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Abstract
There are two kinds of risk in the act of reading: that the reader will not understand what the author wants him to and that the emotional or moral risk involved in such understanding will be so great that the reader may reject it. Either kind of risk threatens the community between author and reader by jeopardizing the confidence the reader has in his own competence as reader and in the author's purposefulness. Failures of communication or too great resistance to the experience offered by a piece of literature prevent active, perceptive, and morally receptive involvement. Redundancy assures that the reader will understand, or that he will receive the message accurately and draw the intended conclusions; and it reassures him so that he will be able to tolerate the lessons he learns.
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1975
References
1 See Liane Norman, “Bartleby and the Reader,” New England Quarterly, 44 (March 1971), 22–39.
2 Aside from its other implications, Seymour M. Hersh's report of the Army investigations of the My Lai massacres documents massive breakdowns of and disregard for accurate and reliable communications. Coverup (New York: Random, 1972).
3 See Eric H. Lenneberg, The Biological Foundations of Language (New York: Wiley, 1967), p. 373.
4 The Elementary Structures of Kinship (Boston: Beacon, 1969), p. 495.
5 Robert A. Nisbet has made the observation that totalitarianism is the “process of the annihilation of individuality, but, in more fundamental terms, it is the annihilation, first, of those social relationships within which individuality develops. . . . Totalitarianism is thus made possible only through the obliteration of all the intermediate layers of value and association that commonly nourish personality and serve to protect it from external power and caprice.” The Quest for Community (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1953), pp. 201, 202.
6 “Redundancy, Rationality, and the Problem of Duplication and Overlap,” Public Administration Review, 29 (July-Aug. 1969), 347. Landau applies communication theory to the administrative behavior of government institutions.
7 Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (Cambridge, Mass. : M.I.T. Press, 1965), p. 6. This statement is the premise of his linguistic theory and the source of his profound disagreement with Skinnerean behaviorism.
8 Biological Foundations of Language, p. 365. Lenneberg here speaks of “conceptualization,” “categorization,” and “tagging cognitive modes.” These terms refer to his definition of words, which name not things but categories or concepts, named or tagged so as to activate the mental concept or category.
9 “Decertainize” is the term Stanley E. Fish uses; see “Literature in the Reader,” New Literary History, 2 (1970), 124. Morse Peckham, in his fascinating book, Man's Rage for Chaos (Philadelphia: Chilton, 1965), advances the hypothesis that the function of all art is to “decertainize,” to disorient: he rejects totally the notion that art is an order-giving activity. Art, as he sees it, is a form of biological adaptation. He calls it “rehearsal”: “We rehearse for various roles all our lives, and for various patterns of behavior. We rehearse our national, our local, and our personal styles. These things we rehearse so that we may participate in a predictable world of social and environmental interaction. But we also must rehearse the power to perceive the failure, the necessary failure, of all those patterns of behavior. Art, as an adaptational mechanism, is reinforcement of the ability to be aware of the disparity between behavioral pattern and the demands consequent upon the interaction with the environment. Art is rehearsal for those real situations in which it is vital for our survival to endure cognitive tension, to refuse the comforts of validation by affective congruence when such validation is inappropriate because too vital interests are at stake; art is the reinforcement of the capacity to endure disorientation so that a real and significant problem may emerge. Art is the exposure to the tensions and problems of a false world so that man may endure exposing himself to the tensions and problems of the real world” (p. 314).
10 Trans. Constance Garnett, rpt. in Classics of Modern Fiction, ed. Irving Howe (New York: Harcourt, 1968).
11 Wayne Booth's The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: Chicago Univ. Press, 1961) is so enormously useful with regard to reliability and unreliability of narration that an ordinary citation seems inadequate. No single work has disposed of so many chilling and inhibitory dogmas about narrative mannerisms.