5 Readers Reading

Books by Norman N. Holland

The First Modern Comedies

The Shakespearean Imagination

Psychoanalysis and Shakespeare

The Dynamics of Literary Response

Poems in Persons

5 Readers Reading

5 Readers Reading

NEW HAVEN AND LONDON, YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1975

Published with assistance from the foundation established in memory of Oliver Baty Cunningham of the Class of 1917, Yale College. Copyright &c.py; 1975 by Yale University. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, in any form (except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Library of Congress catalog card number: 74-26004 International standard book number: 0-300-01854-1 Designed by Sally Sullivan and set in Times Roman type. Printed in the United States of America by Alpine Press Inc., South Braintree, Mass. Published in Great Britain, Europe, and Africa by Yale University Press, Ltd., London. Distributed in Latin America by Kaiman & Polon, Inc., New York City; in Australasia and Southeast Asia by John Wiley & Sons Australasia Pty. Ltd., Sydney; in India by UBS Publishers' Distributors Pvt., Ltd., Delhi; in Japan by John Weatherhill, Inc., Tokyo.

To Jane Who koude telle, but he hadde wedded be, The joye, the ese, and the prosperitee That is bitwixe an housbonde and his wyf?

Contents

Preface

Blake has stated the problem this book addresses as succinctly as anyone.

Both read the Bible day & night,
But thou read'st black where I read white.

The question I would like to answer is: Why is this so? To be sure, Blake had in mind religious controversy as much as people's different readings of a text—

The Vision of Christ that thou dost see Is my Vision's Greatest Enemy. Thine has a great hook nose like thine; Mine has a snub nose like to mine.

As it turns out, however, people read the same text differently for the same reason they have different preferences in religions or in noses: themselves. Answering the specifically literary question involves answers—or attempts at answers—to some basic issues in human psychology. How do people react to noses or, more generally, things, beliefs, other people (like Christ), or literary texts (like the Bible)? How does personality or society, filtered through personality, affect our interpretation of events?

I did not wish so large a problem. I began this book innocently enough, only to investigate literary response and specifically to confirm or change the “transformation” model of literary response I published in 1968.1 I sat down with my colleague Joseph Masling, who had generously offered to help as a psychological consultant; we began to design experiments—and quickly ran into trouble. There seemed to me to be very little that would be “reliably reproducible” in the reading transaction. True, the literary text remained the same, but there seemed to be no meaningful way of relating one literary text to another as comparable stimuli. (The same genre? The

same length? Two poems about seashells? Two “oedipal” dramas?) And I knew from my experience as a critic and teacher that the most skilled readers can diverge markedly in their interpretations even of widely accepted classics. (Think, for example, of the controversies and sharply differing reinterpretations of Marvell's “Horatian Ode,” the Fourth Book of Gulliver's Travels, or The Turn of the Screw.) Of the usual methods of psychological testing—questionnaires, confirmatory judgments, the grids of personal construct theory, Delphi methods—none seemed really applicable to a situation in which each responder was as importantly unique as each stimulus and as each response.

I decided simply to fish for a method by seeing what issues emerged when I conducted more or less undirected interviews with a few readers who had taken standard personality tests. I still could not arrive at clearly testable hypotheses, mostly because I could not find fixed categories either for the reader or the work read or for what the reader said about his reading. Finally, then, this lack of method became itself the method, and I proceeded from the first exploratory group of graduate student readers to testing and interviewing a larger group of undergraduates from whom the “5 Readers” of my title come.

The major problem proved to be, not the interviewing, but analyzing the results. A simple procedure led to an extremely complicated problem of interpretation. Finally, however, this complexity subsided into a basic principle of personal interaction whose very simplicity adds elegance to its other claims on your belief.

Although this book concludes with a general psychological principle, its evidence comes from people's responses to literature—an early concern of mine that goes back past my adult and professional interests to childhood and no doubt stems from my own efforts then and now to cope with the interactions of people around me by finding generalizations from a safe distance. Professionally, I became interested in comedy and questions about why, when, and how people laugh. I was led, naturally enough, to Freud's theory of jokes, which impressed me for two reasons: first, it dealt with these miniworks of literature both in detail and totally, as aesthetically

formed and unified texts; second, it showed how the purely literary (or quasi-literary) experience worked in terms of larger explanatory principles that applied to other areas of human behavior as well (dreams, slips of the tongue, or symptoms).

If psychoanalysis worked so well for jokes, it should be possible to apply it to literature in general. When I turned to psychoanalytic criticism, however, I found it very mixed in quality. On the one hand, there were some truly exciting insights and startling correspondences between psychoanalytic experience and literary works. On the other, only a small part of psychoanalytic theory was being applied, and that within a very limited literary framework. Often, for example, literary characters were studied like photographic copies of case histories, a naive view of realism few literary critics would accept. Within psychoanalysis, little beyond symbolic decoding was being applied: the literary work was treated as a congress of phalluses, vaginas, and anuses, with token reverence to aesthetic mysteries, but no real attempt to analyze them or intellectual themes. Of the developmental stages, only the oedipal was applied to literature. As a result, the psychoanalytic critic could only talk about narratives or dramatic works that had father- or mother-figures, not poetry or prose as such. These procedures gave psychoanalytic criticism a very bad reputation in literary circles, which, I fear, it has not overcome even today.

Nevertheless, there were enough good insights from this school so that I wanted to explore it further, and I was very lucky at this juncture to be able to train at the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute. There I learned of other aspects of psychoanalytic theory and experience that were, by and large, not being applied to literature, notably those strategies for warding off anxiety and coping with inner and outer reality that I term, for brevity, defenses (instead of “defense mechanisms” or “defensive and adaptive strategies”). They emerge in literature as what literary critics usually call form, both in the larger sense of the selection and structuring of parts, and more specifically as rhymes, alliteration, stanza patterns, and the like. I thus found that one could use psychoanalytic psychology to talk about lyric poems and even nonfiction

prose, not just dramatic or narrative versions of the oedipus complex. I also learned more about the pre-oedipal stages, those desires and fantasies that have to do, not with oedipal triangles, but one-to-one relationships or just one's own body. These, it turned out, played the key role in lyric poetry and other literature that did not tell a potentially oedipal story. Even in narrative and dramatic works rich with father- and mother-figures, these preoedipal fantasies served as deeper, more pervasive versions of oedipal material, as they do with real people.

Thus, I learned that people's responses to literature involved a transformation by means of forms acting like defenses, of drives, impulses, and fantasies back and forth from the most primitive strata of psychic life to the highest. Given such a model, one could understand the social, intellectual, or moral themes people found in literature as the highest level of this dynamic and continuing process of transformation. One could explain the way readers respond to literary characters as though they were real people, when they are patently not real and often not even realistic. One could interpret the feeling people have of being “absorbed” or “taken out of themselves” when engrossed in literature: their processes of transformation meld with the exterior work so that they no longer perceive a difference between “in here” and “out there.” In short, drawing on other psychoanalytic concepts besides symbolism and the oedipus complex, notably defenses and the preoedipal stages, led to a complex model of literature-as-transformation, which in turn made it possible to explain a number of literary phenomena such as meaning, realism, the relation of the author's personality to his work, the role of embedded myths, the criteria behind evaluation, and so on. This model and some of its applications I set out as The Dynamics of Literary Response in 1968.2

At that point, I was again lucky: a substantial grant from the Research Foundation of the State University of New York made it possible to test this model, which I had derived fundamentally from a combination of psychoanalytic experience with introspection, and this book is the result of those tests. Essentially, Dynamics has stood up rather well, requiring

only the modification—or reminder, really—that psychological processes like fantasies or defenses do not happen in books but in people. Within that framework, one can see five readers who are the subjects of this book re-create the original literary creation in terms of their own personalities, themselves understood as continuing processes of transformation. Specifically, this book develops four principles governing the interaction of the reader with what he reads, but these four separate principles are themselves simply four different ways of accenting one more general and basic principle. This, it turns out, applies not only to reading, but to a person's interaction with any external reality, human or nonhuman. For example, in Poems in Persons, a shorter and more literary book I was able to write during the long gestation of this psychological and theoretical one,3 I showed how this one basic principle informed teaching, criticism, theater-going, and the very act of literary creation itself. Conversely, the same large principle seems to apply not only to interactions of people but to interactions by anything that can be said to have a style the way a person does: an institution, for example, or a culture or a nation.

Thus, the study of this one phenomenon, reading, may pay back to psychoanalysis the insight literary criticism has borrowed, giving as interest that long-sought passage that would open up the intrapsychic model of classical psychoanalysis to an interpsychic psychology. The psychohistorian, the object-relations theorist, the social psychologist, anyone concerned with the interactions of groups and individuals, may find in the act of reading the basic principles that govern the human activities he studies; for reading ever so curiously mingles person and thing and person and person.

A project as long as this makes one conscious of a great many debts and gratitudes of both a personal and an institutional kind. The Research Foundation of the State University of New York has supported this research most generously. Their three grants have not only made it possible for me to complete this work, but they created the fertile ground from which a major center for the psychoanalytic study of literature could grow. Throughout, my department has created, by its

tradition of openness to new approaches and methods, an atmosphere in which discovery could and did flourish, making us all something more than an “Eng. Lit.” department.

Among the many people who have helped, I am most immediately obliged to the “S s,” as they would be called in the regular psychological literature. I wish I could thank them by name, for they gave of themselves in the most generous sense. I can only hope this book will give them something in return as constructive as what they gave me. Dr. Allen Zechowy, then of the Meyer Memorial Hospital, now of the Department of Mental Health, Prince George County, Cheverly, Maryland, worked with the preliminary group of graduate students. Dr. Andrew Corvus of Children's Hospital (Buffalo) worked with a larger group of undergraduates from whom these five readers were selected. I am grateful to them both for their adroit adaptation of established testing techniques to this new problem and for the skill with which they were able to convey their results and conclusions to me.

During the four-year germination of this book, many people have contributed to it. I am especially obliged to Mrs. Virginia White, Mrs. Helen Walter, Mme. M.-J. Truelle, and Mrs. Joan Cipperman, who stepped in at particularly critical moments to prepare large chunks of the manuscript. In this book (as in Dynamics ) I am indebted to Sterling Lord who negotiated its publication. Whitney Blake and Jane Isay gave fine editorial guidance and encouragement. I am much obliged to Michael Brill for the astonishing diagram in Appendix A. Ms. Mary Z. Bartlett and Mr. Stephen Gormey helped create an immense bibliography of psychological studies of aesthetic responses. I am grateful to them and to Ms. Betty Jane Saik, who both by research and administration expertly steered the project over the greatest part of its course and set in motion the symposia and the research center that have developed from it. To her, not only I, but everyone working in the field, owes a debt.

Those who know this field will recognize how deep my intellectual obligations are to Robert Waelder, Erik Erikson, and Heinz Lichtenstein. In a more personal but no less incisive way, I learn something new about psychoanalysis each day I work with my colleague Murray Schwartz. I am grateful to my

colleagues in the Group for Applied Psychoanalysis (Boston), who heard an early version of these ideas, and the similar G. A. P. in Buffalo and its parent organization, the Center for the Psychological Study of the Arts, who have heard them many times. I am thinking of Barry Chabot, Paul Diesing, Murray Levine, Richard Papenhausen, Lucian Pye, Robert Rogers, Stuart Schneiderman, Mark Shechner, Arthur Valenstein, Howard R. Wolf, and especially Leonard Manheim, Bruce Mazlish and Abraham Zaleznik, with whom I have shared the excitement of psychoanalytic discovery for lo these many years. Their many helpful comments have guided me through a highly complex process of re-examination and revision both of my thoughts and this book.

David Bleich has done outstanding work in this field on which I have drawn, but I am particularly indebted to him for his long and careful commentary on an earlier version of this book. He enabled me to make a transition I found extremely difficult: from a concept of reading as the reader's partaking partially of a process completely but potentially embodied in a text to reading as the reader's active re-creation of the text based on the materials he finds in it (as described below in Chapter 5).

It was after having written Chapter 8 that I came upon my colleague, Paul Diesing's radical sorting-out, Patterns of Discovery in the Social Sciences (1971),4 which includes a searching and sympathetic understanding of the scientific status and the deep assumptions and aspirations within holistic, nonexperimental, case-study methods like those of psychoanalysis, literary criticism, and this book. I have added some references to his work, but footnotes alone do justice neither to the philosophical rigor and wisdom of his analysis nor to the encouragement he gave me for my own.

From the very first day of this project, Joseph Masling has magnanimously served as my psychological adviser. As it turned out, the book departs from his rigorous criteria for control and correlation, but it is a tribute to his educative mixture of firmness and tolerance that I understand the losses I am incurring by giving up experimental canons as fully as I feel the need to do so.

“ ‘That's all very hard to believe,’ she said at length, ‘but I do believe you, Buck Rogers.’ ” The words are Wilma Deering's, but they express admirably Jane Holland's amused patience, skepticism, and final confidence toward the “mad scientist” who sometimes emerged from my study. Dedication cannot express my appreciation deeply or complexly enough. Suffice it to say, I take joy in finding that this study of relations between people could not have gone on at all without our own.

1 The Question: Who Reads What How?

The story was William Faulkner's “A Rose for Emily,” and its one description of Miss Emily as a young girl was as clear as a description could be. The narrator, apparently one of the townspeople, says: “We had long thought of them as a tableau, Miss Emily a slender figure in white in the background, her father a spraddled silhouette in the foreground, his back to her and clutching a horsewhip, the two of them framed by the back-flung front door.” Faulkner has pictured the Griersons as exactly as a photographer would, but that precision quite disappears when the description passes over into the mind of a reader. It disappears even if the reader is as well trained and fairly experienced as the five students of English literature who are the subjects of this book. Sam, Saul, Shep, Sebastian, and Sandra (as I shall call them) all spoke about this “tableau.”

Good-natured, easygoing, dapper Sam singled it out as virtually the first thing he wanted to talk about in the story: “The father was very domineering. One of the most striking [sic ] images in the book is that of the townsfolk looking through the door as her father stands there with a horsewhip in his hands, feet spread apart and between or through him you see a picture of Emily standing in the background, and that pretty much sums up exactly the kind of relationship they had.” Sam was stressing the father's dominance and, in doing so, was positioning the townspeople so that they could see Emily between her father's legs.

This was part of what he found highly romantic in the story. “The frailty and femininity that that evokes!” he sighed. “Just that one frail, ‘slender figure in white,’ just those words there really show us the Emily that was and the Emily that might have been.” Yet, almost at the same moment he was responding to this lacy, feminine Emily, he could say, “The word ‘tableau’ is important. While they [the townspeople] may be

envious and while they may be angry at the way that these people act, they yet need it, it seems, they in a way like to have it, much as one is terrified at the power of a god and yet needing him so much and, you know, sidling up to him and paying homage to him and in the same way I think Emily comes to function as this god symbol.” A curious turnabout from frailty and femininity.

By contrast, Saul, a scholarly type, was circumspect. Sam, in his expansive way, trusted his memory, but Saul, when I asked him about that image, took out his copy of the story and read it over carefully to himself. “Ummm. I had remembered the word ‘tableau,’ and I had forgotten the rest of it. ‘Horsewhip’ there— rings— ‘spraddled silhouette.’ That seems right to me. That summarizes the relationship, I think. She's in the back in white, of course. I think of these white gowns in the plantation balls. The father a ‘spraddled silhouette.’ He's no longer stern and erect. He's spraddled across the door.” Saul was seeing Emily's father exactly the opposite way from Sam, as a weakened, sprawled figure, at least until he read over to himself the sentence with the horsewhip in it again. “A horsewhip suggesting all sorts of nasty, sexual, sadistic overtones,” but then he blurred that image. “Do they mean the horsewhip rather than his own stern demeanor? Or just the normal embodiment of his traditions suggests the decline like ‘spraddled’ does? And then ‘framed by the back-flung front door’ just completes the tableau. It's a nice device. Faulkner makes that one work, too. That's a nice emblem.” Well, maybe so, but Saul had so divided it up and dissolved it into questions and alternatives as to leave me quite puzzled about what he thought the thrust of the image finally was.

Shep presented himself as a rebel and radical, but his reading of the tableau seemed to me no more original or idiosyncratic than Saul's or Sam's. I read the passage to him, and he commented simply, “O.K. Protective image. That he's defending Southern womanhood, perhaps, and defending it in that same sort of mindless way that says, ‘Well, now, we've got to defend it.’ ” He went on to decide that Southern womanhood might well have defended itself and then to make a suggestion quite opposite to “protective image.” “You could, I suppose,

as an alternative interpretation say that the horsewhip is something which he's also adept with indoors as well as outdoors, but I don't think so. Maybe there's overtones that Daddy is sadistic enough—horsewhips being pretty sadistic things to carry around when you're greeting people, you know—that Daddy is sadistic enough where he wouldn't mind taking a belt at Emily once in a while, but I don't think they're much more than overtones.” In talking about the tableau as such, he talked only about Emily's father, and in this curiously alternative or opposed way. Earlier he had recalled Emily as a young woman (and the tableau is the only place she is so described): “I can see her as a very good-looking, dark-haired girl who had a penchant for wearing dark clothes.” Again, I sense in his substituting dark for white a will opposing the text, although at the same time, Shep said he liked this story very much.

Sophisticated, sardonic, somewhat cynical, a lapsed Catholic with aspirations toward aristocracy, Sebastian did not discuss the tableau as such, although he clearly remembered it in typing Emily as “the aristocrat of the Southern town, whose father is the original superego with a horsewhip, beating off suitors.” “He's denying her access to suitable sexual partners.” Often, Sebastian tended to distance and type the characters this way and to flirt with the actual, physical details. Here he saw Miss Emily as “the aristocrat,” her father as “the original superego,” but converted the “suitors” to “sexual partners.”

Sandra, the fifth reader, was a tall, very attractive woman, gentle and subdued in her manner. She liked the story intensely, had read it several times, and had even, in her freshman year, written a term paper on it. Yet she recalled the tableau oddly: “They said they always had this picture of him standing, you know, sitting in the door with a whip in his hand.” As for Emily, “I see her as very young and dressed in white and standing up, I guess she's supposed to be standing up behind her father, who would probably be looking very cross, say, if someone had come to call on her. No doubt, she would have a certain amount— Possibly fearful, but probably more regretful because she's being, they even say, robbed of something at that point.… There would be a great amount of strain

on her face because of her inability to do anything except just watch.” Sandra saw the emotional overtones in the tableau in a more subtle, empathic way than the four male readers did, so that she, too, had her own version of the image.

Indeed, one can say that each of the readers had a different version of Emily and her father. He was standing, sitting; erect, sprawled; domineering, weakened; sadistic, protective, and so on—sometimes even to the same reader. Emily was dressed in white, as for a plantation ball, or black; frail, but godlike; fearful, but “the aristocrat.” Some of these differences involve outright misreadings, but most do not. Conceivably, one could “teach” or coerce these five readers into consensus, but even so, whatever in each person's character originally colored his perception of the tableau would go on coloring his perception of every other element in the story. What is that something, that ineffable effect of personality on perception? That is the issue this book explores.

As the late Stanley Edgar Hyman once said, “Each reader poems his own poem.” Yet we know very little—practically nothing—about such “poeming,” about the way a reader recreates the literary experience in himself. Today's literary critics are expert in pointing out an essence for any literary work. Today's psychologists—particularly the psychoanalytic psychologists—are equally adept at conceptualizing the essential dynamics of individuals. Yet we do not know how literature and readers interact.

We can find out, if you and I apply to what Sam and the other readers said, a combination of the close reading literary critics have so skillfully developed in the last decades and psychological methods of reading from language to personality. We shall move slowly—sometimes we shall seem to go word by word—but once we have put psychoanalytic interpretation together with the literary critic's, we shall have established four principles that account for the way readers read to fit their personalities.

As of now, however, in the words of a recent book on the problem of literary response, “We know almost nothing about the process of reading and the interaction of man and book.”1 In a manner all too common in the world of belles-lettres,

however, the “almost nothing” we know tends to become complexity piled upon complexity, language explained by more language, authorities resting on other authorities—a splendid disguise of abstractions much like the emperor's new clothes. “Scholars and critics,” Walter Slatoff writes, “who would distinguish carefully between various sorts of Neo-Platonism, or examine in minute detail the structure of a chapter or the transmutations of a prevailing metaphor, or trace the full nuances of a topical allusion, will settle happily for mere labels like distance, involvement, identification,”2 labels that not only suffer from vagueness but deceive, creating the illusion that they refer to some real reaction people in fact shared and the critic in fact observed.

This tradition—assuming a uniform response on the part of readers and audiences that the critic somehow knows and understands—goes back to Aristotle's concept of catharsis, and his notions about people's apparently fixed responses to details of wording. Or this tradition might even have originated in Plato's assertion that poetry debilitates. Although the Greeks observed the phenomena that they ascribed to audiences better than later theorists, the tradition flourished after them, reaching a peak with the “rules” of the lesser neoclassical critics. Early psychoanalytic writers on literature followed, rather uncritically, this collectivist view from the litterateurs. Thus we find Otto Rank defending his oedipal interpretations of myths because, “The people imagine the hero in this manner, investing him with their own infantile fantasies.”3 Freud himself assumed a collective response to Oedipus Rex in the letter of October 15, 1897, in which he reported to his confidant Fliess, “I have found love of the mother and jealousy of the father in my own case too, and now believe it to be a general phenomenon of early childhood.” “If that is the case, the gripping power of Oedipus Rex, in spite of all the rational objections to the inexorable fate that the story presupposes, becomes intelligible.” “Every member of the audience was once a budding Oedipus in phantasy, and this dream-fulfillment played out in reality causes everyone to recoil in horror, with the full measure of repression which separates his infantile from his present state.”4

Everyone recoils? Freud himself avoided this fallacy when he studied jokes as a kind of miniliterature; they have a “frame” and a text with especially sensitive formal balances and a response. What would one think of a theory of jokes that always concluded, “and so you laugh” or “and so you don't laugh,” regardless of whether you did or didn't in fact laugh? After all, someone might have heard the joke before; someone else might be depressed; a third person might have no sense of humor, and so on. Indeed, responses to jokes are so various that, for a time, researchers (at Yale) were exploring a “mirth response test,” trying to sort personality types by observing which cartoons they found funny.5 Should we then postulate that responses to tragedy, something so infinitely more subtle than a cartoon, are fixed? No, and for some decades now we have, in fact, known the contrary.

It was in the 1920s that I. A. Richards asked his Cambridge undergraduates for the protocols that led to his ground-breaking Practical Criticism. 6 He asked his students “to comment freely in writing on” a series of poems, their authorship undisclosed. Richards found that these supposedly well-educated young Englishmen were evaluating very strangely indeed, misreading the plain sense of the poems, imposing cranky sets of preconceptions, responding in terms of stock sentimentalities, cynicisms, and other doctrines, as well as (perhaps) irrelevant memories. Richards, let us notice, was exploring his reader's conscious, verbalized responses to literature. Interested in education, he tended to concentrate on those parts of literary response that could be taught, and, indeed, his analysis of misreadings helped to reform, root and branch, the teaching of literature over the next four decades. Today, even among schoolchildren, one finds more sophisticated reading than Richards found among his jazz-age Cantabrigians.7

One would expect the giant entertainment corporations, with millions riding on each reel of celluloid, to have studied response far more carefully than impoverished English teachers could. But the published research in this field remains rather elementary.8 There are many studies of effect, but they move casually back and forth between the transfer of information, the fulfillment of individuals' needs (for example, to escape), the

impact on morality (typically delinquency), and immediate reactions of “like” and “dislike.” Indeed, the industry has developed machines—the Lazarsfeld-Stanton program analyzer, the Cirlin Reactograph—with which an audience can indicate its fluctuating likes, dislikes, and indifferences. Of course, such a device cannot sort out variables—one cannot tell, for example, whether a member of the audience is disliking the whole movie or just the “bad guy” in it. In general, this one-dimensional quality carries over to the analysis of the content of films. The most sophisticated scheme I have seen only gets to issues like “Main story type,” that is, “Is it a Western or a gangster movie?”, “Marital status and changes of leads A, B, and C,” “Sports (type and prominence),” or “Importance of part and characterization of unskilled labor.” I understand that much research in this field is kept secret because of its commercial value. If what has been published is an accurate sample, there would seem to be little reason to do so.

Such simple categories show that a study of audience response demands at least one thing: some sensibly subtle way of analyzing the texts, both the text the artist creates and the text of what the audience says. I. A. Richards had that, with his marvelous sense of language, but his experience showed a second tool one must have to understand audiences. Without a psychology adequate to explain individual responses, one does not know what to do with them except pass judgment on them. “We rarely concern ourselves, for example,” says Walter Slatoff, surveying the post-Richards critical scene, “with the problem of individual differences among readers.… On the few occasions we do entertain such questions we speak as though they were settled by reducing response to two categories—appropriate and inappropriate.”9 Thus, although Richards avowed a concern to maintain differences of opinion, he shifted the problem of evaluating poems to a much harsher dogmatism: passing judgment on “the relative values of different states of mind, about varying forms, and degrees, of order in the personality.”10

Had Richards had a usable psychology of individuals, he would have been able, presumably, to see how his protocols were reflecting personality at all levels, not just the teachable

surface of consciousness. Indeed, David Bleich has recently done just that: shown how some of Richards's protocols reveal the unconscious themes his Cantabrigians were projecting into the texts as part of their response.11 “It has become a matter of course that any item of human behavior shows a continuum of dynamic meaning, reaching from the surface through many layers of crust to the ‘core’ ”—thus, Erik Erikson,12 articulating with his customary eloquence one of the most basic and widely confirmed of psychoanalytic discoveries. Freud's earliest case histories showed it and so did this morning's experience in hundreds of clinics and consulting-rooms. I know, for example, how the style and subject and method of this book stem from very early experiences of my own and my whole present character, including various half-conscious wishes and fears. Although these unconscious and infantile sources are by no means the only ones, if so conscious an act as writing an experimental and theoretical book has strong buried components, I find it hard to believe that responding to a play, a movie, or a poem does not. And, of course, it does.

As the remainder of this book will show, readers respond to literature in terms of their own “lifestyle” (or “character” or “personality” or “identity”). By such terms, psychoanalytic writers mean an individual's characteristic way of dealing with the demands of outer and inner reality. Such a style will have grown through time from earliest infancy. It will also be what the individual brings with him to any new experience, including the experience of literature. Each new experience develops the style, while the pre-existing style shapes each new experience. And this style can be described quite accurately (but not, of course, impersonally).

In short, psychoanalysis offers a powerful theory of individual responses to literature, and it has done so ever since Freud's 1905 study of jokes. (Interestingly, in that very early study, he also showed how social and economic factors would affect the pattern of inhibitions an individual brought to a joke and so affect his responses, but indirectly, as they filtered through his personality.) Other writers have extended this first psychoanalytic aesthetics, Freud's theory of jokes, to other genres and to literature generally.13

For the most part, however, psychoanalytic students of literature, like conventional literary critics, have looked not at the actual individual reading but at the text, the words-on-the-page. Then they have posited a response on the basis of the text. Thus, paradoxically, the psychology that more than any other deals closely and intensely with individuals—psychoanalytic psychology—has in this instance retreated from the living human being, the spirit, if you will, to the letter.

By contrast, conventional psychological literature offers hundreds of studies that deal with actual readers but that suffer from a lack of theory.14 For example, physiological studies tell how heart rate, the electrical resistance of the palm of the hand, or its sweat pattern, vary as subjects watch a movie. Indeed, an Italian experiment even investigated the differing ways identical and fraternal twins fidgeted!15 But I find it hard to believe a single variable such as pulse rate or fidget frequency could represent a complex, multivariant transaction like a response to a film.

Other studies resort to personality tests, but I think it is not much of an improvement over the physiological approach to be able to say that reading gruesome passages from Edgar Allan Poe increases the anxious and aggressive responses to inkblots. Much closer to the method of this book is the study in which judges were able to match viewers' open-ended comments on a movie to their Rorschach responses. Again, however, the experiment merely shows the correlation; it does not suggest an underlying mechanism, only that “individual differences in the perception of a motion picture are a function of global aspects of personality as elicited by the Rorschach.”16 Different personality tests lead to similarly vague conclusions: “Movie attendance is related in some instances to the central aspects of personality.” A child's choices among stories “cohere with other observable characteristics of his personality.”17 Other studies claim to have shown that men watch the men in movies more than women do; that boys prefer adventure stories, while girls prefer stories about love, private life, and glamor; that children who are already pretty aggressive identify with different characters in a Western according to the degree of their pre-existing aggression, their sex, and the ending of the film.18

No doubt, these studies (and hundreds more like them) follow out admirably the canons of experimental rigor. As a continuing line of research, however, they end most inconclusively, to judge, if nothing else, by the number of experimenters who turn to the same old issues over and over again. Instead of coherent research, one finds random observations. What these studies may have gained in rigor they certainly lack in theory.

One returns then to literary and psychoanalytic studies, weak in experiment but strong on theory. Not always, of course. I do not feel that my understanding of the differences in readers' responses is advanced by a literary critic's introducing an “informed reader” with (also italicized) “literary competence” or even a more generalized “reading self,” who (or that) is roughly the critic's age, shares his ethnic background, “has experienced war, marriage, and the responsibility of children,” and so on.19 Some statements about response by literary and psychoanalytic folk do add more rigor and theory than these; some do suggest pervasive links between, on the one hand, the reader's personality (in depth) and his conscious reading skill and, on the other, his response. I am thinking of Morse Peckham's explanation of the effect of one's past aesthetic experiences on response, a theory supported by very detailed analyses from a variety of arts and corresponding to psychoanalytic notions of the role of the ego in art.20 Similarly, child therapists like Lilli Peller and Kate Friedlaender have shown how childrens stories reflect at a conscious level the child's unconscious fantasies, and therefore how the age appropriate to the fantasy determines the age at which a child will like the story. They, too, are showing a theoretical basis for combining the detailed analysis of a story with the depth analysis of the response.21

Such studies, in effect, deal with classes of readers. Psychoanalysis, however, is par excellence the science of human individuality (if there can be a “science” of uniqueness), and we would expect it to be most interesting about literary response when it speaks about individuals. However, it must then necessarily give up repeatable experiments. For example, a group of experimenters, in projecting films for hospitalized psychiatric patients, found that the viewers interposed

their individual defensive patterns between themselves and the film to keep the affect something they could tolerate. Hence, one could not assume that any given film would necessarily arouse certain feelings. Similarly, in an example of “poetry therapy,” David V. Forrest showed how disturbed patients responded to the well-known lyric, “Western wind, when wilt thou blow,” in terms of their several personality types, paranoid, schizoid, hysteric, and so on.22 These papers suggest structures relating personality to response (through defense mechanisms or diagnostic categories that combine defense and level of fixation). They do not, however, take the further step: going beyond types and categories to examine the work of art, the response, and the responder in detail.

One often finds analyses of the individual (but not the work) in case histories. Avery Weisman, for example, describes a rigid, obsessional man who could not face a sea captain's loss of authority in a movie and left the theater before the film's end. The whole setting—other patrons, streets, bodily sensations—seemed unreal to him: he had dealt with his guilt and anxiety by separating his intellectual processes of reality-testing from his conventional, pleasurable attachment to the dream world of the film. Edith Buxbaum, in a famous case, tells of a boy compulsively driven to read detective stories almost to the exclusion of any other activity. He was satisfying his aggressive wishes toward his mother by allying himself with the murderer. At the same time, he assuaged his guilt by feeling like the victim and also the detective. Thus his symptom served both defense and the gratification of instincts, and he became locked into it. Still more tragic was the patient of Gilbert J. Rose who committed suicide after witnessing a performance of Duerrenmatt's The Visit: he, like the hero of the play, felt himself the victim of a fantastically powerful bitch-goddess.23

Caroline Shrodes, however, has studied individual students' responses to particular literary works on the assumption that literary experience matches the therapeutic process: from identification and interaction with the work, to emotional catharsis, to insight into one's particular conflicts and relationships.24 Less clinically, David Bleich in a growing series of moving and perceptive essays has analyzed the responses

of ordinary readers, students usually, in order to elicit the unconscious themes of the text. In other words, he reverses the usual assumption of critics, that by analyzing the text one can understand the response; rather, he argues, by analyzing what readers find in it, one comes to understand the text.25 And he is right to do so. To analyze the text in formal isolation as so many “words-on-a-page” (in the old formula of the New Criticism) is a highly artificial procedure. A literary text, after all, in an objective sense consists only of a certain configuration of specks of carbon black on dried wood pulp. When these marks become words, when those words become images or metaphors or characters or events, they do so because the reader plays the part of a prince to the sleeping beauty. He gives them life out of his own desires. When he does so, he brings his lifestyle to bear on the work. He mingles his unconscious loves and fears and adaptations with the words and images he synthesizes at a conscious level.

It is, therefore, quite impossible to say from a text alone how people will respond to it. Only after we have understood how some specific individual responds, how the different parts of his individual personality re-create the different details of the text, can we begin to formulate general hypotheses about the way many or all readers respond. Only then—if then.

At the same time, however, the reader is surely responding to something. The literary text may be only so many marks on a page—at most a matrix of psychological possibilities for its readers. Nevertheless only some possibilities, we would say, truly fit the matrix. One would not say, for example, that a reader of that sentence from “A Rose for Emily” who thought the “tableau” described an Eskimo was really responding to the story at all—only pursuing some mysterious inner exploration. In the basic question of this book, “Who reads what how?”, there must be a “what,” and our next task is to find out what it is.

2 What? “A Rose for Emily,” For Example

The Model of a Literary Work

In “Who reads what how?”, the “what” has so far seemed little more than a shimmering of possibilities, a pre-text for the reader's creativity. The work begins in the psychological dynamics of its author, and the act of creating it fulfills those processes—for him. The work finds its fulfillment, so to speak, when a reader gives it life by re-creating the work in his own mind. The text as such almost vanishes in the astonishing variability of different readers' re-creation of it.

Typically, the dynamics in any given reader's mind will not coincide with the author's processes, nor will one reader's experience match another's, and even the same reader, we shall see, will respond differently at different times in his life. To be sure, professional critics often write as though they were establishing a “correct” reading, but the fact is that critics themselves disagree more than they agree. Evidently, therefore, one cannot posit even for highly trained readers a “correct” response in any given reader's mind to something definitively “in” the text. We can only understand what a particular reader has experienced after he has experienced it and put forth his re-creation and synthesis beyond his own private mind.

We can, however, set out what readers do in general and we can specify that with some certitude. More than two millennia ago, Aristotle pointed out that one thing audiences do is try to find a unity in what they see, a central theme or meaning or idea around which the various details of the play or story come to a focus. It is a time-proven idea of literary unity or explication that says, if such a formulation is correct, one can interrelate through it each episode, each trait, even each detail of phrasing in a literary work. As a standard handbook of critical methods puts it, once one has “identified the [central]

theme,” “the structural principle” of the literary work, one can “see the whole design of the work as a unity,” as “a simultaneous pattern radiating out from a center.”1

Stories, of course, do not present unities—only so many marks on a page. It is readers who provide the unity, and apparently for two reasons. There seems to be built into the mind a press toward unity. Freud, for example, remarks that “many experiences” lead him “to assert that the dream-work is under some kind of necessity to combine all the sources which have acted as stimuli for the dream into a single unity in the dream itself.”2

Further, readers seem to need such a centering, although they vary, of course, in the degree to which they feel such a need. I happen to be the kind of person who wants a sense of unity very intensely, while others are content with much more easy-going explications. But all readers need to “make sense” of a text to some extent. Otherwise they complain of obscurity and express varying degrees of discomfort and anxiety. Evidently, then, the organic unity in literary works, which is really a unity people create for the work in their own minds, serves some kind of defensive purpose for the reader. “Meaning,” that is, the act of making sense of a text, works as a defense against some source of anxiety.3

Each reader, therefore, will search out a unifying idea that matches his particular needs for sense and logic. Thus, one reader might see Hamlet as centering on the idea of human imperfection or failure, another as “about” the dichotomy between symbolic and real actions, still another as unified around an act of sacramental violence, and so on. Readers will press into service a great variety of ideas—moral, social, religious, or philosophical—to yield the classes and concepts into which they feel comfortable grouping the separate details of the work. And, of course, some readers have used psychological and psychoanalytic ideas—it is no accident that I mentioned Hamlet, the ur- example of psychoanalytic literary studies.

Freud found love of the mother and jealousy of the father first in his patients, then in himself, and then he was struck to find them in Hamlet and Oedipus Rex. Seventy-five years later,

we are no longer surprised. We have by this time inferred psychoanalytic ideas from hundreds upon hundreds of works. Only the most naive of psychoanalytic readers of literature, however, would claim that oedipal fantasies have the same status as “meaning” that more conventional interpretations have. It is one thing to say Hamlet illustrates Goethe's dark maxim that to act is to sin or the great Aeschylean theme of learning through suffering. It is quite another to say Hamlet is “about” the parting and coming together of father, son, and mother. Our feelings toward mothers and fathers come deeper than and prior to the ideas of Goethe or Aeschylus. They are prior because they come earlier in life. In adults one sees mostly derivatives of such early imaginings, rarely the fantasies themselves. They are deeper in the sense that, in most adults, such fantasies tend to be unconscious, closer to the roots of personality in the body than to more consciously intellectual ideas.

