The Theory and Interpretation of Narrative Series
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THE THEORY AND INTERPRETATION OF NARRATIVE SERIES BEFORE READING Narrative Conventions and the Politics of Interpretation Peter J. Rabinowitz with a Foreword by JameS Phelai l OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS Columbus © 1987 by Peter J. Rabinowitz Introduction © 1998 by The Ohio State University. All rights reserved. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Rabinowitz, PeterJ., 1944 Bef ore reading : narrative conventions and the politics of interpretation / Peter J. Rabinowitz ; with a foreword by James Phelan. p. cm. — (The theory and interpretation of narrative series) Originally published: Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 1987, in series: Cornell paperbacks. With new Foreword. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 0-8142-0759-6 (alk. paper) 1. Narration (Rhetoric) 2. Reading. 3. Hermeneutics. I. Title. EL Series. PN212.R33 1997 808—dc21 97-31011 CIP The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the Ameri can National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. ANSI Z39.48-1992. 98765432 1 For Edward Ducharme My dear fellow, you have got it wrong. The play is a success. The only question is whether the . audience will be one. Oscar Wilde Contents Foreword: Before Reading in Its Own Terms ix Acknowledgments xxvii Introduction: Beyond Readings/Before Reading i PART L NARRATIVE CONVENTIONS 1 Starting Points 15 What Is Reading? 15 Who Is Reading? 20 The Value(s) of Authorial Reading 29 The Difficulties of Authorial Reading 36 Rules of Reading 42 2 Trumpets, Please!: Rules of Notice 47 The Hierarchy of Detail 47 Basic Gestures of Noticeability 52 Privileged Positions 58 Rules of Rupture 65 3 The Biggest Black Eyes I Ever Saw: Rules of Signification 76 Signification Defined 76 Rules of Source 79 Good Guys and Bad Guys: Rules of Snap Moral Judgment 84 Truth and the Narrative Audience: The Rule of Realism 93 Post Hoc and Propter Hoc: Rules of Cause 104 Vll Contents 4 The Black Cloud on the Horizon: Rules of Configuration n o Configuration vs. Coherence n o Basic Rules of Configuration 113 Rules of Undermining 119 Rules of Balance: Focus 125 Rules of Balance: Action 132 5 The Austere Simplicity of Fiction: Rules of Coherence 141 The Nature of Coherence 141 License to Fill 148 Rules of Surplus 154 Rules of Naming, Bundling, and Thematizing 158 PART II. THE POLITICS OF INTERPRETATION 6 Through The Glass Key Darkly: Presupposition and Misunderstanding 173 Presuppositions and the Ambiguity of Interpretation 173 Getting to the Bottom of Things 178 Popular Fiction as a Genre 183 Scapegoating Carmen: Reading Misreadings 193 7 Some Have Greatness Thrust upon Them: The Politics of Canon Formation 209 Selected Bibliography 233 Index 241 vin Foreword Before Reading in Its Own Terms JAMES PHELAN Starting Points While writing this foreword, I assumed that I should yield to the inevitable and title it "Before Reading Before Reading" or perhaps "Before Reading Squared/71 have now, however, decided to resist the inevitable in favor of the literal—and its implied challenge of giving a new spin to the common phrase "reading a book in its own terms." Here's why: As Peter J. Rabinowitz explains early in the in troduction, the book's purpose is "to explore .. the ways in which Western readers' prior knowledge of conventions of reading shapes their experiences and evaluations of the narratives they confront" (3). But much in Rabinowitz's exploration of conventions, I gradu ally realized, can apply not just to narratives but also to critical texts. Consequently, Before Reading itself provides the most useful terms and concepts to illuminate Rabinowitz's distinctive theoreti cal project. The reading of Rabinowitz's title refers to what he calls "autho rial reading," the activity by which actual readers seek to enter an author's hypothetical, ideal audience. This foreword is an exercise in authorial reading, but one with an edge. By looking at Before Reading through the lenses the book itself provides, I hope not merely to summarize the book accurately but also to extend its in sights and thus, paradoxically, sharpen our vision of the thing itself. Those lenses, I shall suggest, offer a way of seeing both the strate gies by which Rabinowitz has constructed his complex argument ix Foreword and the significance of those strategies. This vision, in turn, enables us to comprehend more fully and appreciate more keenly the con clusions, the methods, the purposes, and the implications of Before Reading.1 To start with the conclusions, the book offers three main theses: (1) Readers operate with a broad range of tacit conventions that sig nificantly influence their experience and evaluation of narrative. (2) This range of conventions can be usefully grouped under four differ ent readerly activities—attending to the most important details, as signing larger meanings to details, perceiving the text's developing shape, and finding systems of unity among the details. Rabinowitz