Richardson and Fielding: the Dynamics of a Critical Rivalry

Chapter 1

Reception Theory

There are three kinds of reader: one, which enjoys without judgment, a third, which judges without enjoyment, and the one in the middle which judges as it enjoys and enjoys as it judges. This latter kind really reproduces the work of art anew.

— Goethe, letter to J.F. Rochlitz, June 13, 1819

More so than any other two novelists, Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding are placed in a personal and literary rivalry which began in 1741 with the publication of Shamela and which shows few signs of abating even today. The methods and reasons for the rivalry change with the times, but the names Richardson and Fielding seem destined for eternal contrast. Even when the rival is not mentioned directly, it is usually clear from a critic’s priorities that one author is being privileged, usually at the direct expense of the rival: the ghost of one author haunts the criticism of the other. As Ronald Paulson and Thomas Lockwood write of Fielding’s reception, “Finally, many . . . criticisms shade off into the criticism of Richardson’s novels, in which Fielding is almost always the unstated ‘other’ which helps to define Richardson (as Richardson is the ‘other’ in many discussions of Fielding).”

There is something to be said for not disrupting a critical tradition that brings Richardson and Fielding some attention that they otherwise may never have had. The tidy simplicity of the opposition is often a useful framework for teaching their works, making memorable (and in many cases perfectly accurate) illustrations of the eighteenth-century literary climate. Unlike the other famous literary coupling of Jonson and Shakespeare, which is largely the creation of literary critics after John Dryden, Richardson and Fielding did share a genuine personal animosity and repeatedly responded to one another’s works in print. There is no sense in denying the realities and even the benefits of the Richardson/Fielding dichotomy, or for that matter the interesting and neglected theoretical nature of rivalries in general.

What I do intend, however, is to demonstrate the history of how this rivalry came to be established as one of the most unshakable “truisms” in all of English literary criticism. The stakes of this particular debate are high for our understanding of what the English novel is and how it came to be that way. By surveying the recurring dichotomies projected onto Richardson and Fielding by eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century readers, I argue that this is much more than a trivial literary parlor game. Because Pamela, Clarissa, Sir Charles Grandison, Joseph Andrews, Tom Jones, and Amelia are among the earliest and most influential of English novels, readers searching for family trees of literary influence often trace branches of the novel back to one author or the other. Literary history therefore tends to place entire sub-genres and narrative styles into “opposing” camps, and this can often be traced directly back to the Richardson/Fielding opposition.

Moreover, as a reception study, I hope to show how we cannot on the one hand dismiss rivalry-based criticism as biased and unfair and on the other hand claim personal taste as the honest basis for all aesthetic criticism. Studies of subjective critical responses are sometimes seen as pointless and (at worst) petty enterprises: as Northrop Frye writes in his influential Anatomy of Criticism,

The literary chit-chat which makes the reputations of poets boom and crash in an imaginary literary stock exchange . . . cannot be part of any systematic study, for a systematic study can only progress: whatever dithers or vacillates or reacts is merely leisure-class gossip. (18)

It may be true that whatever dithers is leisure-class gossip. (From a cynical and materialist point of view, however, all of literary criticism can be seen as an extended exercise in leisure-class gossip.) What troubles me more, however, is Frye’s primary objection that literary chit-chat cannot have a place a systematic study.

Frye could have found an illustrative example of his complaint in Frederic Blanchard’s Fielding the Novelist: A Study in Historical Criticism (1926), an important book from which I want to distance my own. The fact that this monumental work has almost as much to do with Richardson as it does with Fielding demonstrates how closely the two authors’ critical histories are intertwined. It may be true that pure objectivity is an illusory grail, but Blanchard undermines his own credibility on Fielding by making no attempt to disguise his partisan antipathy to Richardson. Recounting a letter where Richardson gloats over the failure of Amelia, Blanchard writes, “In the following letter one can almost see Richardson drawing a long face and rubbing his hands”. He frequently refers to Richardson throughout as “the little printer,” labeling him as Fielding’s “evil genius”. Blanchard perhaps fails to see that he is himself doing the very thing for which he ridicules Richardson: making petty and personal digs that are irrelevant to the genuine literary issues at hand. In other words, Blanchard ends up adding to the body of “vacillating literary chit-chat” in the act of recounting it. Blanchard’s book is an excellent “study,” but it is not particularly “systematic.” It has static historical data, but it lacks a theory to make it (what Frye would call) “progressive.”