Stories usually do not present infantile fantasies as such. Rather we infer fantasies from stories on the basis of what we know from clinical experience. For example, we can infer from almost any Hemingway story its author's painful imaginings about threats to the visible, physical sign of a man's virility, fantasies all too familiar in American psychoanalytic experience. We can deduce from almost any Fitzgerald story his equally common and vexing fears about unappeasable hungers that can only be satisfied by unreachable women or unattainable sources of riches. Hemingway did not write about penises as such (at least not often), but he did write about risking one's manliness, and his fiction abounds in such visibly virile activities as hunting, fishing, bullfighting, and soldiering. Similarly, Fitzgerald rarely talked explicitly about mothers who frustrate, but he wrote story after story about immensely powerful sources of riches, success, love, or admiration that eventually let you down. What we know about human psychology tells us that these fantasies about one's body and one's parents are likely to be unconscious and primitive, while ideas about wealth or manliness are likely to be the adult, conscious transforms of those early fantasies.

Thus—and this is surely a commonplace after seventy-five

years of psychoanalytic studies in the field—writers create by transforming unconscious wishes from childhood. Most people who are not creative writers know this transformational process best through dreams. Freud notes:

Dreams frequently seem to have more than one meaning. Not only, as our examples have shown, may they include several wish-fulfillments one alongside the other; but a succession of meanings or wish-fulfillments may be superimposed on one another, the bottom one being the fulfillment of a wish dating from earliest childhood. And here again the question arises whether it might not be more correct to assert that this occurs “invariably” rather than “frequently.”4

Just as all people (not just writers or readers) have a press or tendency to form unities, they also have a tendency to transform primitive, infantile fantasies toward adult themes. And both writers and readers use stories to do this.

The reader uses the literary work to create in himself a dynamic psychological process that transforms raw fantasy materials to conscious significance. In this process, he makes use of two basic agents of transformation. One is the press toward theme and meaning, a transformation analogous to sublimation or symbolization in everyday life. Thus getting rich may come to symbolize for him getting the power to win the unattainable Fitzgerald heroine. He may represent in his mind achievements with the visible, physical emblem of manliness by fishing, hunting, bullfighting, soldiering, and the other virile activities that permeate Hemingway's fiction.

The other agent of transformation (besides the process of meaning) is that catchall of aesthetic notions, form. Critics define form in its broadest sense as “all devices that structure content,” but, of course, texts do not structure content—people do. Formal devices become part of the reading experience only as they become part of the reader's devices. If the process of meaning resembles a reader's sublimating, in using forms he looks as though he were using strategies from a more general set of defense mechanisms: putting dangers from inside outside or from outside inside, refusing to acknowledge them, trying to undo them magically, and so on.

In Hamlet, for example, I discover an elaborate set of doublings and splittings that divide my various feelings toward a father among several father-figures: Hamlet's dead father, Hamlet's remembered father, Hamlet's father as ghost, Hamlet's stepfather, Polonius, Old Fortinbras, or the Player King. My feelings toward women divide between earthy Gertrude and virginal Ophelia. I find Hamlet's attitudes toward fathers mirrored by the subplot around Laertes. In short, when I experience Hamlet, I feel the unified cluster of my ideas about parents and rivals transformed by being split up: I have purer, stronger feelings because they are isolated toward different characters and events.

In its most general terms, then, this model of literature as transformation suggests that the inanimate literary work is not that, not a work in itself, but the occasion for some person's work (in the sense we give the word when we speak of the “dream-work” or creative “work”). That is, a reader, as he synthesizes and re-creates a piece of literature, works; he transforms his own fantasies (of a kind that would ordinarily be unconscious) into the conscious social, moral, and intellectual meanings he finds by “interpreting” the work. When I experience Hamlet, for example, splitting familiar fantasies of love and hate toward fathers and mothers, I also find in the play generalized intellectual themes about the way thought and action split and work against each other. In almost any Hemingway story, I find my fantasies about the dangers of being helpless and unmanned transformed into a manly ethic of playing the game bravely and fairly in the face of inevitable loss—a loss I also feel in Hemingway's depressing plots and the way his reticent language withholds from me. In Fitzgerald's works, I sense another kind of loss, breathless, over-romantic exaggerations of language (as well as his depleting finales) from which I get a feeling of utopias undone, riches made unbelievable, feelings derived, in my mind anyway, from longings toward a parental source of well-being.

Once we have recognized that literary works provide the opportunity for psychological processes in the reader analogous both to the writer's original act of creation and to sublimations and other defenses familiar from couch or clinic or, for that

matter, everyday life in and around us, we are in a position to investigate response. We can begin to see how each reader creates from the literary work a psychological process in himself. We say we get absorbed in the act of reading or watching a film or play, but to speak of being “absorbed” by a book puts the metaphor the wrong way round. It is not the book that absorbs us; it is we who absorb the book. It is we who “devour” novels, who have a “taste” for science fiction, who are “insatiable” or “voracious” readers, who “take in” movies, who are “addicted” to murder mysteries or “sated” with academic novels, who find some writers a “treat” but end up being “fed pap” by “the tube.”

As these figures of speech suggest, we enjoy literary works in a mode derived from our most primitive experience of gratified desire, that stage in earliest infancy when we feel at one with the nurturing mother who satisfies our hunger. We also speak of “losing oneself” in a book or becoming “at one with the work of art” or being taken “out of oneself.” These familiar metaphors suggest a loss of self-consciousness or of a sense of one's own identity that also derives, ultimately, from that same at-oneness and merger with the earliest source of gratification.

“The work lives its own life within me,” says Georges Poulet; “in a certain sense, it thinks itself, and it even gives itself a meaning within me.” “Everything happens … as though from the moment I become a prey [sic ] to what I read, I begin to share the use of my consciousness with this being … who is the conscious subject ensconced at the heart of the work. He and I, we start having a common consciousness.” “When a man is ‘absorbed’ or ‘immersed’ in a story,” writes Robert Gorham Davis, “the work … is thinking him. His ego has become object, not subject.” “Let us observe ourselves,” says Ortega y Gasset, “at the moment we finish reading a great novel.” “An instant ago we found ourselves in [its place] with [its people], we were living with them, immersed in their air, their space, their time. Now suddenly without any intermission we find ourselves in our chamber, in our city, in our date.”5

Probably the most exact adult analogy to this state of mind

derives from hypnosis. The hypnotist's subject sets up a subsystem within his ego answering to the hypnotist much the way a reader uses a literary work to set up a process of transformation from it in his own mind. One can think of a kind of “core” in the reader's ego that is regressed to primitive, magical thinking (primary process, in technical terms) based on the fusions of infant feeding. Surrounding this “core” is a “rind” of unregressed ego. The “core” contains the process of transformation that is the literary “work” as performed by the reader. Meanwhile, the “rind” sustains that work by such “higher” ego-activities as putting letters together to form words, remembering what has gone before and anticipating what will come next, synthesizing characters and events, and, most importantly, analogizing from the reader's own experience to the people and episodes of the literary work.

This model—the reader experiencing the work as a transformation within himself of unconscious fantasy materials through form and meaning—comes from The Dynamics of Literary Response. It appears here much as it did in my earlier book, but with an important change in emphasis, something I have slowly learned from listening to what real readers say about their reading. I often spoke in Dynamics as though these fantasies and their transformations were embodied in the literary work, as though the work itself acted like a mind. This, of course, is no more than a useful fiction and maybe less. A fiction certainly. Useful? I now think not.

Processes like the transformation of fantasy materials through defenses and adaptations take place in people, not in texts. They require a mind, either the writer's or the reader's. As Proust wisely said,

In reality, each reader reads only what is already within himself. The book is only a sort of optical instrument which the writer offers to the reader to enable the latter to discover in himself what he would not have found but for the aid of the book.6

Proust's mot, like this whole model, tries to be universal and succeeds in being abstract. To make the model more tangible, to discover the “what” in “Who reads what how?,” we can

turn to a specific story, one that these five readers read. You have already seen one tiny part of their response, their comments on the “tableau” of Miss Emily and her father. Later, in Chapter 6, we shall see much more. At this point, however, I would like simply to show what a story looks like when understood by means of this transformational model. To do that, let us take Proust's counsel and look at what the story becomes in the mind of a sixth reader—me.

The Story: Themes

Evidently, a good many readers like what I like in “A Rose for Emily”—Faulkner's 1931 gothic vignette may be the single most popular short story in America. Anthologies by the dozens include it, as do textbooks and literature courses, while among the hundreds of teachers who must have taught this very short short story, at least twenty have published formal explications, developing social, moral, and intellectual themes from its details. Yet such conscious themes make up just the tip of the iceberg. Critics and teachers can use the story to achieve adult themes only because they also can use it to match defenses and adaptations and fantasies in themselves that reach back to the most primitive layers of their minds.

For me, the story's appeal comes from watching the artful way Faulkner “leaks” the final dreadful secret bit by intriguing bit. He begins with Miss Emily's death and the innocent narrator's recalling how the whole town went to the funeral of the old recluse who had shut herself away for many years in a decaying house on a deteriorating street. The teller of the tale goes on to a series of reminiscences: old Colonel Sartoris had remitted her taxes in 1894, and when the next generation tried to collect them, she faced them down. There had been a mysterious smell about her house that the town fathers had been too courteous to mention to her. Her father had chased suitors away with a horsewhip (in the “tableau” our five readers responded to so varyingly). Then, when he died, she had refused for three days to admit he was dead or to let the body be removed. She took up with Homer Barron, a Northerner and a day laborer, while the town speculated and gossiped

about their affair or engagement. Miss Emily stared the druggist down when he tried to get her to comply with the law requiring her to say why she wanted arsenic. She bought a toilet set for a bridal present, but then Homer Barron disappeared and Miss Emily became a gray-haired recluse, living by teaching china-painting to the children of the town aristocracy, never leaving her house, tended only by an old Negro cook and gardener. Finally, she died and, once she was buried, the men of the town found a sealed upstairs room all decked out in rose, as if for a wedding-night, then, on the bed, the rotted corpse of the poisoned lover, finally in an indentation on the pillow beside him, “a long strand of iron-gray hair.” And even knowing it is coming, I gasp at the appalling rightness of that final discovery.

Except for a few quibbles about the final clue as to when or how long Emily slept with the corpse of her lover,7 a question that I think cannot be finally settled, one can safely say there is considerable consensus about the basic contrast in the story.8 To be sure, different critics accent different forms of that contrast—I see three alternative ways of stating it: social, philosophical, and (less clearly) mythic.

Most critics speak of the tension in the story as social, between the South and the North, the old and the new, the traditional and the traditionless, and the gentility as against the middle or lower classes.9 As Irving Howe says, however, to take the story as dealing just with the decadent South (represented by Miss Emily) and the uncultured North (Homer Barron) is to make it trivial. He finds instead a larger parable about the decay of human sensibility from false gentility to genteel perversion.10

If so, I would generalize the story still further as a break-down of controls. Repressive rules give rise to violence,11 and society itself becomes so weak it cannot enforce its laws and principles. Emily can withhold taxes, refuse to give the druggist her reasons for buying poison, or keep a public nuisance (the smell). Finally, she can commit and get away with murder—her final attack on society's laws and taboos, which society accepts. Yet, as Austin Wright points out, Emily does not simply reject society: the bridal decorations and the murder itself

reveal a deep and lonely longing for marriage, which is a social institution.12 Such a view matches Faulkner's own statement that it is a story “of a poor tragic human being struggling with its own heart, with others, with its environment, for the simple things which all human beings want.”13

Other critics press these social readings of the story toward more philosophical issues. Ray B. West14 sees the subject of the story as a man's relation to time, the past as represented by Miss Emily and her father and the present depicted through the unnamed narrator and “the next generation with its more modern ideas.” Emily attempts, he says, “almost by force of will alone, to halt the natural process of decay and death.” Thus, West finds (as I do) the center of the story in its statement: “With nothing left, she would have to cling to that which had robbed her, as people will.”

West supplies an essentially psychological concept to unify Miss Emily's actions: denial, the defense mechanism that consists of the ego's refusing to perceive what it cannot tolerate. By clinging to the old (the very thing that had robbed her), Miss Emily denies the existence of what is new and painful: the deaths of her father and Colonel Sartoris, the authority of the new town officers—ultimately, “she denies Time, even to the point of ignoring … Death.” “Emily pretends that it, like the sheriff's tax bill, does not exist.” Similarly, she refuses to comply “with the requirements of the law, because for her they did not exist.”

Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren in their justly famous textbook take the idea of denial even further: “Miss Emily … is one of those persons for whom the distinction between reality and illusion has blurred out.” The dead lover seems still alive to her because she has lost “the distinction between illusion and reality, between life and death.”15 A denial of normal emotions, notes William Van O'Connor, invites a retreat into fantasy. Thus, one can see change or, more exactly, the denial of change as the story's central issue. As C. W. M. Johnson states the theme: “If one resists change, he must love and live with death.”16

With that remark, I can put together the social ways critics have accented the story with the philosophical (or psychological)

interpretations to make a transition to a third kind of reading. Miss Emily, by acting out social, moral, and metaphysical denials, comes to symbolize the entire social context of conservatism in the South; she becomes, in short, the mythic emblem for the whole community and perhaps all mankind. From this point of view, the descriptions of Emily as an “idol,” a church angel, and a “monument” take on special force, and Emily, in O'Connor's phrase, becomes “the mystery itself.” Brooks and Warren call her “a combination of idol and scapegoat for the community,” and they suggest that the story's comparison of her strained face to that of a lighthouse-keeper shows that the light she sheds on the darkness of human experience serves the same kind of public function mythic or religious figures do.

This view of her, at any rate, would accord with Faulkner's own: in rejecting a purely North-and-South reading, he said the story dealt with “the conflict of conscience with glands, with the Old Adam. It was a conflict not between the North and the South so much as between, well you might say God and Satan.… The conflict was in Miss Emily.…” Miss Emily, he is saying, comes to symbolize “man … trying to do the best he can with his desires and impulses against his own moral conscience and the conscience of, the social conscience of his time and his place—the little town he must live in, the family he's part of.”17

I also think Miss Emily is a symbol that, like the narrator, sheds a dark light into the polarities of the community around her. For example, the separation of the sexes. From its opening sentence, the story sharply differentiates the roles of men and women in the town: “When Miss Emily Grierson died, our whole town went to her funeral: the men through a sort of respectful affection for a fallen monument, the women mostly out of curiosity.…” Miss Emily separates the sexes, as does the narrator, yet one cannot tell whether the narrator is male or female, old or young. The narrator uses the first person forty-eight times, but always as “we,” never as “I.”18

Thus I feel the narrator, in some ways the most peripheral person in the story, comes to parallel Miss Emily at its center, for she, too, seems to me to be curiously androgynous. At first,

she is “a slender figure in white,” looking, even at thirty, “like a girl, with a vague resemblance to those angels in colored church windows.” When we last see her, it is with gray hair: “Up to the day of her death at seventy-four it was still that vigorous iron-gray, like the hair of an active man.” Brooks and Warren speak of her “tremendous firmness of will.”

She may even be one of those striking Persephonic figures that occur among Faulkner's women, holding in themselves mysterious forces of creation and destruction.19 If so, then someone might see the final strand of hair as analogous to the Greek ritual of cutting off and leaving a lock of hair at the grave of a beloved person, especially since this beloved dead person is named Homer.20 I would note, too, that the colors associated with Emily are those of the dread triple goddess (the colors Apuleius explains as being derived from the moon): black, yellow or gold, and red (here, “rose”). As a goddess of growth and decay, or the inconstant moon, Emily comes to “stand for” and ritualize for me larger entities: the American South or, ironically, all of us, as we reveal but fail to ward off the painful realities of time and change, all too horribly embodied in the final image.

The Story: Fantasies

When I stop interpreting so intellectually, however, and try to get at my “gut” experience of the story, I find I have a special feeling toward Miss Emily. She seems to me a sealed, opaque being, flat as a marble wall, but hiding within her something bizarre, wild, grotesque—and I want that something out in the open. No sooner do I say that, however, than I find myself associating phrases I picked out from various critics as well as background information from clinical psychoanalysis. Here, I have in mind a familiar and well-known symbolism—even so, the story spells it out. In “what had once been our most select street, … only Miss Emily's house was left, lifting its stubborn and coquettish decay above the cotton wagons and the gasoline pumps.” The adjectives make the house into what Miss Emily has herself become: “stubborn” and “coquettish.” Both Emily and the house are “monuments of the past” that

have persisted into the present.21 Twice the story calls Miss Emily “impervious,” an adjective that could apply equally to a house that no white person has entered for years, that has not even a mailbox or a number. Judge Stevens also makes the equation quite explicit: When the younger generation complains about the smell around the house, “ ‘Dammit, sir,’ Judge Stevens said, ‘will you accuse a lady to her face of smelling bad?’ ”

Another symbolism seems relevant to me here: the “rose” of the title.22 William T. Going wittily suggests that, given Faulkner's “subtle and gruesome treatment of odors in the story and the importance of the Grierson name, the title may well refer to Shakespeare's familiar lines from another tragedy of lovers:

What's in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.23

The symbolism both of the house and of the rose makes me feel as though the story were talking distantly and obliquely about the externals of a body that, later we learn, has a nasty secret inside it, dust and darkness and, most strongly, smells: “a close, dank smell,” “a thin, acrid pall,” a “dust dry and acrid in the nostrils.” Again, “It smelled of dust and disuse.” The smell “was another link between the gross, teeming world and the high and mighty Griersons,” and I'll even suggest that the adjective “high” conceals a particularly sardonic pun.

As I recite this litany of dirt, dust, and smell, I feel I am responding to the story, half-unconsciously, with a mixture of attraction and revulsion toward “dirty” body products. In any case, at an intellectual level, I recall that Freud identified a famous triad of traits: orderliness, parsimony, and obstinacy. All, he said, derive from holding on or letting go inner body “dirt” in response to outer demands, and I find all three traits in this story; although the orderliness is reversed with Miss Emily, not cleanliness but uncleanliness: smells, dirt, and dust. Emily is nothing if not retentive.24 Faulkner himself said simply, “She had had something and she wanted to keep it.” This theme of retention made sense for me out of one of the story's

more startling images, a description of the aged Miss Emily: “She looked bloated, like a body long submerged in motionless water.” “Motionless,” West points out, links her to the absence of change, but more specifically to the kind of stasis that swells a body up. This is a story—at one level and for one reader—about the difficulty one has in giving up prized things from a certain house (or body).25

Given the familiar psychological association of the precious and the “dirty,” I felt it fitting that some of what goes in and out is money: “the old thrill and the old despair of a penny more or less.” Miss Emily does not pay money out in taxes. Instead, she defies the authorities who demand that she do so. “She gave lessons in china-painting”—one could hardly find a more obsessional pastime. Further, to learn this art, “the daughters and granddaughters of Colonel Sartoris' contemporaries were sent to her with the same regularity and in the same spirit that they were sent to church on Sundays with a twenty-five-cent piece for the collection plate.” As early as 1907, Freud had pointed out the similarity between religious practices and bodily “duties.” This was even before he had brought out the special connection between parental control of inner physical products and obsessional controls of inner mental products and, indeed, of painting as a possible gratification of impulses to play with body products in an only partially controlled way.26 Thus, the religious images we considered earlier play a part in establishing in my interpretation one level of unconscious fantasy on which the story builds: Miss Emily as “a tradition, a duty, and a care,” resembling “those angels in colored church windows,” “an idol,” “an idol in a niche,” and after her death “a fallen monument.”

I do not, however, wish to give the impression that the only fantasy I find is at the level of controlling what is inside one's body—certainly not with a father like Miss Emily's. He is shown as penniless, violent, angry, having fallen out with the Griersons' only relatives. “We had long thought of them as a tableau, Miss Emily a slender figure in white in the background, her father a spraddled silhouette in the foreground, his back to her and clutching a horsewhip.” Obviously, such a father evokes a child's feelings of fear and desire

for him in Miss Emily—and in me. He dominates Emily, driving her suitors away with his horsewhip, and he continues his power, somehow, after his death. Even after her death, there was “the crayon face of her father musing profoundly above the bier.”

From this point of view, the father controlling and dominating what goes into and out of his daughter, the very center of the story again becomes for me the narrator's remark: “We knew that with nothing left, she would have to cling to that which had robbed her, as people will.” But Emily does more than cling to her father's body. After Homer Barron has apparently deserted her, she isolates herself, “as if,” the narrator comments, “that quality of her father which had thwarted her woman's life so many times had been too virulent and too furious to die.” He goes on to describe her hair as a “vigorous iron-gray, like the hair of an active man.” She is described as a “lighthouse-keeper,” as having “vanquished them [the town government], horse and foot, just as she had vanquished their fathers thirty years before.” Maybe Irving Malin is correct when he says, “Her passionate, almost sexual relationship with her dead father forces her to distrust the living body of Homer and to kill him so that he will resemble the dead father she can never forget.”27 But, for me, it suffices to say Miss Emily identifies with her father, taking on his iron will, his strength, and his brutality, regressing from the little girl's wish to have her father to the more primitive wish to be her father.

In this context, despite the scandalized townsfolk (“ ‘A Grierson would not think seriously of a Northerner, a day laborer’ ”), her faintly “dirty” and sordid choice of Homer Barron seems surprising but right to me. Because he is tabooed, he can be a substitute for her father, the original forbidden lover. The very disapproval of the townspeople becomes tempting because it re-enacts that first, disapproved love, even as it guarantees the lover is in fact not the equivalent of a Grierson. As Freud says, “The condition for forbiddenness in the erotic life of women is, I think, comparable to the need on the part of men to debase their sexual object,” both being ways of seeking “only objects which do not recall

the incestuous figures forbidden” in childhood; however, “these new objects will still be chosen on the model … of the infantile ones.”28

Thus, Emily keeps Homer's body as she tried to keep her father's. At the same time, her vengeful murder of Homer seems just the kind of thing her father would do; I feel she has incorporated much of her father's brutality in herself. There is, in effect, a man in Emily's house—or body—or mind. Even Faulkner tended to masculinize Emily in his description of the story to the students at Virginia: “the conflict of conscience with glands, with the Old Adam.” “The conflict was in Miss Emily,” including, apparently, Old Adam's glands.

By contrast, I feel, the town outside Emily's house sharply distinguishes men from women. The long opening sentence establishes just that: sexes are markedly different in this town, but Emily's house involves a peculiar combination of man and woman. “When Miss Emily Grierson died, our whole town went to her funeral: the men through a sort of respectful affection for a fallen monument, the women mostly out of curiosity to see the inside of her house, which no one save an old man-servant—a combined gardener and cook—had seen in at least ten years.” Similarly, in the remission of Miss Emily's taxes, “Only a man of Colonel Sartoris' generation and thought could have invented [the story], and only a woman could have believed it.” Colonel Sartoris was the one who “fathered the edict that no Negro woman should appear on the streets without an apron,” but in Miss Emily's house the servant is a male cook. The narrator repeatedly insists on calling her supervising relatives, “the two female cousins,” and, in general, it falls to the ladies to keep up standards in the town. “ ‘Just as if a man—any man—could keep a kitchen properly,’ the ladies said; so they were not surprised when the smell developed.” It is the ladies who get the Baptist minister to remonstrate with Emily about her relationship with Homer. The day after the father's death, “all the ladies prepared to call at the house and offer condolence and aid, as is our custom.”

To my mind, the town, by sharply differentiating the sexes, recapitulates the kind of outside control Miss Emily had when her father was alive and before she had incorporated his

masculinity into herself. Although Faulkner himself, as well as many readers, retained a vivid image of the delicately feminine Miss Emily, she actually appears in only one phrase, “a slender figure in white.” Most of the time, we see Emily as she appears to the druggist, “cold, haughty black eyes in a face the flesh of which was strained across the temples and about the eyesockets as you imagine a lighthouse-keeper's face ought to look.” “She carried her head high enough,” driving with Homer Barron, and the word is applied at least two more times to the Griersons as a family. “Miss Emily with her head high”—her body, again, matches the house itself, “lifting its stubborn and coquettish decay above” its sordid surroundings.

This kind of character, fixed on body products, Karl Abraham notes,

sometimes seems to stamp itself on the physiognomy of its possessor. It seems particularly to show itself in a morose expression. [Such persons] tend to surliness as a rule. A constant tension of the line of the nostril together with a slight lifting of the upper lip seem to me significant facial characteristics of such people. In some cases this gives the impression that they are constantly sniffing at something. Probably this feature is traceable to their coprophilic pleasure in smell.29

One could also, I think, trace it simply to controlling, “keeping a grip on,” oneself.

Certainly control seems to me a basic issue of the story, not only for Miss Emily, but also in the town from whose point of view we see her. Repeatedly, we hear about the forces of law in the town, and such writers as Erik Erikson have shown the close link between law as that which “apportions to each his privileges and his limitations, his obligations and his rights” and the “sense of rightfully delimited autonomy in the parents” at that stage of development so involved with retention and elimination, with holding on and letting go, with shame and autonomy, control and will. All these things are important in “A Rose for Emily,” particularly in view of what Ray B. West calls the “conflicting demands” of past and present.30

In the more modern period of the story, law takes the form of

institutions or groups: “the post office,” “them,” “the sheriff's office,” “the city authorities,” “the town.” It is a government of laws, not men. If there are men, they act on behalf of the law, as the mayor and the aldermen and the druggist do. In the older period of the story, it is a government of men, not laws, as government must appear to a child. It is Judge Stevens or Colonel Sartoris who controls, and this style of government is closely associated with Miss Emily's father. Thus, in describing the remission of her taxes, Faulkner uses the key word three times: “Colonel Sartoris, the mayor—he who fathered the edict that no Negro woman should appear on the streets without an apron—remitted her taxes, the dispensation dating from the death of her father … [and] invented an involved tale to the effect that Miss Emily's father had loaned money to the town.”

In many ways, like that “edict,” this kind of law seems to me more like a frightening unlawfulness, like her father's horsewhip or like justice in the Amerikan parts of America even today. Thus, the story shows a peculiar combination of violence with the weakness of the society in enforcing its principles against Emily. When Judge Stevens gets the Board of Aldermen to take the law into their own hands, “the next night, after midnight, four men … slunk about the house like burglars.” Similarly, her father is described as “that which had robbed her.” Then, if I think of the tenacity with which the South has clung to the “peculiar institution” that has cost her so much, I can find still another, regional dimension to the story's key clause: “With nothing left, she would have to cling to that which had robbed her, as people will.”

Predictably, Miss Emily adopts this being “above the law” as her own lifestyle once her father has died. She puts the person in place of the law, as her father did, refusing to recognize the sheriff's authority—“ ‘Perhaps he considers himself the sheriff’ ”—or the Board of Aldermen's. Instead, “ ‘See Colonel Sartoris. I have no taxes in Jefferson.’ ” “Colonel Sartoris had been dead almost ten years”—like her father.

Such a government counts on the pride and dignity of its Sartorises, Griersons, and Stevenses. It punishes by the opposite

of pride and dignity—like the aprons the Negro women must wear as a badge of servitude. Shame is a visual thing. Again, in discussing this phase of development, Erikson says, “Shame supposes that one is completely exposed and conscious of being looked at.” “One is visible and not ready to be visible; which is why we dream of shame as a situation in which we are stared at in a condition of incomplete dress, in night attire, ‘with one's pants down.’ ” In my reading, the control through shame occasions the many, many references to watching in the story, mostly references to the peeping, whispering, gossiping townspeople as they comment on Emily's actions.

This darkness and watching and shaming makes me nervous, but Emily seems unaffected. Indeed, she takes on a symbolic role as a result: “As they recrossed the lawn, a window that had been dark was lighted and Miss Emily sat in it, the light behind her, and her upright torso motionless as that of an idol. Now and then we would see her in one of the downstairs windows—she had evidently shut up the top floor of the house—like the carven torso of an idol in a niche, looking or not looking at us, we could never tell which.” As the lighthouse-keeper, watching and watched, she becomes for me the visible symbol of an old “tradition” that based its hard training heavily on shame, like the educational systems of certain primitive peoples.

As Erikson notes, “Visual shame precedes auditory guilt,” has more of the primitive about it, just as the Sartorises' and Stevenses' system of government does. Emily, ultimately, is not a well-governed person. “Too much shaming,” says Erikson, “does not lead to genuine propriety but to a secret determination to try to get away with things, unseen—if, indeed, it does not result in defiant shamelessness.”31 Emily is both, shameless with Homer alive, secret with him dead. “Already we knew that there was one room in that region above stairs that no one had seen in forty years,” and the participle I have underlined strikes me as psychologically exact.

Control, particularly control based on shaming, plays an important part in the stage of development in which the

child learns to control his body products. It is important, too, to adults with characters fixated to that phase. And it is important to this story. Yet, as in Freud's original formulation, the most central issue of all is possessing or, in Erikson's phrase, “holding on and letting go.” In this story, I feel that to love is to possess someone the way one would possess a thing. Emily holds on to Homer's body as, earlier, she had held on to her father's body. By contrast, I feel Homer's careless love is foreshadowed in the way he doesn't even own his horses but has to rent them from the livery stable. Emily takes possession of him by gifts: a nightshirt, a toilet set, and evidently at least the promise of herself. Conversely, it seems to me, to be loved is to be possessed like an object. Thus, the language of the story links love and death in “the tomb … decked and furnished as for a bridal,” in “the long sleep that outlasts love … [that] had cuckolded him.”

Always, however, in experiencing this story, I found I had in mind a parental figure (Emily's father, the narrator, or the town) who presides over what goes into and out of Miss Emily's house—or body. Erikson calls it the “battle for autonomy”:

If outer control by too rigid or too early training persists in robbing the child of his attempt gradually to control his bowels and other functions willingly and by his free choice … [among other outcomes, he may] pretend an autonomy and an ability to do without anybody's help which he has by no means really gained.

This stage, therefore, becomes decisive for the ratio between loving good will and hateful self-insistence, between cooperation and willingness, and between self-expression and compulsive self-restraint or meek compliance.32

Miss Emily, like a child being trained, vacillates between shameless defiance of that authority (when it is the town) or totally introjecting its demands and complying with them (when it is her father). Against the parent trying to regulate a child's feces, Dr. Spock notes, the child is “apt to fight in rage and terror, as if he thought he was going to remove a very part of his body,” or at least he will become “worried to see this

object, which he considers part of himself, snatched away.”33 This is another sense in which I find central this statement: “With nothing left, she would have to cling to that which had robbed her, as people will.” It is more than just a bad pun to say Miss Emily is a possessive woman. Miss Emily had “incorporated” or “introjected” the harsh controls based on pride and shame that her father embodied. Holding his body and Homer's, retaining them inside her house or body, is the outward sign of an inward adaptation. So also, I would guess, is her having become obese—a sign of incorporation at the beginning as well as retention at the end of her digestive mind and body.

To this highly specialized reading of the story, I associate an odd detail—Faulkner's handling of the voices. Fenichel sums up one psychoanalytic theory about speech: “The function of speech is frequently connected unconsciously with the genital function, particularly with the male genital function. To speak means to be potent; inability to speak means castration.” Thus, virile Homer is associated with “a lot of laughing”; he was “a big, dark, ready man, with a big voice.” “The little boys would follow in groups to hear him cuss the niggers.”

By contrast, Emily's “voice was dry and cold,” and, as for the Negro manservant, “He talked to no one, probably not even to her, for his voice had grown harsh and rusty, as if from disuse.” Fenichel suggests that some of the feelings associated with putting excrement forth may become attached to the putting forth of words. Thus Miss Emily's taciturnity may be still another of her retentions; the Negro's, part of his utter subservience. The story shows still another significance Fenichel gives for speech: “In dreams, to speak is the symbol of life, and to be mute the symbol of death.”34 Thus, in a marvelously chosen adjective, we see Homer's “two mute shoes” in the sealed bedroom.

These references to speech and the voice—though only a small series of images in the story—nevertheless trace out the central psychological pattern I create from it. I find myself imagining the story in terms of going in or coming out, in several senses. That is, Miss Emily's father restricts the suitors who can enter her house (and thus her body). When she is

deprived of sexuality, Miss Emily, and the story as a whole, seem to me to regress to a stage prior to male-female comparisons. She will hold on to what she has: first her father; then her father's tradition and style; finally, Homer Barron, the man who would have robbed her. (There may even be a play on “robber baron.”) In contrast, then, to big-voiced Homer, who puts out sound freely, Miss Emily's silent house signifies the attempt to hold things in. He represents to me the new freedom from the North; she, the attempt to keep things as they are in the South, to stop process and change—a kind of social constipation.

The Story: Transformations

Intimately related to the fantasies I find in the story about controlling what a body has inside it are the defenses that I see developing and transforming those fantasies. As I look at my interpretation of the story, I find I have ordered it by forms that resemble two well-known defenses: denial and incorporation, refusing to perceive painful things (here, pressures to change) or keeping something precious by holding it within one's body. In more literary terms, a major agent of transformation for me is the narrator. He helps me to deny in that he controls what I know about the plot, and he incorporates materials in that he holds back the ghastly secret in dear Miss Emily's house until the end. He controls not only what I perceive but when I perceive it. As for me, however, I feel these defenses at work still more strongly in the character of Miss Emily.

Many of the regular explicators of the story called her resistance to change the central theme, whether one regards change in the specific context of the American South or in a larger, more philosophical way. In psychoanalytic terms, I think they are discovering Miss Emily's adaptive strategy (or maladaptive, really) of denial. She denies time, the law, and even death. “The distinction between reality and illusion has blurred out.”35 Miss Emily simply acts as though the “next generation,” “newer generation,” “rising generation,” did not exist. She lives where she does despite the change in the street. She writes on “paper of an archaic shape.” She becomes fixed

like “the carven torso of an idol,” and “thus she passed from generation to generation.” She becomes “a tradition, a duty, and a care.”

As I read its acceptance of her, the town incorporates this idol in a miniature version of Miss Emily's more drastic incorporation—one way the story generalizes into “Southernness.”36 The town copies Miss Emily. She keeps in her house the crayon portrait of her father, while the townspeople “had long thought of [both Miss Emily and her father] as a tableau.” Miss Emily has for me a mythic dimension: the goddess slaying the year king, Homer, or her father, whose body she retains for the canonical three days. These Persephonic images become the feebly feminine religion of the “ladies” in the town.

In the same way, I feel the town goes along—up to a point—with Miss Emily's denial of her father's death. “We did not say she was crazy then. We believed she had to do that.” Similarly, the townsfolk accept her becoming a recluse “as if that quality of her father which had thwarted her woman's life so many times had been too virulent and too furious to die”—a miniature version of Miss Emily's denial of his death. The townsfolk believe, “ ‘they are married,’ ” then become curiously silent on the subject when Homer disappears—again, they use a less mad version of her own denial. Ruth Sullivan has found a great many ways in which the narrator in particular parallels Miss Emily, as the watcher parallels the watched: for example, his opening sentence about entering the house corresponds to the final breaking into the sealed bedroom.37 In general, he shares much of her pathology—as indeed one would expect (because the same fantasies and defenses permeate all parts of the story in any given reader's reading).

In all this doubling of Miss Emily's adaptations I am seeing what Ludwig Jekels long ago called “the duplicated expression of psychic themes.” In my reading, both the town-narrator and Emily act out a combination of two defense mechanisms: denial and incorporation. The problem they must deal with is change. In external reality, the old is passing and being replaced by the new. Emily (and, in a more muted way, the town) deal with it in one of two ways.

The first is denial: she will say there is no new thing in external reality, as with the taxes, the mailbox, or the druggist. The second is incorporation: I still have the old thing inside me (in my mind or in my house or in my body). This defense takes its most drastic form in Miss Emily's keeping her father or Homer in her house, less drastically in her treating marriage as a possession or keeping the crayon portrait of her father. The townsfolk share this defense by their interest in what they take to be something precious or secret in the house, to be watched or approached “like burglars.”

These two defensive strategies correspond quite neatly to the developmental sequence of the fantasies I found. Consider incorporation. At the level of sexual longings toward a tabooed or parental figure, Miss Emily holds onto her father and her tabooed lover. At the level concerned with differentiating male from female, Miss Emily acquires manly force. She succeeds, at the next level, in holding something precious inside herself against outside and inside pressures to let it go. Finally, at the deepest level of taking the things you want into yourself, Miss Emily takes Homer, the South takes Miss Emily, and so on. Clearly, all these are forms of incorporation, and all involve loving something.

I have, however, also found equivalent levels of aggressive fantasy. She defeats the taboo on a forbidden lover, having and destroying him. At the level of sexual difference and the battle of the sexes, this woman not only avoids being overcome by a strong male, she overcomes him. She defies (by withholding from them) outer authorities and controls that demand she give up the precious thing within her. At the most primitive level, she consumes and eviscerates a loved person. These are all forms of aggressive attack on outside forces felt as coercive or controlling. In effect, Emily gets rid of the parts of external reality she doesn't like—as denial does. By denying the requirements of the law, she destroys the law.

My reading, then, comes to two defensive strategies, several levels of unconscious fantasy, both loving and aggressive, and four ways of stating the conscious theme of the story. Such variety calls for as clear an exposition as I can give, and with appropriate reservations I think a chart would help:

A Transformational Core
for “A Rose for Emily”

In effect, the chart sets out the spine of “centers” that I am using to organize my experience of the story as a whole at every level. For me, as for many other critics, “A Rose for Emily” pivots on the issue of change and resistance to change, or (if we take into account the rich variety of unconscious themes) perceiving change as robbery and resisting that robbery by taking into oneself the outer being that seeks to force you to change. One conscious component of such a theme is the historical issue of South and North. Another is Miss Emily as the Persephonic goddess, traditionally both creator and destroyer, but in this story a lifeless and motionless monument pitted against social and industrial forces of progress.

