SOURCE: Craig, Randall. “Reader-Response Criticism and Literary Realism.” Essays in Literature 11, no. 1 (spring 1984): 113-26.

[In the following essay, Craig discusses the effectiveness of using reader-response theory in the study of nineteenth-century realistic fiction.]

Wolfgang Iser's study of the reader in the English novel and Robert Alter's survey of self-conscious fiction follow curiously similar paths, intersecting at Fielding, Sterne, and Thackeray, by-passing the major literary realists of the nineteenth century, and arriving safely in the compatible country of Joyce and Beckett.¹ The similar itineraries suggest an affinity between the critical perspective of reader-response theory and literary modes typified by self-reflexive or metafictional techniques. Beyond that, however, the avoidance of the realistic novel raises the question of how successfully the methods of reader-response criticism can be applied to nineteenth-century realistic fiction, or more generally, to fictional modes in which self-reflexive textual strategies and the concomitant self-conscious reading activity are deemphasized.

There is, of course, no unanimity of approach among response-oriented critics, who, for example, may be concerned with empirical readers, analyzed psychoanalytically by Norman Holland and sociologically by H. R. Jauss, or with hypothetical readers, defined phenomenologically by Stanley Fish and structurally by Michael Riffaterre.² Regardless of how audience is conceived, however, response critics tend to view the enabling condition of reading as the eliciting and blocking of individual acts of interpretation—on whatever level: personal and psychoanalytical; stylistic, thematic, and generic; or social and cultural. Reading is understood as a process characterized by indeterminancy, disorientation, jolts, and surprises.³ This process of mistaken interpretations and frustrated expectations is more likely to occur in metafiction than in realistic fiction, where authors frequently attempt to educate and fulfill readers' expectations about a fictional world resembling their own existences. This is not to say that a reader-response critic is logically precluded from analyzing a particular text, mode, or genre. But, as Fish's discussion of seventeenth-century poetry and prose demonstrates, the audience-oriented approach is inclined to literature that is “disturbing” and “humiliating.”⁴ Because realism avoids these effects, it challenges response critics to expand the definitions and methods upon which they have tended to rely.

Even before discussing literary realism, it is evident that certain versions of response aesthetics are uninterested in or unequipped for analysis of literary modes. In psychoanalytic response theory, attention is diverted from reading and the text as an aesthetic activity and object, and is turned toward both as indices of primarily psychological processes. Since these functions (in one theory, defenses, expectations, fantasies, and transformations⁵) are extra-literary and related to a specific text only insofar as a particular reader or reading community shows a preference for a certain type of literature, psychoanalytic theory is insensitive to differences in literary mode; in fact, this approach tends to obscure such differences entirely. For instance, the only sense in which a text can be called mimetic by the terms of this approach is that it reflects the identity of the reader himself.

The historical emphasis upon either the material conditions producing art or the impact of literature as a barometer of cultural history and ideology also diminishes the importance of realism as a specifically literary phenomenon and of the reader's role as a critical end, as opposed to a historical end. An example of Jauss's comparison of Flaubert's Madame Bovary with Feydeau's Fanny, which was the more popular novel when the two were first published. That Flaubert is now an acknowledged master, while Feydeau is unread, is seen by Jauss as an indication that the former's technique of impersonal narration constitutes “a turning point in the history of the novel.”⁶ Yet apart from studying the history of response (Jauss specifies spontaneous success, rejection or shock, scattered approval, gradual or later understanding as examples) to determine the emergence of new literary schools, in this case réalisme, he is uninterested in the new demands placed upon the reader by Flaubert's impassibilité.

Thus phenomenological and structuralist response theory appear to be most sensitive to textual features and to reader behavior that can be used to identify literary modes. Both diachronic analysis, focusing on textual conditioning of response during the reading process, and synchronic analysis, emphasizing the literary conventions that account for the text and its readability, are relevant to this argument. Of central importance is the concept of the implied reader, described by Iser as

embod[ying] all those predispositions necessary for a literary work to exercise its effect—predispositions laid down, not by an empirical outside reality, but by the text itself. Consequently, the implied reader as a concept has his roots firmly planted in the structure of the text; he is a construct and in no way to be identified with any real readers. … [T]he concept of the implied reader is a transcendental model which makes it possible for the structured effects of literary texts to be described.⁷