The Richardson vs. Fielding trial needs a court recorder, not another member of the jury. Any critical apparatus used to trace the evolution of the opposition should avoid, as much as language makes possible, taking sides for one author or the other. Otherwise it is only contributing to the situation it purports to analyze. The problem of “taking sides” is doubly problematic when we add the dimension of chronology. As René Wellek asks,

Shall we judge frankly from the point of our own time, simply adding a link to the chain of the historical process, or shall we judge from the point of view of the time in which the work of art was created? Or shall we even judge from the point of view of a third time or of all times combined?

Hans Robert Jauss proposes a solution, offering a theory of critical reception that is potentially more objective while providing a systematic approach to the analysis of historical criticism (or, if you prefer, “leisure-class gossip”). I will begin this chapter with an overview of Jauss’s reception theory and a summary of its main tenets, followed by a detailed examination of one such tenet — the modes of aesthetic appreciation — which I plan to adapt for its particular relevance to the study of the Richardson/Fielding opposition.

Reception Theory: Chain Reactions

Jauss’s words explain why his theory is particularly useful for an overview of the clannish Richardson/Fielding debate:

[I]t is a virtue of the aesthetics of reception that it opposes the ambition of solipsistic interpretation, and is interested less in reciprocal falsification than in the unifiability of different interpretations in which the meanings of works of art — yielded to us and always only partially concretizable — especially manifests itself. (qtd. in Segers 84)

Jauss’s theory proposes to not only take into consideration the past, present, and future, but also to tie them together into one coherent historical perspective on the given literary text. Past receptions are seen as setting the context for present receptions, and present receptions are links in an evolutionary chain that feeds and is fed by extra-literary history. The historicity of literature is seen three ways: diachronically for the interrelationships of texts, synchronically for the world view that is shared by texts of the same moment, and generally for the ways that history at large contributes to the development of literature (Toward 32).

Furthermore, reception theory does not allow literary history to make the common mistake of losing the aesthetic dimension; to the contrary, literary history is to be based upon aesthetics. Part of what makes reception theory a viable tool for a study of how Richardson and Fielding have influenced and irritated one another’s readers lies in its methodology of using subjective literary evaluations as the data for constructing a more-or-less objective literary history. Jauss views the overall critical reputation of an author as the result of a cumulative process of mediation between the work, the reader, and the social background:

The aesthetic implication lies in the fact that the first reception of a work by the reader includes a test of its aesthetic value in comparison with works already read. The obvious historical implication of this is that the understanding of the first reader will be sustained and enriched in a chain of receptions from generation to generation. . . . The step from the history of reception of the individual work to the history of literature has to lead to seeing and representing the historical sequence of works as they determine and clarify the coherence of literature, to the extent that it is meaningful for us, as the prehistory of its present experience. (Toward 20)

It is important that a reception study of Richardson and Fielding emphasize the ways in which past readings have become a “prehistory of present experience.” Reception theory’s alternative to the polarized views of Richardson and Fielding lies in the simple jump from synchrony to diachrony. Jauss provides (but does not emphasize) a catch-all premise that establishes one of the many thematic connections between German reception theory and American reader-response theory: the engine of literary history is located in the mind of the individual reader, “realizing” works in a random, unsynchronous order. When a text is seen as a “literary fact,” capable of being realized over and over again by a continually changing body of readers, the connections between texts are formed by the audience rather than by a chain of historical events. “It is this intersubjective communication that separates the historicity of literature from the factual objectivity of pragmatic history,” writes Jauss. In other words, why not read Richardson in contrast to Smollett, or Fielding in contrast to Mackenzie, Austen, and John Grisham?

To get to the point where the Richardson/Fielding opposition can be transcended, however, one must ask certain questions about the ways it is created and sustained. Wlad Godzich raises precisely the issues at stake:

What happens when we read? Do we bring ourselves to the work or do we get something from it? What sort of prejudgments do we bring to our readings? Do we expect, e.g., certain things in certain genres? Are we intimidated by certain genres, certain authors, certain reputations? What is the image of the author that we bring to a reading? Do we, as the reading audience, exercise some influence upon the author as s/he writes for us? Do we have immediate access to literature or not, and if not what mediations can we repertory? To what extent can we be manipulated so that we respond in an expected manner? How can it be determined that we will respond aesthetically to something that may not have been intended that way?

Godzich’s words were written in definition and explanation of Jauss’s reception theory. “All these questions, and more, especially those having to do with value, emerge in the forefront of attention as soon as a reader- or a recipient-centered approach to literature is attempted”. (x-xi).

