translated from HTML to TEI
Readers are material
beings, placed in time and space, history and geography, and the
material conditions of each reader have an inevitable impact on the
reading experience. In this chapter, I address questions of how our
understanding of literature may shift when we consider the materiality
of the audience as well as of the text and of those responsible for its
production. To increase awareness of the specificity of that material
audience—in contrast to the widely studied concept of the mass
audience—I focus here on two singular readers of one particular book.
I seek to balance what I can ascertain
about the readers against what I have been able to learn about the
author, and against my assessment of at least some aspects of the
text under consideration,
As readers, we each have some sense of our own position in time and space, often almost by default. As students and scholars, we are sometimes invited to consider the importance of an author’s position in time and space. As contemporary lay readers (rather than scholars), we may also be encouraged to pay heed to the author’s persona as developed in websites, Twitter accounts, reading tours, and the like. None of these readerly stances is particularly rare; yet it is unusual to develop an awareness of a reading experience that takes account of the placement of both author and readers. One reason for the scarcity of such an approach, of course, is that readers are multiple and largely unknowable in that very plurality. A book, simply by the fact of its existence, is designed on the broadcast model of one-to-many; to consider it in terms of one-to-one is to alter the exploration of its address in radical ways.
My aim here is to
explore how we understand a reading experience if we balance an
assessment of the text and a study of the author with an equivalent
focus on readers. Already, my articles are betraying my
argument. In my small case study, the text and the author can be
designated through the definitive article the,
but my
specimen readers must more accurately be labelled in the singular as
a
reader—in this case two particular readers, one of whom
influenced the other. The
reader does not exist, except as a
generic category almost too abstract to be useful at all—an audience
member whose experience is represented in an aggregate description
or even a set of statistics. Very often a reference to the
reader camouflages a self-referential assumption that all readers
behave just like the person making the reference. Unpacking this
careless generalization is one of the challenges of this study of
the readerly experience.
Here are the units of my study. In
Conventional studies of literature place
fiction in time and space (with associated cultural and ideological
implications) and often do the same for an author.
My project entails an
equivalent placement
effort of two readers. Obviously not
every reader of a book can be located in such a singular way, but I
hope at least to reveal a standard omission in the conventional
scholarly account of literature and to show how that absence can
lead to an imbalance in our literary understanding that is so
normalized as to be almost invisible.
Leslie began to knit at an over-sized sock, thinking
how her year was parcelled out like the year of a
department store with its August—furniture,
January—white sales. After the summer holidays her
schedule ran, October–November–December, getting ready
for Christmas; January–February, colds and at least one
contagious disease; March–April, letting down her
daughter’s dresses and taking up her own; May–June,
annual meetings and recitals
Leslie’s is a
pedestrian enough life for most of the year, punctuated by
blissful summers at the cottage, which are described as a poem
compared to the long prose of the year
On the Saturday before his birthday they set out. It was a radiant autumn day; looking out at breakfast time Leslie had thought not of orange maples, bronze oaks and the low-burning fire of scarlet sumac but of the fact that it would be a perfect day on which to wash the last of the blankets. She wanted to wash blankets, to make pear jam, to finish Sheila’s new jumper dress.95
To want to get on with one’s work is an honourable enough impulse, but as a reader I find this paragraph depressing.
Leslie is not
impervious to the glories of the northern seasons, however. There is
an ecstatic mid-book chapter in which she manages to get out into
the heart of an ice storm.
All three children are ill and
she has been housebound for many days, but Arthur (who had not
come home on purpose to let her go out since Miles was a
baby
She had not come out a
moment too soon.…Shadows fell long and sharp, painting blue
images of crystal trees upon the porcelain earth.…Houses had
become mere scaffolding to hold draperies of diamond vine and
trellis, flounces of crystal fringe.…She had collected ice
storms all her life and never a lovelier one than this
The children of the other people had waked crying at night and there had been no more blankets to give them. In the morning the loaf had to be sawn like a block of wood and Ruthie, running to the ox-stable, had frozen her cheeks and ears. Leslie pictured the ox-stable as standing where her garage stood and on each side of the bleak white street she saw the gray fence of forest drawn menacingly together. In that clearing during her first winter, one of the women had recorded her wish that the summer heat and winter cold, both so violent, could be carded through one another to make a proper climate. How many women on this ground had wished that?178
Such inner musing is the main focus of this book. Twenty-first-century readers may be frustrated with Arthur’s overblown sense of male entitlement, but it does not seem to occur to Leslie to do anything but take it for granted. Her frustration lies largely with herself. She does not read the ambitious books she borrows from the library; she does not practise the piano; she does not discipline her children sufficiently. The quotidian episodes march forward quietly, with some joy, some irritation, some delight in the children, some unspoken annoyance at the headlong way they pursue life while their mother picks up the pieces behind them, with almost no mention of the absent Arthur.
