Reader-response theorists, still haunted by the spectre of the ‘affective fallacy’, yet equally aware of the dangers of an objectivist stance, are faced with a problem of authority: who or what is the ultimate source of meaning? At one end of the spectrum, authority may be invested in the actual author of the text, as in the theory of E. D. Hirsch; at the other, meaning may be a function of the individual reader's identity, an approach favoured by Norman Holland.¹ Other works, such as Wolfgang Iser's The Act of Reading, or Stanley Fish's Affective Stylistics, grant the written text a measure of authority by claiming that the reader's response is guided and limited by specific objective textual structures.²

Epistemologies may shift authority from the subjective to the intersubjective: meaning is a function not of the individual reader but of intersubjective communities. The later work of Stanley Fish, introducing the notion of ‘interpretive communities’, falls into this category.³ David Bleich's Subjective Criticism, whilst appearing to favour the subjective end of the spectrum, also has something of the ‘community spirit’. As will emerge, the relationship posited between individual subject and community is a problematic one.⁴

Reading the theory ‘through’ Balzac's “Le Colonel Chabert” and “Adieu,” I shall explore a number of problems surrounding Bleich's epistemology, and consider some of the wider implications arising from the concept of community.⁵

I. BLEICH'S EPISTEMOLOGY

According to Bleich, paradigms or world-views are set up to meet the epistemological needs of the present. The objective paradigm which he challenges is no exception: ‘The notion of objective truth has the epistemological status of God: it is an invented frame of reference aimed at maintaining prevailing social practices.’⁶ This paradigm, claims Bleich, has outlived its usefulness. Its epistemological presuppositions must be revised in the light of work carried out by figures such as Einstein, Heisenberg, and Gombrich. ‘Facts’ or ‘knowledge’ do not exist independent of the investigator: they are a function of his motives and the means of investigation. ‘Facts’ are not found, but made.

Bleich's ‘subjective paradigm’ is intended to supersede the objective approach. How does this new epistemology operate in the field of reader-response? According to Bleich, though the literary text has physical properties, its meaning depends entirely on a process which he calls ‘symbolization’. Symbolization, the reader's initial response, can be defined as a peremptory perception and evaluation of the text. It is an imaginative interiorization which is differentiated from a purely sensorimotor response.

Interpretation of the text is referred to as motivated ‘resymbolization’, where resymbolization is defined as the mentation involved in a conscious response to the symbolization. It is a reframing of the symbolization which occurs when the present adaptive needs of the individual demand an act of explanation or interpretation. The interpretation should not be considered in terms of a true/false polarity, but rather in terms of validity or conviction. It is not concerned with a recovery of ‘fact’ or ‘truth’: its success depends upon its meeting of present demands or adaptive needs: ‘The logic of interpretation is that its resymbolising activity is motivated and organised by the conscious desires created by disharmonious feelings or self-images; the goal of these desires is increasing the individual's sense of psychological and social adaptability’ (Subjective Criticism, p. 83).

Central to Bleich's epistemology is the individual's capacity for reflective thought. Bleich refers to a ‘subjective dialectic’, the individual's ability (for example, when hearing a story) to ask himself questions and receive answers. This activity is a sign that symbolization (imaginative response), and not just a sensorimotor activity (registering the visual stimuli of print), has taken place. In the context of the reading act, Bleich introduces a valuable hermeneutic tool: the ‘response statement’. This is a recording by the reader of his subjective responses as he reads. The ‘response statement’ is used alongside the subject's ‘meaning statement’ or interpretation of a text, with a view to bringing to reflective attention the subjective stratum of response, and thereby acknowledging its influence on the apparently objective ‘meaning statement’. The reading subject is, we might say, answerable to and for himself; he is responsible for his reading. The important thing is to know that you know.

Knowledge, however, does not stop with the individual subject and his reflective powers: it must be ‘negotiated’ in a community: ‘To know anything at all is to have assigned a part of one's self to a group of others who claim to know the same thing. … The degree to which knowledge is not part of a community is the degree to which it is not knowledge at all’ (Subjective Criticism, p. 296). The community is also deemed to have reflective powers, to be conscious of, and able to articulate its own motivation for knowledge-seeking. It, too, is answerable to and for itself; it, too, is responsible. Bleich considers this new epistemology to be ethically superior to its objective counterpart: operating according to the rules of the latter, the subjective stratum of any knowledge-seeking act goes unnoted and probably unnoticed. Interpretation operating under the objective paradigm has no authority: authority requires a hermeneutic moment which reveals the interests or motivations of the seeker of knowledge or explanation.