Just as central, I think, is the story's own statement that “with nothing left,” that is, with realities denied, people will “cling to”—incorporate—“that which had robbed” them, that is, the outer forces seeking to control and force them. I will cling in fantasy to that which has robbed me of reality —almost a direct statement of the way the defenses I find of incorporation and denial match the various levels of fantasy. To me, Emily becomes like her father. Then she destroys the tabooed lover's external reality and incorporates him in the house of her body. She becomes strong and masculine enough to conquer the father-lover who seeks to overcome her. She retains, inside her, the dirty but precious contents of her life despite external pressures to let them go. In terms of feeding, her body grows fat as she incorporates, while Homer's body is thinned into a skeleton. The sealed bedroom is depleted. It holds a secret stillness and quiet, while I feel I am left to create in myself the sights and sounds of the sex and the death-agony on the fatal night. Finally, the story withholds its secret from me, and I have to project my imaginings into the last scene.

In this last way, then, the story seems to me again to ask for an interpretation in terms of going in and coming out, but again (I hasten to add) this is my re-creation of the story. We come back to the question from which this chapter began.

What: Subjectivity and Objectivity

The pages above are my reading of “A Rose for Emily.” The fantasies and themes, defenses and transformations I have

described come from the ways my character structure absorbed the story. I re-created “A Rose for Emily” by means of a personality that combines a passionate desire to know about the insides of things with an equally strong feeling that one is, finally, safer on the outside. I have read Faulkner's story with the same mind that delights in photography and movies because they are surfaces that come out of the dark to reveal a reality behind them—yet never cease being surfaces. I read “A Rose for Emily” with a mind still heavily committed to the not-so-new New Criticism (because it explores depths by confining itself to the surface verbal texture), with the same mind that analyzed Restoration comedies (in my first book) as demanding that surface appearances fulfill and complete inner nature rather than mask it, or with the mind that (in this book) probes the depths of literary response but from a position neither “in” psychoanalysis nor “in” literary criticism. In short, interpreting “A Rose for Emily” by a theme of going in and coming out expresses my character just as any of my other activities does.

Naturally, I have supplied evidence for my reading, but as we shall see when we consider the other five readers reading this story, evidence or no evidence, the way one puts a story together derives from the patterns and structures in the mind one brings to the story. Someone else reading it, even from a psychoanalytic point of view very like my own, can arrive at conclusions rather different even though they draw on just as much evidence from the text. Indeed someone, Ruth Sullivan, has done just that.38 The problem is not to decide which of us is right or wrong. Obviously, I am right for me and Ms. Sullivan for her, and either of us—or neither of us—might be right for someone else. The point is to recognize that stories (or evidences from stories) do not “mean,” in and of themselves. They do not fantasy or defend or adapt or transform. People do these things, using stories as the occasion (with more and less justification) for a certain theme, fantasy, or transformation. The problem then becomes understanding, not the story in formal isolation, but the story in relation to somebody's mind. Not a mind hypothesized, hypostatized, assumed, posited, or simply guessed at—as we shall see, we can only work with real minds in real people.

All readings originate in the reader's personality—all are “subjective” in that sense. Some readings take close account of the words-on-the-page and some do not, but no matter how much textual, “objective” evidence a reader brings into his reading, he structures and adapts it according to his own inner needs. (Otherwise, if interpretation flowed structurally or necessarily from the text, why would critics sign their work?)39 It is, as we shall see, impossible to subtract the subjective elements in a reading from the objective, for each helps create the other. Or, more precisely, a reader responds to a literary work by using it to re-create his own characteristic psychological processes.

Knowing this, however, I feel lost in a paradox that, characteristically, I find discomforting. New Criticism turns out to have been Old Subjectivity. A reader reads something, certainly, but if one cannot separate his “subjective” response from its “objective” basis, there seems no way to find out what that “something” is in any impersonal sense. It is visible only in the psychological process the reader creates in himself by means of the literary work.

We are not without a general principle, however. No matter who the reader is or how he reads, what he reads will take the general form revealed by this model: a fantasy transformed by defenses and adaptations to give pleasure and unity and meaning. But what fantasies and which defenses and adaptations he can use to achieve pleasure, unity, and meaning depend on his pre-existing personality, the fatality of defense and adaptation he brought to the literary experience. “What” the reader reads is finally, “what the reader reads.” One can only find out in detail what the “what” is in “Who reads what how?,” by analyzing the other parts of that question: “how?” and “who?” And so we shall.

3 How? The “Experiment”

There are two senses, one general, one special, to the “how” in our basic question, “Who reads what how?” In a general sense, “how” refers to the principles that inform all people's reading, and that “how” is the big question this book addresses. “How” in its more special sense refers to the conditions under which five particular readers did in fact read some short stories, and it is much easier to answer.

The “Experiment”

I simply brought a certain number of readers together with some literary materials, mostly short stories, to see what they would say about them. I began in an exploratory way with a small group of graduate students in English from my own university and finished with a somewhat larger group of undergraduate English majors from a neighboring college. (The “five readers” reported here came from this younger group.)

All my readers had volunteered. I circulated a questionnaire asking those interested in participating (for a modest wage) to fill in their name, address, and age, and also the names of some writers they liked. I chose those volunteers who mentioned writers whose works went beyond the ordinary reading lists of a literature curriculum but did not seem to be faddish or outré. I was hoping for sincerity and frankness. For this reason I preferred literature majors because they were used to voicing their reactions freely to literary works—whether those reactions were favorable or unfavorable, conventional or unconventional. Nonstudents or students from other disciplines often feel challenged to prove their cultural mettle and try to come up with the “right” answer. At least in the preliminary stages, since I was not working statistically, I decided there was no need to average across a spectrum of ages, genders, occupations, and so on. If I could discover the dynamics of response

for this group, the same principles should hold, mutatis mutandis, for anyone. I have since found no reason to change this decision.

Although we occasionally talked about poems, plays, or films, I felt short stories would be most likely to elicit frank, uncomplicated comments. I tried, too, to pick stories that were not too difficult to interpret—you can see all too clearly in the readings of the Hemingway story in Appendix B what obscurity of theme does to readers. Trying also to avoid “stock responses,” I chose stories that were neither respectably old nor fashionably new. Thus, although these readers would sometimes talk about classics like Dickens or Defoe or moderns like Cohen or Kesey, I focused the interviews on ten rather familiar stories of a few decades ago: Joyce's “The Dead,” for example, or Mann's “Mario and the Magician,” from a well-known anthology.1 Here, I will report readings just of William Faulkner's “A Rose for Emily,” F. Scott Fitzgerald's “Winter Dreams,” and Ernest Hemingway's “The Battler.” I first chose these to write about because I thought they represented three distinct categories of fantasy (in a psychoanalytic sense), and the responses to them should have differed accordingly.

I began, in other words, hoping to do an “experiment” in stimulus and response, complete with rigorous hypotheses, predictions to be confirmed or not, measurement, repeatable data, isolation of the experimenter from his material, and so on. I thought I could work with objective tests like questionnaires that could be analyzed statistically. Abruptly, and rather painfully, I realized that none of this fit the problem.

It has been hard for me to get beyond the simple stimulus-response model that some psychological systems offer. As a rather positivistic person, I find it an attractive simplification, and it is the model that I, like most literary critics, almost automatically assume. Literature “does something” to its reader. From this point of view, a story is a stimulus that elicits a certain response. Within the story, any given element, a character, an episode, a theme, a sequence of images, even particular words or rhythms, cause certain reactions in the reader.

Again, from this point of view, if a story is a “stimulus,” one's first impulse is to say the “response” is what the reader

feels at the time he reads the story. We have already glanced at a number of studies that try to measure feelings by hormone concentrations, heart rate, fidget frequency, and the like. As a practical matter, however, I did not regard galvanic skin reactions or palmar sweat patterns as useful indicators of response, and therefore I concentrated on the words my readers spoke. “Feelings” should be expanded to include “thoughts” as well, and one could also wonder whether one must limit responses to those “at the time.” After all, sometimes a reader changes his mind in retrospect. Certainly the teaching of literature aims at sophisticating responses beyond that first impulse. It seemed I had to be interested generally in the interaction of a person with a story, and anything that was part of their relationship had to be counted as part of “response.”

The very notion of a “response” presupposes a fixed stimulus, the “words-on-the-page” that formalist critics have examined so rewardingly these last few decades. The more I worked with real readers, however, the more I was reminded that a literary work is not a fixed stimulus. Rather, each reader must give the words meaning, and he can only give them the meanings they have for him. It is he who fills in the outlines to give characters appearances, ages, manners, or personalities. In our “tableau,” for example, despite the particularity of Faulkner's description, it is left to each reader to assign Miss Emily and her father relative positions in the picture—her an expression, for example, or him a posture. In all stories, it is the reader who fills in motivations, themes, and plot continuities in order to bring the parts he has already experienced to bear on each new experience. To be sure, critics often make “objective” statements about works: “In ‘A Rose for Emily,’ we only see the young Emily once.” “Emily does not want to obey the law and tell the druggist why she wants poison.” “The narrator always talks as ‘we.’” But a critic or reader says these things because he thinks they are important to his personal synthesis of the story. Another critic would single out other features.

We come back again, then, not to a “response” one can easily experiment with, but to what the reader said about his reading as a clue to a complete transaction. Accordingly, I gave

up attempts at questionnaires and group experiments with statistical possibilities. I settled down to work in an informal way with a few subjects. I have given them names here that are recognizably human, although not their own: Sam, Saul, Shep, Sebastian, and Sandra. The alliteration testifies to an ex-engineer's lingering nostalgia for the rigor of statistical work with objective S s that so sternly commands attention in the psychological journals. But, in fact, I tried not so much to experiment as to empathize with and understand these readers' personal re-creations of the literary work.

I met weekly with each reader for a tape recorded interview of an hour or so on a story that we had agreed the previous week he would read. Each subject, of course, knew the interview was being recorded, watched me turn the machine on and off, and each also knew I was having the tapes transcribed. I tried to get each reader to say as much as he could or would about the story, either in statements he volunteered or in answers to my questions. Over and over again, I would ask, “How do you feel about” characters, events, situations, or phrasings, but I also had certain fixed questions for each of the stories. For example, in “A Rose for Emily,” I would ask, “What do you think happened on the fatal night?” or, “Do you feel that Miss Emily took on some of her father's characteristics as she grew older?” I tried to predict my readers' answers to these fixed questions before our meetings. I would ask impromptu questions to draw out more material on a given point. Usually, I asked each reader to retell the story in his own words, although I had to give up that procedure for the more talkative subjects like Sam. Sometimes I would ask them about a specific passage that I read from the anthology. Sometimes they would ask me to read something to them or they would reach over and take the book from me in order to refresh their recollection. And some readers (like Saul) habitually brought the book with them to make sure what they were saying corresponded exactly to the “words-on-the-page.”

By so informal a procedure I was hoping to get out free associations to the stories. I tried very hard never to express shock or surprise or annoyance or any sense that there was a “right” reading. I did try—always—to get the readers to say as

much as they would about a given feeling or point or story until it seemed exhausted. And I did assume that, by and large, what my readers said about their feelings at the time they read the story was true, but this was not essential. Free associations are like the retelling of a dream—an invented dream will express its teller's mind just as a real dream will. So long as a reader was talking fully and easily, it did not matter whether he was recalling his emotions correctly or even if he was disguising them or making them up to suit my professorial mien—free associations reveal the act of synthesis and creation behind them. The reader's words held what I was looking for.

Thus, it was not necessary to compensate for what was, to me, a most startling process of filtration, the shift of face-to-face interview into written transcription. On hearing a tape for the first time, I never failed to be shocked at what had been lost by way of facial expression, gesture, stance, manner, and the like. Further, as the tape was transcribed, still more disappeared: the expression and tone of the voice, clues to sarcasm and irony, the length of pauses, and so on. I did, however, take care to note on the transcriptions any changes of meaning that the actual sound introduced (sarcasm, for example). Finally, what was left was what counted: the texture of significant words.

The words, all by themselves (with only my marginal notes on intonation), provided ample evidence of the way the reader had composed the story for himself. As psychoanalysis has been showing for three-quarters of a century now, the particular phrasings of dreams, jokes, free associations, metaphors, clichés, “Freudian slips,” misreadings, and forgettings reveal the dynamics of the ego behind them. A transcription of informal, spoken comments will do the same, even if the gestures of body and voice have been filtered out, indeed, even if some of the verbal “filler” of spoken English be removed.

Although those of us working on the project transcribed the tapes absolutely literally, recording even um 's and uh 's and pauses, I soon found that quotations from such transcriptions made wretched reading. This, for example, is an exact transcription of the sentence from which Sam's first comment on the “tableau” in “A Rose for Emily” was taken:

Emily is, uh, the daughter of a very prominent resident of a small—is it Mississippi? Probably—town—small Southern town, and, uh, the father was very domineering. Uh. One of the most striking images in the book is that of, is that of, is that of the townsfolk looking through the door as her father stands there with a horsewhip in his hands, kind of, feet spread apart and between or through him you see a picture of Emily standing in the background, and, uh, and that pretty much sums up exactly the kind of relationship they had, uh.

In quoting such materials for you, I have quite freely begun and ended sentences within the flow of speech; I have silently deleted uh, um, kind of, I mean, sort of, you know, like (as in like, man ), and other filler phrases without indicating their departure. I have, by and large, deleted false starts and repetitions. (But this is in reporting to you what the readers said—in my own thinking through each commentary I used the original transcript.) I can say with confidence I have not altered the meaning of any statement, nor have I deleted any substantive word within a quotation without indicating the deletion by ellipsis. To see the changes that did take place, you can compare this exact transcription with Sam's comment on the “tableau” as reported on page 1.

Interpreting What the Readers Said

The crucial data from the “experiment” were the words the readers used about what they had read. These phrasings evidenced each reader's synthesis and achievement of the story, his creation of it for and in himself. The nub of the problem then became interpreting what he said.

For me, the first and most obvious assumption to make is the ever-tempting one of the text as stimulus. One looks in what the reader says for wordings evoked by the text. For example, I find in “A Rose for Emily” a fantasy about holding on against inner and outer coercions to let go something precious and loved but also repellent and disgusting: dirty, for example, or smelly. That something is within or behind oneself, like a revered but cruel past or a lifestyle set by a harsh father or a

scandalous love affair with someone admired but also “beneath one.” Evidently, other critics, too, find a similar fantasy. “Perversion and decadence are a subtle effluvium from the story,” says one. “Social pressure had been too great,” says another about Emily's efforts to keep her father's corpse, “but she learned from that incident the necessity for concealment. The story is a success story—of success in maintaining an untenable position.” I hear in other critics' phrasings the same unconscious meaning of Miss Emily's obstinacy, her “attempting, almost by force of will alone, to halt the natural process of decay,” or her “obstinate refusal to submit to, or even to concede, the inevitability of change.” All these phrasings reveal the body significance of “holding on” against external “social pressure” or internal “natural process” that demands one “let go.” Brooks and Warren's summary statement continues the covert body imagery: “She is obviously a woman of tremendous firmness of will.”2

Other critics, equally skilled, arrive at words that suggest they are responding to quite a different fantasy. Apparently, they see Homer less as something precious held inside, more as the lover implied and denied by the scene with which the story ends. Sometimes the critic's analysis holds that fantasy back from consummation, as when Irving Howe calls the story “one of those chill fables in which” authors “do not let quite enough ‘life’ break through the surface of their prose.” Other analyses carry the fantasy out: “At the center of the story is the indomitableness of the decadent Southern aristocrat, and the enclosing parts reveal the invasion of the aristocracy by the changing order.” Another reader speaks of “reverential connotations [that] cluster about romantic love, the bridal night, and Southern womanhood,” but in the final image of that night, “these hallowed clusters are brutally violated.” Themes of the sacred and profane, masculine and feminine mother flesh out another critic's fantasy of sexual intercourse: “We have, on the one hand, a rose offered in admiration to a woman of indomitable spirit who clung, in the very process of dissolution, to the vision of an ideal; and at the same time, we have the revolting spectacle of an aging and impotent culture couching with a corrupt materialism which its nobler components had rejected.”3

Evidently, critics, no less than other folk, have their personality structures and unconscious fantasies; and even their highly sublimated insights express them. Not only do equally skilled readers show the usual variations in interpreting conscious themes and meaning; they also reveal in their wordings that they are creating the story and its meanings for themselves out of different unconscious materials: “break[ing] through” a “cluster” of “enclosing parts” as against obstinately stopping a “natural process.” There would seem little point, then, in treating a story as a fixed stimulus embodying some specific unconscious fantasy of phallic mother, castrating father, interlocking genitals, or any of the bestiary developed by those psychoanalytic critics who simply decode literary works according to a “Freudian” dreambook.

One could arrive, however, at a more subtle version of the literary work as stimulus. It would be more in the spirit of ego psychology to treat the story as offering its reader certain formal, defensive, or adaptive maneuvers corresponding to ego strategies in people. One might then be able to correlate different readers' responses to a collection of comparable short stories with the different readers' characteristic patterns of adaptation, discovered by interview or projective test.4 Very soon, however, one meets the kind of unexpected response I got from a reader in the preliminary group—call him Sheldon. Before one of the exploratory interviews, I had predicted (to myself) Sheldon would dislike Mann's “Mario and the Magician” because he did not like excessive control from others. This is what he actually said: “Great story! What atmosphere! The real reason I enjoyed it was because there was so much Italian in it.… I spent a little while at Acapulco once …” and he was off on a comparison of Latin types—Italian, Spanish, and Mexican—concentrating wholly on the beach scenes of the first half of the story and quite neglecting the overpowering hypnotist in the second.

Inevitably, one has to regard what the reader brings to the story (his personality, life experience, and so on) as prior to the stimulus of the story itself. Evidently, readers who differ about “A Rose for Emily” do so because they are themselves different. Therefore, one cannot predict what they will say about a

story from the story—another kind of prediction is required, one based on the reader's personality or background. “A richly experienced reader will prefer Hemingway's ‘The Battler’ to Faulkner's ‘A Rose for Emily.’ ” “If a particular reader of ‘A Rose for Emily’ has an unresolved oedipal problem (as determined independently of the story), he should emphasize themes of passivity and fatherhood.” “If a particular reader is an ‘anal’ character, he should single out images of dirt, smell, and money.” I did make predictions of this kind before every interview, and sometimes I was startlingly successful at anticipating what my readers would say about the story and my specific questions. More often, however, I got responses as unpredictable as Sheldon's excursion to Acapulco. More troubling than these errors was the fact I could not tell why I succeeded in some predictions and erred in others, even for the same reader on the same story.

I had to learn for myself what Freud had recognized and accepted a half-century before, that one cannot, in a truly psychoanalytic framework, predict:

So long as we trace the development from its final outcome backwards, the chain of events appears continuous, and we feel we have gained an insight which is completely satisfactory or even exhaustive. But if we proceed the reverse way, if we start from the premises inferred from the analysis and try to follow these up to the final result, then we no longer get the impression of an inevitable sequence of events which could not have been otherwise determined. We notice at once that there might have been another result, and that we might have been just as well able to understand and explain the latter. The synthesis is thus not so satisfactory as the analysis; in other words, from a knowledge of the premises we could not have foretold the nature of the results.… we never know beforehand which of the determining factors will prove the weaker or the stronger. We only say at the end that those which succeeded must have been the stronger. Hence the chain of causation can always be recognized with certainty if we follow the line of analysis, whereas to predict it along the line of synthesis is impossible.5

Nevertheless, even after I realized there was no use in them, I continued to commit myself to written predictions before each interview, simply for my own self-discipline.

These predictions then drove home another point: to be applied ahead of time, the categories (both those to type readers and those to class comments) must be crude and limited compared to the actual words a reader would say. Categories like “anal” or “oedipal” or “experienced” or “emphasize” or “prefer” or “single out” (as in the predictions above) simply threw away most of what the reader said, often the very parts of his discourse that seemed most individual. It is when the critics of “A Rose for Emily” speak of “a subtle effluvium from the story” or “social pressure” or “the revolting spectacle of an aging and impotent culture couching with a corrupt materialism,” that we glimpse the inner dynamics of their personal synthesis and achievement of the story. Categories like “anal” or “phallic” help a little to grasp those dynamics—but only a little.

The same need to listen to a reader's actual words applies to general literary processes as well as to the inner experience of particular stories. Consider, for example, the familiar feeling of “losing oneself” in a book or being “absorbed” in a work of art. These, we saw above, derive ultimately from feelings of being completely mixed into one's earliest, gratifying environment, sensations closely associated with nursing, and with mothering. Therefore, one might try to correlate the degree someone gets “taken out of oneself” by works of art with that person's degree of “oral fixation.” Finally, however, prediction is impossible. Someone with a lot of “orality” could go either way: he might easily become absorbed in all kinds of experiences (not just literature), he might refuse to become absorbed, or he might work out a complex mixture of absorption and escape (as we shall see one of our readers, Shep, doing).

Further, the general category obscures the individuality of the response. Just the three critics we have already heard on this theme of being “absorbed” show considerable variation.* * See above, p. 18.

Georges Poulet spoke of the way the work of art “lives its own life within me,” and his becoming the “prey” of “this being [the author] ensconced at the heart of the work.” I sense that Poulet feels as though the work of art were a being inside himself or as though it had a being inside itself—some form of mother and fetus perhaps. Either way, Poulet himself feels taken over, engulfed, or devoured like “prey.” By contrast, Ortega y Gasset talked about “living with [the characters], immersed in their air, their space, their time,” and he used three images of a timeless time, “moment,” “instant,” “without any intermission.” I feel he is experiencing merger as Poulet did, but more in terms of fusion and union than being a “prey.” Robert Gorham Davis also spoke of being “absorbed” and “immersed,” but he accented the element of passivity in the experience: “The work … is thinking him. His ego has become object, not subject.” Again, it is the exact words these writers use that tell us their experience, not the category “orality,” although it is correct as far as it goes.

Evidently, the words that even a professional reader uses about what he reads reflect his personality, that “one myth for every man,” in Yeats's phrase, “which, if we but knew it, would make us understand all he did and thought.”6 Congreve said it at greater length in terms of the metaphysical issues and the humours psychology of his era:

Our Humour has relation to us and to what proceeds from us, as the Accidents have to a Substance; it is a Colour, Taste, and Smell, Diffused through all; thô our Actions are never so many and different in Form, they are all Splinters of the same Wood, and have Naturally one Complexion, which thô it may be disguised by Art, yet cannot be wholly changed: We may Paint it with other Colours, but we cannot change the Grain. So the Natural sound of an instrument will be distinguish'd, thô the Notes expressed by it are never so various, and the Divisions never so many.7

Fond as I am of Congreve, I did not use humours psychology to interpret my readers' personalities and their comments. Rather, I count myself most fortunate to have had the help of two experienced psychological testers, Dr. Allan Zechowy,

who worked with the first preliminary group of readers, and Dr. Andrew Corvus, who tested the larger, younger group from whom these five readers are taken. To each reader, they administered at least a ten-card Rorschach and a five-card Thematic Apperception Test (TAT). Later, on my own initiative, I myself gave the COPE questionnaire (designed to elicit defense mechanisms).8 I had hoped to predict Rorschach and TAT outcomes from the readers' comments on stories; thus, some readers were tested after the interviews (here, Sam, Shep, and Sebastian). Later, I tried predicting readers' comments on stories from the tests; hence other readers were tested before the interviews (here, Saul and Sandra).

I could not make either set of predictions precise enough to be meaningful, and I slowly realized that with ten or so interviews with each subject, each interview running from twenty to forty pages, I had more than two hundred pages of free associations for each reader. I had, in other words, much more data from which to infer their personalities than even these skilled and efficient testers did because they had only worked with the readers a few hours. I decided the real service the tests rendered was to check my analyses of the readers' personalities, supplement my blind spots, point out themes I had missed, or make me re-examine conclusions I had come to too hastily. For the readers here reported, then, I have taken the interviews as the primary source of data on personality, the tests as only supplementary and to be overruled on the rare occasions where the interviews and the testers pointed to different conclusions.

To perceive the core of personality in someone, as I have tried to do with these five students, one listens with the proverbial “third ear.” That is, one listens to what the other person says about himself or love or politics or friends or ideas or, to be experimental, to what he says about inkblots or cards with pictures on them—but above all to what he says. The “third ear” does not come to such words empty, however. One listens with an open, free-floating attention to the kinds of things people are likely to say or think about parents, their own bodies, authorities, desires, or fears. One listens, in short, with some knowledge of the issues clinical experience has found

important. You have had brief samples of this kind of listening for resonances in phrases we considered from the critics about “A Rose for Emily” or the remarks of Poulet, Davis, and Ortega on literary absorption.

I wanted more, however. I wanted to bring together the overtones and resonances I heard from my readers, whose personalities I knew in a way I would probably never know my fellow professionals'. To interrelate their comments, I found I needed still another structure, one now overworked but still powerful and true.

The Concept of Identity

I brought to the interviews themselves my belief that, for all the infinite variations in his behavior, any individual also shows a deep and essential unity in his personality. I had, in other words, a concept of human character rather like Yeats' “myth” or Congreve's “humour.” Later, I learned that the French critic, Charles Mauron, had applied the same assumption to the personalities of various authors, seeking a mythe personnel which would comprehend “both … the troubles of the living man and the obsessive metaphors of the author.”9

In my own search for the unity in personality, I began with the first psychoanalytic characterology, which typed people according to their dominant drives as these developed from body zones. Despite its crudity, this rather simple system enabled psychologists to group a great many character traits in meaningful ways. It was partly because of this firmly established typology that I chose these five readers out of the whole group, because they give a range of such types. Sam's and Sandra's drives concern themes of strength and power, particularly as they relate to maleness and femaleness. Saul and Sebastian took pleasure in controlling their own inner creations, mental and physical, as against external authorities, while Shep showed strong aggressive drives associated with situations of food, talk, or dependency. You will see over and over again in their interviews traces of these phallic, anal, and oral modalities, but you will also see that these body-derived drives are far from fine enough to account for more than a small

part of what they said about the stories they read.

Classing people only according to drives neglects the adaptations and defenses that give rise to the more complex traits we associate with character or personality. The classic psychoanalytic definition of character is Fenichel's: “the habitual mode of bringing into harmony the tasks presented by internal demands and by the external world.” The word “habitual” stresses the way we sense ourselves and others as creatures with a sameness: “Character means that a certain constancy prevails in the ways the ego chooses for solving its tasks.”

The remainder of the psychoanalytic concept of character rests on an idea put forward in 1930 by Robert Waelder, which has become one of the cornerstones of ego psychology. Fenichel describes it this way:

Under the name of “the principle of multiple function” Waelder has described a phenomenon of cardinal importance in ego psychology. This principle expresses the tendency of the organism toward inertia, that is, the tendency to achieve a maximum of effect with a minimum of effort. Among various possible actions that one is chosen which best lends itself to the simultaneous satisfaction of demands from several sources. An action fulfilling a demand of the external world may at the same time result in instinctual gratification and in satisfying the superego. The mode of reconciling various tasks to one another is characteristic for a given personality. Thus the ego's habitual modes of adjustment to the external world, the id, and the superego, and the characteristic types of combining these modes with one another, constitute character.10

From this point of view, character equals specific methods of solution to inner and outer demands. Each person arrives at his own individual methods of solution, and they remain constant over long periods in his life.

Since they persist, these solutions must also give some pleasure–otherwise, he would seek out an adaptation that yielded more pleasure. It follows, therefore, that people choose methods of solution that also gratify their dominant body drives (oral, anal, phallic, and the like—in the older scheme). Thus

people whose desires take the form of absorbing things into themselves might deal with the world primarily on the basis of identification. Others, whose pleasures come from the creation and control of inner products, might seek adaptations based on getting right down to the “nitty-gritty,” dealing with what's “behind” the facade, “getting it right out in the open,” and so on. Thus, the new characterology includes the old, because certain modes of adaptation tend to gratify certain drives, and thus these adaptations become permanent.

New or old, complex or simple, all characterologies must account for the continuity we see in ourselves and others, the sameness that Freud saw and mentioned as a clinician in 1908, years before he had theory enough to account for what he described:

The sexual behaviour of a human being often lays down the pattern for all his other modes of reacting to life. If a man is energetic in winning the object of his love, we are confident that he will pursue his other aims with an equally unswerving energy; but if, for all sorts of reasons, he refrains from satisfying his strong sexual instincts, his behaviour will be conciliatory and resigned rather than vigorous in other spheres of life as well.11

Today, psychoanalysis explains this sameness by Freud's concept of the ego's defenses (developed and expanded after 1926) and the concept of adaptation (largely developed after Freud's death). Defenses and adaptations become habitual to the extent that they consolidate satisfactions and reduce suffering.

From this point of view, we consciously and unconsciously adopt strategies for minimizing the anxieties caused by conflicts like those between desires and reality, desires and guilt, or morality and reality. We also choose our strategies to achieve as much pleasure with as little effort as possible. In the familiar image of the donkey, we try to maximize the carrot and minimize the stick, all the while doing as little work as we can.

The individual may arrive at a balance that suits him through pathology: he may acquire a symptom, an inhibition, or a neurosis. Or he may adapt positively and creatively, finding a successful balance of pleasure and unpleasure, defense and

relaxation, through love or work (to mention the two great regions for healthy living). Whatever the solution for a particular sphere of his life, once someone has achieved it, he tends to adhere to it. And beneath any one solution lies the deeper, more tenacious, general structure of drives and adaptations that changes little, if at all, even under the greatest stresses.

To express this constancy that informs everything a human being says or does, Yeats spoke of a “myth,” Congreve of “humour,” and Charles Mauron, of a “mythe personnel.” In recent years, “identity” has become the most popular word to describe the modern psychoanalytic concept of character, although Erik Erikson's “ego identity” is more accurate and Heinz Lichtenstein's “identity theme” still more so. Because of the connections I want to make between literary man and literary work, I tend to adapt an old Adlerian term and speak of “style” or “lifestyle.” Whatever the term, however, it must convey a constancy that colors every phase of an individual's life. It is what he brings from all his past to all new experience, and it is extremely difficult—perhaps impossible—to change. Yet, in practice, it can often be expressed quite succinctly.

The classic case that developed the idea of a concise verbal statement of identity is Heinz Lichtenstein's Anna S., a woman suffering through a pathetic and destructive round of alcoholic bouts, lesbian affairs, and businesslike prostitution. Lichtenstein concluded in working with her that her identity theme could be “transcribed” as “being another's essence.”12 That is, Lichtenstein asserts, for every individual there is a central identity “theme” on which he lives out variations, much as a musician can infinitely vary a single musical motif to create a theme and variations. By being a prostitute, Anna made herself her client's essence, the passive appendage that proved his masculinity. In her relations with her mother–the kind of woman of whom one would say, “She is nothing without a man”—Anna became that man: a lover and husband who sold brushes door to door or worked in a factory to support her. She sustained her lesbian partners' claims to masculinity by becoming very feminine and dependent and jealous in those relationships.

The point is that one can state an identity theme for somebody like Anna very briefly, yet that theme can ramify infinitely into all the events of her or anyone's life. Critic Charles Mauron, for example, takes all the texts (even of writers as prolific as Racine or Molière) and “superimposes” them. Mere comparison would keep a distinct view of the juxtaposed texts, but superimposition jumbles them in order to bring out the “coincidences énigmatiques ” or “des réseaux d'associations ou des groupements d'images, obsédantes et probablement involontaires .” From these groups and networks of images and associations he infers the “mythe personnel ” that can then be interpreted as an expression of “la personnalité inconsciente ” and its development, limited as need be by the comparison with the life of the writer. “The perception of the ‘whole person,’ ” says Lichtenstein, summing up his own conception of this kind of interpretation of a personality, “means the process of abstracting an invariant from the multitude of [bodily and behavioral transformations during the whole life of the individual]. This invariant, when perceived in our encounter with another individual, we describe as the individual's ‘personality’ ”13—or “myth” or “humour” or “character” or “ego identity” or “lifestyle” or “mythe personnel ” or “identity theme.”

When I say, then, that a certain reader wants to become a “thing” in a “system” or that another reader wants to draw closer and closer to sources of strength and nurture and never to see their loss, I am trying to state for them, as exactly as I can, identity themes that permeate their lives even as they create infinite variation on those themes. I am trying to state for them the “myth” Yeats wanted that would enable us to understand all someone did and thought, but I am arriving at such a “myth” by means of psychoanalytic ego-psychology.

Ego-psychology has, in Hartmann's words, “sharpened our eyes to the frequent identity of patterns in often widely divergent fields of an individual's behavior.”14 By 1966, Anna Freud noted, most analysts had begun to conceive of “a general cognitive and perceptive style of the ego,” an extension of notions of defense

to include besides the ego's dealings with danger, anxiety, affects, etc., also its everyday functioning such as perceiving, thinking, abstracting, conceptualizing. An ego style, in this sense, is linked with the concept of defence but by no means identical with it. It represents an attempt to embrace the area of conflict as well as the conflict-free area of secondary process functioning.15

Such a “style,” as Hartmann had said earlier, would show how “a person's moral behavior is as much an essential part and a distinctive sign of his personality as is his character or his instinctual life.”16 In a more literary vein, such an “identity theme” links a man's prose style with his total personality.17 Equally, ideologies, values, and all systems projected on the world, notes Abram Kardiner, will reflect the adaptation of outer, social forces by inner character, often in surprising ways. “The son of a millionaire may be a communist because it seems rational and desirable. Back of his endorsement may be an identification with the underdog. But he will present his endorsement in the form of a logical argument which has no reference to his unconscious identification with the ‘underprivileged.’ ”18

Identities in this sense begin very early, presumably with one's biological endowment and prenatal influences—the vague kind of thing mothers recognize when they speak of an “easy” baby or a “good eater.” Freud himself went so far as to suggest that a person's repertoire of defenses might be inherited (even though defense itself is an ego function), because id and ego begin life as one. To some extent recent observations of newborn children bear him out. We seem to come into the world with a certain ego style or “initial organizing configuration” that then becomes fleshed out with particulars as we pass through Freud's phases of development, Erikson's modalities, or the sequence of object relations some English theorists have recently stressed.19 As the author of Peter Pan charmingly put the matter: “I think one remains the same person throughout [all the decades of life], merely passing, as it were, in these lapses of time from one room to another, but all in the same house. If we unlock the rooms of

the far past we can peer in and see ourselves, busily occupied in beginning to become you and me.”20

Lichtenstein, however, goes beyond the other theorists and nontheorists to suggest one specific phase at which the identity theme takes form: during the growth of self-object differentiation, as the child begins to recognize that his mother is separate and therefore that he is a separate being. Although born with a great range of possible adaptations, “the specific unconscious need of the mother … actualizes out of these infinite potentialities one way of being in the child, namely being the child for this particular mother, responding to her unique and individual needs.” This way of being represents a “primary identity,” “a zero point which must precede all other mental developments.” Then, the child develops in a kind of rhythmic oscillation. He brings the identity he has achieved to each new experience, which in turn enlarges the identity he brings to it.21

Thus, in Erikson's closely related epigenetic theory, “Each successive step … is a potential crisis.” Erikson uses that word, however, “to connote not a threat of catastrophe, but a turning point, a crucial period of increased vulnerability and heightened potential, and therefore, the ontogenetic source of generational strength and maladjustment,” a point, in other words, where the individual's new growth subjects him to new weaknesses in order to open him to new powers as well. “Each stage becomes a crisis because incipient growth and awareness in a new part function go together with a shift in instinctual energy and yet also cause a specific vulnerability in that part.” The crisis ends when the new capacities match the new opportunities “to become full-grown components of the ever-new configuration that is the growing personality.”22

The central style or identity theme does not change but the individual does as he absorbs changed external realities or growth from within (biological changes, for example). These changes imply danger, and the ego must defend, often by affirming older patterns of adaptation. “Psychic development implies at all stages both progressive and regressive manifestations,” notes Elizabeth R. Zetzel, summing the matter up. “Regression is thus an inevitable concomitant of forward progressive movement.”23 Roy Schafer puts the matter in structural

terms: development of character involves “a series of hierarchically ordered id-ego positions, each of which acts as a defence against the position below it in the hierarchy.”24

Once a person's identity theme is established it never changes, however. (Lichtenstein goes so far as to argue the “identity principle” is prior even to man's drive for pleasure. To give up identity one would have to become a thing—die.) At the same time, the individual can grow and change infinitely within that style. Similarly, the individual's theme is (probably) not in and of itself healthy or unhealthy—only what he does with it.

Anna's theme was “being another's essence.” Before therapy, she expressed it in a series of self-destroying relationships, painful enough to lead her to seek help. After therapy, she found other variations. Yet one can see the essential continuity of her personality by comparing something she wrote before with something she wrote after. Anna had had fantasies of an imaginary lover, who was a “madman,” and she would set them down in a kind of poetic form:

Is that you beloved, is that you returning to Drown in my madness, to baptize me with the Sweetness of our foolishness? Oh, bring back the strange but happy love.—Bless you, and drink with me my blood to quench our starved thirstiness.… Embrace me oh madness, let my nakedness and nudity quench thy thirst for madness with love of a longing heart.

When you leave I find my Self in a reality upon this God's hell on earth, to breathe only the contemptuousness of man's Sanity. Come back, come back, my Sweet love, don't turn me out, let me bathe my Soul in your torment, bleed my body of its blood for a smooth Vintage of men's liqueur. Let me drink to your holy madness, to our love of Solitude. Oh madness, I love you, come back to keep me from Sanity.

In such prose poems, her images of being drunk by her lover, bathing or drowning in him or he in her, state her wish to fuse with him and become his essence—which is madness. Isolated, however, she is a “longing heart,” turned out into a reality, which being sanity—separateness—is hell on earth. There is, to

be sure, a Byronic grandeur in Anna's seeking the unattainable, but at the same time she was suffering—starving and thirsting—deeply enough to seek help in therapy. After that therapy, she wrote of her first real love affair:

I feel so much part of him that when he tells me something that was unpleasant to him no matter what … I hate the thing or person for it. I feel it displeased him and that makes it terrible. If he is very tired, fatigue takes hold of me, and I seem to share his feeling, and usually end up relieving him of it. Does real loving make one feel a part of another? When he makes love to me I really feel that I'm way down deep inside of him, that his arms are my arms, etc. When he laughs … I am filled with sheer glee. When he is sad I long to whitewash all that has caused him his miseries and I feel compassion so deep that I usually have indigestion.

