SOURCE: "Words Between Strangers: On Welty, Her Style, and Her Audience," Mississippi Quarterly, Vol. XXXIX, No. 4, Fall, 1986, pp. 481-505.

[In the following essay, Pollack analyzes Welty's relationship with her readers.]

Eudora Welty often speaks of her storytelling in terms that suggest it is a strategy for dealing with separateness. She identifies the source of her work as "attentiveness and care for the world … and a wish to connect with it," and she tells us that her "continuing passion" is "to part a curtain … that falls between people." But paradoxically, while Welty expresses her desire for "connection," she nonetheless prefers what she calls obstruction as the means to this end. "The fine story writers seem to be … obstructionists," she notes in "The Reading and Writing of Short Stories," and she finds the "quondam obstruction"—the sheer opaque curtain that veils the meaning of a work—to be "the source of the deepest pleasure we receive from a writer." I find this paradoxical combination of her thematic concern for "connection" and her preference for technical obstruction surprising and provocative, even though Welty's commentators have long discussed it and even though obstruction is commonplace in contemporary fiction. Welty's stated purpose—she writes of successful fiction as "love accomplished"—seems to be contradicted by a reader's experience of the technique she often chooses: a richly articulate style that holds back initially as if she were reluctant to give her fiction to her audience.

One result of this tension between message and technique is fiction before which—as Ruth Vande Kieft has remarked—"the welcome mat [is] clearly out … while the sign on the gate post [reads] 'Keep Out.'" This is not the case with all, but with many of Welty's fictions: "Powerhouse," "A Wide Net," The Golden Apples, the stories of The Bride of the Innisfallen and others. These are fictions which may delight readers of various levels of sophistication and training and yet leave them intrigued, feeling as if perhaps they have missed something in their understanding. And these are fictions that, once they have delighted and puzzled, invite us to ask questions about Welty's style. Some of these questions are larger than how she uses point of view, plot, genre. We might ask, for example, precisely how love and obstruction can become the terms of one artistic equation and what role Welty's style plays in her relationship with her audience—or in other words, how much and exactly what Welty expects of her reader.

The question that occurs to me as I pursue this sort of speculation is whether Welty's style is at times a strategy for winning the struggle that can occur between writer and reader when a text is read, interpreted, and in some sense completed. The hotly debated critical question of who controls the meaning of a text—writer or reader—seems relevant here. Important reader-response critics such as Stanley Fish, Norman Holland, Wolfgang Iser and Jonathan Culler, among many others, have each illuminated the reading process as they see it. Fish and Holland, in their efforts to describe the reader's too-often ignored role in the creation of meaning, have assigned the primary position in this process to the reader and have granted him a remarkable degree of autonomy from the text. Stanley Fish, for example, has denied that a text has meaning independent of the reader's relationship to it. He asserts that a text is not "a thing-in-itself, but an event, something that happens … with the participation of the reader," and that the constraints that determine meaning do not "inhere in language but in situations," that is, in a reader's situations. And Norman Holland has proposed that interpretation is the imposition of the reader's particular "identity theme," the characteristic pattern of understanding that has more to do with the reader's psychology and obsessive interests than with the text itself. These theories that give the reader control over meaning might reasonably unsettle any writer who has worked to polish and perfect a text, and yet they suggest an undeniable circumstance, that texts, as they are consumed and interpreted, do shade off into ideas that exist in readers' minds. Only there is a book completed.

In contrast to Fish and Holland's theories, Wolfgang Iser's formulation of the reading process admits the reader's role, and yet describes a less autonomous, but perhaps ideal reader who is out-going in his textual encounters and therefore careful to respond to the text itself. Iser paints what seems to me the portrait not of every reader in every reading encounter but of what a sensitive reader strives to be. Iser sees reading as a fluid process of self-correction that involves reaction, rereading, and revision as the reader provides a sequence of changing conceptual frameworks for the fiction. "We look forward, we look back, we decide, we change our decisions, we form expectations, we are shocked by their nonfulfillment, we question, we muse, we accept, we reject." Meaning is built gradually: "smaller units progressively merge into bigger ones so that meaning gathers meaning in a kind of snowballing process." Understanding of a text is a carefully constructed product of considerable interaction. Interpretations vary as each reader selects meaning from the potential text and completes it uniquely in response to sensitivities shaped by his education, his social, psychological, and philosophical backgrounds, and his historical place. But meaning does not rest wholly in the imagination of the reader; it resides in the coming together of the reader and the text. The process of reading a text provides the author's blueprint for making meaning with it; the reader builds meaning in part by responding to literary expectations which the text evokes.