II. BALZAC AND BLEICH

Both “Le Colonel Chabert” and “Adieu” represent characters prompted by their present adaptive needs to engage in knowledge-seeking acts, and to form some kind of intersubjective or community relationship. Both texts, to a certain extent, play out or dramatize some of Bleich's ideas. Tompkins has noted that Bleich's privileging of self-knowledge, manifested in the ‘subjective dialectic’ and ‘response statement’, marks an inconsistency in his epistemology.⁷ I shall show that “Le Colonel Chabert” dramatizes the very epistemological issues at stake. Both short stories, in fact, not only ‘stage’ some of the theoretical concepts; they also serve to challenge the theory and to reveal some of the implications which arise from the relationship between individual subject and intersubjective community.

“Le Colonel Chabert” tells the tale of a Napoleonic colonel injured and left for dead after the battle of Eylau. Suffering from a severe head-wound, the colonel digs his way out of a mass grave, recovers his health and memory, and returns to what is, by then, Restoration Paris. There he enlists the help of the solicitor Derville, in an attempt to regain public recognition. After a crucial meeting with Chabert, his wife, since remarried, realizes that his physical appearance has so altered as to render him unrecognizable to the public. After a series of manoeuvrings, she successfully thwarts Chabert's attempts, and the colonel fades into obscurity.

“Le Colonel Chabert” prompts several questions about the nature of self-knowledge. For example, can the individual's grasp of self-identity be challenged by an external authority? Early in the short story, one of Derville's clerks vouches for the authority of the subject: ‘—Je l'appelle pour lui demander s'il est colonel ou portier, il doit savoir, lui’ (p. 31, my italics). As far as Chabert is concerned, his self-knowledge, his knowledge of who he is, is, quite literally, self-evident. There can be no question of intersubjective negotiation:

—Il faudrait peut-être transiger, dit l'avoué.

—Transiger, répéta le colonel Chabert. Suis-je mort ou suis-je vivant?

(p. 58)

To this extent, Bleich's privileging of knowledge of self seems to find literary support. However, Chabert's self-knowledge is challenged and indeed denied by the ‘comtesse’, a representative of the community which is Restoration society. As Chabert discovers, even self-knowledge is negotiable: ‘tout se plaide’ (p. 72). Derville, using terms which would not be out of place in Bleich's own work, makes the point that self-knowledge becomes knowledge only if and when negotiated in a motivated community: ‘Vous êtes le comte Chabert, je le veux bien, mais il s'agit de le prouver juridiciairement, à des gens qui vont avoir intérêt à nier votre existence’ (p. 70, my italics). This raises a number of points which are inadequately covered by Bleich. Exactly how does his epistemology reconcile self and community? On the one hand, it seems impossible to deny the privileged nature of self-knowledge, specifically, of the reflective ego: to do so would be to deny the basic ontological structure of the self. The ‘comtesse’ sees only a part of the problem when she tells Chabert that ‘renoncer à vous-même’ would mean ‘commettre un mensonge à toute heure du jour’ (p. 107). To deny the reflective ego is, ultimately, to deny life itself. Chabert himself touches on the problem when he expresses a desire for the ontologically impossible: ‘Je voudrais n'être pas moi.’⁸ In the closing pages of the text, his attempted self-renunciation hints at the fact that to abolish the reflective ego is to cease to be a human subject: ‘Pas Chabert! pas Chabert! … Je ne suis plus un homme, je suis le numéro 164, septième salle’ (p. 121).

If self-knowledge is an ontological necessity, how can it be integrated into an epistemology such as Bleich's, which insists on the intersubjective negotiation of all knowledge? Self-knowledge is by definition solipsistic. If ‘tout se plaide’, how can proof be offered to a third party? How can Chabert's reflective awareness of himself become material which is accessible to intersubjective negotiation?