If this concept is to be useful in analyzing texts in which attention is not called to the reading activity itself and in which that activity is not typified by disorientation, then the response critic must broaden consideration of communicative strategies to include subtle as well as blatant definitions of the implied reader and to account for positive as well as negative reinforcement of reading behavior. Furthermore, the theory must expand its focus from the relationships between texts and readers to those between authors, texts, and readers. In other words, the principle with which response theory begins, that the observer is always part of the observed, must be extended to authors. Viewing texts as both the product and the occasion of purposeful activity will help response critics to describe textual strategies in the absence of persistent and radical disorientation. This argument does not call into question the assumption of response theory concerning the interaction of text and reader; rather, it restores the balance while retaining the dialectical dynamism implied by Sartre's observation that reading is “the synthesis of perception and creation.”⁸

I

To distinguish mimetic from self-reflective fiction on the basis of the reading activity demanded by each, it is perhaps best to place them in the context of the traditional distinction between novel and romance. From William Congreve's Preface to Incognita (1692), to Clara Reeve's The Progress of Romance through Times, Countries, and Manners (1785), to the nineteenth-century formulations of Scott, Hawthorne, and James, the romance has been seen as the province of imaginative possibility, the novel as the territory of realistic probability. According to Reeve, for example, “The Romance is an heroic fable, which treats of fabulous persons and things.—The Novel is a picture of real life and manners, and of the times in which it is written. The Romance in lofty and elevated language, describes what never happened nor is likely to happen.—The Novel gives a familiar relation of such things, as pass every day before our eyes, such as may happen to our friend, or to ourselves.”⁹ The contrast in content, between the fabulous and the familiar, distinguishes romance from the novel, but two additional factors connect romance with metafiction. The first is the creative freedom of the author. Hawthorne, for instance, maintains that the romance involves “circumstances, to a great extent, of the writer's own choosing or creation.”¹⁰ The second is the accentuated response of the reader. The “impossible performances,” writes Congreve, “elevate and surprize the reader.”¹¹ Both elements call attention to the “made-up” status or romance, and this fictionality or literariness is magnified in metafiction.

The element common to all of the terms for self-conscious literature—metafiction, fabulation, irrealism, involution—is “a consistent effort to convey to us a sense of the fictional world as an authorial construct set up against a background of literary tradition and convention.”¹² Whereas Congreve, Hawthorne, and James explain the romancer's imaginative license and the reader's prescribed response in the prefaces to their fiction, the self-conscious writers celebrate the fictionality of both text and reader within the pages of the novel itself. Thus, to describe the self-conscious novelist, one might turn to James's differentiation of romance from realism on the basis of “experience liberated from the conditions that we usually know to attach to it.” He employs, as the vehicle of his explanation, a hot-air balloon:

The balloon of experience is in fact of course tied to the earth, and under that necessity we swing, thanks to a rope of remarkable length, in the more or less commodious car of the imagination; but it is by the rope we know where we are, and from the moment that cable is cut we are at large and unrelated: we only swing apart from the globe—though remaining as exhilarated, naturally, as we like, especially when all goes well. The art of the romancer is, “for the fun of it,” insidiously to cut the cable, to cut it without our detecting him.¹³

In the same manner, the fabulist, insidiously and for the fun of it, cuts the mimetic cable; unlike the romancer, however, he insists upon taking credit for having done so and leaves the self-incriminating textual clues that will lead to his exposure.

The reader of the self-conscious text, then, finds that orientation in the fictional world depends, not on the conventions of a familiar external reality, but on those of this and perhaps other fictional worlds. The complexity with which these conventions are typically utilized further disorients readers in a maze of literary reference and parody, exemplified by the pyrotechnical display of literary artifice in Tristram Shandy or Ulysses. The readers of these novels must be very active—filling in textual gaps, responding to authorial challenges, retracing steps, and sometimes wiping the egg from their faces. From the critic's point of view, this activity is a salient feature of the text itself—a point emphasized by Umberto Eco:

An author can foresee an “ideal reader affected by an ideal insomnia” (as happens with Finnegans Wake), able to master different codes and eager to deal with the text as with a maze of many issues. But in the last analysis what matters is not the various issues in themselves but the maze-like structure of the text. You cannot use the text as you want, but only as the text wants you to use it. … [W]hen reading Ulysses one can extrapolate the profile of a “good Ulysses reader” from the text itself, because the pragmatic process of interpretation … is a structural element of its generative process. … [T]he reader is strictly defined by the lexical and the syntactical organization of the text: the text is nothing else but the semantic-pragmatic production of its own Model Reader.¹⁴

The implied reader of a self-conscious text—an open text in Eco's terms, a writerly text in Barthes'—is explicitly defined by the text itself. Individual readings may be more or less successful, by the implied reader's role is in general clearly discernible from the rhetorical strategies of the text.

