In the Kafka thread, Bobby said:
I'd be interested in having you expand on this. I don't see how anything but a personal experience of literature is possible.
Since the response is long, and it's a new topic, I have made it a new post.
I would say that a lot of what we experience when we experience art is not personal in the sense that we share much of that experience with everyone else.
It's basically the same as the question of whether we have any access to reality, or whether a "real world" can be said to exist. The simple answer, it seems to me, is that if there was no external reality which we perceive in an imperfect and highly mediated way (to put it lightly), then it would be impossible for people to interact with each other at all. Disagreements about that reality are largely due to imperfect perception, to perspective, and, to some degree, cultural factors.
The only sensible way you can argue that humans have no access to external reality is to take a very strong version of solipsism, in which you assert that reality as you perceive it is all in your head, including all the other people you meet. That's the only way you can account for the apparent agreement between you and other people on what is real.
Suggesting that the experience of art in general is a purely subjective (which I meant by personal) affair gets you into similar trouble and makes it plain that aesthetic experience is far more general than usually recognized.
So things get interesting when you start to ask what parts of aesthetic experience are general and why? How do you distinguish between a generally "valid" aesthetic reaction and a personal one? I think no one should call themselves a critic without having thought this through at least a little bit.
I think there are two levels of aesthetic experience; you could call them formal and interpretational. The formal level is nearly universal because it relies on how our brains process data. (There is probably more to it than that, but this is certainly the foundation.) This accounts for much more of an aesthetic experience than is usually recognized. The interpretational level, where we step back and try to decide what a story means, is where most of the divergence comes in.
That scheme is complicated by the fact that personal factors can interfere with the basic formal level of perception. I can't remember who, I think it was I. A. Richards, who started talking about the idea of an "ideal reader" back in the middle of the last century. I think that's a useful idea. It is impossible to be an ideal reader, but it is possible to be more ideal than others.
The best thing to read for this is the Shakespearean scholar Stephen Booth's latest book. There is a nice excerpt of it there. There is also an essay I published almost a year ago which I'm a little hesitant to recommend because I was working on a deadline and it needed more revision, but it might give you an idea of what I have in mind. And since it's there for all to see I might as well advertise it, I guess.
Posted by Alan Hogue at March 25, 2005 01:38 PMDespite a shared reality and a general aesthetic experience, our experience of literature, although not purely subjective, must involve the personal/interpretative view to a high degree. Take the instance of the first sentence of The Hunger Artist:
During these last decades the interest in professional fasting has markedly diminished.
How does the reader not experience this subjectively? Is Kafka writing of the past, the future, or the present in some far away land we've never heard of? The reader doesn't have to make a decision, but he's already wondering.
As the first paragraph continues, Kafka mentions a cage, torches, a clock, the faces of children, leaving the reader to fill in the blanks of what the cage looks like, how the torches fill the night sky, etc. This is not a failure on Kafka's part; this is Kafka inviting the reader to participate.
Posted by: Bobby Farouk at March 29, 2005 01:17 PMThe reader doesn't have to make a decision, but he's already wondering.
Right. "The reader" is wondering. That's the experience, in a nutshell, that is shared among most readers at that point in the story.
As the first paragraph continues, Kafka mentions a cage, torches, a clock, the faces of children, leaving the reader to fill in the blanks of what the cage looks like, how the torches fill the night sky, etc. This is not a failure on Kafka's part; this is Kafka inviting the reader to participate.
The difference here is that I don't think that this subjectivity is as great a factor compared to the experiences that are basically shared between competent readers. Of course no one will imagine objects mentioned in a story exactly the same way, but is the fact that I imagine a cage with fifteen bars and you a cage with twenty bars of such significance? I think emphasising this just overlooks the huge importance of the similarities between how people experience the story, such as the one you pointed out above.
Anyone whose evaluation of The Hunger Artist hinged on the protagonist's hair color would of course be wasting everyone's time.
It's possible to study literature as a human phenomenon and not a purely personal one. People tend to think that if you focus on things that are not purely personal there will hardly be anything to talk about, but that's not true at all, because quite a lot of aesthetic experience is not, in this sense, personal. That's really my point.
Posted by: Alan Hogue at March 29, 2005 07:04 PM