Several of these were
rewritten for inclusion in
Yet Leslie never does anything
intellectually independent such as publish short stories; the
autobiographical links fall short of a complete match-up. From a
contemporary perspective, Leslie’s life seems to consist of an
enormous quotient of drudgery.
novel.
The novel’s title
comes from a brief episode in the book. Leslie indulges in one of the superstitions of her childhood:
she stamps one hand into the other on seeing a white horse. Her
sons and daughter roll their eyes and she perceives in their
dismissal of her quaint ways a new world that is deficient in
the old magic. It soon becomes apparent, however, that the three
have their own childish rituals. Sheila suddenly stands still,
and then accounts for her conduct in these terms: ‘I was
wishing,’ she explained. ‘You stand on a rainbow and wish.’
She pointed to an iridescent oil stain on the
pavement
I love that
book.
My mother’s copy is a library discard, but it does not
indicate the name of the library. Inside the book I found a bookmark from
My mother grew
up in relatability,
a neologism that perhaps arises directly
out of current reading practices; while I am certain my mother
related
to
Family financial restrictions prevented my
mother from going to university. She took commercial
classes after high school and earned her living as a secretary. She
married young and was a stay-at-home mother like Leslie, eventually
with five children. In
In a perfect world, I would have had the
opportunity to interview my mother about her affection for this book.
In reality, the insidious destruction of
dementia was well underway long before I had the idea of revisiting
my own childhood literacy. I am very, very reluctant to put
words into her mouth, or even to speculate too impertinently about the
hold of this book on her imagination. The
parallels are vivid: the other
people,
one of the more evocative ingredients of
The lifelong love affair between a reader and a particular book is a complex topic, and not one that necessarily receives the attention it deserves. To what extent did this book support and confirm my mother’s life decisions? To what extent may it have consoled her for decisions she regretted? What it did do, I am certain, was provide her with some assurance that her own experiences were seen, recorded, shaped, and expressed in the form of a novel she could hold, borrow, read, and eventually own. She could stand outside these experiences and revisit them, re-savour the felt life in a newly framed perspective, feel the force of its limitations as perceived by another, sympathetic point of view—and perhaps play with its possibilities and alternatives.
The
thought her life and her writing
inseparable
The novel is an account of
a year in the life of a middle-class family, and
according to Anne Innis Dagg, is drawn almost entirely
from incidents in Mary’s domestic life
There
is no reason, of course, why a novel, even an autobiographical
novel, need represent every facet of an author’s life.
average
suburban mother. Be that as it may, she certainly made an
authorial choice to reduce Leslie’s options and to restrict both
her outer and inner life to intensely domestic
concerns.
No doubt some of the constrictions
are linked to the time and space of the era. Here is a scene in which
Leslie and the two younger children are late coming home: Arthur
stood at the window, John waited in the hall, both of them with the
restless and expectant air of hungry men in a house where the
kitchen is empty
I
should have put the kettle on but I brought some work home and I had
started on it
I remember
reading other people
in my city, which for centuries was a temporary summer
shelter for European fishermen rather than a permanent
settlement.
Most crucially, perhaps,
I had not lived a housewife’s life.
I did, of course, recognize the family dynamics that pulse through the book. But the picture of adulthood the novel painted was not one that appealed to me, though I certainly recognized it from my own life and from other reading material that surrounded me.
With books where I
was more closely aligned with the implied reader, I could
import my own experiences into my interpretation. With adult
materials, it was more complicated. In many ways, because I
was reading up,
looking outside my own experience to
sample adult life, I had to place
myself within the
intertext of other adult materials. My own childish
experience could offer only limited grounding to my reading
of placed
—temporally, spatially, and
ideologically.
Much of what
I do not
have enough information to know whether my mother changed her
attitude in relation to professional
adult reader
in the decades between my first and later readings of this
book.
In the other
people
—and that chiefly as a cause for regret, that
my education in local history had been so wanting that my
imagination had never been charged with any curiosity about
the past of my own city.