But in realism the role of the reader is much less clearly inscribed in/prescribed by the text. Realism attempts to convey an accurate depiction of the physical and social worlds—a function historically associated with the novel as a genre. As we have seen, the novel traditionally deals with familiar worlds and excludes “the certain latitude” that Hawthorne claims for the romancer. The novel, he writes, “aim[s] at a very minute fidelity, not merely to the possible, but to the probable and ordinary course of man's experience.”¹⁵ When the realist does have recourse to self-reflexive devices, it is to bolster rather than to undermine the mimetic illusion. Thus, George Eliot writes in Adam Bede: “Certainly I could, if I held it in the highest vocation of the novelist to represent things as they never have been and never will be. Then, of course, I might refashion life and character entirely after my own liking. … But it happens, on the contrary, that my strongest effort is to avoid any such arbitrary picture, and to give a faithful account of man and things as they have mirrored themselves in my mind.”¹⁶ This self-conscious account of the novel's purposes calls attention to the narrator's representation, not to the author's creation, of reality—which is not to say that writers naively believed that objective reality could be transferred to literature without distortion. James, for example, speaks of the novelist as a “particular window” on reality,¹⁷ and Eliot continues the passage cited above: “The mirror is doubtless defective; the outlines will sometimes be disturbed, the reflection faint or confused; but I feel as bound to tell you as precisely as I can what that reflection is, as if I were in the witness box, narrating my experience on oath.” The realist is concerned less with the devices of reflection than with the object mirrored, and avoids the imaginative excess of romance: “The fantastic, the fairy-tale-like, the allegorical and the symbolic, the highly stylized, the purely abstract and decorative.”¹⁸ Thus, to use E. H. Gombrich's terms, although “making will come before matching, creation before reference,”¹⁹ the realists place emphasis squarely upon the more passive role; correspondingly, readers' activity will stress matching as opposed to making.

Implicit in the realists' understanding of the purpose of the novel is a conception of its readers. In Eliot's terms, they are a jury of peers to whom the novelist must appeal as a creditable authority. Because realism is a mode that seeks to communicate, to be accessible, readers themselves play an important role in defining the novelist's strategies. The realist, argue Richard Ellmann and Charles Feidelson, “offers his work as a means of communication among men, dealing with large subjects in a comprehensible way, form subordinated to content.”²⁰ Recondite or disorienting strategies are avoided: experience as well as art is relied upon to communicate meaning. Hence, realistic technique accommodates the audience's assuming roles during the process of reading that, allowing for historical change, they might have actually experienced.²¹ While reading necessarily remains a cooperative actualization of the text, it seldom requires the active role of the reader of self-conscious fiction. In realism, for readers as well as for authors, the role of “matching” is dominant. As a result, reading activity is not as strictly controlled by the text as it is in metafiction. Since the realistic novel refers to external reality and avoids self-reflexiveness, readers are less explicitly defined by purely lexical and syntactical strategies than by the parallels to more or less familiar human and natural phenomena. Textual control over response is diminished; the task of describing the implied reader is complicated, and the challenge to reader-response criticism is sounded.

II

The different reading activities associated with realism and self-conscious fiction partially explain response criticism's predisposition to the mode demanding a more active reader. An additional factor is the definition of indeterminacy or disorientation as the “elementary condition for readers' reactions.”²² The formulation of text-reader dynamics as a process of negation leads to an emphasis of features that frustrate a reader's efforts to naturalize the text by defeating expectation or by withholding information necessary to interpretation, as well as to the exclusion of features having the opposite effects. Many response critics apply the criterion of indeterminacy both honorifically and definitionally to produce a radically dualistic notion of masterpieces and entertainments—to use Norman Holland's terminology—or of artistic and culinary reading—to use H. R. Jauss's.²³ The tendency is to associate masterpieces with lexical, stylistic, or rhetorical disorientation and to place everything else in the pejorative category of popular literature; no provision is made for the realistic novel, which falls through the theoretical gap between what Iser calls an impeded text and the roman à thèse. He argues that “the more a text individualizes or confirms an expectation it has initially aroused, the more we become aware of its didactic purpose, so that we can only accept or reject the thesis forced upon us.”²⁴ Yet the realistic novel often entails fulfilling expectation, and the result need not be escapist or didactic, or for that matter, it is likely to limit a reader's responses so severely. In fact, J. P. Stern defines realism in these very terms: “The picture the realists present, with its inclusions and omissions, is accessible and meaningful to us to the extent that it fulfills and enriches our informed expectations.”²⁵ Reading behavior can be conditioned in ways less drastic than literary shock treatment. Realism tends to teach readers how to interpret the text by gradual and positive reinforcement. This strategy, however, is denigrated by response critics, whose emphasis upon textual gaps has led to a binary, either/or formulation of the range of literature and to a kind of critical schizophrenia.