She is still “being another's essence,” but now in a more loving and self-fulfilling or, at least (I assume), a less painful way.

In short, interpreting behavior through an “identity theme” explains how we remain the same, yet change. The essence of this view of identity is that we can see one theme or style permeating all aspects of an individual's life. In that sense, we have an unchanging self, but nevertheless reality and one's own inner drives demand that that self reach out to new experiences. It then grows by adding these experiences as new variations to its unchanging central theme. An “identity theme” is determined by past events, yet paradoxically it is the only basis for future growth and, therefore, freedom. It is the foundation for every personal and human synthesis of new experience, be it falling in love or simply reading a book. In understanding the principles within the one we learn something about the other as well, for the separate parts of life cease to be so separate.

It is tempting to say, as many critics do, that a given reader likes some story because it affirms his political or religious beliefs, and, in a partial way, that kind of statement is true. But one relates all fields of a person's behavior if one seeks out the underlying identity theme or lifestyle that both the story and

the beliefs (and a great many other activities) fulfill. As we have seen, Sheldon liked “Mario and the Magician” because it reminded him of his own trip to Acapulco. Yet I know it to be more true that he was interested in Latins for their sexuality and in ethnic types in general because he felt controlled by his own matrix of tradition. To understand fully Sheldon's statement, “The real reason I enjoyed [the story] was because there was so much Italian in it,” would take us very deeply indeed into his life.

Again, we come up against the difficulty or impossibility of sorting out the experience of literature into a discrete stimulus and a definable response. Each reader will bring all kinds of personal associations and experiences into the relationship between himself and the story—not least the very conditions of this “experiment.” Obviously, I was myself one of the factors entering into what these readers said about their reading, and I need to face up to the biases and trends I may have introduced.

The Influence of the Sixth Reader

As you (the seventh reader) read the evidence, you will very likely ask yourself from time to time how and to what extent I influenced the things these readers said. After all, they were undergraduates in their early twenties and I a full professor in what one might call the prime of life. Some may have found the whole interview procedure (complete with tape recorder) arcane and threatening. Others may have taken my efforts at experimental neutrality for hostility or indifference. Still others may have felt frustrated that they were not told more of what the tests revealed, for I found that curiosity about oneself was the chief reason readers volunteered. All these readers knew of my interest in applying psychoanalysis to literature, and some of them tried at times to give me what they thought I wanted (interpreted through the usual undergraduate misunderstandings of psychoanalysis).

To ask how these factors affected what they said, however, is to proceed from the same cause-and-effect, stimulus-response model that we have already found inadequate. That is, the story did not “cause” their response—they did. Similarly,

the interviewer and the interview situation did not “cause” their response. Nor did the current crises in their lives. But any or all of these might have—no, must have—entered into what they said about these stories. The point is: what “caused” what they said was their own inner style of creation and synthesis of everything they were experiencing at that moment.

It would be impossible to sort out all the factors that each of these readers worked over in his own mind to make up his personal synthesis of a short story. Could one “hold constant” Saul's anger at being jilted by a girl whom he thought like the heroine of the Fitzgerald story and still “vary” his fear of being overpowered by me in the contest that he took the interview to be? It is useless to think of the problem of Saul's experience of the story—or of me—this way.

Each reader “storied his story.” He created his experience of the literary work from his own lifestyle. Thus, one of the five readers, Sebastian, thought the Fitzgerald hero simply silly, while Sam thought him sturdy and self-reliant and altogether admirable. Sam said he felt toward one of the characters in “The Battler” as toward a sinister and frightening Oriental torturer, a Fu Manchu. On the other hand, Sandra found the same character so gentle and reassuring, she positively glowed that he was in the story. These are the things to be understood, and they are not explained simply by saying Sebastian, Sam, and Sandra were reacting to me.

Had I been working with questionnaires or fixed-question interviews, looking for classes or categories of behavior that could be considered the same no matter who was doing the behaving, such contamination would have been fatal. Had a reader said in answering a questionnaire that he liked a story when he didn't, because he wanted either to please or to frustrate me, the experiment would have gone quite awry. This project, however, sought out the uniqueness of each response. I tried to get the reader to say more and more rather than to force his response into fixed classes and categories.

I was, therefore, more in the position of the analyst whose patient brings him a made-up dream. It doesn't really matter. Both a real dream and an invented one voice the dreamer's

mind. So here, when Sam apparently misremembered and said that what Miss Emily taught the maidens of the town was knitting (instead of china-painting), I learned something about what was going on in Sam's mind. I learned that he transformed an activity with certain specific symbolic overtones into an activity with quite different overtones, and it would not make very much difference whether he did so unconsciously or deliberately.

In fact, I think his was an honest misremembering, quite impossible for me to “cause.” And evidently the “words-on-the-page” (which are “china-painting”) did not cause it, either. His misremembering is his unique act of re-creation, and even if a dozen readers misremembered the china-painting as knitting, the same reasoning would apply. I did not cause it. Neither did the text. Therefore, I would have to look for the explanation in the individual identity of each reader and his unique way of giving life to the story for himself.

In short, we come back to the basic data of this study—what the reader said. Once he has himself decided and said what he was going to say, the data, the two hundred or more pages of his talk, are fixed. What then comes to matter is the interpretation of this mass of material. In effect, the “experiment” becomes the putting together of those materials with the reader's lifestyle.

Two Kinds of Interpretation

The first interpretation involves looking through all the materials for the identity theme of an individual reader. Drawing on the tests as well as the transcripts, I looked through everything for general traits. I sought remarks on general topics, such as politics, marriage, friendship, sex, or family, and also general patterns that pervaded all those pages of talk: splitting dangers into two, looking for sources of security, seeing the world in terms of systems and inanimate objects—that sort of thing. You will find the results of this analysis in the next chapter, which describes the five readers in detail.

The second mode of interpretation was much trickier. It depended on the first which, after all, is a fairly traditional

psychoanalytic approach to free or more or less free associations. Having already arrived at an identity theme for a given reader from all his interviews and tests, I looked through the transcript of only one of his interviews to find the principles at work in his highly personal synthesis of some one story.

As a practical matter, theory aside, my talk about a story with a reader for an hour or so would result in a transcript of from twenty to forty pages. To analyze this diffuse, discursive text, I would transcribe (in a shorthand form, so I could see it in a single overview) everything that reader said which could conceivably illuminate his response: opinions usual and unusual, misreadings, slips, special wordings, body symbolisms, and so on. In practice, I would leave out only those very rare remarks that said nothing about either the story or the reader. I would sort these separate items into from ten to twenty themes. Some of them would represent aspects of the story (a given character or episode or theme, an opinion on its merits, its style, and so on). Others would refer more directly to the reader's concerns (for example, a political association to the story, an association to some other work or an experience, or a special emotion).

Frankly, it took me a long time to infer from the reader's identity theme and the kind of reading he did the principles at work. I found, finally, that I sorted out the ten or twenty themes in his commentary on a given story into three interrelated and overlapping groups. First and simplest were those statements about his likes and dislikes of the story as a whole or of particular parts. Of course, sometimes I inferred a liking even when a reader did not say so explicitly but showed a lot of interest or enthusiasm at a certain feature. Second, I tried to see how, within his likes and dislikes, his wordings revealed fantasy materials: imagery of the body, for example, or significant persons or familiar fears and desires—the kind of thing we have seen reflected in the critics' wordings about “A Rose for Emily” or the phrases Poulet, Davis, and Ortega used about being “absorbed” in a literary experience. Third—and this was the subtlest part—I tried to see how the reader had adapted or managed various elements of the story. Had he stressed some and omitted others? I was interested in his

rewordings and his interpretations, his perception of the story in the broadest sense. In particular, how did he see the characters? How did he interpret the various episodes? Had he forgotten parts (a name, for example)? Changed the sequence of events? Misremembered plot or wording? All these I took to be evidence of the way he had adapted the story to his own identity theme, construing it through his defensive structures.

These analyses of the separate interviews make up the most important outcome of an “experiment” which turned out to be not an experiment at all but the interrelation of two kinds of interpretation. Reworking and refining the interpretation of the individual readings in the light of the readers' identity themes led me to the general conclusions about the literary experience this book sets out. I offer them to you in two forms.

Chapter 5 sets out in general terms the four principles that I think govern the reading experience. They emerged slowly but definitely, with greater and greater clarity, from successive reinterpretations. Alternatively, I offer you the analyzed interviews themselves: five readers' readings of “A Rose for Emily” in Chapter 6 and the same five readers' readings of Fitzgerald's “Winter Dreams” and Hemingway's “The Battler” in Appendix B. In presenting these readings, I quote from 70 to 80 percent of what a given reader said about a given work, but I quote it in a more meaningful sequence and with considerable commentary from me to bring out the principles within the reading.

That, of course, is the real problem of the sixth reader here: that these conclusions rest on my interpretations, first of the readers' personalities, second of their comments. Consequently, my interpretations must necessarily express my own identity theme. The best I can do for the time being (that is, until the last three chapters) is be open with you and show you step by step how I proceeded. In analyzing the interviews, I was on my own, but for the readers themselves, Dr. Corvus's tests provide some confirmation and guidance. The briefest and gentlest of next steps, then, is to look at my style of interpretation as it applied to the search for the identity themes of these five readers. The next step is to see the “Who?” in “Who reads what how?”

4 Who? The Five Readers

They were undergraduates, advanced English majors, skilled and interested enough in reading so that all five were considering graduate school—in short, the kind of student a teacher of literature gets to know best. To know them only as students, however, is not to know why they experience a story or a poem or a drama the way they do. That calls for something more, a richer kind of knowledge, a sense of the essential core of the individual, his or her personal myth, lifestyle, or identity theme.

The data we have consist of Dr. Corvus's Rorschach and TAT results, the COPE test I sometimes administered,1 and, most important, the two hundred or more pages of transcribed interview with each reader. To interpret the primary data, the transcribed interviews, I looked for each reader's remarks on his habitual likes and dislikes in people, politics, poetry—generalizations about anything. As I read, I kept in mind themes Dr. Corvus had singled out, such as feelings about gender and sexuality, attitudes toward aggression, preferred defenses, sensory modes, recurring configurations, and imagery of all kinds. I looked for them in the interviews and also for general clinical entities, personality types and themes, patterns of drive and defense, that occur commonly in our culture. And I also tried to keep an open mind.

In my own notes, I jotted down in shorthand form every statement a reader made that generalized beyond a particular text. I tried to recognize in the set of generalizations a central, recurring pattern of drive and defense, in short, an identity theme within the infinite variations of one individual's concerns. I was carrying out what Heinz Lichtenstein calls “the process of abstracting an invariant from the multitude of transformations,” which is the principle of another person's “personality.”2 First and always, however, I had in my mind's eye the individual human being in front of me and my own feelings toward him.

Sam

Good-looking, tall, talkative, cheerful, and gregarious, Sam was a favorite among the departmental secretaries, with whom he gaily chatted and joked and flirted when he came for interviews. He dressed dapperly, taking obvious pleasure in himself and his world and the flattering attentions his world bestowed on him. I must admit he quite charmed me, too: I thought him one of the most likable readers I worked with. He laughed with ease, and he lounged through his interviews with me comfortably and engagingly. I sensed a certain lack of drive or aggression in him, but a striking ability to project himself imaginatively into people and situations, lending his own good nature freely to his guesses about the motivations of others.

As he told me more about himself, I realized how much Sam wanted to be supplied esteem and admiration, particularly as a tall, handsome, stylish, affectionate young man. He found conflict menacing and either fled fights literally or refused to recognize them. At his most successful, he wooed and placated whatever threatened him until he and it could serve each other in the mutual admiration Sam liked.

This pattern of drive and defense, this hunger for outside supplies of self-esteem, which was to be satisfied through mutuality, colored Sam's personality as he revealed himself in offhand comments on various events and aspects of his life. For example, he told me that he tended to be rather “square” in matters literary. “I suppose my taste is just terribly traditional,” he said, contrasting his likes with more “experimental” fare, and by the word “traditional” admitting he sought reassurances from the past (or perhaps confirmation from me). Similarly, although he held liberal enough political views, he liked established institutions, even Lyndon Johnson (at a time when almost all his fellow-students were gnashing their teeth at him). “I've a great deal of sympathy for [him]. He's got a rotten job.” In a period of long hair and body odor, Sam held out for “social amenities and graces and stuff like that.”

They at least seem to me to be much more abiding. Those are the things that carry down through the generations.… Sure,

they're ephemeral and they're superficial. Fine. But those are the things that seem to be more worthwhile to master than any particular credo that may be out of style in five years. And besides, you don't effect any changes anyway. I'm very pessimistic about that.

Sam's pessimism about political actions showed the passivity implicit in his desire to deal with reality by cozying up to it as a child would. Thus, he could laugh at his own response to a movie, “I enjoyed the color—as I and a child of five would—and I enjoyed all the motion.” At movies, “I just literally lose myself in it. I think of nothing else. I think of no one that I'm with. I think of no problems that I have. I just literally sit back and watch the movie.” Similarly, he described a theatrical performance: “This was a case of my really being carried away by what was said, by the lines.” People, by contrast, did not merge with him so easily as he with works of art. “If you ever feel in any mood, don't ask someone that you're feeling it about what they're thinking, because the answer is inevitably something that will destroy you totally.… because they're not thinking anything attuned to my mood.”

In phrasings like “being carried away,” Sam often put his feelings of regression and identification in terms of body movement. “I think that the movie, with its greater scope and with its more intense powers of pushing you wherever the camera goes, has greater capabilities as far as audience participation (of sorts) goes than the play does.” Sometimes, Sam's phrasings turned toward a sexual passivity, as when he spoke of John Updike's poetry: “I think what he set out to accomplish, or what it seems to me he set out to accomplish, he accomplished in me.” Often, he phrased his likes and dislikes as body movements. Hawthorne's “Young Goodman Brown” was “too extreme, too much of a pull on the imagination,” while Katherine Mansfield's “The Garden Party”, he said, “never got you into the nitty-gritty of any great universal problem.” A story “has to at some point lead you to more basic things.”

The feminine identification he implied by being so passive showed in Sam's style of study, particularly in the housewifely ways he avoided anxiety:

Let's say I have a paper to do … I will do anything. I will find— You know, I'll mop the floors so as not to have to start to do that paper. I will wash dishes. I will page through a magazine that I haven't looked at and should be looked at because the new one's coming in and if I don't look at it, I'll never look at it and so on. As long as it's a reasonably valid excuse. I'll dust. I'll empty ashtrays. I'll straighten my desk. I'll take care of any little trivia until, like if I've got a week to do a paper, there is nothing left to do … except to sit down and do the paper.

This passive trend affected his reading habits: “I want to have a couple of hours to sit down and read [a book I'm really into]. That's why I do most of my reading at nighttime, when all the dishes are done, the bathroom is clean, and all that stuff, and I can just sit down.” I got the picture of someone being clean, orderly, or erect on demand. Thus, Sam said he read The New Yorker for a store of amusing ephemera, because “I find myself a lot of times in social situations where conversation has to be kept going and whether I am actually responsible for it or not, I find myself feeling that something's got to be done, and that I'm the elect— So things have to come up out of nowhere.”

Thus, Sam would stop being passive or housewifely and “come up” with something, because he felt he was being chosen or demanded of and someone might judge him adversely if he did not play a more active role. Also, a fear of the unknown—such as difficult poetry—would bring him up: “If I'm sitting down to read [Wallace] Stevens, I'm on the edge of my chair.” “You've got to be ready to catch the things he throws out.” “I've got to be on my toes. I've got to be constantly thinking of what I'm doing.” “I am sitting on the edge of the chair, so to speak, pencil in hand, ready to underline words, and to watch out for syllables and stuff like that.” By contrast, with Updike's poetry, which Sam took to be “an exercise in language play,” “I find myself able to sit back in the chair. I can put my pencil down and just read him and it's nice.”

Sam was again brought up into an erect position in his response to D. H. Lawrence's “The Blind Man,” a mysterious story that plays a theme and variations on fears of injury. Sam

defended against the blindness by watching. “Wow! It's some thing!” “It was strange.” “I wasn't terribly comfortable. I was always kind of hanging on … trying to grasp just what was going on. It was kind of unfamiliar.” “I wasn't exactly sure what I should have my eyes open for … and it seemed to me that he [Lawrence] kept trying to say something, kept trying to tell everybody something, and that I had to keep aware for what it was.” Similarly, with “experimental” literature, “Perhaps it is just that I don't understand it. Maybe I'm just a bit afraid of it, but I just think that there is a lot of other stuff that one could be bothering about.”

These two last responses outline Sam's two basic adaptations to threat: in the second, flight to get close to some other, nonthreatening thing; in the first, trying actively to “grasp” or see or understand what was going on—preferably so as to achieve a loving, passive identification, the “it's nice” he felt when Updike accomplished something in him. “I'm romantic enough to like the idea of touching and of that meaning something.” “I'd be perfectly willing to adapt myself to an Italian sense of touch.”

A lot of my guards are dropped immediately, when I'm put in with Italians, because that's where two men can walk down the street arm in arm and not be—not have water poured on them from high windows and stuff like that, and girls can hold hands as they walk down the street, and these are things which I find personally charming.

In general Sam tended to retreat from heterosexuality to a simple friendliness, faintly sexual, between men. For example, at a critic's making a good point, he quipped, “I simply pat him on the flyleaf for being clever,” or

I have great sympathy for the … sacredness of touch, especially among friends, more so among friends than among lovers, where, you know,… you have so many other things to worry about … [but with friends] even the slightest touch becomes meaningful …

… and, one should add, a means to identification. Dr. Corvus described Sam in clinical terms as a well-put-together,

almost classical, hysteric, that is, to oversimplify, someone who deals with reality in terms of male and female bodies. Thus, Sam showed the ability to range, in his Rorschach responses, from parts and fantasies of people to real, whole human forms. For example, he could move from raw, unrepressed “cock” and “phallus” to symbolizations like “bowling pin” or “snake head,” or from an area of the inkblot to an actual, well-known person. What problems Sam showed in the Rorschach seemed to stem from aggression. When he perceived aggressive material in the inkblots, he would flee, as it were, to the edges. To inkblots that ordinarily evoke aggressive responses, Sam's associations suggested that, for him, aggression chiefly had to do with biting or the mouth: he would see “something crabbish or clawish,” “tigers,” “wolves,” “a fox,” “a manta ray,” or, most explicitly, “an angry mouth.” He also seemed to retreat easily from masculine aggression to an infant's hunger, as when he moved (in a series of responses) from “scrotum” to “breast” or from “a [David] Levine caricature of a nose” to “breast and tummy.” Never, in his responses, was he the aggressor. Rather he cast himself as a wooer, trying to placate others and get them to like him, perhaps, Dr. Corvus suggested, as a reaction against his own aggressive feelings.

One would guess Sam feared and denied his own anger because he feared the anger of others who might retaliate physically. Such a dynamic showed, for example, in the TAT story Sam wrote for Card 13B which pictures a boy sitting in an empty doorway.

The boy sat stooped and huddled and small against the black depths of the darkened house beyond the doorway. The sun slanted against the side of his face, catching the glisten of his eyes and the gold of his hair. He thought: “Father is away and gone for the day. I wish he would never come back and mother and I would be alone together and mother would be different and we would love each other as it was once before father ever came back.” The father walked into the yard, glinting fire-eyed, red-haired, to the boy—towering above him, daemonic, fiery. The boy shuddered as the father

stooped to pick him up. The father gave the boy a kiss on the forehead and set his bare feet back on the dust of the ground. The boy thought the blood [sic ] that ran from the calf's throat when his father killed him last week, and how it ran into the dry dust of the ground.

I cannot help feeling that Sam was trying to please Dr. Corvus or me by giving a pair of “Freudians” the kind of transparently “oedipal” story he thought we wanted. Also, I think the diction of the story shows he was trying to be “literary.” One does not disguise oneself, however, by being literary and psychological.

Sam identified easily with the boy, readily projecting his thoughts into direct quotation. The first feelings of smallness or loneliness or depression (“the black depths”) Sam canceled out by picturing the light of the sun enhancing the boy's appearance and by having the boy imagine an earlier union with his mother. This wish to go back prior to the father's importance remained only a wish, however, although the fears and anger associated with it were clear enough in the defenses against them. Sam mollified the fiery, daemonic father: all he does is kiss his son. In the description of the towering, redheaded father and also in the rough equation of the boy's body on the ground to the cut calf (“his father killed him [whom?] last week”), Sam almost treated the father-son relation as a contest of two phallic demons. “The boy thought the blood” (a “Freudian slip”?) suggests Sam's fear and anger toward the father, but, presumably, Sam partly identified with that fiery, devouring father, too. The anger, Sam denied by seeing the man as a loving father and the son as misunderstanding. The fear, Sam denied by, first, wishing the father away, then, by seeing him as only loving. Loving and being loved, then, seemed Sam's most pervasive answers to his own aggression and the aggression of others. He would deny inner and outer realities, if need be, to find love and admiration among father, mother, and, indeed, “sun.”

These same patterns of defense showed more schematically in Sam's COPE test. In five out of six queries, Sam picked as his preferred response (eighth decile): “He realizes that the fault

for [X] lies completely with himself and with no one else.” The designers of the test call this “turning-against-the-self,” “a way of dealing with anxiety—blaming the self rather than others who also may be available.” By defining his fault himself, Sam avoided having it either in or defined by “others.”

Conversely, Sam's least favorite defensive maneuver (last choice out of five, four times out of six, hence first decile) was: “He feels that he may [do or be X], but with help from someone more experienced, he could change.” As the test designers say, this item “implies recognition of the anxiety and a statement of the need for help, employing the use of a parent-figure,” and this was not something Sam liked to do at all—have a parent recognize deficiencies in himself. By contrast, Sam loved to relate himself to others in a context where both would see things to admire.

To use all this testing to understand Sam's reactions to literary works, we need to translate it into precise terms of drive and adaptation, and then into an identity theme. We can think of Sam as driven by two kinds of hunger. First, he hungered for admiration of his boyish virility and charm, most specifically, of his erectness in all senses of the word. Second, he longed for affection and thought he would achieve it through “touch” leading to merger with some reassuring person. He resisted his own aggressive drives—instead, he wanted to be given affection and admiration in a passive way.

Sam's adaptations had a duality that matched his drives. Primarily, Sam tried to deal with dangers by creating situations of mutual admiration and reassurance leading to identification, particularly with the very person whose aggression he feared. Through this kind of identification, Sam could gratify at least three drives: to receive admiration and love by wooing them from that other; to penetrate, fuse, or merge with the other; to act out aggressions vicariously and guiltlessly through the other. Secondarily, Sam dealt with dangers by external flight or internal avoidance: denial (refusing to perceive dangers); repression (refusing to acknowledge that he had perceived a danger); regression (a retreat to an earlier state of mind), and so on. In still more clinical terms, Dr. Corvus remarked la belle indifférence, the Pollyanna and counterphobic denials

often seen in the classical hysteric.

Flight, however, especially a flight from passivity, could itself let Sam assert power and gratify drives to express his manliness, as when he could “come up” with a joke or an interpretation. Flight could also make a bid for outside supplies of admiration or affection: “See how I stand up and fly, free of wrongdoing. Admire and love me.” Inner flight, particularly a regression toward childishness, could open still another way of receiving a flow from outside of love and admiration from an environment partly seen as mothering him. And all these adaptations could either aid identification or avoid aggression and so help Sam achieve the popularity on which he thrived.

In briefest terms, Sam's fantasies and defenses came together around wishes to take in or get out, taking in passively or getting out actively. Thus, Sam wanted to take in love and admiration of his own self-contained masculinity. He defended against threats to this solitary maleness by getting out of dangers into an isolated boyishness or by coming close to and taking into himself reassurances about his maleness from outside. Ideally, he achieved the most satisfaction by combining both these defenses and his hunger to be loved as an intact, boyish male by fleeing to a source of admiration. He did not want a sexual woman (who might pose dangers to his isolated virility) so much as he wanted desexualized brothers, fathers, or mothers—provided they seemed strong enough to him to be sources of security against his own deeply buried and quite unconscious hostilities. We could state this as an identity very laconically indeed: to get out of dangers to his maleness and to take into his body love and admiration.

To be sure, this must seem to you much more of an X ray than a portrait. Only a short step, however, takes us from Sam's identity theme—with its polarities of loss and gain, taking in and getting out, male and female—to the very real, very ingratiating and dressy young man seated before me, confessing his concern for manners and external appearances, touch between friends (but not lovers), The New Yorker, housekeeping, and Lyndon Johnson. In all such preferences and interests Sam re-created those polarities—and, of course, in his experience of literature as well.

Saul

The first thing I sensed in Saul was self-possession. He had an inwardness, intensity, and concentration that one associates with the traditional image of the scholar. Yet this self-contained quality masked a number of paradoxes. Although he was the most scholarly of this group of readers, Saul was also the most quirky and unexpected. He sought a precision and clarity far beyond anything the others tried for, yet more often than not the result was shadowy, vague, and elusive. He seemed eager to participate in the project, but when it came to the interviews themselves he so managed and controlled them as to be distinctly uncooperative. He talked, but he seemed to talk mostly to himself. He would muffle his words in his beard, embodying his tendency to slur in a modern hairiness. Matters got more difficult the more he talked, for, to get things very exactly, he would read quickly, softly, in a mumble, as if to himself, long sections from the stories, making his tapes painful and difficult to transcribe. Nevertheless, whatever his unconscious feelings, he brought to our enterprise a conscious commitment and enthusiasm that I appreciated.

Dr. Corvus thought Saul showed a good deal of originality in his Rorschach responses. He would come up with things like “a Gemini capsule” (Card II), “gibbons” instead of ordinary monkeys (III), or an image like “gophers holding hands with elephants” (VIII). He was much involved with trying to make the whole card make sense, and often he would use his ingenuity to synthesize and master the entire blot.

He had trouble, however, with colors. He would say things like, “The colors don't support this well.” “The red and white conflict with a sense of fact” (Card II). “The red is spatially different” (Card III). In Rorschach testing, Dr. Corvus said, discrepancies perceived between the colors and the shapes often signal discrepancies felt between emotions and intellect. Saul tended to use harsh or degraded animal imagery for sexual material, and this might have been the basis for such a feeling of conflict.

Saul seemed preoccupied with another set of images: smallness and largeness (for example, the gophers and elephants).

Often (as in Card VI) he saw the relationship as “a small creature towing a large one.” Other responses—Draculas, fat cats, a fat professor, various images of food—introduced situations in which the “large one” was eating the “small creature.” Saul repeatedly used the word “odd” for the blots, and he concerned himself with the “strangeness” of the various images and how well they “fit” the totality. Thus, he would often turn from big or “important” sections of the blot to concentrate on innocuous details. Dr. Corvus's first metaphor for him was, “He's a photographer, searching for reality, peeking at small facets, rather than the total view.” This, I take it, was what he accomplished by his scholarly, Talmudic style in his interviews with me, when he would take pains to read out exactly the right wording of some relatively unimportant passage while the larger question I had asked him went unanswered. “Circumspect,” in its original Latin sense of “looking around,” would describe Saul exactly.

In his COPE test, he avoided the defense of “denial” (in the sense of “a lack of recognition of feeling toward a significant object. … a lack of recognition that the discrepancy between actual and ideal behavior occurs. … The ‘don't worry’ aspect”). He chose denial last six times out of six, placing it firmly in the zero decile. Saul did not like at all the idea of not seeing something. By contrast, Saul did like to have what he saw confirmed by others. He favored the defense of projection (defined in this test as “reversing the subject and object of the feeling”; “the anxiety problem is accepted but the motivating source of the behavior is perceived as being in the object rather than the subject”). Thus, in his Rorschach responses, he would sometimes preface an image by saying, “You can see …” meaning, “I see,” or, perhaps, “I hope you see what I see.”

Another way he would strengthen his sight was to argue his perceptions into validity. Thus, in Card IV (the “father” card), he saw a tall man leaning against a tree. “That [the tree] is to account for the odd appendage.” In effect, he would comment on his comment, his fantasy becoming more real than the inkblot that gave rise to it. Once, at least, Dr. Corvus said, he physically turned away from the card so as not to be distracted by it as he developed a particularly interesting fantasy. Sometimes,

he would give his images tactile values: for Card VIII, “cotton candy, but it's the wrong consistency.” At other times, he would produce three-dimensional pictures with angles and perspectives.

As with the other subjects, a TAT response gives a good sample of Saul's style. This is to the boy in the doorway:

Appalachia—boy's family not desperately poor (he has shirt, overalls in decent repair) but still they live in hand-hewn house. Poor enough that the boy is succumbing to the emotional blight that poverty confers on the inhabitants of the other America. Boy's unhappiness partly this, partly his father's absence —he has been gone, looking for work, for a month (when the mines pulled out 3 years ago, dad lost job)—father not broken yet by the poverty (only extreme last 3 yrs.) but affected. The boy is affected by father's progressive demoralization.

Saul's response is the shortest of all the subjects', and this is as long as his TAT stories ever got. His writing was tiny and crabbed, and in this story there are eleven places where he crossed out his first word to replace it by a more considered one, not, I would say, with any great difference in subtlety or grace.

Yet in the content of what he wrote, he showed the same careful scholarly attention to details such as how the house was made or how good the boy's shirt and overalls were. But only these few details caught his attention, since the story overall remained quite elusive. Unlike Sam, who put a mother and a red-haired father in the picture, Saul saw it entirely in terms of loss, absence, and deprivation.

Specifically, he saw a large, vague, superior force; “poverty,” he called it, using only that word but using it twice. “Poverty” was attacking an equally large, vague victim— “Appalachia,” “the other America”—and dealing out nebulous harms—“emotional blight,” “progressive demoralization.” The specific people are, vaguely, “succumbing” or “affected.” Against these shapeless ills, Saul tried to balance details and set exact limits. He carefully distinguished two different causes for the boy's unhappiness. The family was “not

desperately poor,” the father “not broken yet.” The poverty has been “extreme” only the last “3” years (expressed with a digit) since the mines left.

In general, Saul sought a precision to avoid vagueness (but unconsciously he often sought vagueness itself). He was preoccupied with “fit.” He was alert for the “odd” or “strange,” and he would hedge, qualify, and redefine in his interviews until he reached what he thought was just the right match. Incidentally, this revising also controlled the interview according to Saul's terms, not mine. “A logician,” Dr. Corvus called him, “a systems analyzer,” and this defensive pattern accounted for some of his literary preferences. “The prose works with authority and precision,” he said of an author he liked (Flannery O'Connor), “specifies something.” “I like the precision in defining this emotion with a good deal of— Well, after ‘precision,’ I don't know for sure what to say. That strikes me as absolutely right. That's another way of saying ‘precision.’ ” “ ‘Crystalline’ is another word.” “I get back to these vague critical terms like ‘conciseness’ and ‘efficiency’ and so forth, which I groove on.” In particular, he liked “that kind of precision, utterly no nonsense, precision in delineating the inadequacies and grotesqueries.” I decided Saul took especial pleasure from women's controlling these grotesqueries, for he praised a very frilly, feminine story as “perfectly realized,” “perfectly described,” “perfectly clear.” “What the mother does … fits perfectly,” Later, he described that mother as “frightening terrible.” Similarly, when he was discussing a Poe story, he said to me, “I felt as though the prose was like iron bars between me and great shadowy shapes on the other side of them.” In effect, as an English major and an aspiring writer, he felt free to avoid the great shapes and concentrate on the exactness of the controls.

Another way Saul's guardedness came through in his interviews with me was his habit of quoting authorities. In a given interview, he might quote critics and writers half a dozen times, often rather oddly. Thus, “I learned from Fitzgerald. I learned more about how America works.” He quoted another novelist as an authority on what men's sexual fantasies were like. He even cited me, as a critic, to myself and fed me psychoanalytic

terms he thought might please me, confessing meanwhile, “I'm still pretty innocent in this terminology.” He also quoted a great deal of text and felt uncomfortable when I posed questions that asked him to imagine events not explicitly described. “Uh, now we're talking less about the text with that question. It's not really clear.… That one was one of the questions I was asking myself, obviously. Um, textually, um [pause] textually, I think it suggests …” and he began to quote again, thus evading my question and keeping his imaginings about the text quite to himself.

I took Saul's inwardness and scholarly intensity to represent at the visible level a deeper inner need to hold knowledge and situations in himself. Saul was a remarkably guarded and secretive young man, much concerned with issues like: Who controls whom? Who is big and powerful and therefore likely to control? Who will be exact and hard and therefore force the other to let go of something, particularly something sloppy or vague, hard to hold onto, whether it is inside or outside one's self? At his deepest level, Saul seemed most to fear being a small, passive object with some big, vague power threatening to take something out of him. He was afraid that a “mine” would be “pulled out.” He seemed to expect the threat from a large, sadistic person, most likely a woman (for Saul tended to see women as threatening, aggressive, or austere).

Saul's scholarly and logical search for precision was the creative way he avoided this danger. He became an intellectual who got things to fit or match in an exact balance that he could control. He bargained terms with that superior force, fearing a disproportion that would lead to an unequal bargain and a situation where he would be overpowered and forced to give up something precious. He constantly searched his environment for anything big or vague that might pose a danger. He needed to see all threats before they could become dangerous; to leave nothing hidden or uncertain; to control situations; and, in particular, to hew to measured balances between closeness and distance, emotion and intellect, acceptance and rejection, or man and woman. If he could not get such a match or bargain, he would avoid the whole situation, physically or psychically, and look for a world of safe precision elsewhere.

Shep

Of all the readers, Shep most intrigued and most saddened me. I found him mixing in the most striking way, stereotype and original, morality and pathology, maturity and immaturity. He held forthright and progressive ideas but in a bitter, wronged way. Shep presented himself as almost a prototype of young alienation—radical, hip, and hostile. His clothes had achieved a kind of monochromatic brown patina. Indeed, he proudly told me one day that everything he had on his back was used clothing he had scrounged for free. His hair was very long and very much in a state of nature. In the interviews, he sprawled and slouched, and his flat Southwestern a 's often trailed into snarls. He tended to be taciturn or at least to measure his words carefully.

He could also be evasive. Consistently, he diverted literary talk into his own sweeping generalizations about revolution, drugs, sex, and a sort of at-oneness with the cosmos. When he did confine himself to literature, he began almost automatically to analyze it, skillfully phrasing clever comments and modern dogmatisms, but talking almost to himself. He was quick and good at literary analysis, but he preferred to seem impulsive, and often, I thought, he deliberately and self-consciously created the mere appearance of spontaneity.

I got the impression from seeing Shep among other students that he had no close friends. Certainly, he never mentioned a close relationship with another person (as Sam talked about walking with friends and lovers or Saul about his girl troubles). Shep did complain of his parents, both in his childhood and in his life at the time of the interviews, and he did mention various writers and celebrities. In a manner almost mythically American, he would speak of fleeting figures he had met on his travels—Shep as the archetypal hitchhiker, the stranger on the train, the frontiersman. But he never spoke simply of being with someone. Instead, he seemed to relate to people in terms of systems, abstractions, and ideologies. To be sure, most of us in Shep's milieu in 1969 applauded Shep's values but, even so, he gave them an oddly bitter, relentless flavor.

Dr. Corvus told me that Shep would typically project something into the test materials but then deny his own projection, insisting someone else had put it there. In the first cards of the Rorschach, for example, he spoke of the images he gave as “the arrangement of ink.” “It was designated that way,” he said, mixing his saying with the blot's design.

Similarly, in one of the interviews, he remarked, “You're leading me down the primrose path just to see how much I can fabricate.” True, I was much interested in his “fabrications,” but why did he think fabrication a “primrose path”? Why would he say of my request that he retell the story in his own words, “That sounds like a trap question”? Before taking the TAT for this study, he recalled, “I think I had one of those once, and it didn't make any sense, because the pictures all aimed toward a certain story that wasn't what I wanted to see in it.” I thought he was saying he preferred his own fantasy free from what he took to be a controlling intelligence in the pictures. In the same way, Shep tended to see the Rorschach cards as literal, not in an “as if” way. Many of his responses to them were hostile: images of projectiles or ripping and tearing apart. In Card IV, he saw a bat, but it was “not particularly out to get me,” he said, as though he had to remind himself he was not under attack. Dr. Corvus said he got the impression Shep felt watched by a harsh superego.

As I reminisce about Shep, I find myself thinking that his mind adapted to the world as a small or frightened animal would. That is, he related to reality by perceiving it in terms of threats. Indeed, a vulnerable organism has to react this way in order to keep constantly on the alert. In this mobilized state, Shep coped adroitly with the world's actual dangers (and those he projected into the world) in one of two ways: either he hid or he fled to a point from which he could fight.

For Shep, hiding meant becoming a mere object among other objects in a “system.” Flight meant exile and resistance. “That's a damned everyday occurrence in my life, the fascism of this country. I carry a piece of paper in my hip pocket,” he said one day, referring to his draft card, “that tells me about it any time I care to look, and that will probably drive me into exile.” Like so many in 1969, Shep felt that he had only

the choice of submitting like a mere piece of paper to an all-powerful state or fleeing elsewhere to fight another day, and the political setting exactly matched these two modes of adaptation.

The United States of 1969 also matched his need to perceive the world as threatening and to threaten in return. In all our conversations, Shep had a tendency to push out from the material at hand into general themes and issues, usually political and social, where he could, in effect, pick fights. Some of these generalizations and comparisons seemed sensible enough, some seemed silly, but all gave me the same feeling in the interview situation. I felt challenged and, in hearing or reading our interviews again, I often detected a testy note in my questions—as now I feel a distinct tendency to be defensive in writing about those discussions. Shep was forcing on me (and on others he described in his interviews) occasions to take offense or to retaliate.

