feminism and the Politics of Reading (London: Arnold, 1997), p.98
and n.22.
18 Barthes: ‘“The text, only the text”, we are told, but “only-the-text” does not exist: there is immediately in this tale, this novel, this
poem I am reading, a supplement of meaning for which neither dictionary nor grammar can account’, and ‘The most subjective
reading imaginable is never anything but a game played according to certain rules. Where do these rules come from? Certainly not
9
A book, then, is not a stable object. It changes according to the use its readers
make of it, and according to the interpretative strategies we use to make it meaningful to
us. It is, to a very large degree, what we make of it; it changes according to the frame we
use to make sense of it.
For me, an important consequence of this is that when we talk about books, we
need to be able to account for the intertwining of the words on the page with the
external factors which allow us to make those words meaningful. Other literary critics
and theorists, however, would take the opposite position. Since it is indeed these external
factors which enable such a strikingly aberrant reading as Thurber’s mystery-reading
woman’s to take place, they argue, we should either eliminate these factors from our
reading process and look at the text itself, only the text; or – if external factors are found to
be essential to interpretation – we should formulate (and obey) a rule which can tell us
which external factors are relevant to a given text.
The first position, however, can never hold very strictly, because texts (other than
dictionaries) cannot in themselves tell us the meanings of words: there are times when we
will need to go outside the text to find out what is in the text-itself. When we are reading
a text written in familiar language from our own period, culture, and/or subculture, it
may feel as though we are not going ‘outside’ the text, because the processes by which
we decode the text are so familiar and habitual that they are invisible to us: but when we
read a text from a different period, these processes become more visible and obtrusive.
(Sometimes, indeed, they are even literally visible on the page, for example in the form of
the footnotes or marginal glosses of archaic or unfamiliar words in a scholarly edition of
Paradise Lost). In the first chapter of his book After Babel, George Steiner compares this
process to translation: the process of reading a text from a different period is identical to
that of reading a text in a different language, as we refer back and forth from the ‘textitself’ to reference books (dictionaries, grammars, historical references).20 Reading from a
different position in terms of identity or culture, as well as in terms of time, can also
make these invisible processes visible, showing that what has been understood as being
straightforwardly ‘in’ the text actually derives from a set of processes, knowledges, or
contexts that come from ‘outside’ it: so, for example, second-wave feminism (often
following Virginia Woolf) showed how ‘obvious’, ‘literal’ or ‘correct’ readings of literary
from the author.... these rules come from an age-old logic of narrative, from... that vast cultural space through which our person
(whether author or reader) is only one passage’, ‘Writing Reading’, p.31.
19 Cf Gadamer: ‘where are we to locate the multiplicity of meaning?’ Hans-Georg Gadamer and Jacques Derrida, Dialogue and
Deconstruction: The Gadamer-Derrida Encounter (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1989), p.115.
20 George Steiner, ‘Understanding as Translation’, Chapter One in After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1975), pp.1-31.
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texts were in fact only obvious, literal, or correct if you took for granted a set of
specifically masculine presuppositions. Read from a different perspective, these texts
looked as different from their earlier selves as the Macbeth Murder Mystery looks from The
Tragedy of Macbeth.21
Even the most text-itself critics, then, accept the fact that to know what is in the
‘text itself’ we have to go beyond the text: after all, the question of whodunnit appears to
be ‘in’ the text to Thurber’s woman reader. What is wrong with her reading, then,
according to these critics, is that she herself does not have the appropriate contextual
knowledge which would allow her to interpret the text correctly. This position appears to
be more tenable than the first, strict but impossible, ‘text-itself’ position: and there are in
fact times when I would want to insist on it. But again, there are so many possibilities for
contextualization that we need a concrete example. So here, as a counterpoint to
Thurber’s story, is Joanna Russ’s account of reading (and rereading) black women’s
writing, in the ‘Afterword’ to her book How To Suppress Women’s Writing:
I went to the library, got Black novelist Zora Neale Hurston’s classic Their
Eyes Were Watching God, and read it.
It was episodic.
It was thin.
It was uninteresting.
The characters talked funny.
It was clearly inferior to the great central tradition of Western literature (if
you added these authors’ wives’, daughters’, mothers’, sisters’ and colleagues’
books). I’d been vindicated. Why go on?
But Elly must have put a virus in my tea or otherwise affected me, as
shortly thereafter I returned from the library with an armful of books and
from the bookstore with another, all these about women of color. There were
novels, short-story collections, books containing literary criticism, literary
journals and a few slender pamphlets from small presses. Then I read John
Langston Gwaltney’s Drylongso, Gerda Lerner’s Black Women in White America,
Barbara Christian’s pioneering study Black Women Novelists, Conditions: Five, the
Black Women’s Issue, Toni Cade Bambera’s Black Women: An Anthology… [etc].