Another example is Stanley Fish, who readily admits his predilection for texts in which the element of reader disorientation is salient: “In general, I am drawn to works which do not allow a reader the security of his normal patterns of thought and belief.”²⁶ Fish reveals this bias when he differentiates between the rhetorical presentation of the bad physician, which “mirror[s] and present[s] for approval the opinions its readers already hold,” and the dialectical presentation of the good physician, which “requires of its readers a searching and rigorous scrutiny of everything they believe in and live by.”²⁷ Fish's own dialectical presentation leads to his endorsement of the allopathic text and his failure to consider the homeopathic method of the literary realist.

One finds a similar situation among response critics influenced by structuralist theory. Jonathan Culler, for example, notes the structuralist's propensity for texts that frustrate naturalization, with the result that “the features on which a structuralist criticism may choose to dwell become those by which it asserts its otherness.”²⁸ Whereas Fish and Iser locate gaps within the narrative itself, Culler maintains that indeterminacy is the result of the necessary incompleteness of the literary sign. The sign must be completed and given meaning, which often requires an acrobatic performance by readers and necessitates that critics focus “on the role of gaps, silence and opacity.”²⁹ The emphasis upon the disruptive elements of literature, therefore, on the “making” dimension of reading is once again clear. The predilection among all response critics for self-reflexive fiction and for the rhetorically complex, generically new, and often historically controversial text has resulted in the gap in the application of response criticism.

Yet there is no reason that response criticism cannot adjust its focus to encompass literary realism. Because the realistic writer appeals to everyday readers and eliminates disorienting strategies, clear signals guiding readers' activity are often absent from the novel. An Umberto Eco points out, by aiming at average readers, the author opens his text “to any possible ‘aberrant’ decoding.”³⁰ That difficulty does not mean, however, that the critic is limited to judging response solely on the basis of how individual readers compare fictional and extra-fictional experiences. Were that the case, the critic would be inescapably caught in the relativistic position inherent in David Grossvogel's definition of the novel: “authenticity—the reality principle—cannot reside in fiction, whose very meaning is feigning and invention: fiction can only activate the reality principle, and principle remains in the reader; whatever work of fiction will induce the reader to grant it his authenticity will be a novel, regardless of whether it is written with careful regard for surfaces or according to formalistic traditions.”³¹ Neither realism nor reading, however, can be purely a matter of individual choice. In realism, the reader is guided by textual strategies, though seldom by radical indeterminancy. The realistic novel is much more likely to depend on repetition, on what James calls “discriminated preparation,” on what Ford calls “justification” and “progression d'effect,” on any number of strategies that communicate a picture of the world and signal how it is to be interpreted. Repetition, as has been recently argued, is a particularly important technique in a form that is itself a kind of repetition of external reality.³² Realistic writers educate readers, not through humiliation, but by familiarizing them with a re-presented world and enabling them to discover the rules by which it works and to apply them both to the fictional and extra-fictional worlds. The concept of the implied reader, then, is no less useful in these texts; the critic has only to shift focus from self-reflexive to mimetic literary techniques.

III

The recognition by realistic authors that they are particular windows and scratched mirrors raises the question of how well response theory can account for the presence of the author in the text. The issue, of course, involves all literary modes but is complicated by realists' claims to self-effacement. Rien T. Segers's objection that reader-response criticism fails to keep “in touch with all three elements of the communication process: reader, text, and author”³³ becomes especially problematic when the writers conceal rather than proclaim their role in producing the text. Strategies such as impersonal narration and even Eliot's self-conscious admission of faulty reflection are designed to deemphasize the author's creative role. The claim to objectivity culminates in Zola, who in maintaining that the author is observer and experimentalist, cites the ideal of Claude Bernard: “The observer relates purely and simply the phenomena which he has under his eyes. … He should be the photographer of phenomena, his observation should be an exact representation of nature.”³⁴