Origins and Alternatives

In 1967 at the University of Constance Jauss delivered his famous inaugural lecture, “What Is and for What Purpose Does One Study Literary History?”, amid considerable political and cultural turmoil. The title was meant to echo Friedrich Schiller’s inaugural speech in 1789 at Jena, “What Is and for What Purpose Does One Study Universal History?”. The connection between the lectures is twofold: each proposes new ties between the artifacts of the past and the realities of the present, and each proposes a revolutionary new era in academic scholarship. It may seem presumptuous now for Jauss to relate “revolution” in Germany during the 1960s with revolution in France during the 1780s, but this was nevertheless an extremely volatile period within the German academy. A revived study of literary history was part of the search for a new political “relevance” for literary studies, the familiar demand made in French, British and American universities during the same period.

What made reception theory “revolutionary” among literary theories was its offer of an alternative to (or perhaps a fusion of) the two dominant theories of the day: formalism and Marxism. Jauss designed reception theory to capture what was best about both methods without reproducing their flaws. Jauss argues that Russian Formalists such as Yuri Tynjanov hold that genres evolved out of other genres with literary history being the story of innovation, change, and exhaustion of old forms; while Marxists such as Raymond Williams hold that literature evolves when economic and social changes alter the ideology of authors and readers. Formalists such as Yuri Tynjanov have an “almost purely intrinsic” view of literary history, and Marxists such as Raymond Williams have an “almost purely extrinsic” view. Jauss’s theory has elements of each: literature is believed to evolve alongside changes in society, but much of this evolution also has to do with literature engaging in a dialogue with itself. Jauss was reaching for a more accurate, practical and applicable method of literary history, one that is sufficiently free of dogma to observe and analyze the effects of dogma in others. The goal is to forge an interdependent relationship between the history of literature (formalism) and the history of the world at large (Marxism), without reducing one to the other or forcing literature to lose its artistic character by pressing it into nothing more than commentary.

American academics have given more much more attention to Wolfgang Iser than to any other single reception theorist. Robert Holub claims the reasons for this are not hard to understand in light of American academic concerns. Iser’s theory is not “at odds with the best traditions of textual criticism and close reading. . . . Speculating on how the reader reacts, filling in the ‘gaps’ as it were, involves little more than interpreting the text,” writes Holub. Iser’s primary concern in The Act of Reading and The Implied Reader is to locate the ways that individual readers create meanings out of the “indeterminacies” built into literary texts. Both Jauss and Iser deal with “the problem of what meaning is and of how a literary text conveys meaning,” writes Jürgen Schlaeger, with “Jauss concentrating more on the historical and hermeneutic aspects of the problem and Iser more on the actual processes of meaning constitution involved in reading a literary text.”

I have chosen to break with American tradition and emphasize Jauss’s theory rather than Iser’s, because my concerns with Richardson and Fielding are more with “historical and hermeneutic” issues than with “meaning constitution involved with reading a literary text.” I take for granted that readers are able to construct a range of meanings from Richardson’s and Fielding’s novels. I am not planning to investigate the epistemology or psychology behind how readers arrived at their meanings. Instead, I feel it would be more helpful (and possible) at this point to chronicle what those meanings were, why they emerged in their specific historical moments, how they have changed over time, and how they influenced subsequent readers. One of the primary differences between Iser and Jauss can be summarized in the distinction between “meaning” and “significance.” Holub writes that “Iser’s work is involved with meaning, and the production of meaning . . . [whereas] significance (for Iser, the reader’s response to meaning), a territory which entails sociology and history, lies outside of Iser’s theoretical terrain.” Naturally one cannot have “significance” without “meaning” (or, I would argue, vice versa), but there are already many excellent “meaning” studies of Richardson’s and Fielding’s novels. What I believe needs attention at this point in critical history is a new look at their mutual canonical “significance.”

Readers, Real and Imagined

From the point of view I have outlined above, it should be clear that Jauss’s theory assumes and contains a great deal of Iser’s. What may not be so clear to American readers is how reception theory differs from reader-response theory, and why this matters to a study Richardson and Fielding in particular. The differences between the two theories summarize, to a great extent, the differences between Jauss and Iser. Not only do Iser and Jauss differ on the ways that readers are to be analyzed, they also differ on the nature and identity of the readers themselves.

Iser writes that his “reader as a concept” has “his roots firmly planted in the structure of the text; he is a construct and in no way to be identified with any real reader.” Iser’s ideal reader avoids the messy reality of shifting cultural sands because “he” remains resolutely theoretical. Actual readers are complex individuals and they make even more complex groups. A detailed study of the individual and collective readers who have recorded their reactions to Richardson and Fielding requires a more sophisticated and flexible tool, one that Jauss offers in his book Toward an Aesthetic of Reception.