These assertions functioned multiply in Shep's character. He was talking the “language of escalation,” generalizing more and more widely and so maximizing the possible areas of disagreement. He thus created the aggressive atmosphere that mobilized his adaptive strengths. In one mode, he cloaked himself in generalities. In another, these general themes and issues worked as a kind of flight for Shep, away from my literary questions into something he himself had chosen; and there, he could fight.

One day, for example, he announced he had come across a review that said an author had “raised fiction to the level of a sport.” Is this what one says to a singularly nonathletic teacher of literature? He talked about Shopper's World, a local mall: “It's really a scary place, not so much the people, but as a whole plastic environment covering acres and acres.” He, by contrast, was “into” Zen and yoga and so did not need a hi-fi, did not even like light shows or the Fillmore. I found myself feeling I was damned if I did (but cowardly if I didn't) argue with him about the aesthetics of shopping plazas or the technology of acid rock. Yet if I had, I suppose we would have settled into a distant sniping, each secure in the fortress of his own value system.

Shep's adaptation of “hiding” himself in a system showed with particular clarity in his response to TAT Card 13B, the picture of the solitary boy in the doorway. Ordinarily, this card elicits depressive material, thoughts about the loss of nurturing persons, for example, or loneliness or hunger. Shep quickly developed the ambivalent themes one might feel toward a withholding mother, but he applied them to the government. (His writing was all small capitals, as if there were no difference between big and little letters.)

POVERTY IN AMERICA. THANK YOU, DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH, EDUCATION + WELFARE. WHAT ABOUT THE DEPARTMENT OF HELL, INTIMIDATION + WARFARE IN THE OTHER PART OF THE BUILDING?

A BOY CAUGHT IN THE ONE NATION IN THE WORLD THAT SHD. BE ABLE TO DO SOMETHING FOR HIM—BUT IS MORE INTERESTED IN WASTING LIVES + PROTECTING CORPORATE INCOME.

WHICH ALL SOUNDS PRETTY MARXIST, I GUESS. I REALIZE THAT IN HUMAN TERMS HIS SITUATION IS NOT UNLIVABLE, MAY IN FACT BE MORE LIVABLE THAN THE CONCRETE-LINED, AIR-CONDITIONED SUBURBANITE'S CHILD'S IS. YET HE LOOKS HUNGRY. WHICH IS A DRAG. WE ARE PART OF THE SAME BODY (AND I DON'T MEAN BODY POLITIC) + I OBJECT TO THIS BOY GOING HUNGRY WHEN THE RESOURCES ARE ADEQUATE TO FEED HIM. IF HE WANTS TO GO HUNGRY AFTER THAT, IT'S PERMISSIBLE, OR SHD. BE. I AM NOT TALKING ABOUT “ACCULTURATING” HIM.

NOR AM I INTERESTED PERSONALLY IN DOING ANYTHING. IF THE BUREAUCRATS DID THEIR WORK RIGHT, THERE WOULD BE LITTLE OR NO NEED FOR VISTA, LET ALONE A LOT OF THE PRIVATE AID GROUPS. THE HOUSE IS NICE. IT SHOULD BE A GOOD PLACE TO LIVE IF YOU'RE NOT HUNGRY. OR MALTREATED BY YR. “PROTECTORS” (THE POLICE—I TAKE THE TERM TO INCLUDE ALL ORDERING INSTITUTIONS OF A SOCIETY, ALL THOSE WHOSE DECISIONS CAN BE IMPOSED ON YOU, INCLUDING COURTS, EMPLOYERS, ETC—ARE NOT SUFFICIENTLY TOLERANT WITH RESPECT TO THE POOR, WHOEVER THEY ARE.)

A PUBLICITY PICTURE, DESIGNED TO STIR CERTAIN EMOTIONS. IF I WERE MORE IMPLICATED IN THIS SOCIETY, PERHAPS MY REACTIONS MIGHT HAVE FIT MORE CLOSELY. ANGER, BUT NO VIOLENCE.

Obviously, in a political setting, Shep's tirade could make perfect sense, but he was taking a psychological test, and he was asked to tell a story to an obviously fictional picture. As in his interviews with me, Shep has fled from a situation that might be revealing in order to snipe at it from the safe distance of an otherwise highly acceptable system of moral and political priorities.

Nevertheless, Shep's response strongly suggests that he did not achieve in early childhood some of the full, stable trust that makes later growth easier. Chief among these earliest gains is a sure sense of one's own boundaries, the dividing line between inner and outer reality, parent and child, and so on. Shep, however, as in this TAT response, felt himself “part of the same body” with the boy in the picture and identified himself with “the poor whoever they are.” Hence, too, he mistook the level of reality appropriate to the picture, seeing it as a “publicity picture” (perhaps for some government agency's sinister plans).

In merging with the world around him, Shep partly converted his own massive feelings of anger into a feeling that he was being dominated by some sadistic being outside himself. Thus, he did not distinguish society's indifference to the boy from a system of “ordering institutions,” a “department of … intimidation.” And behind these sadistic “protectors” I sensed Shep's massive, early resentment of some mothering person. Dr. Corvus also concluded Shep must have felt greatly deprived in childhood. From this deprivation came his feeling that he must either coerce or be coerced and his feeling, too, that to be dependent was (ultimately) to be eaten—just as his upper case letters absorbed the lower case. As Shep said to TAT Card 18GF, “Proximity could breed murder.”

Shep's narrowed sense of self showed up in the way he thought of the body as a destructive machine, particularly when taking something in or putting something out. “In Spain,” he

recalled, “you can pick up a thing called turista which causes vomiting and diarrhea, and I found that most encounters with the people called turistas tend to induce the same reaction on my part.” “When a junky shoots up, there's a narcissistic closed circle from the right hand through the needle into the arm—complete isolation—and I think Hemingway sitting there with the rifle in his mouth, or pistol against his head, or whatever it was, there's that same sort of closed circle from the hand through the weapon to the body. They seem to be caught in the same sort of evil bag,” he concluded, suddenly giggling.

In the same way, Shep found security (of the “hiding” kind) in surrendering the separateness and edges of his self. For example, he commented on the blind man in D. H. Lawrence's story of that name: “If he's going to know objects this way [‘in a way more intimate and more primal than … others know,’ Shep had said], he's going to … have to exist as an object, in the flow of things, surrender to the world, be totally dependent upon it, but not really, because he's an integral part of it—there's not the separation that makes for dependence. If you get into the stream of things enough, you don't have this subject-object dichotomy anymore.” Similarly, he recalled the anti-Negro prejudice of the town he grew up in: “About the most you can do is grant that they are separate human beings, and you don't get around to think of them as being part of your flesh and blood until sometime later.” In effect, he was saying, to be close, to empathize with someone, is to become the same body as that person or to be engulfed by him; and this is something that happens to the black, the blind, the deprived boy in the doorway—and Shep.

As against these weakened victims was “the sort of bureaucratic putdown you run into all over the place,” a mysteriously powerful controlling force: “Ultimately fascism is black magic. It's an attempt to control the environment absolutely, by forces hostile with [sic ] the current of things.” He saw this aim of controlling the bodily currents of others as “the old con of government anywhere, that we're doing for you what you can't do for yourself and proceed and take over all sorts of things that you can do for yourself, such as regulate your sexual habits or your intake of chemicals.” Here, I felt that behind the

specter of the state stood his parents, particularly as they controlled his body's taking in and putting out. Thus he dismissed clothes as “externals … defining who you are rather than the internals … It's a heap of trash.” Of Richardson's Clarissa, he said, “These people [her family] treated her like shit … and by accepting this treatment, she accepts their judgment of what she is in order that they can treat her that way. She becomes an object.”

In short, in Shep's psychic economy, to be close meant being threatened or controlled, which then implied being made an object, perhaps even being consumed or gobbled up. Alternatively, being close could mean being the same as, part of the same body, loved and loving. In effect, one could be safe if one gave up identity and became an object in a system. One could even, in a way, be loved: “There's not the separation that makes for dependence.”

Alternatively, instead of being close, Shep simply fled, both physically and psychically, into that “exile” he so often referred to. “We grow out of it, grow out of … being a child. We lose it.” “She's a bitch,” he said of a character in a story, “but she's a lot like my mother. She can be a bitch, but she'll be very nice out in public. And she probably regards her own family as public.” “I've always liked snow … and if I were to walk outside right now [and see a] pile of snow on the ground, I'd think it was great. Keep snowing all spring,” he said, as though he were addressing the weather gods. “I'm feeling like I've got to get to the roads again, probably take off over Easter and hitch to Denver.”

Besides, or beyond, flight, the further step toward not being controlled that Shep would take was aggression: “Violent resistance.” “Maybe that's the only thing that would do it,” “protect you from fascism.” “If you don't dig killing people, if you would rather have [someone else kill the tyrant], then eventually you may come to realize that the only thing left is exile.”

These extremes—merger as an object in a system or total separation through flight and fight—carried over into Shep's attitudes toward reading and literature. He contrasted times when “I get captured by what I'm reading” with analytical puzzle-solving. “Take an aerial photograph of it. Then I'm very

much the separate observer,” reading “like a damn critic,” thus, like the “damn” man he was talking to. Flight served, like merger, to evade human contact, but literary flight gave Shep a way to re-create his own autonomy: “[What] I'm concerned with in reading is trying to make sense out of my own life.” “That's why I'm in the whole English bag,” he said, because it offered more “insidious reading” than other subjects. Whether he intended “insidious” to mean “tending to entrap” or not, he found in literature a way of actively reestablishing that earliest passive closeness he had fled. “The important thing is making life assume a wholeness both for yourself and for the people you happen to contact through the classroom.”

The dehumanizing common to Shep's merger and his aerial detachment showed again when he recalled “the quote attributed to Mussolini's son bombing Ethiopia, that the bombs down there looked like little red flowers. I find that a very distasteful thing intellectually, and yet I'm still taken by it because in a way, they must have looked like little red flowers, and I'm almost morbidly fascinated with the detachment of a man who could look down there and see only the flowers.” Yet, as he went on, he seemed to say that the cruelly indifferent response was the direct, intuitive one “preceding the intellection of it.” “The Mussolini image is a striking image before I even start thinking about it in terms of an abstraction, and it was just the experiential thing of, here, you drop something over the edge which explodes and blossoms like a red flower before even thinking about what exploding things do.” I could not tell whether Shep knew that Vittorio Mussolini had really been referring to the bodies of Ethiopian cavalrymen making roses when bombed.3 If so, Shep's association doubly suggested the rendering of people into things.

The essence of Shep's identity, this search for thingness, seemed to come from his reacting against an original, mothering utopia that ceased to be a nurturing bliss and became a depriving, disgusting emptiness. “Once Eden goes through the Fall, it becomes the most desolate place on earth. I think that sort of mythic inversion is almost necessitated. You have to maintain the intensity even though you don't maintain the polarity.

So that this [place in a story] has gone from being the navel of the world to perhaps being the asshole of the world.”

Shep seemed to me the kind of adult whose infancy had turned into extremes of rage and who had developed thereafter, not so much in fulfillment of his first experience of the world as in reaction against it. He moved, as we all do, from his first relationship, based on what went into his body, to what might even have been quite average processes of control of what came out of his body, body products and body actions. But Shep seemed someone who had perceived that control in terms of his own massive rage. Control came to represent for him a total taking over of his being. Similarly, in the romance of the boy for his mother or his identification with his father, it seemed to me, judging from the adult Shep, that his aggressive feelings as a child had so colored these later phases of development that he treated the crucial others in his life as things, institutions, or abstract forces that threatened to engulf him.

As an adult, Shep singled out this sort of relationship to reject it: “If two people can't exist as individuals with complete freedom of agency in the world, if one has to possess the other as an object, you don't have a love relationship—you got a property relationship. If I ever decide to make children in the world, I want to marry, not incorporate.” In fact, however, in his constant response to others as things or systems, he was aggressive enough toward them that he seemed to feel secure only if he were himself also a thing among them: the boy in the picture or “the concrete-lined, air-conditioned suburbanite's child.”

In a more positive vein, he admired people or institutions for “exercising possibilities in the world” (which I took to be a conscious moral value derived from his unconscious need to adapt through activity and flight). Choice was a good thing in Shep's economy—he needed lots of emergency exits. Alternatively, he could appreciate situations of “no choice” as “natural” and gratifying if they produced “thingness,” that is, if they assigned one a secure role in some matrix, like a position in a myth (he delighted in mythic interpretations of literature) or in one of the Indian tribes he so admired (part

of his conscious primitivism) or in a social or literary theory he approved.

As an adult, Shep showed in our interviews a warm desire to be a sensitive reader and teacher of literature coupled with an incomplete sense of self that sometimes helped him to be that sensitive reader and at other times gave rise to fierce aggressive impulses. These aggressions would lead him to respond to people in and out of books as abstractions (“red flowers,” “being part of your flesh and blood”), not as people with lives of their own. Within this limitation, however, he responded at all psychological levels (oral, anal, phallic, oedipal—in technical terms), unlike, say, Saul, who responded primarily at one. At all these levels, however, he polarized stories and themes into two extremes of merger into “thingness” or flight-and-fight. Often, Shep seemed unusually mature because of these modes. Certainly his loosened boundaries corresponded to the new directions in American culture. Yet those same loosened boundaries made the world a far more angry place for him than it needed to be.

Sebastian

A complicated, engaging young man, Sebastian had a sardonic sense of humor that made for lots of jokes and for amusing interviews. He was a surprisingly worldly and sophisticated person, the most self-consciously “literary” of these five readers. Clever with words, he was also much attuned to economic class and social status—possibly because at the time we had our interviews, he was working his way loose from family, religious, and ethnic values he had formerly held quite strongly, and he talked a good deal about himself as a lapsed, or lapsing, Catholic. Tall, well dressed in a hypermodern way, hair flowing freely, his eyes wandering a bit, he impressed me as a slightly incoherent, impulsive person, almost too eager to accept new fads and fashions, hurrying to get somewhere without quite knowing where. Although highly articulate, he had a curious way of slurring his words, as though to make them still more casual than they already were, but I felt underneath his seeming ease, his manner was studied. This mixture gave him an

intriguing style that mixed nervous energy with “cool.”

These are only my impressions, however. With considerably more precision, Dr. Corvus found two patterns or directions in Sebastian's responses to the Rorschach, which he stated in technical and clinical language. Sebastian would deal with threatening materials in the inkblots, said Dr. Corvus, by flight or avoidance or denial, typically substituting his own intellectual products for the materials given him or “dressing them up.” Alternatively, he would sexualize things that caused him anxiety, particularly aggressive material, often going to the extent of identifying with them in a pregenital tenderness that was, in Sebastian's own phrase, “definitely benign.” Although the tests are “as if” situations, Sebastian would tend to get absorbed by them (as he did, for me, with literary texts). At the opposite extreme, he would, in Dr. Corvus's words, “arbitrarily brush aside, omit, compartmentalize,” thus returning to his first mode of adaptation. He would use “inconsequential things to blot out disturbing images.” Dr. Corvus sensed, in this side of the pattern, little “self-involvement,” “lots of responses, but shallow, moving away, not pulling together.” In both patterns, that of substitution or that of passively fusing with threatening materials, Sebastian, Dr. Corvus said, showed a pervasive lack of affect, a stiffness, an inanimacy.

Sebastian's COPE questionnaire (considerably less reliable, to be sure, than Dr. Corvus's more supple tests) shed a different light. Far from lacking affect, Sebastian had plenty of anxiety; he did not divorce anxiety from “the discrepancy between [his] actual and ideal behavior” (in the words of the test manual). Isolation was his least used defense (first decile). His most used (ninth decile) was perceiving “the motivating source of [his] behavior … in the object rather than the subject.” That is, Sebastian often felt controlled by others, not himself (as, in the Rorschach, he would blur himself into threatening material).

If I were to try to state Sebastian's identity theme as exactly (and therefore as connotatively) as possible, it would be: to give an intellectual creation of his own and to be given a fleshy control that he could fuse into or withdraw from. With that

theme in mind, read Sebastian's story in response to the “depressive” TAT card of the solitary boy in the doorway:

He lived almost without props. Had none of the paraphernalia of American boyhood. Had only the unchanging faces of buildings. So what developed—almost ex nihilo—was a system of memory. Ex nihilo because the content of his consciousness was almost non-existent. He trained himself in speech—a self taught rhetoric—memorising and elaborating the laconic exchanges of his dour parents, lank creatures both so exhausted from scratching a bare living out of their West Virginia soil that they could spare nothing for conversation. He imagined rooms of a great house and corresponding to each room and to the contents of the rooms he would fit segments of his neat speeches. Interior monologues that lasted whole sunny days as he sat on the log doorsill. They called him dull.

No event in physical reality could begin to compete with the rich ornate rooms full of weighted objects heavy surreal furniture of a crystal mind.

He sat while a bright yellow truck came to deliver a farm implement anxiously contracted for months previously appeared at the crest of a hill a quarter mile distant. He watched, silent, his parents walk to the rough gate to greet its long awaited coming. He saw the panic-eyes of the driver a stranger as he did not, could not stop as the truck careened madly sliding, its rear end thrashing through space to softly thump his silent parents almost silently out of existence and watched without moving as its lumbering yellow shape smashed his fragile blond skull into the rough floor of the seed cabin.

He wrote with conscious artistry, and with a dualism running through his story (as well as that lofty disregard of commas and other niceties so characteristic of the English major).

There are really two stories: one, an investigation of mental products inside the leading character's head; the second, a violent scene “outside.” The first half shows Sebastian's exchange of mental creations for a physical reality—particularly a reality that gave nothing, “nihilo.” “They could spare nothing

for conversation.” Whatever its origins in Sebastian's early relation with his parents, this pattern provides the basis for his ability to use intellectual and verbal products creatively to maximize his possibilities for happiness in the world of the adult.

The second plot in Sebastian's TAT story about the boy in the doorway introduces the theme of control—or, more exactly, the violence that results from the lack of it. The truck of “a stranger,” silent as the son himself, crushes with its “rear end” and “yellow shape” both parents and child. It represents a kind of violent physical match to the first mental plot in the story. In the first, mental possessions substituted for physical. In the second, the “rear end” silently thumps the silent parents. The “yellow shape” smashes the “fragile blond skull.”

The question of stopping a “rear end” brings in themes associated with early experiences of controlling (or having others control) our body creations. The story speaks of “soil,” “weighted objects,” “contents,” and “interior monologues … as he sat on the log doorsill” (italics mine). This TAT also shows a scene by a gate—“his parents walk[ed] to the rough gate to greet its long awaited coming.” Admittedly, Sebastian has much transformed the body meaning of these words. Nevertheless, I think I discern fantasies about the control of soil and a fear (or wish) that failure to control what physically (as against mentally) comes through the gate could lead to the violent destruction of self or others.

In general, then, I find that Sebastian showed two patterns. First, he would seek a control he could join himself to (like the boy in the TAT “memorising and elaborating” his parents' “exchanges”). Often, Sebastian would see control as an exchange and often (although not in this TAT) the controller as a sexually desirable woman. Second, he would substitute his own mental product for these external controls. Thus, these two patterns could combine to make a third, Sebastian's ideal: a mutual giving in which he came close to a sexually desirable controller who gave him something physical, fleshy, or “dirty,” to which he responded by giving his own mental products.

These patterns provided the unconscious basis for Sebastian's distinctive intellectual style: a sophisticated search for models he could emulate, often expressed in imagery like the

“soil” or the “rear end” of the TAT stories. For example, he said that in parochial school, “I felt that I was standing hip deep in my own tradition, and I really liked it.… I've sort of backed out of it.” “I have a tendency now to put my eggs in the hippie basket, like I really identify with that kind of business.”

Of his own ethnic tradition, he said, “It's never as great as it's painted. They really have feet of clay. The only people that are as grand as they say they are are the English. They're flawless, their parades, and their things, and they've got the money to do it right.” He admired “that peculiar British business, which goes from the top to the bottom, practically.… They just seem to have insulated themselves from their violence in a way we haven't done.” Violence in an English (as against an American) novel “would be somehow comical. It would be seen through two or three panes of glass somehow. It would be distorted and far off and not merely somebody actually being thrown out [of a window] and the sense of guts on the street, the loving care for the physical details.” Thus, as in the TAT, Sebastian revealed a faith that sophistication and wit would provide alternatives and controls for the rawly and perhaps violently physical.

It is also worth noting, I think, how many of Sebastian's phrases in his ordinary speech are classic psychoanalytic symbols for the body products on which the child's earliest controls are focused: standing hip deep, putting eggs in a basket, paint, clay, the rituals of Englishness, money, bottom, or guts. He was constantly acting out the substitution of mental products for physical ones. Similarly, it is striking that the controlling forces that appealed to him were precisely those that classical psychoanalysis links to sphincter morality: a ritualistic church and an authoritarian government. “I liked T. S. Eliot [in school]. I liked the idea that there was a kind of acerbic certainty. I was sort of a fascist in that prep school way.” He liked novelists who worked out the Catholic and conservative tradition he was being educated in at that time. “I was totally in it [English aristocratic fiction] … for me, at that point, something in the nature of ritual.… some kind of celebration of something … a liturgical quality. And then just total delight with [their] sharp, aristocratic vision.”

All kinds of reading, however, even criticism, could give Sebastian the mixture of control with giving that he liked. After learning from good criticism, he said, one would read a story “with a sense of treading over familiar ground and coming on familiar and loved landmarks.” Sebastian always sought the “familiar” in his reading. In effect, he liked being given himself. “I was always looking for evocations of the kinds of things that I went through.” “I like John Updike, for instance, very much. Anybody that's working the childhood memory vein always appeals to me. Salinger, for instance.” He felt most entertained when “you realize that you're just being entertained. There's no real demands being made on your consciousness at all.”

Indeed, for Sebastian to identify fully with others, they had to give to him, not he to them. For example, he said of political figures, “It's part of the charisma of any leader that in some way he's giving up something, he's making a sacrifice.… Even though he embodies the group ideal, somehow it's a drain on his energies to be the group ideal.…” Similarly, he said, the Church had taught him “that we've got all the truth here, and we'll give you some.”

By contrast, Sebastian did not like authors or authorities who kept things within themselves. He was “offended” by Thomas Mann, “by his burgherish quality. It's heavy. It's like a Victorian parlor. It's liberal and broad-minded and tries to take everything into its scope, but it's ponderous in the way that it includes everything.… There's no mercurial quality to it, which would make it so much more pleasant”—indeed, witty like Sebastian himself. But with Mann, “Everything is ponderous, that elephantine quality.” Ultimately such inclusiveness and self-sufficiency seemed a withholding: “Because he is aware of everything, he's also a suitable censor.” Sebastian disliked people and institutions who withheld from him, whom he could not get close to.

Naturally, someone who so disliked being withheld from, liked being given to, even being given by the authorities of church and school the choirboy ethics he now rejected. “It thrilled me. I loved it. I liked all the stuff that I had been fed since I was [a child], of the Christian intellectual tradition and

how deep it was, and how groovy it was, and how everybody finally comes down to it, like you can't get away from the Church.” His word “fed” tells us this giving was important to him at all levels of his being, even or especially the earliest but also later stages. “I accepted the categorical imperatives absolutely, and I bought that completely.” “I liked almost everything that I was given [to read].” At a less intellectual level, he enjoyed thinking about women in passive situations: “It was titillating, that a sort of placid Southern beauty like that would— All that passiveness would be just exemplified and there she is, you know. ‘Take me.’ It was sort of exciting.”

Conversely, if an author or an authority gave to Sebastian, Sebastian would not only sexualize and merge into the situation, he would give in return. Thus, at the movies, “if it's done right at the beginning, if I sense any kind of imagination at all, or any kind of depth at all, “I'll just accept all the données without much trouble and I'll buy the whole thing, all the premises, and scream and yell and just be as much a part of it as anyone could want.” Similarly, with the theater: “I always thought of myself as terrific [as an actor] potentially, and so I respond to plays on the level of … thinking about the actors and how they're doing it, and could I do that?” Like so many English majors, he wanted to be a writer, and he often tried out his own creativity alongside the author's, as it were, when he read fiction or poetry, asking whether he would have written it that way. Being given a story, he gave one in return.

Yet there was something odd about Sebastian's giving in return—it seemed (as Dr. Corvus had concluded) to limit his merger. To be sure, he could say, “When I'm in a movie … I'm really in it.” “I guess my state of mind is total identification with what's going on.” “I sort of forget the fact that I'm in a public place and have a tendency to laugh a lot or to make verbal comments on what's going on, as if the movie weren't particularly on the screen but were on my eyeballs instead.” Yet, how many of us, when we are totally engrossed in a movie, are making comments on it? It seemed to me Sebastian's own giving provided him an escape from his fusion with the silver screen—verbal creation. Giving out words in return for getting images meant he could set the terms of his fusion

into cinematic or literary experience. As he said of literary skills, “It's a technique. It's a way of going about it that you can respect, but you know that it's limited. You know that it's not partaking of darkness.”

In short, Sebastian's intellectual statements about life and letters said to me that he had created a sophisticated and worldly-wise view of things from a combination of two deep patterns. First, Sebastian longed for closeness to an authority that was not heavy or demanding or withholding or self-contained by its own ideals. Rather, the authority was to give freely. (It was the “take me” attitude that led me to decide such an authority must have derived from a giving mother.) Second, Sebastian would give the authority something in return: eggs in the basket, a portion of truth, a drain on his energies, business, ore from the vein of memory—he'd “scream and yell and just be as much a part of it as anyone could want.” Most of all, Sebastian would give by means of literary or other intellectual techniques for distancing and isolating: verbal comment, wit, a violence made “somehow comical,” “seen through two or three panes of glass,” “distorted and far off.” “I mean it's very easy to ridicule your own deepest feelings or to catch yourself being swept up in magazine rhetoric.” Ultimately, he could flee altogether into his own intellectual creations, rejecting completely the bargain with the controlling authority, as he was apparently doing with the religion of his youth.

Always, however, he wanted to avoid situations of either total withholding or total merger (either of which, he seemed to feel, could give rise to massive, overpowering violence). He wanted an intimacy limited by means of giving and getting in return. As I suggested above, he acted so as to combine three possibilities: closeness to an authority, being given something warm and fleshly by that authority, giving in return a mental or verbal creation of his own. And it was in this atmosphere of mutuality that our very pleasant interviews took place.

Sebastian, however, introduces another issue—creativity. Although this book has to do, not with writers' creations but readers' re-creations, Sebastian nevertheless illustrates a point

that should be made, because he wanted to be a writer. I do not know if he will go on to become a successful writer in fact or, indeed, a writer at all, but we can see how, if he does, his writing will serve him as an adaptation to certain early wishes and fears, in his case, about the control of physical and mental products. Thus, should he prove “creative” (that word sometimes being narrowly limited to productive artists), his creativity would not be a special faculty but part of the whole pattern of adaptations that makes up his lifestyle. Whatever Sebastian creates, and the very fact of his creating it, will exist on the same basis as his early fondness for the Church or Englishness or passive girls who say, “Take me.”

Consider another TAT story Sebastian wrote, this one in response to Card 2, a scene in the manner of Thomas Hart Benton. In the foreground left is a girl carrying books. In the foreground right a woman leans against a tree—occasionally she is seen as pregnant. In the background a man, naked to the waist, is doing farm work. Sebastian wrote of it:

The farm—isolated, fertile smelling of loam, manure sweat ammoniac and pungent. The hours—earliness—scrabbling poultry faint dawn light harsh noonlight piercing afternoon. Escape.

I can escape. How? One way. The mind. To shut out smells, sounds, excepting. The brain a fragile flower perched closed but timidly opening on—manure fertility.

I am here and gone at once. I am double. A woman. My hips broad.… [sic] my breasts round small. Him. His huge reeking presence in twilight mud clotted wrists. Pole thick coarsely hairy wrists.

I am as fertile as this hateful farm and as and as [sic] the white pages of my life giving book.

The girl, Mona, 16 has lived on a farm in Ohio for all of her 16 years. She has lately become more and more engrossed with a literature unknown as the city world is unknown to her muscular brothers to her faded eternally pregnant mother.

She longs to escape the confines of the farm smells. She enrolls in a correspondence course offered on a matchbook

cover. Is accepted. Applies to a boarding school near Cincinatti. Something of her brooding unrest communicates itself to her examiners. She is admitted.

The time comes for departure. But she senses that in leaving the soil the sinewy muscular sunlit world of labor and childbirth she becomes a prisoner of that departure. Wandering. Error. The girl errant. In the harsh light of late may in the waning heat she waits at the farm gate. Awaits the station wagon to remove her from her thick environment. The sound of her brothers cries is harsh. Her mother, father dead, is silent. Proudly tearful.4

Obviously, we are in the presence of considerable literary talent.

Despite the somewhat self-conscious artistry, however (or because of it), I think Sebastian says a good deal about himself. That is, the first and most obvious thing about Sebastian's TAT protocol is that he did try to make it a short story, a literary production. Indeed, he shows no small talent in such fine imaginings of detail as the ad on the matchbook cover or Cincinnati or his arty stringing together of words in the first two paragraphs (which look almost like a first draft). Given a picture, Sebastian gave back a story—a correspondence course, in a way, a “match book.”

Second, Sebastian got right into the scene, smelling it, emoting to it, recording a series of impressions in a manner quick as life. He was so “into” the scene that for the first few paragraphs I was not sure who the “I” of his story was. Third, Sebastian readily identified with the girl in the picture whom he associated with books and school—he identified with females in three out of four TATs.

Fourth, as with his other TAT story, much of the incidental imagery consisted of familiar associations to body creations: “loam,” “manure,” “pungent,” “reeking,” “smells,” and so on. He partly saw as entrapping and “hateful” the “farm smells,” the “manure fertility,” and the coarsely hairy wrists, thick as a pole (a pun?), to which he limited the muscular (and I think, sexualized) brother.

He saw, however, an alternative mode to that physical,

smelly, muscular fertility, namely, “the brain” or “literature.” He called it an “escape” that would shut out “smells,” but also an “opening on—manure fertility.” The girl escapes, but she is also “a prisoner of that departure.”

Really, then, Sebastian based his story not so much on an escape as on two modes of adaptation, each of which could be an escape and each a trap. “I am here and gone at once. I am double.” In one mode, he felt immersed in physical, sexual, smelly earthiness, as earlier he said he was “hip deep” in his ethnic tradition. In the other mode, he rose above that “thick environment” to be a fragile flower of brain, mind, and literature, and it was in this second, adaptive mode that his intellectual and verbal talents flowered. Thus Sebastian could say, in a key sentence, “I am as fertile as this hateful farm and as”—blocking on this figure of speech—“the white pages of my life giving book.” He was fertile, then, in both modes, in his fusion with a fertile but controlling or authorizing environment and in his own intellectual or literary creativity. Whether he becomes a writer or not, I suspect, depends on which of these modes dominates the other. When last I saw Sebastian, he was on his way to a commune, and I had the impression that, for the time being anyway, an authorizing environment was going to be more important to him than giving out his own creations.

So be it. Nevertheless Sebastian is paradigmatic. One can see the vital possibility of creativity in his character and see also its role in meeting his outer and inner needs, some of which go back to very early infancy. For any human being, the literal, historical sources of creativity lie deeply buried in the haphazard experiences of infancy, which are difficult to learn about, differ for each child, and are quite unpredictable in their results. For the adult, however, one can see the dynamic. Artistic creativity, whether Faulkner's, Sebastian's, or Hilda Doolittle's,5 is simply that particular human being's way of meeting the demands he faces from an outer and an inner reality. That reality can reach as far back, for example, as Sebastian's apparent decision in the very first year or two of his life to give his mother mental products in response to her physical control, nearness, and warmth.

Sandra

Sandra was graceful and stylish, although subdued in manner. “Maidenly” was the adjective Dr. Corvus applied. She tended to be rather blocked and rigid in the interview situation, turning our sessions into a question-and-answer quiz. Indeed, it was not until several had passed that she was able to ramble on freely or even look at me directly. Always, she hedged and qualified her conclusions: “Every touch was pretty perfect.” An insight was “a definite addition, I guess.” Nevertheless, she was an extremely intelligent and perceptive reader, thoroughly cooperative in the “experiment.”

Obviously, one salient fact about Sandra is that she was a woman. I know I responded to her differently, and presumably she talked to me with a set of constraints different from the male readers'. One could say therefore that she brought to both the stories and interviews a set of expectations and experiences not comparable to the male subjects', but this would be to treat her femaleness as though it were “maleness-with-a-difference,” a very old-fashioned and clumsy way of thinking psychoanalytically about women.

In this, the eighth decade of the development of psychoanalysis, one could try instead to understand any human being, male or female, in terms of his or her identity theme. The experience of being female helps develop that identity theme in one-half of a given culture's people, just as the experience of being male does in the other half. And being male or female in a given culture is one of the realities to which each individual must respond by means of his developing identity. There may be some identity themes that are inherently male or female (such as Erikson's concept of “inner space”), but no one, so far as I know, can say for sure as of 1975. To me, Sandra's identity theme seemed the same kind of statement as the male readers'.

If I put all her tests and all her interviews together, I am led to the following theme for Sandra. To begin with, she perceived the world as a kind of mystery; and sometimes, by words like “trap” or “trick,” she conveyed the feeling that the mystery posed dangers. To find out if it did, one had to look at it, and

vision dominated Sandra's sensory patterns to a quite extraordinary degree. If the mystery looked as though it might overpower her, she responded by what psychoanalysts call the “flight” defenses. She might physically avoid the danger, or she might refuse to look at it (“deny” it in the strict sense of avoiding the perception of it). She might perceive it but then erase it from consciousness (“repress” it), or she might perceive it, but refuse to feel any emotion toward it or make any intellectual connections with it (that is, “isolate” it by not letting it “touch” other things in the mind). In short, having seen the situation and found it threatening, she would arrange to see it no longer. Vision was crucial.

If she found it promising, however, she would try to see more of it, see it from closer up. In literature, this seemed to mean technique. More than any of the other four readers, she responded to the techniques and devices of literary works, and she would often, in her comments, play literature off against life, using each to keep the other in balance. Again, if the situation continued to look promising, she would draw still closer and begin to use images or imaginings of touch leading to a more intimate exchange.

“Promising” in this context, or “exchange,” had special values. For Sandra (as for Sam), many of the themes and issues that concerned her involved abilities and achievements of all kinds, especially power as a thing in itself and also the power of eye, voice, mind, arm, body, and the like. Clinically, these concerns derive from the child's longings (after, say, the age of two) to have the same abilities to dominate the world (and himself) as his bigger, more powerful parents do. In that same stage, the physical differences between male and female take on heightened significance, and the child becomes much concerned with his own appearance, activity, and abilities. Many fantasies equate the whole body or mind or person, their rise or thrust or penetration (in various idioms), with the physical fact of maleness or femaleness. Both pleasure and anxiety focus on the theme of “bigger is better,” as it applies to the differences between parent and child, between one child and a competing child (often a sibling), between bodies and parts of bodies, and also between boy and girl.

For Sandra, touching and drawing close seemed to offer an equalizing of such differences, a flow of power from stronger to weaker. “Promising” also meant for her the simpler, earlier pleasures of nurture and food (associated, perhaps, with the stronger mother giving of herself to a weaker child). These, too, would be given her if, after seeing and finding it safe, she drew near the promising source.

Very generally then, we could state Sandra's identity theme this way: to see and approach more and more closely a source of power and nurture, but not to see its loss. This is indeed abstract. My first concrete evidence of Sandra's character came from Dr. Corvus's tests. “A good hysteric,” he called her—about as high a rank on the scale of normality as a clinician is likely to give—that is, someone whose fixations (on the body, typically) occurred sufficiently far along in development to leave only superficial, easily healed limitations. Nevertheless, he said that she showed “significant repression and denial,” using, for example, the word “gray” in her Rorschach responses more than most people do. What colors she did talk about, she tended to mute. In Card X, for example, she began with “blue-gray-green caterpillars” and moved on to “yellow—some sort of horses.” Others she mentioned were a “pinkishred cat” and an “olive-drab beetle.” Nevertheless, she seemed generally satisfied with herself and her life, he said. She was “comfortable with her femininity,” but seemed rather in awe of male vigor, power, and protectiveness. She wanted to see more of these things and, curiously, it was precisely seeing that she regarded as a way of participating in or drawing on masculine strength, possibly because she was herself (in the appropriate idiom) very easy on the eyes. Thus, she recognized male-female differences but in order to minimize them. She both saw a great deal and refused to see a great deal.

The artful story she told to the blank TAT card showed how some of these patterns worked in her thinking:

Emily opened her eyes. “Nothing,” she said. “There's nothing there.” She'd been blind since birth, and her parents had tried everything. Finally, they had brought her to Vienna. Dr. Herzinger would take her into his hands. The famed

eye surgeon had worked miracles. Her case was a challenge. Emily remembered hearing him sigh all during the initial examination. “I'll be honest with you,” he told the girl. “Chances are 80-20 against you.” But, well able to afford the operation, her parents had consented. The girl herself built up no false hopes. “Nothing,” she said. “Of course.” She stared straight ahead at the white expanse. Then came her father's voice: “Emily—” he said. “The doctor wants you to try moving your eyes. You've been staring at his stomach for five minutes.”

The happy, even witty, ending shows the wishes and adaptations that are important to Sandra: deficiencies in the girl will be minimized through seeing, through being close to benevolent males (father-figures in Vienna—where else?), and through receiving from others strength (through stomach or eye—I?). The less happy opening shows one line of Sandra's defenses, not seeing: “ ‘There's nothing there.’ ” At the same time, the surgeon's realism and Emily's refusal to build up false hopes suggest the positive, adaptive role of seeing in Sandra's psychic economy: exactly and realistically defining sources of strength and sustenance.