In Jonathan Culler's terms, the text bids the reader to draw on his "literary competence." This competence, which is a knowledge of implicit but well-recognized literary conventions, allows a reader to recognize a story pattern, plot type, or genre, to identify a technique of point of view or an allusion and, on the basis of expectations cued by the text, to predict a kind of meaning to be made. In a successful reading, these conventions are the shared knowledge of the author and reader. Otherwise we have the case of the inexperienced student reader of "The Wide Net" who is perplexed when William Wallace, searching for the remains of his wife Hazel, wanders into the pleasures of a golden day. This none too hypothetical reader, perhaps unfamiliar with the conventions of the heroic epic, cannot predict that the wandering of a hero may prove to be his track, the path by which he will arrive where he is going. In Culler's view, conventional literary expectations make reading and writing possible. These

the author can write against, certainly,… may attempt to subvert, but [they are] none the less the context within which his activity takes place, as surely as the failure to keep a promise is made possible by the institution of promising. Choices between words, between sentences, between different modes of presentation, will be made on the basis of their effects; and the notion of effect presupposes modes of reading which are not random or haphazard. Even if an author does not think of readers, he is himself a reader of his own work and will not be satisfied with it unless he can read it as producing effects.

Here, Culler is able to grant the reader his place in the literary process while affirming that the author's text guides his expectations.

My own reaction to the work of these four critics is to recognize that they have highlighted an obvious but somehow long-neglected variable in the meaning-making process: readers and their responses. Yet when Fish and Holland picture the reader's process as largely independent of an author's control, I cannot help feeling that their correcting visions are misleading, although their strong emphasis on the reader's role is certainly predictable when the goal is to establish his place. One result of their influential discourse has been to make literary discussion of the author and his intentions unfashionable. But because I view reading as an encounter with minds and worlds, times and cultures distinct from my own, I find myself wanting to reverse this trend away from the author who is other. One particular value of the reader-response critical model, if we put it into such reverse, would be to bring attention unexpectedly back to the writer. In other words, reader-response theory, having raised the issues of who controls meaning and of how it is negotiated by author and reader, both invites us and enables us to ask how an author attempts to direct his readers' somewhat unpredictable responses. For this reason, Iser's and Culler's work is more useful to me as I consider reading as an encounter, taking place sometimes over long distances of time and space, yet yielding an interaction and perhaps even an intimacy. In reading, as in a conversation, two minds can meet. And the one who speaks first, the author, tries to establish expectations to which a reader can predictably respond, albeit somewhat differently from every other reader. Together, through their shared knowledge of literary convention, over their different and mutual interests as well as their historical and cultural perspectives, the author and reader produce the individual literary performance.

The reader-response debate may seem far afield from Welty's own critical vocabulary, but it is relevant to a consideration of her style. A writer such as Welty, who I will argue hopes above all to be met in her fiction, might reasonably be concerned that the shared literary performance of author and reader should not ignore the guidelines that her written text imposes. Welty's concern with the question of who controls meaning in the reading process is clearest in her essay "How I Write," which was first published in 1955 and later revised for inclusion in The Eye of the Story. In the first published version, Welty discussed the faults of a type of reader who sees the writing of a story as only "his own process in reverse":

The analyst, should the story come under his eye, may miss the gentle shock and this pleasure too, for he's picked up the story at once by the heels (as if it had swallowed a button) and is examining the writing as his own process in reverse, as though a story (or any system of feeling) could be more accessible to understanding for being hung upside down.

Apparently, Welty was giving careful thought to the writing and reading processes, to their difference and to their relationship, years before the reader-response critics became vocal in the 1970's. I take Welty as my subject here because she has explicitly shown her awareness of the reading process and the risks that an author faces when giving fiction over to a reader, but also because I believe she has developed a stylistic trait that is her personal strategy for guiding her reader towards meaning. My goal is to identify this particular trait while defining all that Welty hopes for from the writer-reader relation, its hazards notwithstanding. Ultimately, I would like to suggest why when asked by Joanna Maclay in 1980 "how [her] notion of the potential reader" affected what she did "to make [her] meaning clear," Welty answered by quoting a line of Henry Green's: "Prose should be a long intimacy between strangers."

My argument is that Welty's style demonstrates, and in its way seems designed to demonstrate, the primacy of the text in the reading process. Her fiction repeatedly elicits expectations that it promptly defies. Yet the mistaken expectations that a reader develops as he follows the experience provided by her language are a part of her directions to the text's meaning. The effect is to invite the reader to return to the story again and again, to urge him to read it closely and attentively. Areas of obstruction—for example, unusual uses of point of view, of plot, genre, and allusion—are themselves clues in Welty's fiction; and once a reader has identified which of his expectations are frustrated, he is usually on his way to understanding the fiction at hand, having found its center. Seen in this light, Welty's use of obstruction could be a technique for shaping a responsive reader through her control of the textual experience. By composing texts that require attentiveness and yield best to rereading, she might invite a reader to practice self-correction and to follow more closely her lead through the reading process. How she achieves this by manipulating the reader's expectations (of the sort that Iser and Culler stress) will, I hope, become clear in this essay.

Evidence of Welty's interest in the encounter of author and audience, and in the potential struggle between them for control of meaning, is available in several of her fictions that inherently explore problems in audience reception (for example, "Keela, the Outcast Indian Maiden," or Losing Battles). One of the earliest of these and, in my view, one of her more "obstructed" short stories is "Powerhouse," an opaque parable (in Welty's words) about "the traveling artist … in the alien world" and portrays his interaction with audiences of varying degrees of receptivity. At second glance this story can reveal Welty's perception of the fragility and achievement of the writer-reader relationship, as well as the technical process by which she herself manages and creates that encounter. For the sake of what this story reveals about these issues, I take it as my point of reference and departure.