Yet minimizing self-reference and utilizing impartial or comprehensive points of view can at best only obscure the contradiction lying at the bottom of realistic theory. The author cannot be mere reflector. James responds to the claim to objectivity by arguing that Maupassant, for example, “is remarkably objective and impersonal, but he would go too far if he were to entertain the belief that he has kept himself out of his books.”³⁵ The author is inscribed in the text by his positioning of the camera and by the choice of a subject. Thus, the author is part of the work both by definition—because “life [is] all inclusion and confusion, and art [is] all discrimination and selection”—and by temperament—because of “the very complexion of the mirror in which the material is reflected … of the nature of the man himself” (AN, p. 120). The underlying principle of response aesthetics, that the observer is always part of the observed, must therefore apply to the origin as well as to the reception of the work of art.

Response critics, however, have not extended the logic governing their conception of readers to authors, a step essential to theoretical completeness and to the discussion of a mode in which the author's function is problematic. Conrad's account of the author “as a figure behind the veil, a suspected rather than a seen presence—a movement behind the draperies of fiction”³⁶ suggests the Wizard of Oz's command to “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain”—a command all too often obeyed by response critics who have failed to consider the literary process in toto. Fish, for example, admits: “If pressed, I would say that the method of analysis does not require the assumption of either control or intention.”³⁷ Even those critics who acknowledge the importance of the author insist that statements about intention can only be speculative. Riffaterre, for example, posits a writer preoccupied with “the way he wants his message to be decoded” and more conscious, therefore, of the message than are the readers. Ideally, the critic would begin with the author's intentions; however, Riffaterre argues that they are unrecoverable. Thus, “the literary phenomenon can be defined as the relationship between text and reader, not the relationship between author and text.”³⁸ But this definition, in addition to its theoretical incompleteness, suffers from a pragmatic limitation because it excludes the advisory function of authorial intention. Authorial comments, which frequently form a part of the critic's knowledge even before a novel is read, minimally serve the heuristic function of calling attention to specific narrative strategies.

Consideration of the author's role in “writing” his audience as well as his text will enable response criticism not only to encompass all elements of the literary process but also to account more readily for literary realism. As Henry James points out, an author necessarily creates his audience: “In every novel the work is divided between the writer and the reader; but the writer makes the reader very much as he makes his characters.”³⁹ More recently, Walter Ong has claimed that the “writer's audience is always a fiction”: “the writer must construct in his imagination, clearly or vaguely, an audience cast in some sort of role. … [T]he audience must correspondingly fictionalize itself. A reader has to play the role in which the author has cast him, which seldom coincides with his role in the rest of actual life.”⁴⁰ Both Ong and James refer to the historical author's shaping of actual audiences, and neither elaborates the complex interconnections among historical authors and audiences and their hypothetical counterparts, implied writers and readers. Sufficient for my purposes, however, is the recognition that historical authors, based in part on an understanding of actual audiences, make a series of textual decisions intended to affect readers in certain ways. To the extent that they may be described, these understandings and decisions—conscious or not, successful or not—can help the critic to define the implied author and reader of the text.

IV

This formulation of the author's relationship to his readers is particularly appropriate to realism because the intended reader is often the common or everyday reader whose taste and skill are suspect, as studies like Richard Altick's The English Common Reader demonstrate. Thus while the novelist might begin with a conception of a model reader, the limitations of the reading public will necessitate the attempt to foster in actual audiences the perceptiveness of model readers. That process can take place only in the text; therefore, the response critic must see in textual strategies an attempt to teach readers how to read the novel, or, in other terms, to narrow the hermeneutical gap between intended and model readers.

