In short, the reader could be wrong, as the experience of reading must be absorbed and fine tuned by the knowledge of reading. Not *every* interpretation (I prefer to say *translation*) is valid. The reader cannot simply read and see in the text whatever they want. What gives the reader the heroic power to construct and deconstruct a text is simply their knowledge (grammar, rhetoric, logic, codes, conventions, criticism) of the text, how much text they already have swimming in their"black blood", in author F.G. Paci's phrase.
Simply read any page of Finnegans Wake or read any language not native to you. The reader's responses will be quite limited. Having said that, there are great methods of "reading" or "misreading" that are creative and not subjective, that can be proven by repetition and even taught to children.
The way I think about this is that our subjectivity has a necessary place in reading, but there is a bad kind of subjectivity and also a good kind.
ReplyDeleteThe bad kind really doesn't believe in the objectivity of literature (or religion or politics or history or philosophy or anything in the realm of the humanities). And so a poem or a book becomes a Rorschach test, interesting only because of the way the reader projects their own subjectivity onto it. I've done a bit of TA work, and I've encountered at least some students who take this to be the case. And it's sad when they do.
The good kind of relativism recognizes that a poem is or should be a "world of delight", a place that can be explored for a long time, yielding more and more discoveries. Something objective in its particulars and complexity, but subjective in the sense that OUR particular imagination is recreating it from the string of letters on the page.
If you get rid of the objectivity, you are stuck in the prison of your own prejudices, but if you get rid of the subjectivity, you leave no place for imaginative response.