This problematic relationship between transcendent subject and community is briefly raised by Tompkins, who compares Bleich's concept of community to that of Stanley Fish:

Both statements suggest that individual or subjective knowledge exists prior to the formulation of publicly shared assumptions and that membership in an interpretive community is a conscious act entered into freely by each individual. … This description [of the interpretive community] stands Fish's concept on its head. Instead of the individual's being constituted by the assumptions of the group, the group is formed by individuals who then negotiate its assumptions into existence.

(p. 1073)

The conflict appears to be irreconcilable. One can adopt Fish's stance, whereby the subject is constituted by group assumptions and correlatively loses the freedom of the self-reflective, transcendent self. In this case we can no longer talk of authority or responsibility: the subject is not answerable to or for himself. Alternatively, one can seek to preserve, as Bleich does, the freedom of the transcendent self, in which case we cannot accept that all knowledge is negotiated in a community.⁹

“Le Colonel Chabert” plays out this epistemological conflict to perfection. In Chabert's case, joining the community represented by the ‘comtesse’ would mean denying his own existence; it results in an ontological impasse. Extending this, and taking Chabert's case as exemplary, we might ask how can individuals be convinced to join a particular community? Thomas Kuhn, referring to paradigm switches and communities of scientists, suggests that persuasion can go only so far: ‘The transfer of allegiance from paradigm to paradigm is a conversion experience that cannot be forced.’¹⁰ Richard Norman, considering a similar problem in terms of seeing ‘gestalt’ figures (duck/rabbit; old/young woman), states: ‘I cannot “choose” or “decide” to see the figure in a certain way. If I am able to see it as a picture of an old woman, this is because that way of seeing forces itself upon me. We can speak of the dawning of an aspect.’¹¹ Proffered ‘proof’ about the ‘gestalt’ figure (‘here is the nose, here the chin’, etc.) is proof only to one who is already in-context: ‘The “evidence” each gives will be understood in the relevant way only by one who is already convinced’ (p. 335). Neither Fish, who takes the same line (the subject is always-already in context), nor Bleich considers in sufficient detail the processes of joining and leaving communities.

The conflict between Chabert and the ‘comtesse’, a spokeswoman for the Restoration community, extends the issue into the domain of ethics: what happens when there is a conflict of interests between communities? How are differences settled? How, exactly, does communication and negotiation take place? In the case of Chabert, the innocent victim seems to fall prey to an anonymous corporate body.¹²

Bleich notes: ‘If there is no external standard, collective interests are the highest authority, and knowledge depends ultimately on how individuals form groups and circumscribe the existence of other groups' (Subjective Criticism, p. 264). But how exactly does this circumscription take place? Freedom of the individual seems to be threatened by the concept of community in one of two ways. First, on a more fundamental theoretical level, freedom is denied if, as is the case in Fish's theory, the individual is said to be constituted by the group, to be always-already in context. Secondly, freedom is threatened if the group chooses to ‘circumscribe’ by violent means. In both cases authority is put above liberty, becoming, by definition, authoritarianism.

To return to “Le Colonel Chabert”: the character Derville raises another question which is inadequately dealt with by the theory: that of commensurability. How many communities can one belong to, and how is membership to be established or defined? Derville is lawyer to both Chabert and the ‘comtesse’, he is in what Sivert refers to as ‘an unsavory legal situation’ (p. 224). One of the solicitor's interlocutors comments on this capacity to move freely between communities: ‘Vous avez l'esprit juste, vous autres avoués, quoiqu'on vous accuse de le fausser en plaidant aussi bien le Pour que le Contre’ (p. 62).

Derville joins his particular communities freely, and out of self-interest (monetary gain and an enhanced reputation). He is not already in-context. This raises once again the issue of how membership is established.

Bleich suggests that the members of the group articulate their motivations, but need these be genuine? Is there not room for duplicity and manipulation? Is the group really answerable to and responsible for its members and their apparent motivations? The ‘comtesse’ conceals her knowledge of Chabert's identity (‘C'est lui, se dit en elle-même la comtesse’ (p. 97)), and follows a personal, unacknowledged motivation.

