Aphorisms on the Anthropology of Audience

There are two key questions in our study of a literary text, or our study of literature as such: What’s the meaning? and What’s the use?

What’s the meaning (OE mænan, “to tell”)? That’s to be found in the intent of the author. What’s the use (L. uti, “to possess and employ”)? That’s to be found in the action of the audience.

The critical method of an audience should be contingent upon the compositional mode of an author.

By mode (L. modus, “manner”) I mean the manner in which the author represents things, his or her attitude toward the text, thus the slight inflections and subtle clues used to color more apparent formal aspects. It is what some critics call tone (Gk. teinein, “to stretch”), or the way an artist tweaks his or her text to make it unique. In either term it is the most elusive aspect of literary composition and the least standardized component of literary criticism.

Among other things, an author’s mode can be didactic or ironic.

In the didactic (Gk. διδασκειν, “to teach”) mode, an author treats his or her text as the answer to a question the audience might have. The author has the answer, so he or she teaches it directly to the audience.

In the ironic (Gk. ειρωνεια, “feigned ignorance”) mode, an author treats his or her text as the question an audience ought to be asking. If the author knows the answer to the question, he or she feigns ignorance, or pretends not to know.

Perhaps poetry (Gk. poiein, “to make”) is constitutionally ironic – as Philip Sidney says, “the poet, he nothing affirmeth” – but I think it is helpful to say that authors of the didactic mode resist the openness of poetry, while authors of the ironic mode embrace it.

What critical responsibilities does an audience owe to the didactic and ironic modes?

To the didactic mode, an audience should learn (OE leornian, “to find the track”) the text, or follow the thought of the author in order to grasp it, evaluate it, and endorse or reject it.

To the ironic mode, an audience should experience (ex, “out of” + periri, “to try or test”) the text, or observe personally, precisely, and repeatedly the way an author works.

The text of an ironic author should be studied as the scientist (L. scire, “to know by the senses”) studies the world, by living within it, first of all, and then by conducting experiments, some of which will produce unexpected results. When rightly studied, ironic poetry offers a unique opportunity to test out different attitudes and opinions without incurring the consequences that often await a bad decision out in the world.

Philip Sidney describes how poets create a “second nature” in their texts. For example, as Shakespeare is the “poet of nature,” his drama creates for us a little world in which to live – The Globe, as it were.

If poetry creates a second nature, this other world is populated with interpretation. We often speak about “renaissance literature,” but the real rebirth in literature occurs when the individual enters into the world of a text, a reader reborn as an interpretation.

Like humans here on earth, these interpretations live in the second nature of poetry, walking about, interacting, communicating, negotiating, staking claim to all they can, warring with each other, forming allegiances and dissolving them, exerting power and authority, and discovering finally which among them can peacefully coexist and which must battle to a bitter death.

Regrettably literary criticism is a war, all against all, but it is really a war in heaven. In the world of human being, mortality conquers all, but in the poet’s second nature, with its different metaphysics, an interpretation can live forever, and so one fights another, interpretation against interpretation, neither mortal but both irreconcilable with the continued existence of the other.

No more than Milton’s Adam could arm himself for battle between angels and demons can the literary critic hope to end the interpretive conflicts over an ironic text. The most authoritative statement on an ironic poem is a record of the struggle to interpret it, detailing how the text is open to altercation, who has fought for what, why and how it is they fought, and how we can proceed either with compromise or amidst conflict.

I am committed to formalist literary interpretation, but I am not content only to interpret the form of a poem. Rather, I should say I am content in the interpretation of a poem, my experience an available text for analysis, as is our experience and their experience.

Any approach that treats explication, by what route you will, as the final resting place of analysis overlooks something so central to poetics that its exclusion, whether prescribed or performed, is embarrassing and literally inhumane: poems are written for people, and the act of audience cannot fall out of our attempt to interpret the author’s intention. The author intends audience, and the ironic author intends different audiences to have different interpretations.

The inhabitants of poetry’s second nature, our interpretations, can be examined, across space and throughout time, in such a way as to reveal the natural laws that govern the world of audience. Since the society of interpretation in the poetic second nature is a personification, it requires the analytics of anthropology.