Then I went back and read Their Eyes Were Watching God.
It was astonishing how much it had improved in the meantime.22
The joke here, of course, is that Their Eyes Were Watching God has not changed (it still
consists of the same words in the same order); it is Russ, as a reader, who has changed.
21 Here cf the concluding sentence of John Frow, ‘The Literary Frame’, Journal of Aesthetic Education 16:2 (1982), pp.25-30, p.29: ‘To
“see” the frame is to account for the culturally determined vraisemblance by which the conventions determining the reception of the
work are naturalized, become second nature; and the full social dimension of the literary sign can only be restored through a
deliberate reconstruction of these conventions’. On the gendering of vraisemblance, see also Nancy K. Miller’s amazing essay,
‘Emphasis Added: Plots and Plausibility in Women’s Fiction’, in Showalter (ed), The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature
and Theory (New York: Pantheon, 1985), pp.339-360.
22 Joanna Russ, ‘Afterword’, in How to Suppress Women’s Writing (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1983), pp.135-142, p.136.
11
This is a story which would gladden the heart of many traditional literary critics,23 as Russ
gives up her first, ignorant, reading, even though it ‘vindicate[s]’ her own initial position,
and diligently labours to gain the historical, contextual, and critical framework which will
allow her to attain a deeper appreciation of the text. (Note that she does this very much
in Steiner’s model, by leaving behind the ‘text itself’ and moving from Their Eyes Were
Watching God to multiple other texts.)
And yet Russ’s story is in many ways indistinguishable from ‘The Macbeth Murder
Mystery’. Russ, like Thurber’s narrator, learns to read a specific text in a new way, by
placing it up against a new set of texts: she is rewarded for this by getting a better text.
Macbeth is able to serve the function of the ‘good mystery’ that Thurber’s woman reader
wants; Their Eyes Were Watching God has undergone an astonishing improvement. In both
cases, too, the change in reading is prompted by an encounter with another reader, and
both Russ and Thurber’s narrator move from a position of incomprehension,
disagreement and/or outright hostility to a position in which they are not only able to
share the other reader’s reading, but to generate new readings of future texts according to
their new knowledge (Thurber’s narrator is going to solve Hamlet, while Russ goes on to
read a huge variety of texts by women of colour).
And yet it would be disingenuous to pretend that I don’t somehow know that
Russ has moved to a more correct reading of Their Eyes Were Watching God, while
Thurber’s narrator has moved to a less correct reading of Macbeth. All readings are
enabled by the same sorts of factors, but not all readings are equally legitimate. This
seems to me to be the central, and always generative or provocative, paradox of reading.
Anything can mean anything – Macbeth can be a murder mystery, ‘the air was crisp’ can
refer to a musical composition – so why, in practice, doesn’t it? How do we know that
Macbeth is not a murder mystery? Who decides which readings are legitimate, which
contexts are appropriate and which are inappropriate?24
This is the point where talking about books (or talking about talking about
books) cannot avoid engaging with history, sociology, politics, and cultural studies.
23 Or possibly not. Russ goes on to ask ‘Is it possible that there are lots of different traditions and that the only thing that makes mine
look central is that I am in it?’ (p.136). Harold Bloom, who is about as ‘traditional’ a literary critic as it’s possible to get, argues that it
is not possible to have multiple parallel traditions in English literature, so although he should approve of Russ gaining the historical
and contextual knowledge necessary to gain a deeper appreciation of a text, he in fact doesn’t, because he doesn’t believe those texts
should be read in any tradition other than the Great one. See Harold Bloom, A Map of Misreading (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1975), with Annette Kolodny’s discussion in ‘A Map for Rereading: Gender and the Interpretation of Literary Texts’, in
Showalter (ed), The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature and Theory (New York: Pantheon, 1985), pp.46-62.