When we first meet him, Powerhouse is performing for a white audience that has come to marvel at a grotesque "Negro man," to see not the artist behind the mask but the mask they have urged onto him. To them, the black jazz musician looks "Asiatic, monkey, Jewish, Babylonian, Peruvian, fanatic, devil." Powerhouse, stomping and smooching, improvises, however, with the stereotypes that his audience attributes to "people on a stage—and people of a darker race." In his performances, he tries to work this imposed identity until it becomes a medium for expressing his private self. But this particular audience on this particularly rainy night in Alligator, Mississippi, is not ready to receive the man behind his mask. Instead of sympathetically receiving his performance, instead of sharing his effort and his eventual achievement, they "feel ashamed for" the jazzman who seems to them to give everything, and who, holding nothing in reserve, seems to expose himself before their unsympathetic eyes. They are curious, enthusiastic, but not in tune with him.

Attempting to give himself to these alienating spectators, Powerhouse feels displaced and begins to retreat behind the mask that reflects his audience's expectations for a "vast and obscene jazzman." He plays "Pagan Love Song," a sad song that he touches and that touches him back, confirming his estranged mood. Like Welty herself, Powerhouse is an artist who needs to place himself by recognizing his emotions, and to touch home with them in his work. And so he plunges into a depth of self by inventing the suicide of his wife, Gypsy, a story that he tells at first with his "wandering fingers," that is, in a musical exchange perhaps accompanied by stage whispers. The story he improvises creates a reason for his blues: a fictional telegram signed "Uranus Knockwood" that announces the news "Your wife is dead."

Powerhouse's audience for this narrative performance is—in addition to the reader—the band itself, whose members vary in their capacities for sympathy and receptivity. They are implicitly different models of the reader. The far section of the band is "all studious, wearing glasses, every one," and "don't count." These technicians are figuratively and literally too far away to hear the jazzman's story. "Only those playing around Powerhouse are the real ones," the co-creating audience of Valentine, Little Brother, and perhaps Scoot. Of this group, Valentine and Little Brother readily receive, participate in, and protect Powerhouse's invention; Valentine immediately picks up the theme that Powerhouse establishes and begins to improvise on it: "'You say you got a telegram.'" But Scoot, who is a "disbelieving maniac," is not so cooperative; he asks a series of challenging, although participating, questions: "'Gypsy? Why how come her to die, didn't you just phone her up in the night last night long distance?'" Such questions are inappropriate because they take the fiction literally, and so resist Powerhouse's fiction-making project and his purposes. They are combative as well and force Powerhouse to move his story in new directions; they challenge his control of the performance instead of inviting him to proceed with it. For a time, however, Scoot's questions serve Powerhouse well enough. For although Scoot asks Powerhouse to justify his creation rather than to expand it, his questions nevertheless give Powerhouse the opportunity to elaborate; the drummer's bantering questions establish the beat to create against, a function appropriate to his musical instrument.

Leaving the dance hall at intermission with his three accompanists, Powerhouse—now between sets in Negrotown's World Cafe—finds a large audience ready to respond to him as he develops the theme of Gypsy's death in a solely narrative performance that discloses themes of loneliness, disappointment, anger, and defiance. Powerhouse asks first to hear Bessie Smith's "Empty Bed Blues," but the juke box plays instead "Sent For You Yesterday and Here You Come Today," and Powerhouse imagines Gypsy wanting him. She listens for his footsteps and hears those of a stranger passing by. Powerhouse does not come. And she, defiant in her separateness, angrily kills herself by busting her brains all over the world.

"Listen how it is. My wife gets missing me. Gypsy. She goes to the window. She looks out and sees you know what. Street. Sign saying Hotel. People walking. Somebody looks up. Old man. She looks down, out the window. Well?… Ssssst! Plooey! What do she do? Jump out and bust her brains all over the world."

Splattering Gypsy in a fantasy that investigates solitude, separateness, and death but is not itself sorrowful, the improvisation transforms Powerhouse's mood of lonely anxiety. As his mood changes, he elaborates on that comic, mythic nemesis, Uranus Knockwood, the father of all misfortune, the man who "takes our wives when we are gone," and who finds Gypsy when she dies:

"That no-good pussyfooted crooning creeper, that creeper that follow around after me, coming up like weeds behind me, following around after me everything I do and messing around on the trail I leave. Bets my numbers, sings my songs, gets close to my agent like a Betsy-bug; when I going out he just coming in. I got him now! I got my eye on him."

For Powerhouse, Knockwood personifies affliction; he is the troublesome carrier of misfortune who brings disappointment, failure, and anxiety.

