Finally! A reason why certain texts (anyone else have trouble with
Hemingway in high school?) escaped all attempts at my comprehension:
“The personal aesthetics of individual readers thus could be
grounded...in the nuances of their mind-reading capacity” (Zunshine
1098). This article fascinated me because not only do you realize that
when you read you are looking at a world from the author’s
perspective—meaning the author wrote the black marks you are
perusing—but you are also looking at the world through your own eyes, a
character’s eyes (or more than one) and their respective perspectives
of the world. Involved, yes?
In this muddled fashion the reader deal with more than one mindset at
a time (if you will allow characters to have a mindset) and sets of
intentions—at the same time, often in the same scene such as when
Zunshine presented the Mrs. Dalloway example with Richard Dalloway,
Hugh Whitbread and Lady Bruton in the drawing room which leads into the
confusing mesh of fifth and sixth levels of intentionality that the
reader supposedly draws from the text.
Now I have a question.
Could these speculated intentions of author and character be
considered “gaps” according Iser? The reader creatively (if mistakenly)
“fills in” the intentions of characters as exhibited by their physical
actions in the novel? This could particularly be so if the writer is
someone like Hemingway or Woolf who only give us smatterings of
physical action, leaving us to dig frantically for emotional responses.
Zunshine is a reader-response critic so supposedly attributing Iser to
her argument can do no harm and only spur more speculation and debate.
Emily Franzen
3 comments:
In the " 'Effortless' Mind-Reading" section of her essay, Zunshine notes that "we have cognitive adaptations that prompt us to 'see bodies as animated by minds'" (1094). Thus, when Virginia Woolf describes Peter Walsh as "positively trembling" during his interaction with Clarissa Dalloway, she provides the "body," or physical action, and nothing more. It is then up to the reader to infer how the mind animates the body.
This inference, I think, is essentially filling in the gap that Woolf creates. Emily makes reference to Iser, who defines gaps as the "blanks" in texts that must be filled in by the reader. The blanks may be between words, paragraphs, or--in this case--between the body and the mind. If the reader investigates this blank, he or she may gain insight as to how Peter Walsh's body language is "indicative of his thoughts and feelings" (1089).
My question is this: Zunshine notes that Woolf assumes that we will automatically read a character's body language as indicative of his thoughts and feelings because of our collective past history as readers. How do we know which readings are correct?
In response to Marcus' question, I don't know if we can determine which readings are correct. The different interpretations we form based on our readings are just that- different interpretations. The only way I believe we can go about determining which one is "correct" is by looking at the evidence in the text supporting each different interpretation. However, that theory has the potential to have no end, because the evidence one sees is almost arbitrary. We have no real limits to what evidence is acceptable; therefore, I see no end to this process.
However, I do agree with the quote from Zunshine, that Marcus gave and how that affects the interpretation of Clarissa. So maybe through these “cognitive adaptations that prompt us to see bodies as animated by minds” we are able to determine a rough idea of what the character is thinking or feeling based on their body language. And maybe that is enough whether we know which readings are correct or not.
I think that Iser would consider the gap between the character's written actions and their implied mental state to be a "gap" in the text.
I especially like that Zunshine specified that people fill in the gaps of a text from their own experience, whether they are right or not is besides the point.
I think, though, it is "our ability to interpret the behavior of real-life people --and by extension, of literary characters" to which Zunshine credits the assumption that we will automatically "read a character's body language as indicitive of their emotions and feelings," Theory of Mind stems from life and not our experience as readers- as evidenced by her example of Temple Grandin, who although she was able to read the same texts as the other students was left unable to fill in the gaps because she did not have the experience of doing so in life because she was not cognitively adapted to do so.
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