The formalist argument for irony encourages historicists to use the language of anthropology to examine the text as a mirror of tensions in a society, however historicist critics have not yet embraced the suggestion that the same irony also makes the text a mirror unto subsequent societies. Cultural poetics can and should easily become a cross-cultural poetics.

I believe the approach I am describing avoids the historicist tendency to treat an ironic text like a political instead of poetical document, the old historicists often seeing propaganda and the new historicists often subversion; and this approach extends the formalist reading that rightly recognizes irony but wrongly celebrates its discovery as the end of interpretation, which properly ought to break through the range of possibilities opened up by the ironic text to a more discrete articulation of a probable interpretation at a given time; thus I’m interested in not a new historicism nor a new formalism but encompassing both a new kind of reception studies specifically for the ironic text.

For the didactic text, reception history is about who gets the text right and who gets it wrong. For the ironic text, what is is right. I am not being optimistic here, trying to make whatever current state of criticism the best of all possible worlds. I only mean to say there is no wrong or prohibited interpretation of the ironic text, while no interpretation is ever complete until it is situated as a potential, not necessary, response.

An anthropology of audience can assemble a compendium of hypothetical and actual experiences with a singular textual moment, a catalogue built from a controlled variable that allows for the recognition of paradigmatic behavior and enables a comparison of competing paradigms.

This approach assumes a disenchanted ontology of meaning – what it is is what is there, not anything terribly complex, just interpretation – and I have turned away from profound investigations of meaning that try to articulate once and for all the ironic author’s intent in something other than the recognition of his or her audience as the moral authority of the poetic second nature.

I pursue instead a phenomenology of the ironic text that aims to examine what it does in time, analyzing its appearances in our personal and cultural histories as these appearances relate to structures of consciousness. The anthropology of audience aims not to interpret a text in and of itself, nor to search for the intent of the author, but to understand the interpretations of that text on their own terms, whatever their conditions may be and whether or not their claims are justified.

Thus the anthropology of audience marries phenomenology with cultural materialism for a new kind of reception history that is more than just the strawman to begin an article or the afterthought to end it.

This anthropology of audience is only appropriate for authors rooted in the ironic mode. It is predicated on an acceptance of irony in principle, and it depends upon a demonstration of irony in the text. I can imagine an anthropology of audience for ironic authors in the English tradition such as Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton, but it would not seem appropriate for didactic authors like Gower, Drayton, Bacon, and Hobbes. For that matter, it would be helpful to have an anthropology of audience for the canon of English poetry, since, as I have suggested here, its central writers all share the spirit of irony.

How might the anthropology of audience operate in the classroom? It would have to be dialectical, a text speaking to students and students speaking back, so the course focuses on making a material record of their experience with a text over time. In a course on Shakespeare, for example, an instructor can map the vast and varied geography of Shakespeare’s world by documenting the students’ differing interpretations of a particular Shakespearean moment, while students can then chart their own intellectual development over time by returning to that moment again and again throughout a course of study to see how they read it differently, and to ask what changes in assumptions and interpretive strategies bring about a revision in a particular reading. Give students the opening soliloquy of Richard III (1594) on the first day, and ask them what it means. Read the play in full, and ask them again. Give them Ambrose Pare’s Of Prodigies and Portents (1582), and ask again. Then Bacon’s “Of Deformity” (1613) and again. Read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and Victor Hugo’s Notre Dame de Paris (1831), and ask again and again. Screen Richard Loncraine’s film of Richard III (1995), and again ask them the meaning of the hump. Read from Norman Rabkin’s Shakespeare and the Problem of Meaning (1981), and talk about what exactly meaning is, and ask them again. Now have each student give a narrative to his or her intellectual history in your class. Whose interpretation has changed? How did it change – from what to what – and why? Has anyone’s interpretation remained the same (and what stalwart conviction on this student’s part has so calcified interpretation)? Now put these students in conversation with each other. Who says what, coming from where? What other courses are the students taking that have influenced their interpretation of the hump (this, I promise, is inevitable if they are paying the slightest attention to you and your colleagues)? As the students prepare to exit your course, what conflicts remain heated, and what can be cooled into consensus? After all this, students will leave the sanctuary of your classroom, whether they know it or not, having interpreted and in fact participated in the operation of intelligence, and they will understand the importance of its history.