The reader is aware that an injustice is being perpetrated. Bleich does not consider the possibility of an abuse of authority via a skilful deployment of language. Motives can be hidden or falsely displayed by the use of rhetoric which, with the abolition of external authority, becomes a vital commodity and weapon. In the case of Chabert, rhetorical powers of conviction, ominously, lead to actual conviction: his attempts to defend his self-knowledge are overwhelmed by the ‘comtesse’, and the innocent individual is marginalized in jails and asylums.¹³

The fact that motives can be hidden, and individuals manipulated, is dramatized more forcefully in the second of Balzac's short stories, “Adieu.” Philippe and his companion come across an isolated property in which they find a young woman, devoid of speech, more animal than human. Philippe recognizes with horror that the woman is Stéphanie, his lover of old whose life he had saved during the Bérésina crossing. Philippe displaces Stéphanie's uncle, a doctor, in his attempts to restore Stéphanie's sanity. After a period of failure, during which Stéphanie neither recognizes Philippe nor recalls anything of her past, Philippe attempts a final cure by organizing a re-enactment of the crossing of the Bérésina. Stéphanie appears momentarily to return to normality, only to fall dead a few minutes later. Her death is shortly followed by Philippe's suicide.

Philippe's motivation for negotiating knowledge, for attempting to persuade Stéphanie to recognize him and the past as ‘facts’, may be seen to be other than his stated altruistic intention. His motivation may be purely sexual. A certain physical preoccupation emerges symptomatically on several occasions: for example, in his rather incongruous reaction to his companion's sighting of what is apparently a ghostly figure. Rather than express disbelief or alarm, Philippe merely asks: ‘Est-elle jolie?’ (p. 157). His unreciprocated advances to Stéphanie also suggest a physical motivation: ‘Mais elle lui laissait passer les mains dans sa chevelure, lui permettait de la prendre dans ses bras, et recevait sans plaisir ses baisers ardents’ (p. 204).

Stéphanie's uncle/doctor may also be seen to be driven by unstated motives. His articulated intention is to effect a cure, but the reader might well feel that he too exploits his ‘patient’ and follows purely self-interested motivation. Notice, for example, the unsettling description of his reaction to the death of his niece: ‘Le vieux médecin reçut le corps inanimé de sa nièce, l'embrassa comme l'eût fait un jeune homme, l'emporta et s'assit avec elle sur un tas de bois’ (p. 214). His attentions have something of the voyeuristic about them: ‘Je comprends sa folie, j'épie ses gestes, je suis dans ses secrets’ (p. 209). If we look to the etymology of ‘comprendre’, we are returned to the notion of circumscription, and the suggestion that manipulation and exploitation, the abuse of authority, are not far off. In both these cases articulated motives for knowledge-seeking (an apparently altruistic desire to restore Stéphanie to sanity) appear to be secondary to unacknowledged, self-gratificatory motivation.

I suggested above that when overarching sources of authority are absent, rhetoric becomes a valuable resource. Language may be employed not only for straightforward ‘negotiation’ but as a weapon in a power struggle. The doctor employs rhetoric to suggest that communities have been established. Although Stéphanie cannot respond, or perhaps even understand him, his use of the first person plural implies that negotiation has been linguistically established, and that the community members are in agreement: ‘Nous lui pardonnons, n'est-ce pas?’ (p. 206).

The use of rhetoric in the attempt to establish communities can be extended to the relationship between the narrator and reader of the two short stories. To read the doctor/uncle's intentions or motivation as I have done means resisting the narrator's impassive description; it means refusing to join his community. In “Le Colonel Chabert,” the play of narratorial rhetoric is more revealing. We have, after all, no ‘proof’ that Chabert is who he says he is, and the famous Balzacian narrator initially sets aside his omniscience and withholds knowledge. Early in the text, he refers to Chabert as ‘l'inconnu’ (pp. 27, 29), ‘le vieil homme’ (p. 29), ‘le prétendu colonel Chabert’ (p. 36). It is surely no coincidence that at the point where the narrator does commit himself and seek to establish the identity of Chabert, his use of rhetoric increases. He first refers to the mysterious character as ‘le colonel Chabert’ on page 37, backing up his acknowledgement (or suggestion) of identity with a reference to ‘le vieux soldat’ on the following page. Significantly, this is accompanied by the use of the second-person pronoun, which invites the reader to assume the role of addressee: ‘Vous eussiez dit de la nacre. …’ The attempt to establish a community with the reader is strengthened by the deployment of the first-person singular, again appealing to a second-person interlocutor whose role can be filled by the reader: ‘pour faire de cette figure je ne sais quoi de funeste …’ (p. 39).