Jauss does agree that authors assume an “ideal reader” for their works, thereby incorporating the core of Iser’s theory into his own, but this hypothetical reader exists in an equivocal relationship with the actual readers. According to Jauss, “[T]here are works that at the moment of their appearance are not yet directed at any specific audience, but that break through the familiar horizon of literary expectations so completely that an audience can only gradually develop for them.” For example, it is simplistic to say that Richardson conceived of a single “implied reader” for Pamela. On one level he was writing for young middle-class servant girls in need of model letters, but on another level he was writing for specific readers in his devoted coterie of personal friends (none of whom, incidentally, were middle-class servant girls). Regardless of the original audience, Richardson’s novels are now at their second peak of popularity with a body of feminist readers who would be deeply alien to (and would probably not be wholly approved of by) Richardson. Once an audience does develop, the continued popularity of the literary work depends to an extent upon the literary tastes which the work itself has directly or indirectly influenced. This is not always good news for the author: “When, then, the new horizon of expectations has achieved more general currency, the power of the altered aesthetic norm can be demonstrated in that the audience experiences formerly successful works as outmoded, and withdraws its appreciation.” As I will demonstrate in chapter three, the phenomenon of an all-too-pervasive influence is at work behind the radical reversal of Richardson’s and Fielding’s popularity at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

Jauss and Iser may differ on their theoretical constructions of readerships, but there are other, more complementary ways in which they are working on the same larger project. Jauss’s theory can be seen as beginning where Iser’s ends. Jauss is perhaps thinking of Iser when he makes this distinction between two kinds of reception, synchronic and diachronic:

[Reception theory] must on the one hand shed light on the actual process through which the effect and significance of the text concretizes itself for the present reader, and on the other reconstruct the historical process in which readers have received and interpreted the text at different times and in varying ways. (Aesthetic xxix-xxx)

Just as Jauss points out the way his theory works with Iser’s to complete the whole reception picture, Schlaeger points out how Iser bolsters Jauss’s weakness: Jauss’s theory accounts for how the chains of meaning create literary history, but fails to analyze the dialogic ways in which these individual meanings are constructed. “And this is exactly the point where Wolfgang Iser’s theory of aesthetic response takes off,” writes Schlaeger.

“Realization” of Texts: The Continuity of Literary History

Reception theory and reader-response theory have one additional idea in common, an important one which I believe has not received sufficient attention in what few comparative studies there are. Both theories claim that a text essentially does not exist until the reader “realizes” it. Their conceptions of exactly what this “realization” is and how it works are not the same, however. Reader-response theory tends to use “realization” as part of the process of semantics and the phenomenology of reading, whereas reception theory uses “realization” as the linchpin for all of literary history. As a result, Iser’s (and Stanley Fish’s) “realization” is rooted in the deep structures of language, authority and culture; whereas Jauss’s “realization” is, perhaps more naïvely, related to broad questions of sociology and background reading. The “history of literature is a process of aesthetic reception and production that takes place in the realization of literary texts on the part of the receptive reader, the reflective critic, and the author in his continuing productivity,” Jauss states simply.

Jauss broke with conventional paradigms of literary history by affirming that the “facts” of literary history are not enough: they do not capture the non-chronological continuity of an individual’s reading experience, nor the “event” nature which makes a work useful and allows it to be “transmitted” from the past to the present. It may not seem too radical an innovation to declare that meaning can only exist in an unending sequence of present moments, but in the context of an evolutionary model of literary history, the contrast to static structuralist modes is clear. Jauss writes a strong defense of the aims of the reception-based approach:

[T]he best chance for success for a new literary theory would come . . . by utilizing the insight into historicity which is peculiar to art. Not the panacea of perfected taxonomies, closed systems of signs, and formalistic descriptive models but a historical investigation that did justice to the dynamic process of production and reception, of author, work, and public . . . [the answer is] to renew the study of literature and lead it out of the blind alleys of a literary history that was running aground in positivism, the sort of interpretation that had stopped serving anything other than itself. . . .