labels the conventions governing these activities the rules of no tice, signification, configuration, and coherence. (3) The way in which readers apply these rules has political consequences because those applications are affected—again often tacitly—by readers' ideologies. The interaction between convention and ideology illu minates the politics of interpretation, especially such phenomena as motives for misreading and the dynamics of canon formation. To move from this general overview of the content to a more de tailed analysis of the book's methods and purposes, let us turn to an analysis of how the rules illuminate the book itself. Notice The key perception behind Rabinowitz's formulation of the rules of notice clearly applies to critical texts: readers give greater atten tion to some parts of texts than others. Consequently, the specific rules of notice he identifies can be applied to non-narrative texts with very little modification. Rabinowitz focuses on "two interre lated aspects of noticeability: concentration and scaffolding" (53), 1. In adopting this approach to Before Reading, I am choosing to get inside the book's workings as it appeared in 1987 rather than to emphasize my location in 1997 and so stand outside it and discuss how it might be different if Rabinowitz were writing it today. My choice of approach indicates that I believe the book holds up very well ten years later. Some of the issues that loom large in it—the need to shake off the shackles of the New Criticism, the need for canon reformation—do not loom as large in contemporary critical discourse, though it is arguable that they X Foreword that is, places where writers expect or direct readers to pay special attention, and the arrangement of those places into a structure on which readers can hang an interpretation. More specifically, Rabinowitz identifies three kinds of noticea bility. (1) Basic gestures: these include—listen up!—explicit textual signals such as outright claims for importance, repetition ("concen tration and scaffolding are interrelated aspects of noticeability"), and figurative language (these parenthetical remarks are as subtle as heavy metal music). (2) Privileged positions: these are "titles, be ginnings and endings (not only of whole texts but of subsections as well—volumes, chapters, episodes), epigraphs, and descriptive sub titles" (58) as well as key moments in the unfolding of plots. (3) Ruptures: these are of two kinds, intratextual and extratextual. In tratextual ruptures break patterns and continuities of style, charac terization, theme, or plot. Extratextual ruptures either transgress the social norms the text initially assumes or invokes, or, through implicit or explicit intertextual reference, modify or even violate established literary norms. The "shocking novel" breaks certain proprieties defined by the larger society; the genre-bending narra tive seeks to alter established generic norms. With critical texts, then, intratextual ruptures would break continuities of argument or style (I might disrupt this foreword by suddenly exclaiming, "Before Reading rules!" and then saying no more). Extratextual ruptures would modify or violate the conventions of critical argument, would revise or even repudiate received critical opinion. Attending to extratextual ruptures in Before Reading will mean addressing its implicit and explicit intertexts. The scaffolding of notice in Before Reading is provided by its careful organizational divisions: a general introduction and two parts, the first given over to narrative conventions, the second to the politics of interpretation. Each part is further broken down into should. I would venture to say that if he were writing the book today, Rabinowitz would choose different non-canonical texts to focus on in his discussion of the poli tics of interpretation—I imagine a text by an ethnic writer and one particularly illu minated by the insights of queer theory. But I believe that the essentials of his argument about conventions, politics, and their interrelationship would not need to change. xi Foreword chapters and each chapter into titled subsections. A look at just two of the privileged positions—the title and the introduction—in com bination with extratextual rules of rupture will illustrate the inter relation between scaffolding and concentration in Before Reading. The book's main title is deliberately arresting—and slightly, al beit appropriately, misleading. By 1987, the reader- response move ment had been in full swing for two decades, and it had produced books and essays on The Dynamics of Literary Response, "The Semiotics of Reading/7 Interpretive Conventions, The Implied Reader, The Resisting Reader, Readings and Feelings, and even on the question Is There a Text in This Class! Rabinowitz's title is ar resting because it indicates that the book is both continuous with and slightly disruptive of this tradition. It declares its interest in reading but identifies a spatiotemporal location that none of this previous work had noticed—and claims it to be deserving of a book- length treatment.