Bearing in mind what I have said about rhetoric and manipulation, the attentive reader should perhaps be aware of devices such as first-person and second-person pronouns, the impersonal ‘on’, gnomics and demonstratives, all of which imply shared assumptions and values.

The fact that language, the medium of intersubjective negotiation, is potentially duplicitous, emerges from a careful reading of both texts. Two passages in “Le Colonel Chabert” take on a completely different force retrospectively or during a subsequent reading. Early in the text: ‘Accoutumé sans doute à juger les hommes, il s'adressa fort poliment au saute-ruisseau, en espérant que ce Pâtiras lui répondrait avec douceur’ (p. 28). The ‘saute-ruisseau’ has already been seen by the reader to be the ringleader of those mocking Chabert. The phrase ‘accoutumé sans doute à juger les hommes’ is therefore read as irony. Manipulated by the use of rhetoric, in the form of irony, the reader is invited into a relationship of complicity with the narrator. He is encouraged to believe that the stranger is a poor judge of character, and consequently, that he is unlikely to be the ‘colonel’.¹⁴

We see the manipulative potential of language at work shortly after this incident. One of the clerks in Derville's office remarks of the unknown figure: ‘—Il a l'air d'un déterré’ (p. 30). During a first reading of the text, the metaphor is taken at face value: that is, as no more than metaphorical. Its literal reading (Chabert is, precisely, a ‘déterré’) can be activated only retrospectively or during a subsequent reading. Again, a form of rhetoric has been deployed: the very fact that Chabert is described as like a disinterred cadaver masks the possibility that he might literally have been just that. The truth about Chabert's real identity is thereby obfuscated. Language has once more been used to manipulate.

A similar process occurs in “Adieu.” In the opening pages Philippe's companion refers to the estate before him as ‘le palais de la Belle au Bois Dormant’ (p. 156). The ironic reading emerges only when the closing pages of the text have been read. Only then does the reader realize that far from following the pattern of the encoded fairy-tale ‘happy ending’, Balzac's tale ends in tragedy: Stéphanie is awakened by her ‘Prince Charming’, Philippe, only to die. Language can mask truth and knowledge.

I have said that the negotiation of knowledge may be complicated by a deliberate manipulation of one's interlocutors. Language, the medium of intersubjective negotiation, can become a tool of deception when rhetoric is deployed, and true motives can be kept hidden. But motives may not only be disguised intentionally; they may be inaccessible to the conscious mind of the subject himself. By emphasizing the role of the individual's reflective capacity, Bleich neglects the part played by the unconscious as a powerful source of motivation.

The possibility of unconscious motivation is raised by Balzac's “Adieu.” Ostensibly, Philippe's motivation for the negotiation of knowledge, his need, for example, to re-enact the Bérésina crossing, is his articulated desire to cure Stéphanie. However, the text points to the possibility of non-linguistic forces being at play:

Quoiqu'un souvenir d'une affreuse amertume crispât tous ses traits, il ne pleura pas. Semblable aux hommes puissants, il savait refouler ses émotions au fond de son coeur, et trouvait peut-être, comme beaucoup de caractères purs, une sorte d'impudeur à dévoiler ses peines quand aucune parole humaine n'en peut rendre la profondeur.

(p. 152, my italics)

During the Bérésina crossing Philippe was witness to potentially traumatizing scenes: ‘Et le grenadier de la garde poussa les chevaux sur les hommes, ensanglanta les roues, renversa les bivouacs, en traçant un double sillon de morts à travers ce champ de têtes.’ (p. 187) Could it be that the full horror of this event is being repressed by Philippe, and that the true motivation for his re-enactment or repetition has deeper sources? If motivation can be unconscious, and therefore inaccessible to the individual and his self-knowledge, then Bleich's theory suffers a setback. Subjects may articulate their motives and set out their subjective responses in ‘response statements’, and they may negotiate knowledge in acts of apparent self-reflectivity, but other forces, equally a part of the subject, may be operating which are unknown to them. The subject's self-reflective capacity can only extend so far. He is answerable only to and for his conscious mind; he can know only that he knows to a certain extent.

