Toward an Aesthetic of Reception

"I put them together because Jauss and Iser worked at the same university and led a movement – the Konstanz school. They both tried to theorise the role of the reader. They too were very uncomfortable – as McGann was – with the notion that meaning just inheres in texts and it’s the role of the professor to tell people what the text means. So they theorised what goes on in the act of reading. The reader, they said, is not a passive recipient of meanings on the page, but brings his or her own experience and ideas to the act of reading and to the making of meaning. Jauss is the one who invented the notion of “horizons of expectations”, which is an attempt to say what the reader already has in his or her mind before he or she encounters the literary text. I use “horizons of expectations” a lot in my book. Although the notion is a theoretical concept, I tried to apply it empirically with actual historic data and I found it works well. For example, we can appreciate how astonishingly liberating was the experience to the early readers of the radical works of Byron and Shelley – which, owing to a quirk in the copyright law, were sold at an extremely cheap price in huge numbers – when we understand that their previous reading, if they had had any at all, was texts of the rural religious culture of the previous century, which is all they would have been given at school and which presented an England that was as far from their experience as Virgil’s Georgics . We have here an example in which we can trace in detail, with quantification, the whole literary process from the writing of highly innovative works, through publication and sales, to readerships, and on to the establishing of a reforming movement which brought about real world effects. It is reception theory, and in my case, also practice. The theory aims to emancipate the reader, giving her or him the active role that we know from our own experience occurs. Reading is an event, a transaction. This does not mean that anything goes, and that there is no role for the critic in helping readers to understand how the author has achieved his literary effect, with allusions, historical context and so on. But it is possible to read without being convinced, even to read actively against the grain, to pick and choose which passages to give weight to. In particular, the reader normally has a good idea of what to expect before he or she starts – for example, what genre the book belongs to. With romantic fiction, modern bookshops arrange their shelves to alert buyers to exactly what to expect. For example, repeating the old familiar themes of happy endings, marriage, the rake reformed by the love of a good woman, and so on, as well as new genres which are constantly being added. That prefiguring, often through the external design of the book, also happened in the Romantic period, and it is condescending to the readers as well as unhistorical to think that they were not aware of what was going on and complicit. Iser, whom I knew quite well before he died a few years ago, was very much driven by the experience of Germany. He had grown up as a young man in the ruins of Germany and saw that the authoritarian way of teaching literature – that the professor knows what is right and the pupil writes it down and reproduces it – failed to encourage critical engagement and had been part of the explanation for why Germany had suffered such disasters. He tried all his life to devise a theory of reception which preserved the notion of value in high culture. So both he and Jauss talk about “aesthetic” but I think in English we would say “value”. Iser was not saying that all texts are of equal value – that Jeffrey Archer is as good as Shakespeare – but tried to find a theory that both gave an active role to the critically alert reader and preserved notions of cultural value. Personally, I don’t think he succeeded but he was trying hard until the last months of his life. But also, I don’t think we need to do that. I think we can separate the question of identifying and conferring value on some texts from the question I address in my book – how are mentalities formed by the reading of the past? The opposition is very much associated in the anglophone world with the English literary critic FR Leavis and an insistence that there is a canon of great works – Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Dickens and so on – and that this is the “great tradition” and it’s the role of an elite professoriate to preserve and defend it, and pass it on to the next generation. But that doesn’t give any role to the reader. Yes, as an interpreter. That approach, besides being authoritarian, underestimates the active role of the reader in the making of meaning, as the Konstanz school saw. And it is of no help in addressing the questions I am more interested in, such as: How did books and reading help to shape mentalities? Why and how do societies change? What are the historical processes – that must involve the competition between ideas being carried in material form – that have brought us, as societies, to our present mental states?"