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