The most fundamental pedagogic strategy is to employ narrative models for reading activity. The author, for example, might establish a parallel between fictional and extra-fictional experience or between characters' life experiences and readers' interpretive activities. This connection is made explicit by references to fictional characters' efforts “to read” their situations.⁴¹ Equally valuable, however, in revealing how actual audiences learn to read in the process of reading is a consideration of the external evidence documenting the writer's concern with historical audiences and with fictional techniques designed to affect them in certain ways. Although the writer's conception of his public is almost invariably low, it can suggest the strategies that might be used to appeal to the public without compromising artistic integrity. While such evidence is not always extant and authorial statements are not always reliable, authors' preoccupations with their readers can provide, first of all, a framework for analyzing textual features as part of an intersubjective process between writers and audiences, and, second, an impetus for considering the formal elements of literature, not as detached and static features of an artifact, but as active strategies in a communicative interaction. Viewed in these terms, realistic devices such as exhaustive description of milieux, repetition, and justification are means of teaching readers how to interpret the world of the novel. Progression d'éffet, the carrying forward of the novel “faster and with more and more intensity,”⁴² is possible because readers are increasingly skilled in interpretation and less in need of authorial commentary or explanatory “pictures” in the Jamesian sense. Critical practice should follow, as closely as the particular instance allows, the process of literary communication that it seeks to illuminate, beginning with a consideration of a writer's understanding of his readership or desired readership in relation to his perception of the nature and purpose of his art. This “reading” of audience leads to the “writing” of readers able “to deal interpretively with the expressions in the same way that the author deals generatively with them.”⁴³ Recognizing this, the critic can subsequently turn, in the manner of Fish and Iser, to the readers' activity in relation to textual features.

Because several examples of James's concern with the demands of his art and his public have already been cited, I will use What Maisie Knew to illustrate one way in which this critical perspective might be applied. After his disastrous venture into the theater, James is thought to have turned his back on “the beefy British public [with] its vulgarities and brutalities.”⁴⁴ Resolving to “take up my own old pen again,”⁴⁵ James returns to the novel with heightened appreciation of two dramatic principles: “the sacred mystery of structure” (N, p. 208) and the “guarded objectivity” (AN, pp. 110-11) of dramatic or scenic presentation. Critics understandably have looked for (and found) evidence of dramatic influence on the novels after 1895. Yet his experiments with dramatic economy and presentation do not mean abandoning readers to fend for themselves. While despairing of financial success, James still speaks of laboring for a “‘living wage’ … the reader's grant of the least possible quantity of attention required for consciousness of a ‘spell’” (AN, p. 54). While not particularly optimistic about his salary—for example, he writes in the preface to What Maisie Knew that he won't “go on as if this [caring about the treatment of theme] were the case with many readers” (AN, p. 158)—James does take some measures to guarantee a subsistence income. The novel is not entirely dramatic, and the reason lies, I contend, in James's provisions for his readers.

What Maisie Knew does not consistently rely upon either the tight structure of the well-made play or the scenic method of the theater, but these deviations from the new aesthetic canon do help readers to interpret the novel. Only the chapters having to do with Maisie's early life in London demonstrate the architectonic structure that once led James to write, “A moi, Scribe; a moi, Sardou; a moi, Dennery!” (N, p. 100). This early action can be ordered with mechanical precision into three acts, each culminating with a transitional scene involving, appropriately enough, a carriage ride or journey (Chapters 5, 13, 20-21). The first act (Chapters 1-4) documents the period of Maisie's six-month visit with her divorced parents. In the second act (Chapters 6-12), the duration of her stay with each parent, now remarried, is considerably longer. Her value to them no longer consists in depriving the other of the child, but in burdening him or her with Maisie. All guise of parental affection ceases, a situation formally recognized in the third act (Chapters 14-19). Beale and Ida reject their spouses, who form an intrigue of their own, with Maisie as the pretense for their relationship. This predictable action proceeds with the rigor of Newton's third law, as the narrative alternatively focuses on the parallel activities of each (step)-parent.

But when the scene changes to France, the artificial structure and mechanical action abruptly change. The action is concentrated and continuous, the final ten chapters covering only five days, while the previous twenty-one chapters spanned more than five years. After “this intensely structural, intensely hinged and jointed preliminary frame” (N, p. 257), James in effect begins the novel over again in Chapter 22. Maisie is in the same position in which she had been placed by the divorce court, this time caught between a single set of step-parents. But having witnessed a succession of mutable marital relations, she has “a sense of something that in a maturer mind would be called the way history repeats itself.”⁴⁶ With a maturity beyond her years, she actively interprets a world that had previously baffled her.

Narrative technique also evolves with Maisie's emerging interpretive sophistication. In the early sections of the novel, an intrusive first-person narrator articulates for readers what Maisie is too young to understand. He even apprises readers before Maisie's appearance on stage that “nothing ill” will befall her, despite “the ordeal that awaited her unspotted soul” (p. 19). Readers' concerns are deflected from her fate to the processes by which she survives; but more importantly, as Maisie becomes increasingly adept at interpreting her world, the narrator becomes less and less able to articulate her understanding. In crucial situations her “noiseless mental footsteps” (p. 221) leave him far behind. Thus he relays facts but cannot provide interpretations of them; the novel becomes entirely scenic. Readers, however, having been initiated by his earlier commentary, surpass their guide's perspicacity and follow the subtleties of Maisie's hermeneutical trail.