This story of the seeing but not-seeing girl foreshadowed the same adaptations her COPE test revealed in a more schematic way. Sandra preferred as defenses denial, isolation (in the test's special sense of denial of affect), and projection (in the test's definition, recognizing a feeling, but finding its source outside, in another, rather than inside, in oneself). All three of these defenses ranked in the ninth decile, the last two quite highly so. One recognizes in this schema the “flight” defenses we have already mentioned that make up various ways of not seeing. Nevertheless, Sandra did want somebody to be dependent on, for she totally rejected “blaming the self rather than others who may be available” “as a way of dealing with anxiety”; she chose, for a defense, turning against the self last in all six test situations, putting it in the zero decile. This is Sandra's longing for an outside source of strength and comfort.

Sandra's TAT story was quite self-consciously literary, and,

in general, in our interviews, Sandra spoke far more than any of the other readers about literary techniques. “I can't help—Almost as soon as I respond— I suppose I can't respond to any story, you know, straight, emotionally. I think, as soon as I read it … ‘Isn't that good!’ ” “I have a feeling that, powerful as the characters were, I would still always think of the way something was being told and the things that were being used, and certainly it adds to my total enjoyment (or not) of the story itself.” “I seemed to be quite taken up in what was really happening with the people, but at the same time (not first) I was noticing the story, the sort of short sentences and very strange language sometimes.” Her concern with literary techniques led her to quite astute observations that in turn augured well for her own success as the English teacher she wanted to be.

At the same time, this concern for literary techniques made Sandra a certain kind of English teacher's ideal reader—slightly pedantic. (Indeed, she even said of D. H. Lawrence, “A high school English teacher might fail him … because sometimes he would put the strangest combinations of sentences together.”) Because she employed attention to technique both as an early warning system and as a source of pleasure, Sandra—alone among all the readers I have ever studied—found it easier to become “absorbed” in complex, poetic language than even the most overpowering movies.

Most of the time I'm reading and I'm at a certain distance where I'm saying, “Isn't this good?,” “This is really perfect here,” or—you know, and I'm saying this to myself as I go along. I'm still, quote, caught up in it, but at a distance of time. Then every once in a while, I suppose it's when you get to a passage that—What would you call it? Maybe “lyrical,” although that's a pretty overworked word—then I stop saying, “Isn't this good?,” and I don't know, I have a feeling that I'm moving with whatever's being said, rather than standing away and watching what's going on.

Often Sandra described her sense of absorption this way, as a kind of mutual movement.

For example, talking about a poem (and again, showing her

unique ability to lose herself in quite formal writing), “Even without saying it out loud, I respond to the sounds, the movement of it. It's got a fairly soft and I suppose you'd say ‘undulating’ movement. Even the shape of the lines falls into that wave-like pattern.” Similarly, she could become “absorbed” in something as complex as Henry James's language precisely by being aware of it, “the way he narrates in there, fairly long prose passages, and the kind of dialogue that he uses in characterizing the people of this little world that he makes. So that I think it's kind of possible to enter into the world that he's creating.” She would recall in a story, “the first thing that got me” or generalize, “Even if I read something fast, if there's really something that I'm going to like in it, it gets me the first time.” She could speak of the way “a book really gets me” or say of a story, “It's really powerful. It's kind of a dreamy thing. It just takes you right up in it.”

By contrast, in movies (where most people find it all too easy to go into a trance), Sandra concentrated on technique, even in a film that apparently hit her pretty hard (Roman Polanski's terrifying study of a schizophrenic girl, Repulsion ): “God, wasn't that amazing? I just couldn't believe it. It had an amazingly horrifying impact, but I was really awed by his photographic techniques.” Sandra's wordings (“amazing,” “couldn't believe it”) show her using her more drastic defense, not seeing, before settling for a balanced concern with technique. “It was amazing that he could bring that kind of horror to the screen and still not overdo it. Every touch was pretty perfect.” Further, technique could rescue even the unsatisfactory, such as a Hollywood film she didn't at first like. “The story itself leaves a lot to be desired. But as far as acting and directing and that, I was pretty well impressed with that and that really made it.”

Technique, then, verbal or cinematic, served Sandra as something to see and judge before she would give in to the real pleasure of literary works for her: entering their world and getting close to the people in them. “In so many stories,” she confessed, “it's so hard for me to separate or to forget that the story is told in a specific way and to react to the people in the story, that I don't know if I ever could really do [it].”

But she did. Sometimes the person she sought would be the author. Thus, “I think it [biographical information about Joyce] made me like it [“The Dead”] more. I don't know why, particularly. Maybe … because it makes you, ever after that … always conscious of a person behind it, too, which is a definite addition, I guess.” Sometimes, a narrator would attract her, perhaps because his apparent power over the story played into her interest in strong men. “I have to admire the writing, because if it weren't so well done, and if it weren't for that specific narrator, I think I probably wouldn't have liked the story at all.” And, about the fatherly narrator of Mann's “Mario and the Magician”: “I liked, I really liked the narrator. I really enjoy his voice telling this kind of story very much.” “The narrator is your person to hang onto.” (Sebastian, you remember, disliked this narrator for being “ponderous” and “broad-minded.”)

At the same time, her responses to the hypnotist's dictatorship in that story showed that there had to be a limit on power. She felt it necessary to remind herself that hypnosis could not make you do everything: “I had always thought that really the unwillingness of a subject would prevent it.” Yet, it was precisely her need to limit the hypnotist's power that enabled her to make an interpretation of the story broader than the usual allegories of Hitler and Mussolini: “It's about freedom in very basic and important ways.” To credit the story, “You would almost have to believe that there is such a thing as power that one person could have over another person, no matter where he gets it from … although I think you could reject this kind of story on a factual basis and see it in a larger perspective of power of any one person over another person.” Sandra's fear of that kind of power made her reject entirely a dominant Fitzgerald belle dame sans merci.

Alternatively, she could, as we have already seen, defend by concentrating on formal elements. “Powerful as the characters were, I would still always think of the way something was being told.” Thus, she liked Henry James's Europe for its formal isolation. “It was another world. It's like long gone and far away.” “It's like a story was opened up in front of him and

then closed, but … he still has it that he can show it to other people.”

Her visual images here recall her major sensory mode. She seemed to enjoy stories that gave her the sight of a mystery: “They're mysterious people, and I suppose that's part of— I keep thinking, ‘fascination’ or ‘intriguing story’ and it applies to both stories.” Apparently, for her, these sights related to unconscious themes of thrust: “These two stand out as having something very strange about them, just on the face of the stories themselves, beside whatever interpretations a person would put to them.” Or lack-of-thrust themes. Of a woman in a story, she said, “I think of her as a person that's not integrated into a whole purpose, and even if she does have— I'm not even sure if— Or what there is really right at the bottom of her that is her real self or what would be being herself. I'm not sure what it would be.” And then she changed the subject, “That gets into the whole theme in the story about seeing.” (I think “whole” here had an unconscious meaning for her as the word often did for Sam.)

For Sandra, seeing gave power. “Looking at a person,” she said, “with them not being able to look back makes it kind of helpless for the person that's being looked at.” She recalled “Sartre's idea of the stare where a person … has another person in control when they stare at them and the stare is kind of even a stare of hatred, I think he calls it, where you objectify a person for yourself. And the only time that you can get back and get your self-possession back is when you stare back at the other person.”

Seeing also meant she could control or limit others, for example, Gabriel Conroy in “The Dead,” whom she thought weak and impotent. “The most interesting physical characteristic, to me, is the way Joyce describes his … glasses glinting in his face, and you can see these wireless glasses, and it's almost as if they take the place of eyes.”

Seeing had another kind of power, clearing up mysteries, which otherwise made Sandra anxious. For her (as for Sam with his symbolisms masculinely “holding up”), interpretation took on an almost physically penetrating quality. “When you're worried about a problem like ‘What does that mean?’,

you want to find the key, because it is so important.… If not maybe the key to the story, but a key to making it all hang together, because it is something that's been working all the way through.” Of an interpretation she agreed with, she said, “I think he's really got it here.” “It's pretty impressive.”

For Sandra, as for Sam, the act of reading took on overtones of mastery, but, of course, Sandra had her own special themes, as one can see from comparing her TAT story to the others for the picture of the solitary boy in the doorway. Like her other TAT story, it shows her characteristic concern with power and strength.

If you walk by this hut any afternoon of the week, you'll see the boy on the stoop. His father's out in the woods working at the funny machine the boy peeked at once. All the older boys are there, too, for they're big enough to help run the machine and drive the pick-up truck to and from the hollow. Ma is working the small, dusty plot that provides a few wizened vegetables every week. She'll be back soon to start supper for the boys. He can help a little then. That's about all he can do. There aren't any other kids his age for miles. He'll just sit here and wait to grow big.

As with her other story, the “plot” deals with the deficiency in the central character, here, the boy's helplessness and loneliness, but the cure does not require surgery—he'll just “wait to grow big.” By contrast, the father has a “funny machine” the boy “peeked” at once. (A still? promising oral pleasure?). The older, bigger boys help run that funny machine and the “pick-up truck,” both, I think, symbols of virile erectness and penetration to be contrasted with “the hollow.” That may belong to the mother—the story is ambiguous—but mother certainly works the “small, dusty plot,” barely productive, while the men make things. Even so, despite her concern with deficiency and paucity, Sandra created the kind of environment she liked: a world of cooperative effort and mutual reinforcing of old and young, male and female, parents and siblings—all having shared, if unequal, strengths. The story acts out her identity theme almost literally: to see and

approach more and more closely a source of power and nurture, but not to see its loss.

Abstract but Individual

Obviously, a description like that resembles an anatomy diagram more than a portrait, yet it is by some such schema, which is both abstract (that is, general, universal) but also individual, that one can grasp the dynamics of a reader's recreation of a literary work. General as these identity themes are, they suggest that other categories would be just as abstract and far less individual. I cannot, for example, imagine how one could account for any given reader's imagery about a story by means of “objective” categories like social group, years of education, or economic class.

Similarly the characterology of early psychoanalysis would be abstract and offer only a slight individualization. It would type Sam and Sandra as a pair of “phallic” characters or, as Dr. Corvus said, “hysteric.” Saul and Sebastian would form another pair (“anal” or “obsessional” characters), and Shep, whom Dr. Corvus diagnosed as a “paranoid character,” would be, in body terms, an “oral” personality. Yet, as we shall see, readers of the same general type “storied” the same story quite differently, even at the simple level of liking and disliking. Saul, for example, liked the authority of “A Rose for Emily,” while Sebastian found it too defined and “discrete.” Evidently, to deal with people's experience of literature we need something more individual than the traditional categories, even though they do reveal some convergences in personal dynamics.

It is for that reason I have turned to identity themes even though these are drastically open to the biases of the interpreter's own style. Just as they are five readers reading stories, so I am a sixth reader reading their readings. It can't be helped. One must simply acknowledge the personal concerns of the interpreter.

It is in that spirit that I point out that each of these five identity themes involves a dualism. Each consists of a going away from and a drawing close to. Shep, as I see him, dealt

with the world either by exile to a point where he could resume his fight or by hiding and becoming a thing in a system. Saul could draw close by means of a defined bargain with a defined adversary, or he would escape to a safe precision elsewhere. Sebastian sought out an exchange of his wit for fleshly dirt from some authority figure—or else he escaped by concentrating entirely on his own verbal or intellectual creations. Sam either fled into an isolated, boyish masculinity or sought out mutual admiration leading to a passive identification with a stronger male or asexual figure. Sandra could proceed through a sequence of seeing, touching, moving with, and drawing from a source of strength and nurture or she could flee to a different source.

These dualisms could come from the ambivalence that pervades every human interaction. They could also come from the sixth reader's characteristic concern with inside and outside. But it is also worth noting, I think, that the flight sides of these identity themes quite resemble the closeness sides. That is, Shep fights to the death on either side. Saul seeks precision and Sandra sources of strength on either side. Sebastian creates with his mind and Sam becomes boyish on either side. In a broader sense, we might hypothesize that an identity theme is not dual but single, although it may look different depending on the balance between pleasure and pain in the particular setting where we see it. We will see it more as flight if the environment arouses anxiety. We will see it more as a drawing close if the context promises more gratification. In literary terms, as we shall see, not only does a reader like a story in his own characteristic way, he dislikes it in his own way, too.

Identity themes give us a way of understanding a whole character, relating moves toward pleasure to defenses against unpleasure. One abstracts an identity theme from the myriads of ego choices a person reveals much the way one abstracts a central theme to express the unity of all the many words in a literary work (each an ego choice of the writer).6 Just as several literary works might be described by a single theme (appearance versus reality, for a familiar example, although even more precise statements would do multiple duty), so a single identity theme might satisfactorily describe more than one person. Individuals

and the details of their lives are, like literary works, unique. Themes, being abstracts from unique sets of particulars, are not so individual. Yet, as we shall see, they offer powerful help in accounting for unique events such as the one this book is devoted to: the creation of a unique experience of a work of art by a unique perceiver of that work or, in Donne's lovely word, their interinanimation.

5 The Answer: Four Principles Of Literary Experience

A scan of all of Sam's, Saul's, Shep's, Sebastian's, and Sandra's interviews leads to a style for each of them that pervades everything he or she says or does. They and all of us live by creating variations on an identity theme that is our essential self. “Creating ” is a key word, for such a view of human nature implies not only sameness but differences that we create. Each of us creates at least his own way of walking, talking, smiling, sitting, sleeping, loving, fighting, eating, and all the rest. Presumably we also create our own ways of seeing films and plays or reading poems and stories.

Identity implies, too, that all these creations have a unity, particularly that we meet and create external reality by the same strategies we use to manage internal reality. As Joyce wrote: “We walk through ourselves meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love. But always meeting ourselves.”1

Just how we meet ourselves in the books we read is the question I am raising, and the answer this book sets out is four principles that describe the inner dynamics of the reading experience. I would have liked to let the interviews themselves tell you these principles, with a minimum of comment from me, but that would require you to do the work I did—more, I think, than any author has a right to ask of his reader. I therefore present them here, before the evidence in which I found them.

The Four Principles

In a way, all four can be summed up in one overarching idea; we can think of it as the first of the four:

Style Seeks Itself

In general, if a reader has responded positively to a literary

work, he has been able to put elements of the work together so they act out his own lifestyle. Alternatively, if he has no reaction to a literary work, or a negative one, that tells us he has not been able to use the work to reenact his own style.

We need to talk about something more precise, however, than just “the work,” because readers often respond in a half-and-half way, positively to some parts and negatively to the rest. For example, Sandra was pleased by Hemingway's descriptive style, but repelled by his dialogue. How does one explain such partial responses? Partly by specifying details within the work, partly by focusing on the relevant aspect of lifestyle.

If a reader responds positively to parts of a work, he has composed them to act out for him one specific part of his lifestyle, namely, his expectancies toward other, separate entities. That is, each of us approaches a new experience with a certain characteristic cluster of hopes, desires, fears, and needs. We want this economy of expectancies acted out by that separate entity in such a way as to net us pleasure. We expect the same from literary works. Moment by moment, line by line, word by word, we try to make the characters perform, the plot evolve, the language resonate, and all the parts of the work coact to yield a balance of gratification.

Our first principle, then, is the following: if we have responded positively toward certain features or combinations within the work, we perceived them as acting out within the work our hopes at any given moment toward the whole work as a separate entity. But if we responded negatively or not at all to some elements, we did not perceive them as acting out within the work the kind of balance leading to gratification we would like from other beings.

Notice that there has been a kind of right-angle turn. The reader who is responding positively perceives the work and elements within it as acting out in its own linear sequence the hopes that run from reader to work. To put it another way, the reader responding favorably feels no difference between what he perceives as going on “in the work” and what goes on between himself and the work. If the work pleases him, events “out there” become events between “out there” and “in

here.” The reader merges with the book, and the events of the book become as real as anything in his mind (so Poulet, Davis, and Ortega have described “absorption”). In the more technical terms of Roy Schafer's analysis, this feature of literary response comes from a particular split in the ego, a “suspension of the reflective self representation that pertains to the act in question,” here, reading.

The term reflective self representation refers to the implicit or explicit notation accompanying realistic thought that it is thought (e.g., memory, perception, anticipation, etc.) and not concrete reality. When the subject suspends his reflective self representations, he disappears as thinker and experiences his thoughts as though they were concrete realities,2

as when we are “absorbed” in a literary work and willingly suspend our disbelief.

Each reader will achieve this absorption in his own way—if he achieves it at all. He will therefore deal with the work by means of the adaptations and defenses he ordinarily brings into play with external realities. Hence the pivotal relation in his experience of a literary work—and the second of our four principles:

Defenses Must Be Matched

If the reader has a favorable response toward a work, he must have synthesized from it all or part of his characteristic structure of defense or adaptation. He must have found something in the work that does what he does to cope with needs or dangers.

By “adaptation,” one ordinarily means the progressive, constructive, and maturational mastery of inner drives and outer reality. “Defense” means a mechanism put into action automatically and unconsciously at a signal of danger from within or without. Thus, the two terms can overlap in any given situation. When the ego projects, it deals with a danger by seeing it as outside, but projection may also be a way of empathizing with another person, seeing his point of view. Introjection puts a threat inside, but it may also provide a basis for stable inner governors to keep a psychic balance. Denial

avoids threats by refusing to perceive them at all and repression by not acknowledging the perception, but either may be adaptive in protecting the ego from intolerable fear.

An older tradition in psychoanalytic writing often treated defense mechanisms as though they were blocks to normal pleasure, in and of themselves pathological, undesirable, and to be removed in therapy when possible. A more modern approach, based in ego psychology and the concern with man in society that one finds in Freud's last writings, sees defenses as necessary adaptations to inner and outer reality, not obstacles to pleasure but preconditions without which pleasure would not be possible. Here I shall use both words with the understanding that they often refer to the same activity but looked at differently: “defense” in a context of merely avoiding pain; “adaptation” in a more positive context of constructively coping with inner and outer reality.

Each individual evolves his own style of defense and adaptation, which becomes, simply, one part of his total lifestyle. Particular defenses and adaptations in particular contexts just represent variations he plays upon the one identity theme. And evidently, to judge from five readers' readings, each of us passes all his experiences through the filter of his personality, particularly in a defensive way to avoid pain.

As we shall see with our five readers, this re-creating of one's own defenses from the materials of the story becomes very delicate and unpredictable. Sebastian (whom you may remember as the lapsed Catholic and would-be aristocrat) dealt with dangers from controlling forces by offering his own creations of a verbal or intellectual kind. When he read the Fitzgerald and Hemingway stories, he held the heroes in contempt, although these men offered creations of their own, because their creations involved business success and athletic manliness. They were not verbal or intellectual enough for him. He objected to the two heroes as “simple-minded.”

For a reader to match his defenses by means of elements in the story, he must be able to satisfy his ego with them at all levels, including his “higher” intellectual functions. Thus, it is the matching of defenses that draws on a reader's concern with language, his experience of prior works, his critical acumen, his

taste and all the things people bring to bear when they deliberately evaluate literary works. As we shall see when these five readers explain their value judgments, their perceptions of the text, even the most subtle and intellectual ones, rest on their need to match defenses. Thus, Sebastian's comment on the two heroes looks like an objective reading of the text, but he would not read them that way except for his need to meet the world by offering an exchange of inner creations. Sam, the boyish and dapper seeker of self-esteem, found those two heroes quite satisfactory, because their independence matched his defenses, so very different from Sebastian's his need to reassure himself with admiration. I, with my concern for inside and outside in “A Rose for Emily,” paid little attention to the narrator, while Sandra found him one of those reassuring sources of strength she needed. She responded warmly and positively to him, taking him to be one of Faulkner's considerable achievements in the story.

In short, these matchings of defense involve subtle balances. I find them quite unpredictable, but once made or not made, I can see very clearly what took place. Much less tricky, much less delicate is the other mode of using the work to re-create one's own style: matching, not defenses, but fantasies or drives. This is the third principle governing literary experience:

Fantasy Projects Fantasies

That is, each reader uses the materials he has taken in from the literary work to create a wish-fulfilling fantasy characteristic of himself. The fantasy does not lie latent in the work—only the materials for the fantasy that each reader will then create for himself in the terms that give him pleasure (and the fantasy the reader creates may or may not coincide with the fantasy the writer had while writing).

This principle—that the fantasy is not “in” the work but in the reader or, still more accurately, in the creative relation between reader and work—marks a departure from an older psychoanalytic concept of literature. I and other psychoanalytic critics have often written as though each literary work had a fixed fantasy content. As a matter of common sense, however, works do not have fantasies—people do. Fantasies are clusters

of wishes deriving from the stages in which children develop. These stages focus on particular issues such as being fed, giving up one's bodily creations, accepting limits and controls on physical and sexual strivings, accepting the difference between the sexes and the generations, and so on. Further, these stages seem linked to parts of the body in a biological timetable that does not vary from culture to culture, although, of course, different cultures do vastly different things with these various themes and issues.

What in the child were early and later stages become in the adult “higher” and “lower” levels. All coexist, however, and it becomes possible to think of personality at least partly in terms of fixation to one or more levels. In adults one recognizes derivatives of these childhood issues by wordings that reveal connections between adult activities and particular body parts, parent-child situations, or other psychological issues associated with one or more of these stages. Thus, to use familiar literary examples, one can identify a class of writers (Jonson, Dickens, Gogol, and Balzac come to mind) whose writings deal extensively with the underworld or the lower classes, whose vision is dominated by images of dirt, dust, garbage, gold, money, mud, fog, or smells, and whose plots balance off pettifoggery, pedantry, miserliness, or obstinacy with sadistic violence or unnatural purity. We recognize in such writings adult creations transformed from childhood concerns with the control by outer authorities of inner creations, mental or physical, dirty or precious. If we were to work with specific books, we could be still more precise, moving from a broad sense of phase or level to the specific fantasies that give rise to Dickens's themes of parental betrayal or Balzac's sense of overpowering impoverishment.

None of this, however, says the fantasy is “in” the work. Rather the fantasy is “in” the writer, and we read the work as evidence of his creative transformation of the unconscious themes that concern him. We read “through” the story to the mind behind it as we would read a TAT story. And above all, one tries, by honest self-analysis, to recognize and take into account tendencies to use the interpretation to express one's own identity theme.

As one listens to these five readers talk about particular stories, the last illusion of a fixed fantasy content should fade away. Each reader used the materials of the story to create a fantasy at the level of development that mattered to him. No matter how convincing a case I can make for “A Rose for Emily” as a story built on wishes and fears about the control of body products, Sam perceived the story in terms of the masculinity that concerned him, and Saul fantasied about overpowering authorities. Each reader placed the unconscious fantasy content of the story in the level or levels of fantasy where his own mind habitually functioned. For example, Miss Emily, according to the story, taught the young ladies of the town china-painting. One would assume that such an activity symbolizes a control over smearing and daubing, turning paint, messy, perhaps, or soiling, into something pretty, delicate, and precise. Sam, much concerned with boyish virility, remembered china-painting as knitting, replacing any “symbolism” of smearing with an act of penetrating with a long, pointed object. He used—or misused—the story to create a fantasy at the level that mattered to him.

Moreover, the reader will use the materials of the story to build, not some fantasy ostensibly “in” the story, but his own characteristic fantasy. I do not mean to imply that each reader has only one fantasy, but it is good to recall that he has but one recurring structure of defenses and that defense and drive are really only different points of view on a single phenomenon: his lifestyle or personality. Hence, as we shall see, Sandra, who needed both defensively and libidinally to draw close to sources of strength and nurture, tried to fantasy them in the stories she read. Saul, who wanted to meet the world in a precise bargain, used the materials of the stories to create bargaining situations. Each of the five readers drew on the characters, episodes, and language of what he read, but he structured them into the specific form of fantasy that gave him pleasure, just as he had matched his defenses.

Thus, fantasy and defense are intimately interlocked in literary response because of their deep relation in the mind. At the earliest stage of our development, we live through an ambivalence: our mothering source of sustenance is by that very fact a

source of frustration as well. Good development means tolerating that early mingling of love and hate so that the first relation with another can form a structure for all later relations, which will include that first ambivalence. As a psychoanalytic maxim has it: what we deeply fear, we also wish; or, you could state it the other way round: what we wish we also fear. Either way, it suggests a final limitation on human happiness as well as the means by which we gain pleasure in this mortal coil.

For any given individual, his preferred fantasies and his structure of defenses will deal with the same kind of thing (just as his first human relation had to be attached to a single person), things like Saul's bargains and controls or Sandra's sources of strength. In order to bring a reader's defenses and adaptations into play, he needs to perceive the thing he fears. For Sandra, for example, to bring a story into her world, her kind of experience, she must bring her adaptations into play. To do so, she must perceive the very overpowering she so much fears—then, and only then, can she construct defenses to manage it. From another point of view, however, that over-powering also makes up the power source that Sandra enjoys being close to. To gain pleasure, then, she must perceive the work in terms of power. To make it important or even real for her, she must project into it the kind of thing she both fears and wishes; that will enable her to use the work in her defenses and thus to accept it and enjoy the pleasure of being close to a source of power.

In effect, we are understanding the psychology behind the literary maxim: form and content are one. That is, as we saw in developing identity themes for these five readers, a single theme permeates all the mind's multiple functioning. Much the same language will describe an individual's adaptations as his drives, because, although those two functions operate between different agencies confronting the ego, any given mental transaction will combine elements of drive with defense and adaptation. In the act of reading, drive corresponds to content, which corresponds to fantasy, while defense corresponds to form, which corresponds to management of fantasy, both triads taking place, not in the text, but in the reader's mind. Thus, in a psychological sense, much the same language will describe

form as content. “Form and content are one,” but they exist, not “in” a text, but in the unity of the reader's personality. Saul's bargains, Sandra's sources, or Shep's systems serve both to ward off dangers and to secure gratification, and, as we shall see, they transform the stories they read into the bargains, sources, and systems they desire.

Form and content differ, however, in an important way. As we shall see, the reader's relation to a story becomes tricky and subtle as he synthesizes his defensive structure from it. By contrast, he has no trouble at all using the story to get the fantasy content he wants. Put another way, once he has achieved the defensive forms and admitted at least part of the story into his psyche, he easily goes on to transform what he has admitted into his preferred level and type of fantasy. Form-defense differs from fantasy-content this way because they are associated with different actions of the reading mind. The reader defends against the story as a potentially dangerous external reality. He actively shapes it before allowing it into his own mental processes. Therefore, the act of defending operates against the story, to keep it out of the psyche. Only what precisely matches the reader's defenses gets through. Once in his psyche, however, the story becomes swept up in the general press every human being has toward gratification. The reader's psyche uses, adapts, and transforms whatever it has taken in from the story that will yield pleasure. The ego's defenses act like a doorkeeper carefully checking invitations against the list of acceptable guests. Once the guests are admitted, however, the party turns out to be not stuffy at all, but quite easygoing, even a bit rowdy and disreputable.

Once the reader has achieved both the delicate matching of all or part of his defensive structure and the much more open adaptation of what he has matched to suit his fantasies, the fourth principle comes into play:

Character Transforms Characteristically

He will “make sense” of the text. By means of such adaptive structures as he has been able to match in the story, he will transform the fantasy content, which he has created from the materials of the story his defenses admitted, into some literary

point or theme or interpretation. In doing so, he will use “higher” ego functions, such as his interpretive skills, his literary experience, his experience of human character, in general, his subtlety and sensitivity. He will bring to bear the social, moral, or political ideas that already embody congenial transformations for him. He will, finally, render the fantasy he has synthesized as an intellectual content that is characteristic—and pleasing—for him.

In effect, our four principles have closed the circle. In characteristically fantasying, defending, and transforming, the reader works out his own personal style through the story. Since he has a positive relation to the story, his style must have found itself in it. Had any of these three points of connection failed—in particular, had he not been able to match his defensive structure—he would not have been able to synthesize and recreate the story within his lifestyle, and therefore he would not have a positive relation to it. It is interesting that Freud hints at this idea as early as 1900 in the concluding, metapsychological chapter of The Interpretation of Dreams. 3 The individual cannot work with an idea in a secondary-process way—that is, in the intellectual and aesthetic transformation that makes up our fourth principle—unless he is in a position to inhibit any unpleasure that may proceed from it (except, of course, for a signal to start the inhibiting process)—that is, in our terms, unless he can match his defenses.

The circle closes another way. The first principle (“style seeks itself”) describes the reader's relation to the sequence of events in the literary work. As each event does or does not act out his characteristic expectancy, he does or does not establish a positive relation toward it. Our fourth principle (“character transforms characteristically”) describes his relation to the story as a totality of separate events, as the “organic unity” critics since Aristotle have described. Now, however, we see that that unity does not reside in the mere work. The reader, by means of his ego's ability to organize and synthesize reality, creates a unity from his positive relation to the story. Each act of reading is constructive. It makes something new, something human, something personal—or else no real act of reading takes place.

Finally, then, these principles assert that it becomes both useless and impossible to separate the act of reading from the creative personality of the reader. Thus, I found that I could not separate the principles themselves from actual readers reading; I could grasp these four principles only by studying single interviews about particular stories in the light of the reader's personality as revealed by the whole series of interviews and tests. Having once arrived at these principles, however, I realized I could have reached them directly, by deduction: they follow abstractly from the concept of identity, particularly identity as a style of multiple functioning.

Reading and Identity

Identity we have defined as an essential sameness in the human personality, and we have understood it as an identity theme on which the living organism plays out variations as a composer might. Each variation he plays functions in multiple ways (in Waelder's term). That is, whatever a human being does—dream, tell a story, acquire a symptom, take up a vocation, make a friend—he does so as to achieve a maximum of pleasure and minimum of pain with a minimum of effort.

Waelder went on to relate this basic inertial principle to the structural view of the personality. It is the ego that must passively respond to and actively seek out solutions to the demands of inner and outer reality. Specifically, four “agencies” act on the ego in a highly symmetrical fashion. The reservoir of drives (the id), presses toward blind, immediate satisfaction, while the internalized pressures of parents and culture (the superego) trigger defenses in the ego that inhibit or change the raw drives. The ancient inertia of self tends to make the ego solve its problems as it did before (the repetition compulsion), while reality (the fourth agency) constantly confronts the ego with new tasks that demand new solutions. The ego acts between paired alternatives: to satisfy the drives or deprive them, in new ways or in old. And what we have been calling defenses or adaptations are the solutions the ego adopts, either by being acted upon or by itself actively testing the pressures of inner and outer reality.

The concept of identity puts in systematic form the observation that the ego habitually adopts the same general style of solution. Within this sameness, however, there is an important difference. An adaptation or defense acting on external reality will look somewhat different from the same strategy acting in internal reality. Within, one finds magic, animism, primitivity, in the formal term, primary process thinking. The ego looks outward more carefully and warily, using, in psychoanalytic terms, secondary process thinking or problem-solving intelligence. “The inner world has its origin in an animistic world view, a world view dominated by man's helplessness in the face of separation and death,” writes Arnold Modell, while the ego's relation to reality has to do with the ability to give up imaginary satisfactions and really act upon one's environment. But the line is not hard and fast. Particularly in symbolic thinking, and thus in art and language generally, Modell suggests, “Private and public modes of thinking interpenetrate” just as, in action on the world, “the created environment and the autonomously perceived environment interpenetrate.”4

In reading, the text serves as the external reality that the reader meets as he meets any object outside himself. His ego maneuvers it carefully to consciousness through his system of defenses and adaptations. Hence, our second principle, the touchy and delicate matching of defenses: if the reader has a positive relation to something he has read, he must have been able to find in it a total or partial match to his characteristic pattern of adaptations. True, the individual's pattern is constant, but facing outward, toward reality, he accents secondary-process thought and the warding off of dangers more than the taking in of pleasures. Conscious intelligence, logic, experience, and other “higher” ego functions play active roles as does style in its more primitive modes: physical avoidance, the unwillingness to perceive unpleasant realities, dehumanizing oneself or others, seducing a dangerous force, dividing up reality to deal with it in little bits—to mention defensive modes like those of our five readers.

Once a reader has been able to draw a work into himself through his system of defenses, however, the accent changes. Facing the inner world, the ego accents the search for pleasure

more strongly. In reading, we eagerly draw on the various elements of the work to make up a satisfying fantasy, much as the first builders of churches reassembled the censored marbles of pagan temples for their own purposes. Working within, the ego acts freely, creatively, and imaginatively, with far less concern for danger since here, where reality does not threaten, it has no need to fear real anxiety or shame. This is the third principle, the third component in the reader's synthesis: fantasy projects fantasies.

Even in the world within, however, the ego does not simply fantasize. Rather it imagines, partly consciously, partly unconsciously, a satisfaction that balances the competing demands of the three inner agencies and the external reality of the text. That is, fantasies represent a compromise among the drives toward pleasure, the warding off of guilt and anxiety, the tendency to repeat old patterns, and the creative push to achieve a new satisfaction from this new experience. Thus, the fourth principle: Character transforms characteristically. From whatever part of the work he has filtered through the structures that he keeps between his inner world and his outer environment, the reader creates a fantasy within his individual style. Then he transforms that fantasy using his characteristic modes of defense and adaptation and the words that he has matched to them.

He will transform the fantasy he has created into a synthesis and unity that he finds consciously integrative and satisfying. The political man will confirm his interests in personality or leadership. The moralist will find a reinforcement of his ethical views. The scientifically minded man will see verifiable realities. And each of them will have transformed the literary work by means of the same ego balance of drive and defense that supports their conscious orientation toward politics, morality, or science. Or else they will not have established that positive relation to the literary work that means, really, sharing in the act of creating it. The reader's ego uses the text to build from his own unconscious drives through his own patterns of adaptations and defense toward a conscious significance and unity that matters to him. Either he has that positive re-creation or he wards off the story, keeping it separate, out of his

lifestyle, and he works out his fantasying without reference to the words. He becomes able to think Miss Emily an Eskimo.

This fourth principle (characteristic transformation) defines the reader's relation to the whole work as a meaningful unity. He must also make the work fit the principle of multiple function in the momentary, sequential, word-by-word process of literary experience. Our first principle, style seeks itself, states that at each moment, as well as in the total experience, the reader tries to have the various elements of the literary work enact what he expects from it as a separate being. That is, he will try to make the language, events, or people he creates from the text function in multiple directions to work out the compromise among the demands of inner and outer reality that is his own style. But in this particular context, his momentary response, he will try to use words, plot, and characters to act out that part of his lifestyle which defines what he expects from an other. To the extent he succeeds, the boundary between self and gratifying text will blur and fade. He will become “absorbed.”

The literary work I read today represents the latest in the long sequence of gratifying others to whom I have related, beginning with the nurturing mother of earliest infancy who actualized in me a certain lifestyle. In particular, however, each literary work caps the sequence of literary works that preceded it and before them the mixed human and literary experience of being read to. As Selma Fraiberg points out,

There will come a time childhood when pleasure in reading and in language achieves a certain degree of independence from the human partners who had served as teachers. The dialogue that had originated between the child and his family and the child and his teachers is no longer the indispensable component in learning and in pleasure. The book itself has taken over as a partner and is invested with some of the qualities of a human relationship.5

Thus, we come full circle: The “expectancy” we bring to reading makes up one small aspect of lifestyle, but that expectancy also inherits and stores early interpersonal experiences around reading—as lifestyle itself crystallizes from early relationships.

In our print-oriented society, children learn to read through personal relationships, and reading itself becomes an extension of these relationships. Other is other, be it book or mother, casual friend or total environment, and we relate to that other in terms of our particular identities. The English psychoanalyst, D. W. Winnicott, takes man's cultural experience back to a “potential space,” originally between baby and mother, then child and family, later individual and society or the world. “This potential space is a highly variable factor (from individual to individual),” and “it is here that the individual experiences creative living,”6 that is, through regressing to the experiences of earliest infancy. There is no reason, however, to limit this potential space to cultural experiences—all experiences of an other take place at that interface and take place in terms of an identity that continues the theme laid down in the new human's first human relationship.

In effect, our four principles define the way self and other interact in such a potential space. Self warily takes in some of other through its system of adaptations and then freely and creatively uses what it has taken in as part of its own system for transforming drives toward pleasure and meaning and wholeness. From this larger point of view, the four principles involved in reading quickly coalesce into one. Id and superego, drive and defense, look less like psychic entities in themselves, more like functions, and still more like ways of looking at one central relation, between the individual (taken as variations on an identity theme) and an other.

If we look at the identity theme as a strategy for warding off anxiety and pain, we are looking at it as a defense. Then, it acts like a lock that must be exactly fitted to admit the intruder. If we regard someone's identity theme as a strategy for maximizing gratification, however, then it looks like a greedy amoeba soaking up whatever its chemistry will tolerate. If we regard it as a strategy for dealing with the outer world, we are taking it as an adaptation, wary, calculating, reality-oriented, and secondary-process. If we observe it applying only to inner reality, however, it seems archaic, primitive, magical, and primary-process.

Yet inner and outer, primary-process or secondary, reality-oriented

or compulsively repeated in response to inner cues, defense or pleasure-seeking—these are only modifiers for accenting one facet or another of a single principle of interaction that is the result, the “answer,” this study yields. A reader responds to a literary work by assimilating it to his own psychological processes, that is, to his search for successful solutions within his identity theme to the multiple demands, both inner and outer, on his ego .