24 And awareness of legitimacy can of course affect the way we read: the high-school student may read The Macbeth Murder Mystery (or
The Juliet Romance, or The Tragic Love Story of Romeo and Mercutio) for pleasure, but for marks, she will produce readings of The Tragedy of
Macbeth or The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet. On this, see Henry Jenkins, ‘Reception Theory and Audience Research: The Mystery of the
Vampire's Kiss’, in Gledhill & Williams, Reinventing Film Studies (London: Arnold, 2000), pp.162-182 and available online at the
author’s website (http://web.mit.edu/cms/People/henry3/vampkiss.html)
12
Reading is not an individual act which takes place in the privacy of the reader’s mind:
rather, as William A. Johnson has recently put it, reading is a ‘sociocultural system’,25
involving an intricately knotted set of relationships between reader and text, reader and
other readers, reader and institution, reader and context(s). Successfully producing and
circulating a new reading of a text therefore involves a struggle not so much against the
text as against other readers, institutions or disciplines. Institutional power (including
state power and ideology) is one of the key factors that determines which meanings are
available and which appear obvious. I’ve mentioned, for example, how second-wave
feminist readers had to produce and share new criteria for evaluating and analysing texts
in terms of gender, and how they had to do this in opposition to existing criteria
according to which their readings were irrelevant or incorrect: Lee Edwards remembers
being told that her proto-feminist interpretation of Antony and Cleopatra, which sought to
hold both Antony and Cleopatra to the same ethical standards of behaviour, was ‘wilfully
misreading the play in the interests of proving a point false both to the work and in
itself’.26 Thus, the work of producing a new reading involves a struggle not just on the
conceptual level, over meaning or interpretation, but also, on the level of institutional
and even state power, a struggle over legitimacy and over truth. The right to produce and
circulate one’s own meanings – to insist on one’s own truth – is central to the workings
of literary studies as a discipline, but its implications go far beyond the boundaries of that
discipline, connecting disciplinary and conceptual struggles to broader political projects
of resistance. Indeed, many (if not all) contemporary political and legal struggles can be
understood as interventions into what words or texts are able, in specific contexts, to
mean: must the word ‘marriage’ refer only to a relationship between a man and a woman?
Must the word ‘woman’ refer to someone who was assigned female at birth? These are
not simply abstract questions of interpretation: they have concrete effects on the legal
status, privileges and rights of many people.
In short, the practices which produce ‘wrong’ (aberrant or illegitimate) readings
of texts cannot be strictly distinguished from practices which produce legitimate and
obedient readings of texts, and moreover practices which produce ‘wrong’ readings may
be doing important personal, cultural or political work by the very fact that they are
resisting institutional or ideological norms for reading or interpretation.
25 William A. Johnson, Readers and Reading Culture in the High Roman Empire: A Study of Elite Communities (Oxford University Press,
2010), p.11.
26 Lee Edwards, ‘Women, Energy, and Middlemarch’, The Massachussetts Review 13:1/2 (1972), pp. 223-238, p.230.
13
So when we talk about books, what we say, who we say it to, how we say it, and
what the consequences of our talk might be – all these things are structured and
determined by multiple complex and interlocking factors far beyond the formal
properties of the book or the conscious preoccupations of the reader. Accounting for
what happens in a given act of reading means accounting for what Tony Bennett calls
‘the whole ensemble of material, social and ideological relations that condition the
apparent givenness of “the text on one's desk”’27 – and it’s that ‘whole ensemble’ that I
will be trying to map in this book. I won’t be introducing a new dataset with which to
correct an existing model, or a new conceptual orientation under which all existing
models are to be subsumed; I will be drawing from the work of other scholars for most,
if not all, of the individual points, observations or theories about reading that I will offer
in the book. But what I hope will be new and useful about it is that it will set out
Bennett’s ‘ensemble of relations’ as an ensemble. The current state of affairs is that
numerous critics and theorists offer excellent partial accounts of reading, concentrating
either on specific dimensions of reading (affective or aesthetic engagement, resistance to
ideology, construction of fictional worlds), or on the reading practices associated with
specific kinds of text (mass-market romance, gay-authored cinema) or specific kinds of
reader (black women, gay men, teenage girls). An adequate model of reading in general, it
seems to me, has to be able to incorporate all these aspects, and give some sense of their
relation to each other in the complex ‘sociocultural system’ of reading. It’s like the
parable of the blind men and the elephant: for a given purpose and in a given context,
one might need (or choose) to restrict one’s attention to the elephant’s leg, or to the
elephant’s trunk, but you will do better even in this if you know that the leg is a leg, not a
whole creature in itself, and that it is related to the other parts of the whole ensemble of
organs and processes that make up an individual organism.28
The map or model of reading I will put forward in this book consists of a
network of relationships between three major nodes: text, context and reader. In this
network, each node acts on and transforms each of the other two. A text addresses an
implied reader; a context produces an ideologically positioned reader; a particular
community of readers produces a socio-culturally informed reader; and these three
‘readers’ are not the same, nor is any one of them equivalent to the ‘real’ reader, although
27 Tony Bennett, ‘Texts in History: The Determinations of Readings and Their Texts’, The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language
Association 18:1 (1985), pp.1-16, p. 12.