During this performance, Valentine and Little Brother encourage and protect Powerhouse's creation. Gradually, a larger audience has formed around the small group and its collaborative members recognize Knockwood immediately. "'Middle-size man.' 'Wears a hat.' 'That's him.' Everybody in the room moans with pleasure." Powerhouse's creation of Knockwood—the man who brings the Blues—becomes for this sympathetic audience a means of chasing those blues away. A waitress, in full sympathy with Powerhouse, calls out, "'I hates that Mr. Knockwoods.'" And she is also the one who asks him, "'All that the truth?'" Her admiring question, like Scoot's belligerent inquiries, once more raises the problem of the truth of fiction. The musician, performing for this flirtatious, provoking "Little-Bit," at first offers to show his telegram. He is halted for a moment by the protective cry of Little Brother, who does not want the energy building for the next set to be lost, and who fears that if Powerhouse reveals his art, he may sacrifice its power. But Powerhouse, who is now playing primarily for the waitress, explains it anyhow:

"No, babe, it ain't the truth…. Truth is something worse, I ain't said what, yet. It's something hasn't come to me, but I ain't saying it won't. And when it does, then want me to tell you?"

The truth that has not yet come to Powerhouse is something worse and something better than the story of Gypsy's death. That truth is on its way; it is the transfiguration that his story generates once it is successfully received and completed by this audience.

Powerhouse has told a story about loneliness and with it he has produced a sense of belonging. This familiar pattern of the blues performance is analyzed by Ralph Ellison in his essay "Richard Wright's Blues": it fingers a wound, and yet through the joy of expressing, surviving, and successfully sharing a painful emotion with a sympathetic audience, transforms it into something nearly or clearly celebratory. And so Powerhouse, singing the blues, has transcended his isolation and "come out the other side." Heading back to the dance, he creates a telegram of reply that puts the four of them "in a wonderful humor." He will wire the offending Knockwood: "'What in the hell you talking about? Don't make any difference: I gotcha.'" Members of the small group agree, "'You got him now,'" and feel that transformation, the surge of power generated by the fiction. They see that Powerhouse has investigated a death no one believes in—though all know it to be real and haunting—and somehow located through it his own life and strength. With his story, he has mastered his experience; he has transformed his disconcerting present into a future of his choice and created joy by fabricating a tragedy. The truth of his tale is the emotion that it has reflected and transformed.

As Powerhouse prepares to re-enter the white dance hall, Scoot, in crazy obtuseness, asks if Powerhouse isn't going to call home and learn how Gypsy really is. Then "there is a measure of silence." Scoot, "one crazy drummer that's going to get his neck broken some day," endangers the success of Powerhouse's art by failing to receive it. But because Powerhouse has the audience he needs in Valentine and Little Brother, Scoot's belligerence will not harm the evening's culminating musical performance.

In the final section of the story, we see that Powerhouse's successful narrative performance has recharged his creativity. Back in the dance hall and in the audience, we watch Powerhouse approach his piano as if "he saw it for the first time in his life." Then he

tested it for strength, hit it down in the bass, played an octave with his elbow, lifted the top, looked inside, and leaned against it with all his might. He sat down and played it for a few minutes with outrageous force and got it under his power—a bass deep and coarse as a sea net—then produced something glimmering and fragile, and smiled.

In this scene Powerhouse moves from his theme "I got a telegram my wife is dead" to the number "Somebody Loves Me." He has cast off his loneliness for a certainty that someone loves him—a certainty based on his interaction with the audience at the World Cafe—and he calls and shouts, "'I wonder who?'" Grimacing, he challenges his white audience with the line "Maybe … Maybe … Maybe it's you!" And with this furious invitation, he also addresses the reader. In a blunt confrontation between author and audience, Powerhouse and Welty may seem to merge, to ask, "What kind of reader are you?" Are you like the white audience, alien, gawking at an entertainer whose creative efforts you block rather than receive? Or like the far section of the band—"studious, wearing glasses," not really with it? Or perhaps you are like Scoot, attentive, but asking all the wrong questions? Or could it be that you are like Valentine and Little Brother, participating in sympathy with the artist?

In short, the question that Welty asks in this last line of "Powerhouse" is whether we love her in her story. This question is unexpected because Welty herself has hindered her reader's first approach to intimacy. In a fiction that dramatizes a performer's relationship with several essentially unreceptive audiences, Welty has chosen to complicate her own author-audience relationship by adopting the technique of obstruction. Although my summary has smoothed the story over and temporarily set aside the questions that color a reader's first encounter with it, the story itself unfolds against expectations that it creates but fails to fulfill.

"Powerhouse" is likely to astonish a reader in three ways: (1) in its turn away from the question of whether Gypsy is really dead, (2) in its merging of Powerhouse's narrative invention with his musical creation, and (3) in its unannounced shifts in point of view. I have named and will discuss these narrative surprises while fully aware that the precise steps of every reader's encounter with the story will be different and reflect his or her readerly skills. I am not prescribing here readerly errors necessarily encountered by all readers of this text, but attempting to describe the process of revising expectations that Welty's text calls for, a process I will be somewhat overly deliberate about, slowing it down so that it can be discussed.