The alternative to literature serving nothing but itself is a literature that serves what Jauss calls “history at large.” Jauss formulates this interdependent relationship between literature and “reality” not only to make his theory more accurate, but also to recapture the humanistic function of literature that traditional “authors-and-movements” histories commonly ignore and political histories commonly oversimplify. Jauss instead believes that the most important way in which literature relates to general history, and the way in which I hope to use Richardson’s and Fielding’s literature in this book, is in its “socially formative” function. The literary work is not just received against the backdrop of social norms and expectations, it is perceived against other works of art and the experiences of day-to-day life. Because literature is not somehow separate from other phenomenological experiences, it contributes to the flow of undifferentiated experience as well as reflects it. Jauss writes that there exists a “properly socially formative function that belongs to literature as it competes with other arts and social forces in the emancipation of mankind from its natural, religious, and social bonds”.

The work itself therefore plays an active role in shaping the cultural norms that in turn shape its own reception (remembering, of course, that works need not be “received” in the chronological order in which they were written). Applying this to the history of Richardson and Fielding criticism, the two authors have contributed to the evolution of the critical criteria that are, ironically, sometimes used to discount their own novels. For example, Nancy Armstrong’s theory of the novel in Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel emphasizes the power that female characters are given within the domestic sphere, leading her to privilege novels such as Richardson’s Pamela. Citing the premise that “Fielding found it ludicrous to think that a man of such station would so overvalue the virginity of a woman who was not particularly well born,” Armstrong therefore assumes that “Richardson’s representation of the individual inspired Fielding to write two novels in rebuttal”. Armstrong reduces the quantity and quality of literary life to be found in Fielding’s works to a single vindictive motive. Who is to say that Fielding’s Amelia, however, did not have its share of influence over society’s expectations of women’s moral authority in the domestic sphere? Directly or indirectly, Fielding helped to shape the literary criteria and expectations of novelistic writing that are used to discredit him.

Reception and Author-to-Author Influence

As in the above example with Armstrong’s reading of Pamela, the seeds for the reception of a wide body of works can be found buried within one influential text. The authors of fictional texts themselves respond creatively to their predecessors, adding another dimension to the complex interactive process between authors, texts and readers. “In the step from a history of the reception of works to an eventful history of literature . . . the next work can solve formal and moral problems left behind by the last work, and present new problems in turn,” writes Jauss.

Jauss’s method in his book Question and Answer: Forms of Dialogic Understanding is to approach literary works as “answers” to “questions” posed by earlier literary works. The premise is not too dissimilar from Harold Bloom’s “anxiety of influence,” only less pessimistic and less overtly Freudian: Jauss uses the word “reconstitute” (101) rather than Bloom’s “misread” for what authors do to their predecessors’ texts. (“Reconstitute” has connotations of creativity which suggests authors rising to the challenge of their predecessors rather than sinking beneath their weight.) Jauss illustrates his theory with Bloom’s famous example: Paradise Lost. Jauss sees Milton’s work as a reception of, and poetic commentary on, the third chapter of Genesis, establishing “a new horizon of meaning for the words.”

Richardson and Fielding are particularly tempting for this kind of author-to-author reception study. Using the same model, one could produce an analysis of Joseph Andrews as a reception of Pamela, Amelia of Clarissa, or Grandison of Tom Jones. Critical works such have these have been done often and well, so I have no plans to “reconstitute” them here. These are reception studies only under a broad definition of the term (a definition which somewhat loses sight of the theory’s original revolutionary aims), tracing literary history within its own self-contained boundaries with little or no reference to a collective body of readers or to “history in general.” As a corrective, therefore, I will consider how creative writers respond to the Richardson/Fielding rivalry, but only in the context of a wider reception history and the social/historical conditions which permeate it.

The Recovery of Alterity: The Interactions of History and Aesthetics

“Aesthetic perception is no universal code with timeless validity, but rather — like all aesthetic experience — is intertwined with historical experience,” writes Jauss. Jauss conceives of aesthetics, the engine that runs the entire literary enterprise, to be no more isolated and self-sufficient than the readers themselves. It is inaccurate to say that reception theory is simply the study of how works exist in relation to their readers; the heart of the theory lies instead in the three-way relationship of works, their readers, and history.

The premise is more original than it sounds. Aesthetics is seen as a function of history, not a commentary on it, something that literature causes rather than the other way around. Jauss is therefore able to reconcile his belief in the importance of the aesthetic’s historical dimension with his belief in the importance of a non-chronological aesthetic response. In other words, an understanding of the original historical context of a work adds a dimension to our present aesthetic appreciation (which is itself framed by its own historical context). For example, Richardson’s and Fielding’s historical canonicity has become the chief reason why they are still read, and the fact that they are still read is of course the reason for their continued canonicity. Our awareness of Pamela’s and Tom Jones’s eighteenth-century popularity is certainly a source of their ongoing twentieth-century current appeal.