We began with a simple fact: the variability of literary response (Blake's “thou read'st black where I read white”). We have come now to the reason for that variability: two interacting forces that define human motivation, an identity principle of continuity and a pleasure principle of change. Louis Sullivan's Irish maid Julia summed them up as well as anyone. The great architect describes in his autobiography a childhood visit to his former home and a conversation with Julia about the many Irish immigrants fighting in the Union Army. She recalled a man from Kerry who joined up:

And wan day as he was out a-walking fer his health, and faring to and fro, he came upon a blanket lying on the ground; and at once he picked it up and with great loud laughter he sed, sed he: Sure I've found me blanket with me name upon it: U fer Patrick and S for McCarty; sure edication's a foine thing, as me faather before me wud say.

Oh, Julia [said Sullivan], I don't believe that's true. That's just another Irish yarn.

Will, maybe it isn't true and maybe it's just a yarn; but I belave it's true and I want to till ye this; the man from Kerry had a rale edication. Ye may think I'm a-jokin' now, but when ye get older and have more sinse ye'll be noticin' that that's the way everywan rades; and the higher educated they are, the more they rade just as Pat McCarty did, and add some fancy flourishes of their own.7

True enough. As Julia suggests, what we have found out for reading does seem to apply as aptly to blankets as to books.

One has only to state this basic principle to realize that it need not be limited to reading. The individual (considered as the continuing creator of variations on an identity theme)

relates to the world as he does to a poem or a story: he uses its physical reality as grist with which to re-create himself, that is, to make yet another variation in his single, enduring identity. In short, what started as an explanation of literary experience begins to become a general account of the relation of personality to the perception and interpretation of experience. Or how we can all make “U.S.” into our property. But before going on to such larger, empyrean speculations, we should look at what gave rise to this theory, what it was designed to explain, namely, five readers reading.

6 The Evidence: Sam, Saul, Shep, Sebastian, and Sandra Read Faulkner's “A Rose for Emily”

The Story

In my own reading of “A Rose for Emily,” I found two basic structures. Incorporation: I will take and keep the old thing inside of me. Denial: there is no new thing in external reality. Within a core defined by these defensive patterns, I could transform the events and words back and forth from a variety of primitive, bodily fantasies about Emily and her house to social, intellectual, and mythic themes about the conflict between the denial of change and its inevitability.

As a professional critic, I would like to be able to say this reading is in some objective sense “true,” but, in all honesty, I cannot. As we have seen, readers (including professional critics) respond to a story by re-creating their own lifestyles from it. Therefore, my analysis of “A Rose for Emily” in Chapter 2 remains just that—my analysis. Objective analysis of a text in seeming isolation reveals only the story as it was re-created in the mind of the analyzer with all his conscious and unconscious concerns.

As through and accurate as I may think my analysis of the story, few of these five readers' comments correspond to what I found “in” it or “there.” Each reader created the story anew for himself, and he alone can say what he has created. Therefore, what these five readers say is the final evidence for this general theory and four particular principles of literary response. One must turn to them to decide whether the four principles are satisfactory answers to the question, Who reads what how?

I have chosen, however, not to present the interviews simply verbatim. It is extremely difficult to discern from simple transcripts

the underlying dynamics without more reflection and work than any author should demand from his readers. I have instead quoted extensively from the interviews, developing various themes and issues in what the reader said, more than he could have on the spot.

This chapter consists, then, of commentary by our five readers on Faulkner's “A Rose for Emily.” In addition, I have provided (in Appendix B) their comments on two more stories: F. Scott Fitzgerald's “Winter Dreams” and Ernest Heming-way's “The Battler.” To see the diversity in different readers' readings of a single story, you might choose simply to read straight through this chapter. Alternatively, to experience the continuity within one reader's readings, you might choose to follow one reader through all three stories. In either case, you may want to glance back at the description of a given reader in Chapter 4 before reading any of his remarks. The essential thing is to experience the sameness one reader brings to different stories and the difference different readers bring to the same story. Only then will you be able to test the explanatory power of these four principles or to pass judgment on the general principle that literary response expresses not the text alone but the reader's re-creation of the text within his identity theme.

Sam

Sam showed in his other readings and in his tests a pattern of defenses that one might very briefly summarize as “in” and “out”: to get out of dangers to his maleness and to take into his body love and admiration. In addition, Sam, who had once attended a class on this story, may also have brought to “A Rose for Emily,” either through his own reading or his instructor's, comments by Faulkner and by Brooks and Warren (if I recognize some faint echoes correctly).

In general, Sam wanted to draw close to a source of strength, while Miss Emily wanted to draw a source of strength into herself—a very threatening prospect for Sam, one would think. In his “in” mode, however, he could deal with dangers by identifying with them, adopting a position of being mothered or

nurtured or admired by what he had found dangerous, ultimately taking it into himself. He could also deal with dangers by getting them “out,” fleeing them psychologically, by denying their existence, for example, or holding off the feelings they aroused, forgetting them, or displacing them (as he would shift from the center of an inkblot he found threatening to its edges). Through these denials Sam was able to relate to levels of the story that did not threaten his own intactness. “I think that I'm romantic enough to—I would have loved to live as moneyed and landed gentry in the Old South before the War.” “I'm romantic enough to have liked that kind of life.” “I kind of think that it's nice that things were once like that. It's good that they're not like that now, because it is so grossly unjust. But it's interesting to see that they were once like that.”

The Old South charmed Sam by re-creating an order into which he could, as it were, cuddle right up. “That kind of smallness,” he called it.

Things were so ordered then. It seems that everyone did have their place, not only the Negroes to be kept in their place, but the whites to be kept in their place, and it certainly involved more liberties and the like, but everything was nice and set, and one knew what one had to do and what one was expected to do, and one did it happily if one was rich, because there were nice things to do. There were parties … and everything else. I would certainly not want to be a Negro in those times, but they did exist, and if I were living at the time and had my choice of who I wanted to be, and had my choice of being a born baby to one of these people, I would certainly pick the richest Southern family in the whole South and live my life probably very happily. Because I think that I'm lazy enough and selfish enough and I'm shortsighted enough when it comes to my interests that I would be able to do this kind of thing with very little qualms.

In that disquisition (and Sam was nothing if not a talker), a number of his themes emerged. Again, we hear him talk about the sense of security he wants, nurturing showered on him, all decisions made for him, in short, being a “born baby.” To get this nurturing matrix, he was willing to give up a good deal of

reality (be “shortsighted”) and one senses in that plaintive phrase about the times or the slaves, “they did exist,” a steady pressure to deny painful realities. Others would have to remind him: “If I were asked, you know, if you asked me … ‘Well, what would you feel about this if you were a Negro's son who had to be in the thing?’ and then, of course, different answers would come.” Yet, evidently, he would still be a “son,” a “born baby,” and it is with those words in mind that one has to hear his notion of “the top.” “I just like the order of it all, especially when, in this wishful kind of way we're talking now, I can place myself at … any level of that order, which, of course, would be the top.”

In effect, Sam would be the loved baby by virtue of denying harsh truths, and he was honest enough with himself to recognize this. “Had I lived then, I don't think I would have had any moral qualms.” “The whole slavery issue and that whole aristocratic life amidst so much poverty among whites and Negroes is not justifiable in any sense. Yet I don't think that I would have worried about that, as you seldom do when you're in that kind of position.”

Sam was less conscious of the aggressive pleasures I think he felt at being on “the top.” “I would have been a great plantation owner, and I would have whipped my share of slaves, and all these other terrible things that now would never enter your mind [sic ], but these were established things then, and it seems that one didn't question whether they were right or wrong.” Similarly, when I asked him about the 1894 edict created by Colonel Sartoris—“he who fathered the edict that no Negro woman should appear on the streets without an apron”—Sam was candid again:

I hate, I hate to say. I like it. It's terrible. It's the worst thing. I mean, it's not terrible for me to like it. It's terrible that that kind of thing ever once existed. It's inhuman. It denies so many basic rights of everyone involved. It treats the Negro as animal. The Negro is not animal. But I can't help but be charmed by the naïveté, by the total lack of concern that such a position of power places one in.

At another point he acknowledged a more sadistic pleasure.

“I react with kind of a smile that says, ‘Oh, those were the good old days’ type of thing, when I read that with the apron on the street.” I do not mean to be harsh on Sam—all five readers said very similar things—but it is clear that whipping, or the edict, or his wishes to be on “the top,” “in that kind of position,” “such a position of power,” all let him get a taste of the pleasures of tyranny, of masculine dominance in its crueler forms.

In short, to put his response in terms of our four principles, Sam could match one of his basic defensive patterns to one he found in the story. Once he was sharing with the story a denial of threats to himself (but not to others), he could project a fantasy content into it. Notice, however, that Sam's fantasy content did not include the fantasy I found of holding on, despite pressures, to something precious inside one's house-body. Rather, Sam fantasied at levels that concerned him more: cuddling in or being “on top.” Cuddling in as a born baby referred to holding on at a level of nurture—a level more primitive than one's control of body products. Being “on top” in Sam's sense referred specifically to the preciousness of maleness and dominance by one's body. Thus, both are ways of holding on, to be sure, but in modalities earlier and later than those I found in the story.

Sam's need to confirm physical masculinity came through most clearly in what he said about Miss Emily's father. “She lived under her father. Her father made the decisions. Her father kept things up. Her father was the leader, the member of the town council … a very strong male figure in her life, and she was totally dominated by it” (sic —and notice that, as if he weren't strong enough already, Sam elected Mr. Grierson to the town council). Almost the first thing Sam picked out from the story, as we have seen in Chapter 1, was the “tableau.” “The father was very domineering—one of the most striking images in the book is … her father stand[ing] there with a horsewhip in his hands, feet spread apart and between or through him you see a picture of Emily standing in the background.” Again, she is “under” him, although in a different way.

Through Emily's father we can see the double value of phallic strength for Sam. It could deprive or it could provide a nurturing matrix to support, in Miss Emily's case, her femininity. “I think she had as much of a chance to be [feminine] at the beginning, had she lived in a world where her father's rules worked, as at one time they did. I think everything would have been fine. She would have had a thousand niggers* around to do her work for her, and she would have been happy, and she would have met a man of the quality—in quotes—and everything that everyone expected.”

Emily's position would have matched Sam's as a “born baby,” but her father made the tradition destroy rather than support. “I think at one time she had the grand chance just to be the darling lady throughout the whole of her life. It seemed that her father, and all he stands for and all you can make him symbolize, ruined this.” He “forced her life down roads that perhaps it wouldn't have taken,” by “turning suitor after suitor away, with each time he's doing it, casting her in—ruining her life more and more.”

Sam imaged this as the father and tradition physically obstructing suitors seeking to get to Emily. “Her father stood in the way of many suitors because of aristocratic and traditional reasons.” “Her father … stands for the old way of life against the new incoming way of life.” Given Sam's concern with virility, I believe phrases like “whole,” “stand for,” or “incoming” had not lost their bodily meanings for him.

Similarly, new and incoming Homer involves a sexual symbolism, as does Emily when she “begins seeing Homer Barron, which is probably the only gap that the story had.” “Perhaps … she feels this kind of chance ought to be given.” “Anyway, it's a strange kind of leap of faith that you have to take there.” Again, Sam juxtaposed symbolic acts: “She receives him into the house. She goes out with him in the carriage, is seen around town with him unchaperoned.”

In general, Sam regarded Homer as standing “for the new road of the future coming down, and again, for the North as * Sam, like the other readers, was using this epithet deliberately to “try on” a slaveholding frame of mind, not to cast a racial slur.

opposed to the South, which her father was.” “For ‘Barron’ to make any sense,” said Sam, working on the name, “you'd have to apply it to Emily, the kind of thing he brings down from the North.” “It is this that really renders her barren, or renders her as the last of her generation and the last of her kind, and so what he brings is sure death for the aristocracy and the race that Emily comes to have to symbolize.” Loss was another Barronial theme: “She lost her honor to Homer Barron.” “As far as Emily is concerned, what this kind of newness brings… is barren, is death.” “She, too, must die until finally there is nothing but Homer Barrons running around.” Homer, in other words, contrasts with the tradition as lover does with parent, but just as the hypermasculine parent was double-valued, so Homer's love and sexuality carry with them death and sterility.

Homer and Mr. Grierson brought out Sam's attitudes toward masculinity. Miss Emily presented a much more complicated character to relate to, involving several kinds of fantasy and defense. For Sam (as for all the other readers), the house came to symbolize Miss Emily herself. “Other things that stand out strongly in the story are the picture of the house as being a picture of her whole way of life. [It] comes out much more clearly, with much more force than I've ever given it.”

Partly, the house stood for Miss Emily's body as a container of prized objects, living and dead at the same time. “When her father died, Emily put up some sort of a hassle about taking it—about taking him—out to be buried.” Here, Sam's wording does remind me of the struggle children sometimes put up against the loss or taking away of their body products, also the familiar confusions in children's thoughts about their feces: Are they living or dead, part of “me” or just an “it,” or, in this case, “him” and “it”?

She seemed to me to be terribly strong inwardly … she had a lot of inner fortitude, and the only way it behaves … shows itself is in what she dedicates her life to doing as far as the house—In other words, progress will march along, but it will stop and then pick up after it reaches Emily's house. It's just not going to be there, and this takes a fierce determination.

Stasis and obstinacy—these are the traits Miss Emily's bodyhouse expresses, “her determination to maintain things as they were.”

But Sam did not settle for Miss Emily's anality—he made her over into his own levels of fantasy, expressed in hassles, strength, and fierceness. “Other things stand out that are impressive … that of the house, that of her, as character, as strong-willed, tragic hero.” For Sam, Miss Emily and her house had some of that power to “stand out” that her father had; in another genital sense, she made up for what she lacked of male power by holding on to some man's. “She lost her honor, and what else could she do but keep him [Homer] forever, make him hers in the only way she possibly could?” What, indeed? “He is seen going into the house by someone that night and is never seen to leave it.” “Lord knows what they had been doing inside the house, anyway, whether … she had compromised herself in other ways.” Sam showed his phallic transformations most graphically by misremembering Emily's obsessional china-painting: “The house is closed up. She doesn't receive the knitting students anymore, or whatever she was teaching them.” Penetrating needles replace painstaking brushwork.

Someone as narcissistically masculine as Sam, however, wanted to emphasize the difference between the sexes. Here, Sam would often see Miss Emily as intensely feminine, as in his framing her in the “tableau” between her father's legs: “That pretty much sums up exactly the kind of relationship they had.” “The frailty and femininity that that evokes!” sighed Sam, thinking of the “tableau,” “just that one frail, ‘slender figure in white,’ just those words there really show us the Emily that was and the Emily that might have been.” At one point he called her “the darling lady”—a woman with a chance to be “feminine.” “She was probably still attractive” and “thin” when she met Homer, he decided.

Sam was no feminist: he turned Emily into someone wholly passive, with marriage the only sensible aim for her life. “What hit me throughout the story was the total lack of any freedom. It wasn't even a question of fate. It was just environmental and preconceived mental sets that had governed this poor lady's life

from the onset.” “She's caught between memories of her father and the kind of life that he stood for and desires inherent in her. And it seems that she's trapped by what Homer Barron does, probably inadvertently, by taking her out and riding her in the carriage [sic ], therefore getting the whole town to think that they're going to marry.” “She refuses to bow to this [namely, the fact that aristocracy no longer exists, and everyone pays taxes, and tells druggists why they're buying arsenic]. Were she to bow to this, she would have to say, ‘Well, then, why in heaven's name am I not married with family when I could have been?’ ” Only the belief in her own aristocracy can “make her life at all worthwhile, at all dignified. Otherwise, it becomes farcical, that you have this sad lady living in, just let's say, living in a three-room apartment in some part of the town and yet not marrying and not doing this and not doing the other because she's aristocracy.”

Again, typical for a male concerned with physical masculinity, Sam thought of Emily partly as threateningly strong, partly as frail and helpless. Although she was destined only for marriage, he also saw marriage with her as potentially dangerous. “She killed as the only way of marrying him.” They were “not actually married and not married in Homer's mind. I think this was kind of a melodramatic wedding for Emily. It doesn't seem to me that she could have gotten Homer up there [sic ] if she had mentioned anything about its being a wedding.” The only way she could “make him hers … was to kill him and have him there.” “They go to bed again, one last time, and everything is laid out [sic ], and she puts the arsenic in the wine … the goblets, or whatever, and kills him.” And after this deadly wedding night, “She's eminently faithful to him, even after she kills him. She is as good a wife as any wife could be.” Again, Sam said,

I don't think the idea would ever come into Emily's mind after the murder, to marry. She was married. It was for Emily a marriage and of a very sacred sort. Had a man come along and fallen in love with her, who was everything that both she and her father put together [sic ] could ever have hoped for, of such lineage and such money, and the like, that

it can't be imagined, I don't think that she would have married him, because to her mind she was a married woman. She lost her honor to Homer Barron, and in order to regain her honor, married him, and would only lose it and go deeper in sin type of thing, if she ever considered marrying again.

Again, after the marriage, “If you're going to take that salt and pepper hair found on the thing as indicative that she did go back and lie with him … she was almost consummating the marriage every night and lived as a married woman would, I suppose, in her own way.” “Sleeping with him,” Sam described it, “as I'm reluctant to say … after he was dead, or just perhaps lying by him.” This marital fidelity “puts us more in sympathy with the kind of pathos of her life,” “the whole pathos of her situation.”

Once Homer was dead, however, Sam tended to see Emily as made of sterner stuff, “something like Scarlett O' Hara, not quite as gaddy.” “While she was younger this [total dominance by her father] was not something that was unwelcome. I think she began to resent it as she got older.” “The solitude of her life … does not make for femininity and the hardships, the lack of money.” “She's fiercely independent. The townsfolk hold her in great respect that isn't really due but almost because of fear.” A similar tendency to make her strong showed when he said, “Perhaps she was by anybody's standards insane by the end and hard and unnatural in the sense that she slept with this corpse and a murderess, by all standards. I think, though, that her situation evokes a lot of sympathy.” “As she grew up and as she took looks at herself and saw what her life was, it seems that she became hard, independent as hell, especially after her father died.” Of her various refusals, Sam would say, “That stands out definitely.” “Other things stand out that are impressive,” and he continued with other, similar masculinizings.

Thus, Sam ran a gamut in his attitude toward Emily. At the gentlest level, he said something like what Faulkner had said: “ ‘Rose for Emily’ seems like kind of tribute paid … now tell the story in a ballad-type way about Emily whose life was awfully difficult.” Or Brooks and Warren, who saw

“her as … strong-willed tragic hero.” “I think,” Sam could say in this masculinizing vein, “that she handled herself in a Hemingwayish way, in a kind of manly way, didn't cry and didn't complain and kept up all appearances as best she possibly could.” With a sterner attitude, Sam noted that one of the men, after throwing lye around the house, “sees her in the window with the light behind her … a kind of Buddha idol—that's the image that it evokes. It's kind of an idol for the town, for a whole way of life, for a whole frame of mind, this kind of old, traditional Southern way of life, and she became its goddess.” Sam spoke of “gothic grandeur midst absolute poverty.” “She began to be as the townsfolk look at her, legendary, a kind of pagan deity to all that they'd have her stand for.” And that “stand for” signals a change of sex. “While they [the town] may be envious and while they may be angry at the way that these people [the Griersons] act, they yet need it, it seems, they in a way like to have it, much as one is terrified at the power of a god and yet needing him so much and, you know, sidling up to him and paying homage to him and in the same way I think Emily comes to function as this god symbol.”

Sam was able to accept the harshness of an Emily who was both feminine trap and masculine god because he could construct denials for himself out of Emily's. “In an effort to just live her life out, [she] would close off whole areas of reality and not even look at them.” “When her father died, Emily … kind of in her own mind, refused to believe that he was dead.” When a complaint is made about the smell around her house, “She refuses to listen to it, so the townspeople themselves have to go and spread lye.” This is a “Freudian” misremembering—the complaint came to the Board of Aldermen, not to Emily. It is as though Sam needed to have her deny, not anonymous townsmen. Similarly, “She won't sprinkle the lye because that's ridiculous.” But nobody asked her to.

In many ways, then, she provided Sam with denials of impotence: “She refuses to cope with the inroads of the present” (an echo of Homer's “incoming” road; perhaps), and, Sam suggested, “The total physical deterioration … could easily be

seen as symbolic for mental deterioration, too.” “So much of what she had grown up under,” Sam said, having just mentioned her father as symbol for the tradition, “and come to see as life was not real and was dead and was changing and moving on.” Yet, Sam felt, Emily could not accept this change; to do so would be to make her “bow,” “collapse,” and otherwise lose her erect strength. He imagined Emily saying to herself: “ ‘My entire life has been formed and pointed toward this kind of an existence. I'm not married. I'm not really happy because of it. And if it's held such sway in such important areas of my life, I am certainly not going to let it override me now.’ ” Sam seemed to mean by “it” the whole concept of the aristocratic Southern tradition, and for it to “override” Emily meant for it to overtake her and ride over her in its rush to change—but, admittedly, his usage is odd. “ ‘Besides, I'd collapse. I'd fall down. My mind would unhinge by all the contrasts suddenly there if I were to let it. So I must go on as if everything were the way my life of loneliness shows that it should be.’ In other words, it would be the only thing that would make her life at all worthwhile, at all dignified.” “ ‘If I accept this, that I have to pay taxes like everybody else,’ ” Sam imagined her saying, “ ‘and yet I can't do so many other things like everybody else … ’ this would just be totally conflicting and it wouldn't work.” Sam's Emily, like Sam, has to deny in order to be “formed and pointed,” and not “collapse,” “fall down,” or “unhinge.”

At the beginning of the interview, he had talked about her fierceness, her grand manner, her becoming an idol or a god, even with masculine phrasings about her “standing out” or “standing for.” However, once he had imagined the “disgusting” part, her lying with Homer, he shifted to feeling sympathy for Emily, and then shifted again, this time to stressing her passivity, how she was never free, totally bound by her tradition, “under” various pressures. From passivity, he went on to the very feminine; frail Emily, then back to the mannish, strong tragic heroine. Evidently, triggering these shifts was what Sam knew about the dirty secret or what Emily knew.

I said to Sam that we really only see Emily as “bossy, domineering, tough,” but that he was suggesting she was

“feminine in the early part of her life.” “So then, what's the thing that made her change?” I asked. “The realization that her father was dead,” he quickly answered. “And I think a kind of awareness that things were moving on, that things were changing, and yet, a similar awareness that she was unable to change along with them.” Yet it is precisely this change that Sam thought Emily denied by her style of life.

It might be most accurate then, to say that Sam felt that what you know and what you can avoid knowing determine whether you will be frail, feminine, and passive (“under”) or masculine and cruelly domineering (“on top”). And this idea applied as much to Sam's relation to the total story as to that segment of it called Miss Emily Grierson. Following our principle of the matching of defenses, Sam found a defense in the story: denial, or the whole question of what one can tolerate knowing. Having selectively denied, Sam made the story's words about holding in something precious into his own preferred fantasies about holding on to a nurturing matrix so as to thrust forth in a virile, aggressive way. Then, following our concept of “characteristic transformation,” he transformed those fantasies into intellectual themes in his own style.

Thus, Sam decided on “the reason of this story”: “I think the thing we talked about, about the future and the past and what one should carry out of the past with one into the future, is pretty much it.” “The past should not be totally ignored,” he had said, “and yet it should not be totally lived in, and some sort of a compromise has to be made.”

What he [Faulkner] is asking you to do is bring the good of the past to bear upon the future … bring the valid of the past to bear upon the future … bring the valid of the past to bear upon your life in the future. In other words, that tradition which is helpful, that tradition which is good, that tradition which gives solid [sic ] and reason to your life, is fine. To do, as perhaps is suggested Homer Barron does, and throw it immediately over one's shoulder and never look at it, for what counts is the future, that's not good either. To do what—we can't say her father, because he died—but to do what Emily did, and to base her whole life on an idea of the

past, can easily lead to the kind of tragedy that Emily's life does. Neither is good. A kind of middle road, a kind of compromise seems to be what is suggested.

Reasonable as this interpretation is, it also derives from Sam's own wishes for an early (or past) matrix from which he would draw supplies (of love? strength? self-esteem?) in order to push on into his later life in a virile way acceptable to his own need to be admired as a young man. Further, when we looked at what Sam meant by that past, we found that he built it up from a series of romantic denials of reality.

Even so, Sam felt a little nervous about what he did and did not know in this story. He did not find his expectancy of supply and support so simply gratified by the ante-bellum world of “A Rose for Emily” that he could just merge into the story. He contrasted “A Rose for Emily” to the only other ante-bellum story he could think of: “I enjoyed it very much…but I didn't really lose myself in the sense that, well, that you could lose yourself analogously in Gone with the Wind. ”

The story was complex enough to…keep me on my toes, in the sense that I felt that I had to be on top…I did enjoy it thoroughly, and was involved with it, but didn't lose myself in the sense that I could just really sit back and let the story unfold, because the story didn't. It unfolded all right, but I always had to figure just how the hell it was unfolding. And ‘What, now! That was twenty years ago!’ like you had to have a pad of paper next to you to figure out the time thing.

Even so, Sam took pleasure in the puzzles of “A Rose for Emily.” “I enjoyed the kinds of mechanical demands it made on you to figure out what happened where and everything else.” “Another one of the things that … I felt I was being forced to do as a reader was to dig between and beneath just what was being said, to find out real things, especially with the ending.” As we have seen, Sam wanted to penetrate things in a variety of senses.

One way he did so was to project himself into the situations and characters, understanding them by playing them out—for

example, that mysterious wedding night. “Perhaps she said, ‘This will be our own little common-law wedding, dear,’ and Homer, ‘Heh, heh, heh,’ you know, and ‘I'll skip town tomorrow,’ would say ‘All right,’ ‘Fine,’ type of thing.” Homer, he said, left “perhaps telling Emily where he's going, perhaps saying, ‘No, I will not marry you. I never had it in mind to marry you.’ ”

Another way he went into the story was less projective and more critical: he tried to “solve” it like a problem or a puzzle, and this too may have had a thrusting, probing, virile significance for him. “It was, in a way, a mystery story.” For example, he had said Emily's taking up with Homer “is probably the only gap that the story had.” Later he said that he, as a reader, puzzled in order “to try and fill in a lot of gaps.”

In this problem-solving, however, Sam handicapped himself by a variety of denials, although, to be sure, he frankly confessed them. Thus, he admitted he was “reluctant to say” whether Emily had been sleeping with the corpse or not. “You really can't— You don't know, and you're kind of loath to think about it, because it's kind of disgusting.” Because he didn't want to look at the event itself, he looked instead (as in his Rorschach tests) at the periphery. He drifted helter-skelter through the possibilities of that wedding-night until finally he concluded, “It all boils down to the fact you have to interpret the last paragraph where the hair is found. … There is dust on top of the hair.” “It sounds as if it's [the hair] on top of the dust or at least not that heavily covered over by the dust.” Limited as my housekeeping skills are, I nevertheless suspect that trying to decide whether a strand of hair someone has picked up had been on or under dust would puzzle the most compulsive duster. The story, at any rate, gives no clue.

This concern with the position of the strand of hair matched another pattern in Sam's response. It showed, for example, in his recollection of the tableau: “the townsfolk looking through the door as her father stands there.” Actually, the story describes “the two of them framed by the back-flung front door,” so the townspeople must have been outside the house and the Griersons on the porch or other space in front of the front door. Later, Sam called the tableau, “the picture of her shown by her

father.” Both errors shift the position from which the event is seen. Similarly, he recalled Emily's wedding present, not as “a man's toilet set,” the story's phrase, but “the silver backed combs and things like— Or was that his to her? Do you remember? Or was that hers to him?” In the same way, he spoke of Emily's “chatter” with the druggist. Hardly accurate. The only chatterer one could possibly associate with that scene is Sam himself. Again, Sam described the method of narration: “All the secrets, if any, that you're privy to, are just ones of general speculation and rumor.” How can one speak of “rumor” as a “secret”?

All these slips and self-contradictions carry out denials: Sam avoided seeing something he did not want to see by concentrating on something peripheral. As such, his denials use the way the story omits and slides over its clues so as to build toward the final, awful discovery. This shared denial, this matching of defenses, established Sam's basic and pervasive contact with the story.

Indeed, it was precisely Sam's ability to regard the South as benevolent even when perpetrating slavery, violence, and humiliation on Negroes that provided his deepest point of identification with the story (as a “born baby”). Having established the South as a nurturing matrix, Sam could then pursue his other libidinal aims: being “on top,” in “a position of power,” “a great plantation owner,” whipping “my share of slaves.” Miss Emily's father illustrated this same double value: he provided a matrix in which she could have been “the darling lady,” but as things turned out, his values destroyed her life. So, too, Homer Barron's phallic powers had this ability to give Emily a life or take it away.

Homer had something else as well that was important to Sam, the ability to elude the matrix of the South, to fly free. “He returns, it seems to me, because Emily sends for him. That would be the only reason I can see of his coming back.” Sam rendered Homer's freedom in images of air. Homer Barron, “catching wind” of the threat of marriage, leaves. “She was too clever to put any claims on him forcibly, because I think he would just have blown the joint.” And there was perhaps the faintest grisly echo of these images when Sam described

the entry into Emily's house after her death: “The townsfolk pour into her house … to air their curiosity.”

Homer did not fly, however, but Sam was able to accept his demise by taking the murder as only a meal and a marriage. In the development of the story, the South ceased to be a useful matrix, and so did Miss Emily. Sam, however, could accept a masculine version of Miss Emily as a “god” to whom one would sidle up. He took on a masculine role himself, penetrating and probing the story's secrets (but using denials to avoid anything too threatening), and enjoying his power over it. “I, feeling that I was more or less successful with it [‘the time thing’], I enjoyed it. It was kind of an easy crossword puzzle type of thing to be doing on the side.” In effect, Sam had wanted to get on top of the story and force his way into it by actively interpreting it. By the end of the interview, he felt he had been fairly successful in doing so, and this gave him libidinal and aggressive pleasures of a thrusting, penetrating kind. From his vantage point on top, following the principle of expectancy enacted, Sam responded favorably to Emily. “She has so many conflicts that she has to resolve,” and he sympathized with her for facing and solving her life problems as he had solved his problems of interpretation.

In key with his shift from a kind of passive nurturing in the motherly bosom of the Old South to a more active probing of the story, Sam took the intellectual theme to be carrying forth something from the matrix of the past to thrust into the future, a theme akin both to Homer's tentative flight and Sam's shift from a passive enjoyment of Gone with the Wind to an active solving and filling in of the Faulknerian gaps.

As for Sam's characteristic transformation, he did not develop the fantasy I did, having to do with the control of inner things. Instead, he introduced the virile themes of strength, domination, and penetration that concerned him, and he transformed that fantasy of being on top (through denials he created from the story) into an active, male theme of—the missing defense—flight. At that (phallic) level, I thought the story showed Emily's becoming a strong, masculine woman, but Sam did not see it that way. For him, the story seemed to be Emily's proving he was right in his fears about women. Emily's

killing Homer equaled marrying him, and Sam took the theme of the story to be, “what one should carry out of the past with one into the future.” That is, Sam would like to be able to carry “what gives solid and reason to [his] life” away from such a woman (or matrix) and “bring [it] to bear…in the future.” To the extent “A Rose for Emily” made that difficult for Sam to do, he parted company with the story. Not, however, before he had, in his completely individual way, demonstrated the four principles of literary response.

Saul

Scholarly Saul, as we have seen, guarded himself very heavily indeed against the danger that more would be forced out of him than he wished to give. His need—to find a balanced bargain in which he could be sure he would not be overpowered—governed not only his response to the story, but his attitude toward the interview. “I had to sit here and face that question when you asked me that.” When I asked him what he thought actually happened on the night Homer was killed, “It's another question I have to face right now.” In effect, he perceived the interview (not without reason) as my demand that he deliver answers. This, alas, was exactly the opposite of what Saul wanted to do. He wanted rather aggressively to control the pace and direction of what came out, and he had to “face” me because he feared being forced by someone he could not see, someone behind him, for example.

“I knocked it [“A Rose for Emily”] off in the last twenty minutes,” he announced at the beginning of the interview, thereby imposing his own limits on the depth and seriousness of our conversation. Introducing an “analogy” he had to the story, he said, “I'm not sure how [it came to me]. I wouldn't want to defend that for very long. That's one of my quick associations to it. I did another thing wrong …” Evidently, to associate freely and quickly was “wrong.” Saul needed to control the interviews, because (I think) he feared that if he freely associated, talked “away from the text,” for example, he might let more out than he wanted to.

In general, a reader's experience of a literary work depends

first and foremost on how closely he can create his adaptation from the work. Saul needed to see forces that might make him let too much out—alertness was one way he coped. Bargaining with forces he thought might take something away, however, was even more Saul's way of dealing with the world, as, for example, in the interviews.

To apply this mode to “A Rose for Emily,” he had to find a person with whom he could establish his bargain, and he did: Faulkner himself. Then he took this approach via the author to be the proper “Eng. Lit.” way of doing things. “I'm more prone to do this on Faulkner than I was on Katherine Mansfield's story, read it like a graduate student, fit it in to what I know about Faulkner, and so forth.” Yet this bargain, too, required further defending, as when he read out a sequence of adjectives that had caught his fancy, but commented, “I said, ‘Yeah!’ two ways. One, a kind of gut reaction way. The other in a ‘Gee, this kind of sums up Faulkner's attitude toward’ [way]. You know, in the footnote.”

Even his enthusiasm had to fit within bounds. He liked the tableau of Emily and her father: “It's a nice device. Faulkner makes that one work, too.” “I like [the story], if only to start with this on the level of authoritative prose.” To another sequence of adjectives, “I don't get much ‘gut reaction.’ I just see it fit in the pattern.” “ ‘Authority’ is the word I get most with Faulkner.”

In the course of our ten interviews, he praised several other authors in almost the same words. This sense of the writer as an “authority” seemed to play an important part in Saul's feelings toward literature in general and Faulkner in particular. “He knows, he knows. He always gives the impression of knowing what he's doing.” “He's just so goddamned good…with such masterful authority. He knows what he's doing every time he puts a word down. You know, he gets away with lots of things that not too many people can.” “I think there's something about his rhythms.”

Yet, true to his concern with holding on and releasing, Saul needed to feel that his authoritative writer dropping each word according to his rhythm and intention could, if he wanted to, simply let go: “There's a wild, wild paragraph,” he said of

Light in August , “in which he just lets out all the stops.” “I think he makes some of this work the way it seems Whitman makes things work. He just yells them. It's got kind of 1840's public oratory.” “I think that's probably the way he's doing it. … He, like Whitman, mixes Latin and Greek derived words with slang. He does everything wrong , and it works.”

As in that echo, doing things wrong, Saul readily identified with Faulkner. “I've got to assume, at least Faulkner is assuming, that arsenic takes a while to act.” Saul's sense of being in an equally balanced bargain with Faulkner even led him into the hubris of competing with that brilliant writer: “I would never dream of trying anything like that, and he makes it work!” “The bastard can out-write me. He writes just magnificently!”

Yet, as one would expect, he also undermined the very authority he seemed to admire. “I sometimes suspect Faulkner of being just a little stagy in some of this,” by which Saul meant working things out too neatly, and, therefore, manipulating him, getting responses out of him he did not wish to give, responses that he, Saul, might feel guilty or ashamed of. “I suspect Faulkner again there [in connection with the old Negro]. No matter how much I like Dilsey [in The Sound and the Fury ], I suspect in her case, too.” “Even after you think about it [his prose] a while, he's managed to fool you.” “Sometimes you smell a little staginess,” when “he gets away with things that … he shouldn't be getting away with.” And, common though it may be, the idiom of ‘getting away with things’ exactly expressed Saul's fear.

In much the same way he traded with Faulkner, Saul singled out the nearly invisible narrator of the story. “The thing with ‘we,’ I like the way he handles that. It's really nicely done, I think.” Curiously, he found this the realest thing in the story: “There aren't quite any real people … except maybe the ‘I’ that's speaking” (although the narrator always speaks of himself as “we”). By supplying a nonexistent “I,” Saul revealed his relationship to the narrator as another person with whom he bargained for the story's information, shifting and displacing items, particularly the emotional weight to be given them. Saul identified with this controller as he had with Faulkner. For

example, who is the “I” in this sentence of Saul's? “I managed to deal with what happened to him [Homer] by saying he went away somewhere.” Is “I” Saul or the narrator?

Similarly, when he responded positively to Miss Emily, he did so because she resisted the controlling forces of others. She had “a certain amount of power, not a power that females would have had in the old traditions. But it's not the same kind of power that her father or the mayor [had].” He said this in answer to my question about whether he thought she took on some of her father's force in her later, withholding years. “It's a defensive and resistant power, not particularly masculine power.” That she “vanquished” the city council, he said, meant, “She wouldn't listen to them, just as she wouldn't yield to having the mailbox and the numbers put on her house for free mail delivery.”

“As the last holdout, she's doing very well at it,” “She is , you know, the last holdout of these old traditions.” He was describing a contest of wills, not unlike my efforts to get responses from him. In this vein, he made an interesting slip while reading part of the story aloud to me. “ ‘She looked back at him, erect, her face like a stained flag’” (instead of “strained”). Again, “The house is the last holdout on that once most select street.” He liked the tableau of Miss Emily and her father and the front door. “They're framed in this door of this old aristocratic house which now stands alone among cotton gins … and gas stations. It strikes me as right. I can't say [why].”

We can, however. Such a “framing” or holding was just what Saul wanted. He had been able to strike a balanced bargain with Faulkner's authority or the narrator's. Having achieved his major defensive pattern of withholding within a frame, he was able to enjoy the story. And he was able to respond to persons and actions with the story (notably Miss Emily) who acted out for him the balance of outer control and inner withholding that was Saul's expectation toward most of life. Thus, Saul liked Faulkner's language, singling out phrases like “stubborn and coquettish decay,” “decorated with cupolas and spires … in the heavily lightsome style of the seventies,” “the cedar-bemused cemetery.” Here Saul was

finding the limited controls he favored in Faulkner's balances of positive and negative values (“coquettish decay,” “heavily lightsome”). Then, in their unconscious significance, these phrases could link human traits to decay. They could express the body's experience of the loss of its precious but disgusting, living but dead, products in a larger, more totally human experience of the death, decay, and loss of a tradition.