When a reader first meets Powerhouse's statement "'I got a telegram my wife is dead,'" he may wonder why Powerhouse, who should be mourning, is on stage. If he concentrates on Powerhouse's startling announcement, he may be too preoccupied to notice that the jazzman's story is told in a musical exchange:

"You know what happened to me?" says Powerhouse.

Valentine hums a response, dreaming at the bass.

"I got a telegram my wife is dead," says Powerhouse, with wandering fingers.

"Uh-huh?"

His mouth gathers and forms a barbarous O while his fingers walk up straight, unwillingly, three octaves.

"Gypsy? Why how come her to die, didn't you just phone her up in the night last night long distance?"

"Telegram say—here the words: Your wife is dead." He puts 4/4 over the 3/4.

"Not but four words?" This is the drummer, an unpopular boy named Scoot, a disbelieving maniac….

Little Brother, the clarinet player, who cannot now speak, glares and tilts back….

"What the hell was she up to?" Powerhouse shudders. "Tell me, tell me, tell me." He makes triplets, and begins a new chorus. He holds three fingers up.

"You say you got a telegram." This is Valentine, patient and sleepy, beginning again.

Powerhouse is elaborate. "Yas, the time I go out, go way downstairs along a long cor-ri-dor to where they puts us: coming back along the cor-ri-dor: steps out and hands me a telegram: Your wife is dead."

"Gypsy?" The drummer like a spider over his drums. (italics mine)

This passage introduces both the theme of Gypsy's death and the suspicion that Gypsy is not dead. A first-time reader meets it wondering how to understand Powerhouse's narrative-within-a-narrative. The temporarily obstructed reader, trying to make sense of Powerhouse's tale, may or may not notice and respond to the suggestive phrases that I have italicized. When a reader does focus on these lines, unexpected questions about the unconventionality of this passage arise. "Literary competence," the reader's conventional expectation, is leading the way here, and underlining the importance of Welty's unconventionality. When Powerhouse speaks with wandering fingers, is he literally speaking through his musical performance? His 4/4 over 3/4 and his triplets, not coincidentally, are the rhythms he develops in Gypsy's story. And when Scoot and Little Brother speak, are they speaking in turn as their performances allow and instruments direct? When Valentine begins again, is he beginning a variation on a musical theme? If a reader is attentive and recognizes the correspondence between Powerhouse's fiction and his music, what should he make of music that poses as narrative? Is Powerhouse's story perhaps the narrator's interpretation of his music as she listens intently to hear the performers' "least word, especially what they say to one another, in another language?" How many readers attend the text closely enough to ask these sorts of questions, and at what point in their reading process?

A reader's confusion about Powerhouse's narrative is explicitly invited to turn to skepticism when Scoot asks, "'Gypsy? Why how come her to die?'" Then a reader may be trapped for a time in Scoot's overly literal questions. Wanting to know if Gypsy is really dead, the reader asks a question that the story brushes aside. As his expectations for a literal truth are frustrated, he soon realizes that his is the wrong question, that he has been misdirected by his false expectation, and by Welty, who set up that expectation. His surprise, his obstructed expectation, may then unfold the fiction by leading him to ask why Powerhouse told the tale of Gypsy's death. Gradually, the answer to this question appears if the reader has been willing to follow Welty's text: Powerhouse's music and his story are two interactive elements in one composition on the theme of loneliness which itself is a joyful, creative means to counter it. Like Power-house, that person of joy who transforms the black devil stereotypes of his audience into a medium for self-expression, Welty maneuvers the expectations of her readers until they help her to create something of her own.

Welty leads her reader by indirect means to ask about the source of Powerhouse's art, about the truth of his fiction, about his need for an audience. She maneuvers the reader's own reactions—which are structured by the text, as Iser and Culler have suggested—until they create the meaning of the story, a meaning that exists in those reactions rather than in the text per se. She guides the reader with an experiment in point of view. The story's first, second, and fifth sections are told by a hypothetical someone in the audience at the dance. The third and fourth sections, however, seem to be related by a more privileged narrator who moves with Powerhouse through the rainy night. Or perhaps these sections represent the fantasy of the narrator in the audience, whose imagination responds to Powerhouse's art. Whatever the cause, the effect of the shift is clear. By shifting the point of view closer to Powerhouse, Welty moves the reader from the audience's view of him as a marvelous, but "vast and obscene" jazzman, to perception of the man behind that grotesque mask, the man who "seems lost—down in the song, yelling up like somebody in a whirlpool—not guiding [the band]—hailing them only." The shift moves the reader from the audience that views Powerhouse as alien, monstrous, "Asiatic, monkey,… devil," to membership in the elite who travel with Powerhouse and know his emotions and artistic strategies. In these sections of the story, the reader's privileged vision exceeds and frames that of the original narrator. The unexpected narrative shift reduces the distance between narrator and subject, and thus urges the reader into sympathy with Powerhouse and his creative need. This new relationship causes the reader to revise his first assessment and perhaps to realize that the meaning of the story was not disclosed in Powerhouse's fiction about Gypsy's death, but at the end of the first section when the narrator spoke cryptically of listening in order to learn "what it is"—that is, "what it is" that makes a performance great. In its way, the story has taught the reader himself to be a part of this thing, for if he has met the challenge of Welty's obstruction, he has become, like Little Brother and Valentine, part of an attentive, involved, cooperative, and loving audience.