Problems of authority are central to all reader-response theories. Bleich, in seeking to preserve the freedom of the subject, perhaps over-emphasizes the capacity for reflective thought (we might say self-authorization). However, whilst granting the subject freedom with one hand, he seems to take it away with the other by claiming that knowledge is a function of standards negotiated within a community.

Theories which deal largely in abstract terms run the risk not only of internal inconsistency but also of a certain blindness to the implications they bear with them. The concept of the community is one such area treated inadequately by the theorists. It may be that literary texts still have something to teach the theoreticians.

Notes

1. E. D. Hirsch, Validity in Interpretation (New Haven, Connecticut, and London, 1967). In the later The Aims of Interpretation (Chicago and London, 1976), Hirsch modifies his position, but maintains the author as the rightful origin of meaning (Norman Holland, 5 Readers Reading (New Haven, Connecticut, 1975)).

2. Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore, Maryland, and London, 1978); Stanley Fish, ‘Literature in the Reader: Affective Stylistics’, New Literary History, 2 (1970), 123-62.

3. Fish, ‘Interpreting the Variorum’, Critical Inquiry, 2 (Spring 1976). See also Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1980) for a collection of Fish's essays prefaced by the author's description of his change of direction from the earlier ‘Affective Stylistics’.

4. David Bleich, Subjective Criticism (Baltimore, Maryland, 1978).

5. All references to Balzac are to Le Colonel Chabert suivi de trois nouvelles, edited by P. Berthier (Paris, 1974).

6. Bleich, ‘The Subjective Paradigm in Science, Psychology, and Criticism, New Literary History, 7 (1976), 313-34 (p. 317).

7. Jane Tompkins, review of Bleich's Subjective Criticism, Modern Language Notes, 93 (December 1978), 1073.

8. Chabert expresses a similar ontological twist when he apparently acknowledges his own death (p. 32): ‘—Est-ce le colonel mort à Eylau? demanda Huré … ❙—Lui-même, monsieur, répondit le bonhomme.’

9. The same problem emerges in theories which seek not to contextualize (place in a community), but to textualize the subject. It is no longer the subject, but language which speaks: ‘But once the conscious subject is deprived of its role as a source of meaning—once meaning is explained in terms of conventional systems which may escape the grasp of the conscious subject—the self can no longer be identified with consciousness’ (Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics (London, 1975), p. 28).

10. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, second, expanded version (Chicago, 1970), p. 151.

11. Richard Norman, ‘On Seeing Things Differently’, in The Philosophy of Society, edited by R. Beehler and A. Drengson (London, 1978), 316-44 (p. 334).

12. Eileen Sivert, approaching the same short story from the perspective of feminist views of identity, states that Chabert's story of his identity cannot exist, as it has already been written ‘by the most powerful institutions of society’: ‘Who's Who: Non-Characters in Le Colonel Chabert’, French Forum, 13, no. 2 (May 1988), 217-28 (p. 224). When we realize that these ‘institutions’ are the military and the legal profession, the potentially sinister implications of community start to become clear.

13. Derville, as a representative of the legal profession, is paradigmatic of the replacement of a true/false polarity by conviction. In a court of law, ‘evidence’ is evidence only if the case wins; the evidence offered by the defeated party is no longer evidence if the rhetoric of the opposing advocate prevails.

14. The relationship between irony and authority also emerges here: whose irony is it? The narrator's? The author's? Barthes comments on the loss of source or authority in true irony: ‘Un texte multivalent n'accomplit jusqu'au bout sa duplicité constitutive que s'il subvertit l'opposition du vrai et du faux, s'il n'attribue pas ses énoncés (même dans l'intention de les discréditer) à des autorités explicites, s'il déjoue tout respect de l'origine, de la paternité, de la propriété’ (S/Z (Paris, 1970), p. 51).