This matching of defense, drive, and therefore expectancy made up Saul's positive response to the story. He also had negative responses, particularly when he felt threatened or overcontrolled. He had two characteristic ways of dealing with these threats to his autonomy. First, he might push the opposing force away, make it disappear, as it were. Second, he might deal with it logically so as to “cut it down to size.” He could then strike a new, more favorable bargain with it, dominating it or even, perhaps, getting rid of it entirely. Consider the way he commented on Emily's father: in effect, he blotted him out by dividing him up into inconsistent alternatives until one could see him no longer. “How do you feel towards him?” I asked. “I think of [George] Wallace supporters,” he replied, but went right on to say, “I think he was partly, at least, like the mayor who had fathered the— You know, more in the image of the aristocratic white Southerner with benevolence towards niggers—to a point.”*

“This constrictive benevolence,” he called it, and the adjective reveals the sense of coercion and control that mobilized Saul's defenses. Thus, he dealt with the tableau of Emily and her father in the doorway by splitting it. “ ‘Horsewhip’ there—rings—” “A horsewhip suggesting all sorts of nasty, sexual, sadistic overtones.” Yet, even as he gave him this sadistic sexuality (again appropriate to Saul's fears of authority), he took it away. “The father a ‘spraddled silhouette.’ He's no longer stern and erect.” True, “sprawled” is one possible meaning for “spraddled,” but many people would take the word in this context to mean “spraddle-legged” or “straddled,” that is, with legs spread wide apart. Saul took the word to mean a decline in Mr. Grierson's powers, and then he proceeded * As noted before, the epithet is Saul's experimenting with a racist attitude.

to qualify the image even further. “Do they mean the horsewhip rather than his own stern demeanor? Or just the normal embodiment of his traditions suggests the decline like ‘spraddled’ does?” Frankly, I cannot tell very clearly what Saul meant, but what is clear is that he was controlling the tableau by dividing it into separate words and then dividing even those words again.

Similarly, when I asked him about the edict that no Negro woman should appear on the streets without an apron, he shifted to the participle that introduced that appalling law: “ ‘Fathered’ … is the word you're asking about, I suspect,” and he promptly rewrote it to “ ‘sponsored.’ It means practically the same as ‘sponsored,’ I think. I don't know. Although I suppose you could talk about paternalism and stuff but—” It was typical of Saul to try to make a tyrannical father into “paternalism,” which then vanishes.

It was equally typical of him to blur, qualify, and so weaken the substance of the edict. “It's just a matter of, you know, Negroes are not allowed to be people, only servants. That's a social class thing.” Even holding the book, he had changed “Negro woman” to “Negroes,” and still holding the book, he phrased the edict: “No one should appear on the streets without an apron. That's just identifying the servants, that they're not allowed to dress up in their Sunday best on the street.” The effect is to deny all the force and cruelty of the original, to take the coercion out.

He applied the same equalizing technique to other authority-figures in the story. “The druggist … asking her what she's going to use it for, is like the people saying that ‘We're the [“city authorities”]’—They're the same representatives of the same order of things.” And he had already seen them defeated. He blurred distinctions further in recalling, “The people—they all think about ‘in their brushed Confederate uniforms’—they talk about having danced with her.” But these words in the story describe only “the very old men.”

He felt Faulkner, with Miss Emily's servant Tobe and Dilsey of The Sound and the Fury , was “romanticizing the good house nigger,” “making of her more a literary symbol and less a real person, which is what apparently the entire social structure…

of the house militated to do: make people into figures in the white man's psychic drama of some sort, rather than allowing them to be people on their own.” Yet, despite the touch of Fanon in this speech, it was Saul, not Faulkner who erased, in these words, blackness into “people,” or said of this utterly baffling servant who shared Miss Emily's ghastly secret all those years: “There's not much to him, except she clearly—he's in her control or he willingly— Well. That sounds like two different things.” “Devoted while he's her servant for forty or fifty years. There's something, and he's so much associated with her when he's— He has something and knows— He's complicit somehow in this murder.”

I tried to open up Saul's enigmatic view by offering him the suggestion (which I had got from another reader) that Tobe had masterminded the whole thing. To this bizarre idea, Saul commented, slowly and sagely, “Well, he appears and disappears appropriately,” then, after a long pause, “I don't recall anything in the story … anything that suggests she was in any way captive by anyone living.” “But why would he go out to the market? ‘Show these gentlemen in.’ ‘Show these gentlemen out,’” he quoted, as if to prove that no self-respecting mastermind would be coerced into a servant's role, not in complete control of appearances and disappearances.

As for the real murderer, Emily, he saw her as the controlled, rather than the controller (not, as I saw her, someone changing those roles in midstory). “She had pounded into her head … that she is better, that she's one of the chosen, one of the elect, one of the better people.” “That's one of the more important mechanisms of how she's trapped in this heritage.” “I don't find her as frightening terrible as I do, say even the mother in Mansfield's story.” “There's something pathetic about Emily.” “I perceive her as more a victim.” “I'm sympathetic to the sorts of things that have happened to … the lost Miss Emily.” “I perceive her as less terrible, partly because of a kind of sympathy, maybe because she's more shadowy.”

In general, he tended to make Miss Emily unreal. Of the murder scene he said, “I can't imagine them having tea in their nightgowns.” “This is more like it's being acted out in a dusty

museum case.” “I think I react sort of like a museum grotesque of some sort.” If he could not make her passive or harmless, a “victim,” he made her threat remote and therefore not dangerous. “She manages to conceal all this and be still thought of with a certain amount of reverence, until after her death.” Thus, when I put forward my idea that Miss Emily took on some of her father's brutality and force, Saul would have none of it. “It hadn't occurred to me because I don't think of her as quite that real.” “She's still too wispy and shadowy and, you know, wispy gothic, for me to think about it that way, masculine.”

This was Saul's other way of establishing his own controls against forces that looked as though they might be able to control him. He would push the opposing force away, make it disappear, by, in effect, changing the subject (that is, the grounds of the bargain). This was Saul's “originality.” Inevitably, he felt that, to talk about “A Rose for Emily,” he had to tell me about The Sound and the Fury, Light in August , and movies of the 1930's set on glorified plantations. Less predictably, he talked about a Katherine Mansfield story and Miss Lonelyhearts. Still more originally, he decided Faulkner's prose style worked the way Whitman's poetry did, and rather than discuss any of the language of this story, he cautioned himself, “Let me stick to Whitman.” Almost the first thing he said was, “The analogy of that strange Christ figure in Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood came to me.”

Despite his willingness to compete with Faulkner, Saul showed blind spots when he tried to talk about the prose rather than just quote it. “I had remembered the word ‘tableau,’ and I had forgotten the rest of it.” In the amorous language of the last scene, “I haven't the slightest idea what ‘cuckold’… what it's doing here.” Again, unless he was controlling its terms, he refused the bargain.

In the same way, he associated an unreal Miss Emily with an unreal South, a sense of Miss Emily as monument and idol—“It just fits the death of the old traditions.” Saul knew nothing about the murder but his own “filmy guessing.” “There's something finally unreal about Southern gothics,” like Miss Emily: “wispy and shadowy,” “less terrible …

because she's more shadowy.” Saul associated to this ideal a specific image of things appearing and disappearing: “this gothic world where figures appear and disappear much more readily than they do, say, in the streets of Buffalo, in the real world out there.”

To some extent, Saul's whole response seemed to pivot on this sense of things appearing and disappearing, which sometimes was good, sometimes bad. Part of his “negative reaction” to the story came because it got “shadowy.” Yet, losing something calls for restitution. “After they lost the war, they had to idealize something … The aristocratic conditions, like the movies of the plantations in the ′30s and ′40s and ′50s. All these great plantation balls and the white gowns floating around and all this lovely, lovely world.” “They tried to enforce that,” he said. “It's no longer possible to maintain it.” “That can no longer be maintained with sanity after that world disintegrated.” “When the tradition no longer had the hold on life to protect them, you have to get stern to hold on,” and this word, he thought, described Miss Emily's manner better than “masculine.”

Saul's concern with “holding on” led him to respond especially to things appearing or disappearing, and this concern in turn led to what resembled denials, deliberate ignorances, in his perception of the story. They were not denials, however, but distancings he himself imposed. Saul had to be on guard. He seemed almost aware of his tactics, for just as he had called old Miss Emily “cockeyed,” he could speak of “the cockeyed way I perceived the story.” “Five paragraphs from the end they talk about the one room that hadn't been opened in forty years, and, until I started reading that, it hadn't—I had faced the question [sic ] of what happened to, um, the man's name— ” and he had blotted out Homer Barron. “I didn't think of the smell or anything. I managed to deal with what happened to him by saying he went away somewhere. He left.” And, at a later point, he said, “I managed to ignore the poison when I was dealing with what happened to Homer Barron.”

These statements that he had “managed to deal with” or “faced the question” make his reading seem like a highly logical affair. So, in a way, it was; for logic and dividing into

particulars was Saul's alternative to his other strategy of blurring distinctions and making parts of the story appear and disappear. “The moment I read this line [about the unopened room]. … at that point it was all predictable.” “That and the smell and so forth hit me, obviously. The smell was him decaying. Had it not been for the smell, it wouldn't have been so certain.” Recall the way he divided up the sadistic tableau. At another stage in the interview, he developed four logical possibilities for the way the murder could have taken place, mumbling and maundering about the speed with which arsenic works, putting on and off clothes, having the Negro carry Homer up the stairs, wondering whether they would have had tea in their nightgowns, and so on. The fact of the murder got lost as he concluded, “The only thing that's clear is that she has this ‘iron gray’ hair they find on the pillow next to his pillow.” “The whole end of this story is rather obscure, to tell you the truth. I suspect we're supposed to project our own gothic horrors into this kind of Rorschach blot on the last page.” Exactly right, I think, certainly righter than those critics who have tried to ferret out exactly what happened on the fatal night. The point is not, however, whether Saul is right or whether he seems right to me. The real question is, How did he —the most guarded and defensive of these five readers—accept so open a reading of the final, threatening mystery?

Of our four principles, the most basic is that of “expectancy enacted.” A reader responds positively to certain elements, when he feels those elements do within the work what he expects toward the work; he responds negatively to those elements in which he cannot match his own structures of defense and adaptation. Saul responded positively to Faulkner's “masterful authority,” the managerial narrator, the “resistant” Miss Emily, and the language and images that “framed” their content. These things he saw as deliberately controlling what they would let out or hold onto. They thus acted out exactly both Saul's defenses and his drives. Indeed, the story came so close to his own patterns that he saw the theme of the story quite conventionally: holding on to tradition. He found, in effect, just the opposite of what he found in “Winter Dreams,” holding on,

rather than letting go “ ‘transient beauty’ and all this decadent crap.”

Saul responded negatively to people or episodes in the story who seemed to him not limited or contained and who seemed to show overwhelming power: Miss Emily's father, the more demanding parts of Faulkner's prose, the edict against Negro women, Emily's enigmatic servant, Miss Emily as a murderer, and the final fact of the murder itself. He interpreted these as situations in which the bargain did not take place between equally balanced opponents. Rather, one side demonstrated overwhelming power. To such a situation, Saul applied one of two defenses. He might deal with it logically, dividing up strengths as he divided Mr. Grierson until he was of manageable size or as he qualified various forces: the druggist, the city council, the cruel edict, the murderess. Or he might push the large force into the distance, making it remote and unreal, as he did Faulkner's more complex prose or the Old South—or the “inkblot” of the murder. It cannot control his response: “I suspect we're supposed to project our own gothic horrors” —with the implication nobody was going to frighten Saul that easily (so that his “open” response was really another kind of wariness).

In effect, Saul dealt with the world (and, within the world, this story) in terms of things appearing and disappearing. Would he be coerced into letting something out from inside himself where it lay hidden? Would he be forced to make something of his own, which was invisible, appear? Or would he be able to coerce the coercer and make that other appear or disappear according to his, Saul's, will? This more rigid defense led to his logically mastering that other, qualifying it until it became small or remote or unreal.

It was perhaps inevitable that Saul's last words about the story would be split between his two negative modes, pushing away and logically dividing. “My only negative reaction would be, um, well, two.” On the one hand, “It does get a touch shadowy.” “It's sometimes just a little mawky, stagy, and pat.” (“Mawky,” I decided, was a portmanteau word, from “mawkish” and “murky.”) On the other hand, “It works itself

out maybe a bit too neatly. It's a masterfully unfolded pattern, but maybe if you know the pattern already, and it unfolds so easily, it's less thrilling a story to read.”

Shep

Radical Shep liked “A Rose for Emily.” This story, he said, comparing it to others in the anthology we were using, was “up on a level with the Conrad [“The Secret Sharer”] and the Joyce story [“The Dead”]. It's kind of midway between the two, with Joyce somewhere up near the top.” Shep's enthusiasm means he interpreted the story's form and structure to yield a match for his own strategies of defense and adaptation.

Shep, we have seen, had two related patterns, both aimed at preserving a sense of identity in the face of an other perceived as overwhelming and all-powerful. First, he might try to become a passive victim, a “thing” in a “system.” Alternatively, he would flee the matrix to fight it from a distance—exile and resistance, as he said, speaking of his underground lifestyle. This flight-and-fight strategy, however, could cut him off from a story, at least if applied at the outset.

From time to time, Shep would use his interest in “systems” to throw out a digression in such a way as to mobilize opposition—although I think these maneuvers had more to do with his response to me than to the story. Often, he stated these digressions as conflicts. “The Southern tradition, I think, is preferable to the tradition of the McLuhanistas, that kind of pop tradition” (a curious phrasing). He felt, even in Faulkner's own writings, one could do better than the Griersons. “The thing that Sam Fathers was into [in “The Bear”], it was very much a better tradition to be in than the slave-owning aristocratic one. Even the Snopes tradition was a little bit better before they started making money.” “Something like [William] Burroughs' cut-up method … is an attempt to regain—and I would, in fairness to Burroughs, say, regain in a better form than the old Southern aristocratic one—an attempt to regain that form which Faulkner at least writes as though he has.” In effect, Shep brought in McLuhan to be put down by Faulkner; Sam Fathers, and

even the Snopeses, to put down the Griersons; Burroughs to put down Faulkner, and so on—he was acting like a fight promoter, particularly when he changed from intellectual and literary preferences to more tender topics.

“I don't like it [the Southern tradition] for the same reason that I don't like Christianity. … I don't like Christianity from some of the things that it's done trying to stay alive.” Or his comment on Miss Emily's father in the tableau: “He's defending Southern womanhood … in that same sort of mindless way that says, ‘Well, now, we've got to defend it.’ ” “He [Homer] can build roads like a mother, you know. He's great at building roads, but the roads don't go anywhere. They're no real connection. They're that phony geography that ends up on Esso travel maps.” I sensed in Shep a hostility just looking for something to pounce on. He seemed constantly to be tossing in baits to see if he could draw me into an argument of some kind—about the falsity of Esso maps or Christianity or McLuhan or Southern ideals or whatever it might be.

Shep's other defensive strategy, however, played much more of a role in his response, because he could so easily match it in “A Rose for Emily.” That is, half of Shep wanted and needed to find he was incorporated into a matrix, even, if necessary, as its victim. For me, much of “A Rose for Emily” builds on the formal strategy, “I will take and keep the old thing inside me”. Miss Emily's keeping of Homer, for example, the town's affectionate tolerance of Emily, or Faulkner's flashback form. If Shep also saw the story that way, he could match his style exactly.

Shep himself longed for a nurturing and sustaining system, “some sort of contact between self and environment.” he called it, and he saw the whole Southern milieu of the story in these terms. “For Massa, it represented something valuable and some way really tying in with what was around him, with the world that he lived in, and also with the time that he lived in, and the times preceding and following that.” “These people were integrally and viably connected with what was around them, with their environment in general, be it social or physical, and … consequently they didn't exist as individuals in the sense that most fiction deals with. They, in a way, are seen in a

mythic dimension, or maybe a heroic dimension would be a better way to put it.”

Either way, Shep did not react to the characters as individuals but as abstractions, as words. “Names,” he concluded, “are magical. Names mean something.” He felt sorry for Miss Emily, “regardless of the slave-holding bit and what the Confederacy stood for. The metapolitical oneness, the action which was identical to its object, the energy transmission of the scene was a very good one, so I did sympathize with her.” “In a way,” he said, “the two are inseparable, the person and the situation. … I found myself feeling as though she and virtually everyone else in there, as well as the things like houses and so forth, were extensions of a whole group of things, a whole piece in the historical geography of the place.”

He saw time the same way. For example, in his retelling the story in his own words, he said, “I think that I tend to sort things out and arrange them in this historical sequence because I don't have the sort of thing that Faulkner had and that the people in the story had about some sort of an integral tradition, some sort of connection with the past, in terms of geography, in terms of the way events tend to accumulate and make places meaningful, and that's the real geography of the area.” He referred again to “that geography of experience,” “historical geography,” and it was this sense of an eternal now that seemed to be the chief appeal of the story to him.

“I got quite hung up in it, particularly along the temporal-spatial continuity that exists for the people in it and that makes possible his [Faulkner's] violating chronological forms. … the fact that things in Jefferson coexist in past and present.” Again, it was this particular feature that made him admire the mere technique of the story: “The movement is perfectly logical, but it fits in with the flow of the story, because those movements are all there in the present that he's writing in.” Although he recognized that he himself could not sustain such a mode—“My own words would probably tend toward the chronological”—he was also able to recount in exact detail the complex narrative sequence of the opening paragraphs of the story.

He had, in fact, better recall than any of the other subjects of

the way Faulkner made past and present coexist, and he admired it more. “What he manages … in that first section, of getting you to accept the eternal moment through which he sees things, is beautiful! It makes the whole story worth reading, just to catch what he's doing there and to watch him continue to do it the rest of the way through.”

Shep, however, saw both the timelessness of Faulkner's time and the matrix of Southern tradition ambivalently. On the one hand, the tradition made freedom for some people. “Insofar as it does manage to make (for only the whites involved in it) a way of fulfilling their possibility as human beings in the world, of gaining some sort of contact between self and environment, insofar as it does just that, I like it, because it's something that I wish I had.” On the other hand, it posed two dangers.

First, it could trap people: “The aristocratic tradition could exist only if you had an adequate number of serfs around. If there weren't enough people willing to be serfs, you had to just take some and make them be serfs and fight to defend your right to do this. Wow!” Nor was the danger confined to serfs. Miss Emily, he said, took over the burden of decay from her father and so became shorter, older, and “drastically ugly.” “It wasn't a matter of going into something naturally, the way, say, Indians in the same tribe—their children move into the adult position naturally. I think she had to. It was expected of her … because there was a choice now and there didn't used to be a choice. Earlier, it could have been natural.” “She was perpetuating the same ethos in which [sic ] her father lived.”

That was the second danger: a stultifying rigidity. The tradition, he said, “started out as a way of exercising their [the aristocrats'] possibilities in the world and exercising them to a fairly maximal amount, but … it eventually became a retreat behind which they could find shelter from some of the new things that were happening.” Thus, the tradition became “aristocratic, heavily ritualized, and increasingly more formal.” “They had a very rigid formal code and it was perhaps very much a dead code by the time she got her hands on it, but it represented something which the new people weren't able to offer an adequate substitute for.”

Given this rigidity and no substitute for the tradition, it became

a source of deadly force—at least, that is what Shep seemed to be answering when I asked him where Miss Emily got the strength to kill Homer Barron:

The strength is there in the rigidity of the code that she lives in. That rigidity gives her the capability of functioning even this way, I suppose, particularly in that, as the code has fewer and fewer people attached to it in any sort of meaningful way, it becomes more and more rigid, as she becomes more and more rigid in her confrontations with the town. …It's a very rigid posture and that rigidity is her strength, even if it be inverted into destructiveness. Really, that's all her strength is, an inversion of the original positive rigidity of the code, the rigidity as ritual, as structure of life.

In effect, Shep was describing someone both in and out of the trap of tradition.

Time, too, he saw as something nurturing but also entrapping. His very first words about Colonel Sartoris's ugly edict that Negro women had to wear aprons were, “He was mayor in 1894, so, according to the time scheme I just ran him through, he'd be into the formal, the protective stance of this ethos.” Even his more isolated comments linked the edict to time: “I think of that edict as being a stupid and rigorous way to try to protect himself from change.” “By the time of 1894, when Colonel Sartoris is [sic ] mayor, it [the tradition], it's dead formalities.”

Similarly, Shep's misreadings of the story tended to cluster around issues of time. For example, he was nonplussed when I reminded him that the hair on the pillow was gray. “Wow! Wait a minute! Yes … Let's see, was her hair gray when she married him? I just assumed that it would be gray when he came back that time the neighbor saw the Negro let him in, that her hair would be iron gray. Otherwise, it would be a black hair, I guess.” He went on to fumble with the various clues about time, and possibly it was his pleasure in mingling past and present that accounts for his strange idea that what Miss Emily did with Homer's body was look at it. The hair, to almost every critic I have read (whatever their other differences), proves that she lay down beside the body at some time. But

Shep decided it meant “probably that she would come in there and lock him away, to keep it, that she wanted to use the body for something, if only to look at it.” Similarly, he had a unique notion of Miss Emily's motive for killing Homer, that by putting her lover through a process of decay (“and coming to relish the sight”), she could offset with a kind of sympathetic magic the social decay around her—again, one senses an attempt to bind up past and present in timelessness.

In effect, Shep derived from the story a special match to his need to find a sustaining tradition, an inner geography of experience, a timeless mingling of then and now, a positive version of the infant's early experience of nurture and mothering. Shep felt toward this matrix a sense of security and satisfaction leading to a loss of personality in a larger mythic or heroic realm. But he also felt this security as a dangerous rigidity that harbored a murderous power to kill and enslave. He opposed it and decided that he; Faulkner, and Emily were all, in varying degrees, able to take an active role toward this social matrix, manipulating it, watching it, and rearranging it.

In other words, we are seeing come into play Shep's first defensive strategy, flight-and-fight. His other defense enabled him to find in time and tradition a matrix or system into which he could subside, losing his individual identity. It could nurture and sustain him or it could entrap and engulf him with rigid, murderous force. He found both need and pleasure in fighting that matrix, thus bringing his first defense to bear and creating the ambivalent pattern that permeated the way he saw the story's themes and ideology. Now we are beginning to see how this second defense also governed Shep's perception of the story's people and episodes.

Consider, for example, a minor, although ideologically fraught, character like Miss Emily's Negro servant. As we have seen in the TAT story he told for the picture of the solitary boy, Shep tended to identify with the downtrodden. He did so here, making the Negro part of the whole Southern aristocratic tradition (as he himself, he said, wished to be), relating him to Miss Emily, therefore, as the presiding goddess of that tradition. “He also maybe is one of the last of his kind.” But he is the opposite side—“He comes out of the same ethos as Miss

Emily, but he comes out of the dark side [sic ] of it, where he's accepted his inferior position.”

In effect, the matrix—and my maternal pun is always intentional—oppresses the Negro, and thus oppresses Shep. “He comes out of the side that undermines the ultimate effectiveness of her and her father's ethos, the side that's being denied, and it becomes a way of life simply because they [the Negroes] choose to accept their denial. It's kind of a political asceticism.” But blacks (and I think Shep would identify with them) will no longer “shuffle and say, ‘Yassuh, boss,’ … [and] work almost to the point of death.” “The new order will take over.” (Shep might have known the Hitlerian overtones of that phrase.) “Then, with the blacks at least, the new order has the possibility of creating that viable ethos again after a hundred years, because apparently they're being able to do something with their blackness and turn it into a positive way of life.” First Shep saw the Negro as a thing within a system. Then he saw a reversal of that order, with the Negro escaping the system imposed on him and asserting his own against it.

In effect, we are seeing Shep work the characters in the story into his flight-and-fight strategy. First, he would “flee” a character, making him abstract, ignoring or mistaking his motivations and relations with other characters. Then he would describe him in a confronting or aggressive way, often by means of a displacement onto a distant or radically different system, which, indeed, he would identify as such: “the new order.” He opposed Emily's father this way—perhaps indicating what he would like to do with his own father.

First, he made Grierson trivial. “There isn't that much said about her father, except that he dies and that apparently he made her lead a very restricted life.” “Her father is, I think, a very incidental figure. He's next to last, and next to last is a bad place to be.” “Effectively he was dead when he was alive … the dead hand of the past.”

In part of Shep's mind, anyway, Mr. Grierson seemed a mere appendage to Miss Emily's actions, notably her keeping of his body. “Why she wanted her father's valuable— I mean, that's for the Electra complex people to decide.” Shep sensed Miss Emily as powerful or maternal, and he suggested that she was

the diabolic planner of all the events that had to do with Homer. “Perhaps [she ] even might have been nourishing her father's false hope that if she could marry this man [note that Mr. Grierson had died before Homer appeared] … then she might have figured that if she could have had children by this man, she could have seen that they went straight.” In effect, Miss Emily is so capable, she “nourishes” her father by totally controlling her children.

Once Shep had invented this strong Emily, however, the other part of his psychic pattern came into play, and Mr. Grierson became her powerful antagonist. When he discussed the tableau of Emily and her father, at first, the horsewhip was “a protective image” (!), but he added:

You could, as an alternative interpretation, say that the horsewhip is something which he's also adept with indoors as well as outdoors, but I don't think so. Maybe there's overtones that Daddy is sadistic enough—horsewhips being pretty sadistic things to carry around when you're greeting people—that Daddy is sadistic enough where he wouldn't mind taking a belt at Emily once in a while, but I don't think they're much more than overtones.

Yet these overtones exactly fit Shep's pattern of avoiding the story's threat and then actively re-establishing the threat on his own terms.

He did just this with Homer, at first denigrating him as a lover, “a fairly crude guy, building roads.” He felt Homer's name meant, “You're supposed to picture some of the worst of the people that came down, very simple, very lower class, very much beneath Miss Emily's former station … the ignorance of the poor boy from the country.” He tended to reduce Homer's sexuality: “She has sort of a lover in this Northerner.” Barron, he took to mean “Barren, you know, the thing about having no possibility of creating something that will work.”

Gradually, however, toward the end of the interview, he began to admit a tenderer Homer, one central enough to be the rationale for the story's title. “ ‘A Rose for Emily’ could represent either Homer Barron himself as a lover for Emily or his attentions to her in the sense that a rose can be symbolic of all

the gifts and attentions that he had paid her.” A curious reading, I thought, for the story seemed to show Homer callously using Emily. Shep went on to make Homer into a thing by suggesting that the dead Homer was a monument to Emily.

At first, he would not say there was a marriage “certified by any civil or religious people, in which she lived as a wife and … he treated her as a husband [sic ].” But, he said, “She would have had to—in her own mind—decide that they were … married, in order to even get into bed with him.” And by the end of the interview, he was saying, “She did marry him. She changed her name to Barron.”

What had happened midway was his sexualizing of Homer. Perhaps somewhat annoyed at me for asking him to infer motives about which the text was silent, Shep invented a conversation between Emily and her lover to explain Homer's going away and coming back just before the murder:

Maybe he wanted to go off and said he was visiting his folks, but she knew his parents had been dead for twenty-five years. … She knew also that he had this, this woman in this other town. He says, “I want to go up to Memphis to visit my people.” She'd say, “Your people live in Illinois.” He'd say, “No, they're coming down to Memphis.” She'd say, “Who are they staying with—that woman up there?” And he'd say, “No, it's my parents,” and leaves and comes back and says, “Wow! Had a great time with my parents,” and she decides to let him back in just long enough to do him up right. Maybe even says that she wants to live with him as man and wife, and he gets hip to what's going on. He wouldn't mind a little more of that. … But that's all hypothetical.

In effect, just as Shep himself had made Emily's father aggressive, he also made Homer sexual—after he had denied the story's versions of those threatening traits. Shep tended, at first, to weaken Emily, to deny her the mythic, heroic role derived by some of the story's critics (Brooks and Warren, for example). “In a way, Miss Emily is a descendant of the culture hero, except that she's a descendant of the culture hero in his waning phase.” Earlier, he had used that word, “descendant”:

“She was her father's descendant, the end of the [line],” “a woman of the old order of the South,” who had to be protected by dead forms and formalities like the edict. “The generous gesture … of the remission of the taxes—it's a way of denying the fact that taxes could be a burden on Miss Emily.”

Also weakening her (and also in line with his pleasure in merging past and present), Shep said he saw Emily in “several coexistent images. I can see her as a very good-looking dark-haired girl who had a penchant for wearing dark clothes.” The only picture we get of the young Emily, though, shows her in white—I am reminded not only of Shep's countering the tableau but also of his complicated associations to themes of blackness, particularly sexual desires between black and white people. “And I can see her,” he went on, disposing of her by means of time now, “as a middle-aged woman beginning to get sloppy around the edges, and her hair is gray, and beginning to become increasingly isolated from the people around her because hers is a different life pattern. Then I can see her as that last image that the townspeople see her as, the short, squatty, screwed-up, dark-haired woman.” Again, Shep seems to have made a slip: when middle-aged, her hair was gray; now, old, her hair is dark.

Shep, however, ignored the slip and began to nag at the question “How did she get short from being relatively tall?” (another way of weakening her). And yet another: “I don't think of her as being womanly,” he said. “I think of her as being ladylike.” “Feminine, in that she is nice and ladylike…but not female in that she doesn't realize the body aspect of what it means to put down ‘Sex: feminine’ [e.g., on an application] as opposed to “Sex: masculine.'”

Later in the interview, however, Shep began to toy with the idea of a stronger Emily. For example, he related the title to a phrase concerning the aldermen trying to collect taxes: “If you read it as in parentheses, ‘They (arose for Emily),’ it's a sign of social respect to her.” Similarly, he emphasized Emily's strength with the druggist (or, more accurately, her obstinacy). “She won't violate the code about ‘Never lie,’ but on the other hand she won't violate it far enough to treat this man as anything more than he is—her servant. She walks in there. That is

her store, and he's there to get for her what she wants.” Psychoanalysis would trace this kind of obstinate adherence to codes to a specific source: the child's concern with the rules about surrendering his body products and the contests that often spring up as to who will dominate in that situation. Thus, Shep went on to recall “Mark Rudd's remark about the job of the [university's] administration is to keep the johns clean. If the johns are dirty, it's a bad administration.”

In this context, Miss Emily's obstinacy resembles that of a child determined to get and to keep, and so Shep saw her motive for the murder. “She decided that they got her father, and they weren't going to get him [Homer].” Shep could accept revenge against Homer as a motive for the killing, but, he said, “There is a great deal of flamboyancy added to the thing. She did it with style. She was no simple murderer, and a simple murderer would have been concerned only with the revenge motive.”

Shep went so far as to suppose that Emily contrived the whole affair with Homer to kill him. “It's possible that she could have done the whole thing from the beginning with the eye towards seducing him and destroying him.” She intentionally became a “fallen” woman: “She maybe never would have stepped down at all if she hadn't intended to destroy him in the end—but I don't think so.” He preferred to think that Emily decided to kill Homer only when “she felt he was going to leave.” She bought gifts to convince people they were married, “plotting revenge already.” Hence, he decided, Emily bought the gifts and the nightshirt all as camouflage, a “cover,” to make it appear they were married.

Making Emily so deliberate makes her that much stronger, particularly as a rebel against established society—the role of hers that corresponded most closely to Shep's own lifestyle and his flight-and-fight adaptation. In one respect, however, Shep needed to limit Miss Emily: he insisted that she could not have been sleeping by the corpse (even after we had discovered his mistake about the grayness of the hair on the pillow). “I just don't see how she could and leave the dust undisturbed, not from the standpoint of sanitation, but from the standpoint of physical realities of dust.” Yet most critics of the story think

Emily lay by Homer long enough for her hair to turn gray and then stopped long enough for the dust to gather. “Do you think they were making it before that night?” I asked him. “I don't think so,” he said, “not the way the room was decorated, ‘this room decked and furnished, as for a bridal.’ It sounds like it was done as a special occasion and fairly recently.” Yet the narrator of the story, the town gossips, and even Shep himself in other contexts, have all decided that at this point “poor Emily” has “fallen” through some hanky-panky in the yellow-wheeled buggy. Shep, however, had assumed that any sexual intercourse must have taken place in the bedroom as part of a murderous act of rebellion against the “new order.” In the same way, he had been unable to accept closeness from women in other stories. Not even his strong defenses would enable him to accept sex or nurture from a woman who had not been turned into a “system.”

With that one important exception (more important in life than letters), Shep's twinned defenses permitted him to enjoy a variety of fantasy satisfactions from the story. According to our four principles of response, if the reader can create his defenses from the work (as Shep does so richly here), then the reader will go on to project into the work those fantasies that most concern him. Shep was most involved with a matrix that he could merge into or flee from. He both feared and wished nurture from such a matrix, for it threatened—and promised—a total control in which he would lose his own separateness and identity. Such hopes and fears stem from the infant's first taste of the world—quite literally through eating from it. Then his awareness of himself as a separate being comes as he learns he must wait for that world, that other, to come lovingly or threateningly to ease his hunger.

The one thing, then, that Shep could be sure of in Homer's murder was its oral component (although other readers felt less certain as to the eating and drinking involved). About “inward things,” Shep found the story indefinite, but

You can conjure up with not too much problem some of the formal things that they must have gone through. She must have asked him to come in to eat dinner so she could get the

poison into him somehow, or maybe it was in the drink before they bedded down. Anyway, she offered him this loaded refreshment, and he accepted it and thanked her and … that sort of thing fits in just fine because that's what anybody would do in that situation.

Food was a weapon.

So also was speech. Thus, Shep described Miss Emily's confrontation some years later with the men of the town about Colonel Sartoris's remission of her taxes: “And here she meets them verbally and just draws the line and says, ‘Don't step over that,’ and refuses to let them.” As part of his weakening of Homer, Shep did not mention Homer's “big voice,” although the story singled it out. The first thing he mentioned about this Negro servant was, however, that he had lost his voice. “Anybody who would forget how to talk because he hadn't had occasion for it is really a first-rate Uncle Tom—which is weird, because Uncle Tom stood up and said, ‘Fuck off, you guys,’ a lot more strongly than ‘an Uncle Tom,’ as an epithet, would.”

In effect, mixing up a mild Tom and an angry one, both purely metaphoric identities, suggests the anger and destruction Shep could mobilize by being separate and having his own voice. Thus, at many points, he said of Miss Emily things like: “She had so little choice.” “There was nothing left for her but the tragic event.” And we have seen him feel the opposite: that the Southern tradition could, for all its oppression, provide “some sort of contact between self and environment … something that I wish I had.”

Similarly, when he thought about Faulkner (for he always sought out the person who created the matrix), he found nothing “that enables you to tell whether this is simply a job of good writing or whether it's actually his [Faulkner's] way of perception, his day-to-day experience that it would be impossible for him to write in any other way.” That is, was his writing the act of a being totally controlled? Or was it the act of a deliberate, separate other? Reluctantly, Shep settled for the latter. “It's possible that it's something that he's learned, because it's something that seems to go above what he had in

something like Soldier's Pay or Mosquitoes ,” which Shep called “the really sloppy period at the beginning.”

The word “sloppy” signals another level of Shep's fantasies, those associated with the child's messes—his body products—and the efforts of himself and others to control them. Shep singled out the problem of Emily's smells. “She has one confrontation with the men of the town about smells coming out of her house, in which she doesn't even really speak with them. She sits in the window, watches them do that thing about keeping the town neat, and scorns them for it.” In effect, Shep thought the authority-figures should tidy up after Miss Emily's smells, as university administrators should clean up the toilets. In this way, he seemed to confuse identities: the dirt is Emily's or the students', but the fault is the authority's.

Shep's response to the theme of dirt and disorder led him to a highly idiosyncratic theme for the story. He decided Emily's purpose in the murder was: “offsetting it [‘the social decay that she realized her time and her people were undergoing’] with the physical decay of this representative of the new period.” As he described it, she was almost doing sympathetic magic. “Social decay and physical decay are not that far apart. They're no further apart than body and body politic.”

She can reverse the social decay process by putting her lover, representative of all of them [“the newcomers”] through a physical decay process and coming to relish the sight. This would also give some sort of, quote, explanation, unquote, for her necrophiliac hangups. The fact that she wanted her father's body around to … preserve it from decay—she was denying the end of the line thing symbolized by putting it underground and letting the earth have it.

Shep became even more repellent as he expanded his image: “She's is doing the same thing in social terms that her father's body is doing underground.” “There's this process of putrefaction.”

Repeatedly, he referred to Miss Emily in terms of the “end” or “behind” or leaving something behind. “She knew she was the end of the line.” “The situation had, in a way, been inflated by her, her lastness, her finality [so] that the only event equal

to it was what she did.” “Homer Barron dead [was] kind of a monument behind for her and behind— you know, showing her triumph, monuments being, I suppose, designed to show the triumph against time.” “At the beginning, she is a fallen monument.” “The monumental aspect of roses [sic ] is another one.” Her own putrefaction, Homer's, and the opposite—the sweet, ephemeral perfume of roses—all make odorous monuments “behind” Miss Emily.

In response to my standard question about Emily's introjecting her father's values, he answered, “She doesn't so much become like her father as she takes over the burden of decay from him. She becomes uglier, shorter … shorter in my mind, older (pretty obviously, you gotta do that). You don't have to become quite so drastically ugly as she does, though.” “She's … not so much a tragic fi