Welty's style, then, urges a reader to attend the text, to be a reader responding to a writer. Her "obstructions," paradoxically, are a measure of her apprehension for successful interaction with her audience. Her misgivings about her readers' powers of receptivity, expressed here in fictional form, have also made themselves felt in her interviews and critical essays. I turn to these now to define more precisely Welty's attitude towards the reading encounter.

In her interviews and essays Welty has been warmly responsive to her best readers, and quick to say that—because of the help of such early supporters as Ford Madox Ford, Katherine Anne Porter, Robert Penn Warren, and her agent Diarmuid Russell—her work "has always landed safely and among friends." She has appreciated critical attention, named insights it has given her, and even remained tolerant of interpretations that seemed to her "far-flung" by remembering that a writer hopes to suggest all kinds of possibilities. As early as in "How I Write," she realized that a reader's commentary on a story "may go deeper than its object and more times around; it may pick up a story and waltz with it so that it's never the same," allowing that the waltz might be desirable, since the richness of fictional meaning is made over time and in more than one mind.

But Welty has also shown periodic and healthy exasperation with wrong-headed readers, an exasperation with their failure to meet her in her fictions. Then Welty seems to feel as if a portion of her audience is like Marion, the campfire girl in her story "A Visit of Charity," who set out to meet someone new but retreated when faced with the shock of encounter. In an interview with Henry Mitchell, Welty joked about ordering stationery printed with a ready response for misguided correspondents: "You Just Can't Get There From Here." A reader familiar with her occasionally disturbed reactions to requests that interpretations be confirmed might guess she had a reply to some of those letters in mind. Another such correcting reply is her essay entitled "Is Phoenix Jackson's Grandson Really Dead?" in which she responded to the "unrivaled favorite" question of her public, and quietly explained that their inquiry, like those that Scoot had made, was not relevant to "the truth of the story." Earlier, in her essay "The Reading and Writing of Short Stories," she had confessed to being "baffled" by rigid analyses of her stories. "When I see them analyzed—most usually 'reduced to elements'—sometimes I think, 'This is none of me.' Not that I am too proud to like being reduced, especially; but that I could not remember starting with those elements—with anything that I could so label." And in an interview with Charles Bunting, she expressed surprise that some of her readers had failed to respect her as an authority on her fictions:

I've had students write to me and say, "I'm writing a thesis to prove that The Golden Apples is a novel. Please send me…."… So I write back and say that it isn't a novel, I'm sorry. They go right ahead, of course. It doesn't matter with a thesis, I guess.

These comments all suggest Welty's mistrust of those readers who fail to meet her in her fiction. In "How I Write" she described this reader as suffering from too independent an imagination, which was also a failure of imagination. Perhaps resembling the technicians of Powerhouse's band, "studious and wearing glasses," he can seem "blind … ingrown and tedious" in his analyses because he thinks that "he is 'supposed' to see in a story … a sort of plant-from-seed development, rising in the end to a perfect Christmas tree of symmetry…." Unlike "the reader of more willing imagination … [who] may find the branchings not what he's expecting," this reader, she went on to comment in "Words Into Fiction," errs by replacing her "mystery" with his order:

… a body of criticism stands ready to provide [a] solution, which is a kind of translation of fiction into another language. It offers us close analysis, like a headphone we can clamp on at the U.N. when they are speaking the Arabian tongue….

A year or so of one writer's life has gone into the writing of a novel…. Does this not suggest that … words have been found for which there may be no other words?

This sort of approach to fiction, as Welty put it in a remark about Faulkner's critics, is "to tree it." She dislikes the desire to explain and restate fiction that "outside its own terms, which never were explanatory, no longer exists." Convinced that meaning is not excavated from a fiction like precious metals from rubble, but is an experience one has while reading, Welty has mocked the critical impulse to explanation, saying, "I was once asked to tell one of my stories in my own words." Unlike the critics who perturb her with their explications, she believes "great fiction … abounds in what makes for confusion…. It is very seldom neat, is given to sprawling and escaping from bounds, is capable of contradicting itself, and is not impervious to humor. There is absolutely everything in great fiction but a clear answer." "To make a work of the imagination out to be something in another category, that can be learned in capsule terms, as an algebraic, or mathematical formula, is," she argues, "not honest." Like Little Brother who feared that Powerhouse might lose his performance if he explained it, she does not trust explication. Instead, like her friend Ida M'Toy, she wants to be listened to with the whole attention, to have her "true words" remembered, and to warn us: "'Let her keep it straight, darling.'"