While I could appreciate the felt
detail in into
its restrictions and limitations. I put the
book aside.
In the summer of
fulfilled
woman’s
life.
What was
the problem that
has no name
As an adult looking back on my childhood
reading, would I have been so sharply troubled by
Once I
learned these basic biographical facts, however, I could not
unread
them out of my response to the novel. My readable
today? Does this book lend itself to
resistant reading only in anachronistic ways? How
difficult would it be for a contemporary young woman to
read this novel
compliantly?
In spite of the
ways in which her own accomplishments meant that autobiographical
narrative of frustration, even while
acknowledging the joys of being alive in a prosperous and
comfortable society. To what extent was she simply recording
a problem, even as she inadvertently extended her story’s
reach by showing little girls (never her chosen implied
readers) that the future really might be
dreary?
The iniquities for women of the postwar retreat to home and the
suburbs have been well rehearsed.
My first reading position as a child
interloper, outside the implied address of this novel,
highlights questions about the place of readers in our literary
landscape. Once this orange-and-pink hardback was
let loose on the world,
As a white, middle-class female adult, I
was not so far from the implied reader inscribed in this story;
as a child, I was radically outside some of the terms of its
address. My example is a very small case of the ways in
which actual readers can distort the singular direction of the
notional communicative arrow
from writer to recipient. This
account of me and my mother as two divergent readers is historically
not very important, but theoretically I think it provides a
significant reminder. Moreover, my own experience is bifurcated; I
was by no means the same reader in
Readers are notoriously hard to pin down and impossible to render stable. My mother’s unchanging ardour for this book possibly reflects her delight at her identification with the implied reader; for Canadian readers at that time, this was a relatively unusual experience, one she clearly cherished. But my own reading relationship with this book was highly mutable and always resistant. My mother and I were two closely connected readers but we never made the same link to this story—nor could we.
An approach that takes account of the force supplied by readers in many ways localizes a text through the individual connections its various readers make to its fictional structures. Yet in many real ways, that local life is the only existence a novel can have. It changes the nature of the scholarly relationship to that text if, in addition to attending to the prism, we also acknowledge all the rainbows on the wall. But making room for individual readers in our schema of literature is an important step to consider.
My
mother and I occupied the same space and time as we read
Even a
case study of two opens the door to a more plural approach to this
or any novel. If we confine our study of this novel to the limits of
carded
through
the lives of its readers. The significance of a
reader’s placement in time and space is conventionally elided in
much scholarly study, but that evaporation of the reader into
some kind of impersonal analysis is itself a fiction. Even as we
may have to create an empty set to represent the plurality of
potential readers in time and space, we need also to make
allowance for the located and specific nature of the scholar who
presents a
reading. No reader is disembodied; no reader
exists outside of time and space. Acknowledging the force of
that locatedness on the part of readers allows us to attend
properly to the dynamics of reading that make literature what it
is. Within the larger context of this scholarly collection, for
example, this chapter is unusually autobiographical; but I bring
the same history and experience to all my reading, no matter how
neutrally and academically I write about a
book.
Any mapping of a novel that tries to
include its total readership would be utterly illegible, an
irony of the one-to-many schema. Yet the novel comes to life
only in the minds of individual readers and it should be
possible to register the weight of that fact in some way. What
would happen to our scholarship if the plenitude of digital
space allowed us to consider a database category along the lines
of known readers of this novel,
for example? How would
such a change affect the balance of power that has for so many
years privileged the author and rendered interpreters bodiless
and placeless—a neutered stance that belies important elements
of the accomplishment of any work of fiction that successfully
reaches others?
By known readers of this novel,
I
do not mean simple sales or borrowing figures—although, despite inherent
limitations, such data would be of considerable interest if rendered
specific. (How well did
The material audience is
part of the world of literature. As critic the
importance of developing nuanced analyses of non-academic
reading practices and theories capable of explaining the
pleasures, politics, and social relations that reading practices
both shape and resist
With our massive digital affordances, we are in a position to consider ways in which we might mark the activities and achievements of a book’s readers located in time and space. Without belabouring the metaphor too heavily, current book history is indeed standing on a rainbow of varied and individual private responses to the materials whose details we otherwise record carefully—and if we simply stamp on it, the rainbow will dissolve into an oil slick of indecipherable and apparently insignificant uniformity. How can we acknowledge and make space for the variegated and transient power of that rainbow in our scholarly record keeping? Is it not time to take up that challenge?