Both narrative structure and technique, then, prepare readers for the interpretive challenge of the last section of the novel. The principle of preparation is also derived from the theater. Agreeing that “the art of the drama, as a great French master of it has said, is above all the art of preparations,” James extends the notion to the novel: “The first half of a fiction insists ever on figuring to me as a stage or theatre for the second half” (AN, p. 86). The predictable structure of the first section facilitates Maisie's and her audience's early learning and reading skills. But just as her knowledge is not limited to the empirical input of her environment, readers cannot limit themselves to the judgments of the narrator. To understand Maisie's accomplishment, they must replicate her intuitive feats.

Maisie is herself an example to her audience—a parallel made clear by James's repeated reference to her efforts “to read” her situation (pp. 147, 157, 235, 272). But she is also an example to the late Victorian public and to the self-appointed moralists and censors among James's contemporaries. Insofar as it concerns Maisie's series of parents, the novel is an outright assault on Victorian sexual prudery and an insult to the values of family and fidelity. That Maisie emerges “a torch of virtue alive in an air tending to smother it” (AN, p. 143) demonstrates that the novelist's timidity and audience's offense at discussing such issues as divorce are mere “superstition” (AN, p. 143). Opposed to that superstition is the knowledge which Maisie gains, as well as the effect of the novel as a genre, which is, according to James, “help[ing] us to know.”⁴⁷

James's definition of the novel's purpose in terms of audience effect naturally suggests the approach of reader-response criticism, but it also underscores the advantages of including a writer's consideration of his readers in addition to and as part of the readers' experience of the text. The response critic need not, therefore, avoid the territory of the realistic novel as Mrs. Wix shuns France and as late Victorians quarantine the world of “‘amour’” (p. 223). While the “simple instructress” (p. 71) remains in her apartment and “benighted … Anglo-Saxon readers” celebrate their ethical and ethnocentric insularity, Maisie receives “new information from every brush of the breeze” (p. 221). Response critics who expose themselves to the realistic novel may not find there, as Maisie does in France, “the ecstasy of a larger impression of life” (p. 185), but they will have the satisfaction of a larger expression of their own critical practice.

Notes

1. Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1974), and Robert Alter, Partial Magic (Berkeley, CA: Univ. of California Press, 1975).

2. For a classification of the kinds of reader-response criticism as well as a brief description of their differences, see Susan R. Suleiman, “Introduction: Varieties of Audience-Oriented Criticism,” in The Reader of the Text, ed. Susan R. Suleiman and Ingrid Crosman (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1980), pp. 3-45.

3. Terms such as these are endemic, or perhaps epidemic, among response critics. See, for example, Wolfgang Iser, “Indeterminacy and the Reader's Response in Prose Fiction,” in Aspects of Narrative, ed. J. Hillis Miller (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1971); H. R. Jauss, “Levels of Identification of Hero and Audience,” New Literary History, 5, (1974), 283-317; and Michael Riffaterre, “Criteria for Style Analysis,” Word, 15 (1959), 154-74.

4. Stanley Fish, Self-Consuming Artifacts (Berkeley, CA: Univ. of California Press, 1973), pp. 1-2.

5. Norman Holland, “The New Paradigm: Subjective or Transactive?” New Literary History, 7 (1976), 335-46.

6. H. R. Jauss, “Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory,” New Literary History, 2 (1970), 7-37.

7. See, Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1978), pp. 27-38.

8. Jean-Paul Sartre, What Is Literature? (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1978), p. 37.

9. Clara Reeve, The Progress of Romance through Times, Countries, and Manners (New York: The Facsimile Text Society, 1930), p. 111.

10. Nathaniel Hawthorne, Preface to The House of the Seven Gables (New York: Norton, 1967), p. 1.

11. William Congreve, Preface to Incognita (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1922), p. 5.

12. Alter, p. xi.

13. Henry James, The Art of the Novel, introd. R. P. Blackmur (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1934), pp. 33-34. All references to the prefaces will be from this edition and will be cited in the text, prefixed by the abbreviation AN.