Welty's strategy, then, for shaping and educating the reader who substitutes his own words and meaning for hers is to temporarily hinder his progress through the work. Because he looks only "for his own process in reverse," and so is in some danger of never finding Welty in her own story, she delays his appropriation of it. Her style demands that he gain perspective on his own first impressions, and coerces him to become more familiar with the limited range of possibility that is the text. Welty wants her words, the order she has created, to be held; one important effect of her style is to keep the reader close to those words while he is temporarily uncertain how to convert them into any of his own. Welty would perhaps like her stories to be too complex for analysis; and interpretations of her fictions are, in fact, rarely able to recreate the process by which a reader understands them, although that process is, after all, where the pleasure of an encounter with her fiction rests.

When Welty writes criticism herself, her key words—mystery, passion, and love—are of the affective sort that make analysts nervous. But Welty is not speaking in vague generalizations when she discusses successful fiction as "love accomplished." Instead, she is outlining her expectations for her audience. What she wants from her reader is to have him find her and thereby know her. However, Welty is an author who thinks autobiographical revelations are largely irrelevant in a writer-reader exchange. Instead, the writer's project—at one level—is to transmute his or her essential, as opposed to merely real, self into fiction. When Welty praises other authors, she frequently writes of their presence in the text. For instance, Henry Green "is there at the center of what he writes, but in effect his identity has turned into the fiction. And while you the reader know nothing of Mr. Henry Green's life, as he has taken good care to see to, in the long run a life's confidence is what you feel you have been given." When Welty tells us that this writer lives in his work, that his fiction "should be read instead of some account of his life," she is expressing an oblique but genuine concern that her own fiction be an encounter.

In this reading encounter, Welty expects to move her readers towards an intuition of what Wayne Booth has called "the implied author," what I have called her essential self, a construct that readers infer from the "real" author's conscious and unconscious literary choices. These choices are what Welty refers to when she writes that it is "through the shaping of the work in the hands of the artist that you most nearly come to know what can be known, on the page, of … [him] as apart from the others." "The events of a story," she tells us, "may have much or little to do with the writer's own life; but the story pattern is the nearest thing to a mirror image of his mind and heart." "It's our perception of this ordering"—and here I find myself thinking of Welty's own ordering for obstruction—"that gives us our nearest understanding" of an author.

Welty expresses both what she hopes for and fears from interaction with her reader with a word that, in her comments and criticism, she repeatedly borrows from her photographer's vocabulary: "exposure." In her preface to One Time, One Place, she speaks of having first recognized her narrative goal of exposure—to record the divulging gesture, to disclose the inner secret concealed in the concrete and objective by framing it—while working with a camera. She "learned quickly enough when to click the shutter, but what [she became] aware of more slowly was a story-writer's truth: the thing to wait on, to reach there in time for, is the moment in which people reveal themselves." Welty seeks the perfect fictional exposure that will capture and convey her feeling and identity in words as a camera arrests a telling sign with the click of a shutter. Welty has argued that fiction, "whatever its subject, is the history itself of [the author's] life's experience in feeling," and should therefore be read with love. But like the young girl in her story "A Memory" whose experience of first love contained discoveries of separateness and vulnerability, Welty understands the complexity of the reading process perfectly well enough to dread the hazards of encounter. Consequently, she is somewhat anxious as she exposes her essential, rather than merely actual, self to her audience. She writes of her need for "exposure to the world," but also of "the terrible sense of exposure" that she feels when she suddenly sees her "words with the eyes of the cold public." She writes of exposure as a process that "begins in intuition and has its end in showing the heart that expected, while it dreads that exposure."

The challenge of exposing an essential self in fiction rests in manipulating the external realities of words and readers to bring it into being, and certainly the project is full of risk. The most unreliable factor is the reader: the author's attempt to create and communicate herself will fail if the reader does not receive her. Like Welty's character Clytie who peers into others' faces while looking for the one that is familiar—her own—Welty sets out to meet the reader in part to find herself. It is up to the reader to reflect back to her, mirror-like, the intelligence that glances off her fiction. For this reason, the reader who first misses Welty's intention, then recomposes her text along his own lines, and finally returns to her a stranger's face, is troublesome. Still, Welty relies on this audience because she can only judge her success at constructing herself in her fiction on the basis of its reception. Her essential self is the product of her fiction's reception—the presence that her careful readers come to know as imaginative and intelligent, observant and witty, sympathetic and sharp, quite vulnerable and yet experimental and daring.

Like Powerhouse, Welty risks giving all she has to an audience that perhaps will know no better than to feel ashamed for her self-exposure. She takes this risk with feelings of vulnerability offset by the self-confidence of an artist who understands her medium and knows quite a few ways to manage the reading encounter. "Exposing yourself to risk is a truth Miss Eckhart and I had in common," Welty remarks in a self-revealing line that draws a comparison between her own passion for her life's work and Miss Eckhart's "love of her art and … love of giving it." The risk involved here is in the "giving it," as when Miss Eckhart gave to Virgie Rainey who, like some headstrong reader, was fortunately taking even though she appeared to reject. At the end of One Writer's Beginnings, the autobiographical essay in which this line appears, Welty remarks, "I am a writer who came of a sheltered life. A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within." In these lines, I hear Welty noting the connectedness of as well as the distance between what I have called her real and essential selves. And I hear her rediscovering for herself and for us too the daring of imaginative wandering, of artistic experimentation, and of the risk she has taken when giving her fiction over to us, her readers.