28 Cf John Fiske, ‘Moments of Television: Neither the Text nor the Audience’, in Seiter, Borchers, Kreutzner, and Warth (eds) Remote
Control: Television, Audiences and Cultural Power (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), pp.56-75, p. 57: ‘there is no text, there is no
audience, there are only the processes of viewing’.
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all these ‘readers’ all interact with each other in the act of reading. So the book is
structured in three parts of two chapters: Part I, Text/Context, has Chapter One on the
way in which texts produce contexts, then Chapter Two on the way in which contexts
produce texts; Part II has Chapter 3 on the way in which texts produce readers, and
Chapter 4 on the way in which readers produce texts; and Part III has Chapter 5 on
contexts producing readers, and Chapter 6 on readers producing contexts. The
conclusion, ‘What Has Poststructuralism Ever Done For Us?’, argues that a
reconfiguration of literary studies around the idea of reception allows us to move on
from the impasse that Thomas E. Lewis identifies as coming from ‘the successive
demises of authorial intention, decidable language, and competent readers as guarantors
of literary intelligibility’.29 That is, since the 1960s/70s’ multiple interventions into
reading practices (including poststructuralism and deconstruction from France, Marxistinflected Cultural Studies from the UK, second-wave feminism from the US, and
‘reception aesthetics’ from Germany), the meaning of a text can no longer be guaranteed
by the author, the reader, or by a fixed set of meanings inhering in the languages or codes
of the ‘text itself’. And yet literary critics still sometimes talk as if they could be right
about books: as if the fact that Macbeth is, ontologically, not a murder mystery (although
we can read it as one) does not mean that it is also not, ontologically, a tragedy (although
we can read it as one). Literary critics, that is, sometimes seem not to know how to talk
about books without an understanding of the text as a scientific ‘object’ or datum, an
object about which we can make provable or falsifiable propositions. Unfortunately,
books are not this sort of object. But fortunately, even if literary critics don’t know how
to talk about books, readers do. My models here are Thurber’s American woman, Joanna
Russ, and the reading-group members that Jenny Hartley writes about in her book
Reading Groups:
For most people the point of the group is the talk, and they talk not in order
to coerce each other into a common reading of the text, but rather to enjoy
the diversity, the jolt of looking through another's eyes. ‘I hadn't seen it that
way’ is the mark of approval and satisfaction.30
What all these readers have to show us is the pleasure and the value of sharing readings:
not of proving or enforcing a single ‘common’ reading or ‘correct’ reading authorized by
the text, nor of producing a purely idiosyncratic and ‘personal’ reading which only
29 Thomas E. Lewis, ‘The Referential Act’, in Whiteside & Issacharoff (eds), On Referring in Literature (Indiana University Press, 1987),
pp.158-74, p. 161.
30 Jenny Hartley, Reading Groups (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p.98.
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repeats what the reader knew already, but of successfully communicating to another
person, not just my reading of the text, but the way I got there from the words on the
page. Communicating the creative processes of meaning-making which have enabled me
to enjoy a murder mystery against all the odds, or to appreciate a whole new tradition of
black women’s writing, or to see a familiar book in a new way.
What we talk about when we talk about books is not, because it cannot be,
books: at least not the book-itself, the book as self-contained, scientific object. When we
talk about books we talk about ourselves: our place in the world, the resources we have
for understanding and orienting ourselves in our families, our societies and cultures. We
talk about others: the others we meet in books and the others we meet through books.
We talk about the ways in which we make sense of books: the contexts in which we place
them; the experiences and memories we associate with them; the conceptual,
experiential, and affective grounds on which our own understandings appear legitimate;
the powerful cultural institutions which seek to authorize some readings and marginalize
others. So when we talk about books, we are doing all sorts of work: the work of selfunderstanding or transformation; the work of empathy and communication, of learning
how to understand what is of value to another person and (in practical and concrete
ways), how to see the world through other eyes; the work of cultural critique and the
transformation of institutions of meaning, as we disembed books and meanings from
their given or authorized contexts and re-orient them in ways which make available new
strategies for resistance, new resources for understanding the world and our place in it.
And that seems to me to be precisely what makes talking about books valuable, and – in
the end – it’s why I’m still here in the university, negotiating the timetables and the
administrative cock-ups and the difficulties with Blackboard, in order to get to a room
like this, a room full of colleagues, or students, and do what matters most to me: talk
about books.
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