14. Umberto Eco, The Role of the Reader (Bloomington, IN: Indiana Univ. Press, 1979), pp. 1-10.

15. Hawthorne, p. 1.

16. George Eliot, Adam Bede (New York: New American Library, 1961), p. 174. George Levine discusses passages like this one in other novels to emphasize the realists' “primary allegiance to experience over art. … In adopting the technique of the direct address to the audience in order to justify the treatment of ordinary experience, all these writers participate in a cultural project—moral, empirical, and self-conscious—that appears conventional only in retrospect.” The Realistic Imagination (Chicago, IL: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 18.

17. Henry James, Theory of Fiction, ed. James E. Miller, Jr. (Lincoln, NE: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1972), p. 65.

18. Rene Wellek, “The Concept of Realism in Literary Scholarship,” Neophilologus, 45 (1961), 11.

19. E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1972), p. 99.

20. Richard Ellmann and Charles Feidelson, Jr., The Modern Tradition (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1965), p. 229.

21. Peter J. Rabinowitz discusses realism in terms of the closeness of authorial audiences, that is, the hypothetical reader for whom the text is rhetorically designed, and narrative audiences, that is, the imitation audience within the text itself. “Truth in Fiction: A Reexamination of Audiences,” Critical Inquiry, 4 (1977), 121-41.

22. Iser, “Indeterminacy,” p. 6.

23. See Norman Holland, The Dynamics of Literary Response (New York: Norton, 1975), and H. R. Jauss, “Levels of Identification of Hero and Audience,” New Literary History, 5 (1974), 283-317, and “Literary Theory as a Challenge to Literary History,” New Literary History, 2 (1970), 7-37.

24. Iser, Act of Reading, p. 189.

25. J. P. Stern, On Realism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973), p. 98. See also, pp. 76-77.

26. Stanley Fish, “Literature in the Reader: Affective Stylistics,” New Literary History, 2 (1970), 147. For Fish's description of how his thought has evolved since the publication of this essay, see the Introduction to Is There a Text in This Class? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1980), pp. 1-17.

27. Fish, Self-Consuming Artifacts, p. 1.

28. Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1975), p. 160.

29. Culler, p. 160.

30. Eco, p. 8.

31. David I. Grossvogel, Limits of the Novel (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1968), p. 47.

32. See, Susan Rubin Suleiman, “Redundancy and the ‘Readable’ Text,” Poetics Today, 1, No. 3 (1980), 119-42; Liane Norman, “Risk and Redundancy,” PMLA, 90 (1975), 285-91; and J. Hillis Miller, Fiction and Repetition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1982).

33. Rien T. Segers, “Readers, Text, Author: Some Implications of Rezeptionsasthetik,” Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature, 24 (1975), 21.

34. Emile Zola, “The Experimental Novel,” in Literary Criticism: Pope to Croce, ed. Gay Wilson Allen and Harry Hayden Clark (Detroit, MI: Wayne State Univ. Press, 1962), p. 592.

35. Henry James, “Guy du Maupassant,” in Theory of Fiction, p. 177.

36. Joseph Conrad, “A Familiar Preface,” in Joseph Conrad on Fiction, ed. Walter F. Wright (Lincoln, NE: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1964), p. 119.

37. Fish, “Affective Stylistics,” p. 147.

38. Riffaterre, “Criteria,” p. 157, and “The Stylistic Approach to Literary History,” in New Directions in Literary History, ed. Ralph Cohen (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1974), p. 147.

39. Henry James, “The Novels of George Eliot,” in Theory of Fiction, p. 321.

40. Walter Ong, S. J., “The Writer's Audience Is Always a Fiction,” PMLA, 90 (1975), 12.

41. For an account of the ways in which characters are models for readers, see Steven Mailloux, “Learning to Read: Interpretation and Reader-Response Criticism,” Studies in the Literary Imagination, 12, No. 1 (1979), 93-108.

42. Ford Madox Ford, Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance (New York: Octagon Books, 1965), pp. 218-25.

43. Eco, p. 7.

44. Henry James, quoted by Leon Edel, Henry James: The Treacherous Years: 1895-1901 (New York: Avon Books, 1969), p. 134.

45. The Notebooks of Henry James, ed. F.O. Matthiessen and Kenneth B. Murdoch (New York: Georges Braziller, 1955), p. 179. All subsequent references are from this edition and are cited in the text, prefixed by the abbreviation N.

46. Henry James, What Maisie Knew (Garden City: Doubleday, 1954), p. 142. All references to the novel are from this edition and are cited in the text.

47. Henry James, “Nana,” in Theory of Fiction, p. 135.