Thinking about the range, publication history, and achievement of Welty's fiction, it seems possible that Welty's concern to reach her audience has affected the shape of her career. The very diversity of Welty's fiction reflects her address of different audiences and, perhaps implicitly, her exploration of the idea of audience itself. In the year when Welty discussed the potential chasm between writer and reader in "How I Write"—1955—she was already an author who had addressed a variety of audiences, a variety climaxed by the great distance between her easily accessible, democratic The Ponder Heart and her obscure, elitist The Bride of the Innisfallen, books that were published back-to-back in 1954 and 1955. And then, in 1955, there began a period which lasted for fifteen years and ended when she published The Optimist's Daughter and Losing Battles in rapid succession in 1969 and 1970. This period, sometimes inaccurately called a gap in her career, was a time when Welty wrote more than she published and experimented by reaching out to new audiences. It seems possible to me that these years reflect a productive reaction to her reader's initial failure to meet her in The Bride of the Innisfallen, a failure measurable through the cool response of her reviewers. Did Welty reconsider her address of her audience while postponing exposure as usual?

There is some evidence to support this possibility. First, during these years, Welty's publications addressed several new audiences in new ways. She published essays that clarified her attitude toward criticism, a children's book, The Shoe Bird, as well as two stories responding to the Civil-Rights crisis in Mississippi which developed private themes through less private subject matter than she had taken before. What she did not publish, but instead worked on over a period of ten years, was her central fictional project, Losing Battles. This project was quite different from The Bride of the Innisfallen and problematic to Welty for the same reason that the novel is highly accessible to readers; that is, it is built almost entirely on dialogue and action. Welty commented that because she felt she had "been writing too much by way of description, of introspection on the part of [her] characters, [she] tried to see if [she] could make everything shown." Then, before completing Losing Battles and offering it to her readers, she wrote her very personal The Optimist's Daughter and quickly published both books. Welty herself has pointed out that during these years she was nursing her failing mother and teaching for a year at Millsaps College—two events that of course changed her usual writing habits. Constrained, she took notes and wrote scenes for Losing Battles, tucking "them in a box, with no opportunity to go back and revise, but writing a scene anew instead of revising it, so that the work prolonged itself." "I … kept thinking of more and more scenes…. There were extra incidents, which told the same thing in different terms, different scenes, different characters." "I must have thrown away at least as much as I kept in the book…. I would write the scene out just to let [the characters] loose on something—my private show." Of course, speculation that this change in habit and project grew up partially in response to thoughts and feelings about meeting her readers is just that, speculation. But during these years, Welty did not offer more of her very personal, or obstructed fiction to her audience through publication. Instead, she grew in new ways and produced Losing Battles.

At the climax of this novel Jack Renfro is able to love Julia Mortimer and so to admit her to his family circle: "'I reckon I even love her,' said Jack, 'I heard her story.'" The familial model of author-audience interaction that this novel conveys is not at all beside the point. In her essay on Jane Austen, Welty pictures Austen "reading … chapters aloud to her own lively, vocative family, on whose shrewd intuition, practiced estimation of conduct, and seasoned judgment of character she relied almost as well as on her own." In that image, Welty imagines a perfect family circle as the ideal author-audience relationship. Jane Austen, Welty wrote, "must have enjoyed absolute confidence in an understanding reception of her work. [Her] novels still have a bloom of shared pleasure. And the felicity they have for us must partly lie in the confidence they take for granted between the author and her readers."

If Welty has a model of her own to offer to current theorizing about the writer-reader relationship, it is this confidential family. And the function of her sometimes obstructing style is to transform the willing stranger into a member of this inner circle. Welty's narrative obstacles can thus be understood as leading one to read for the sake of encounter rather than appropriation. It is the very process of unraveling difficulties that binds the successful reader to Welty with the thread of fiction; they come to share knowledge inaccessible to others who have not been so attentive, or sympathetic. As the division between reader and audience gradually dissolves, the reader is directed to complete the fiction along the lines that Welty imagined. Her obstruction of her reader's expectations more than reflects, it enacts her characteristic theme of love and separateness; it leads the reader to experience isolation and to discover communion.

In the interview I mentioned earlier, Joanna Maclay asked Eudora Welty "how [her] notion of the potential reader" affected what she did "to make [her] meaning clear." And Welty, who at first answered, "I don't know," ended by quoting Henry Green's remark: "Prose should be a long intimacy between strangers…." In the context of my discussion of Welty's "Powerhouse" and her view of reading, I hope that this response has come into focus as a photograph does when rising to exposure in a developer's tray, or as Welty's fictions can in the reading process. Welty, it seems, was writing about and with knowledge of the issues of the reader-response debate two decades before it gained attention, and by adding Welty's voice to the others quoted in this article, I add the writer's point of view.