Jauss differs sharply from the New Critics who tend to reject historical understanding as superfluous to aesthetic perception. Jauss does not even consider historical understanding to be an option, attractive only to academic or unusually curious readers. Whether we may like it or not, or know it or not, historical understanding is what makes aesthetic appreciation possible in the first place. A literary work exists in a subtle conflict with its historical moment, and our ability to gauge the distance between the work and the horizon of its historical backdrop is the key to its canonical (if not artistic) significance. Jauss writes that the “artistic character of a work” is in proportion to “the distance between expectation and experience, tradition and innovation.” Texts that pose no challenging questions to their times — works that lack “alterity” — are likely to be seen as marginal, “popular,” or (ironically) of “historical interest only.”

There are two kinds of history: general and personal. Jauss means to include both. Works are written as “answers” to “questions” posed by history, be those questions abstract or intimate. A modern reader approaching an eighteenth-century novel, for instance, is free to read that text for the answers which the historical author originally intended (e.g., Fielding’s views of Methodism), for answers to historical questions of which the author never could have conceived (e.g., how Clarissa can relate to women being given rophynol and “date raped” at a fraternity house), or for answers to questions significant only to the individual reader (e.g., what Lady Western can teach you about how to handle your mother-in-law). The list is by no means all-inclusive, and should not be dismissed as trivial or facetious. Jauss believes that these are the reasons why we read literature in the first place, and that this is as close as we are likely to come in a post-Marxist age to a humanistic function for the humanities, which is to “wrest works of art away from the past” and continually pose new questions to which older works can provide modern answers. These “answers” to the various “questions” of history do not necessarily have to fall in a tidy chronological order, however. Samuel Richardson can answer Danielle Steele as much as Danielle Steele can answer Samuel Richardson.

Such a view holds serious implications for the canonization of authors in general and for Richardson and Fielding in particular. If canonization depends upon aesthetic response and aesthetic response depends upon recovering a sense of a work’s alterity, then the history of Richardson’s and Fielding’s slippery canonical status is the story of when readers have chosen to reconstruct that alterity, why, the degree of alterity they find, and the point from which they choose to measure it. The “newness” is often lost on later readers, however. Jauss claims that the elements of what was once a new perspective are still within the text, but once they become familiar, they require “special effort to read them ‘against the grain’ of the accustomed experience to catch sight of their artistic character once again.”

Whenever Richardson or Fielding are overtly contrasted, it is almost always because the critic is trying to “catch sight of their artistic character.” Reading the novels “against the grain” frequently means reading one author’s works against the other, using them as sandpaper for one another in an attempt to recover a sense of freshness or new relevancy. I would argue that since Richardson and Fielding have been seen as filters for one another’s work from the very beginning, their original audiences had an unusual kind of “alienating new perspective” that makes it problematic for us to find a clear point of reference from which to mark our “aesthetic distance.” It seems to have always been, and to always be, almost impossible to read one author free from the horizon of the other.

The Horizon of Expectation

The concept of the “horizon of expectation” is obviously central to Jauss’s approach. Jauss defines the horizon as a “historical marker and, at the same time, the necessary condition for the possibility of experiential knowledge — constitut[ing] all structures of meaning related to human action and primary modes of comprehending the world” (Q&A 197). Richter summarizes the horizon as something beyond the mere history of taste. The horizon of expectation is much more inclusive: it is a “history of all the various preconceptions — about art, reading, and the cultural milieu in general — which audiences bring to literary texts” (119–121). Furthermore, Godzich points out the way that the concept of the horizon distances Jauss from structuralism:

The pitfall that the Russian Formalists could not avoid, namely the separation of literature and life, is thus overcome, for it is in their daily lives that readers build up their horizons of expectations and it is in the same lives that any work-induced changes will have to take place. (xii)

“Changes” is the key word in Godzich’s sentence. The relationship between reception and horizon is circular: the horizon of expectations informs our responses to literary works which in turn alters our horizon, leaving us with subtly different expectations for the next literary work. How a work meets, falls short of, or exceeds “expectations” contributes to our estimates of its literary significance. For example, a new work which fits neatly within the preexisting horizon of expectation may be seen as little more than a commercial commodity, whereas a work which challenges expectations may, depending upon the extent of the challenge, be accepted as artistic or rejected as unintelligible. Rejected works may be rehabilitated, however, as in the cases of D.H. Lawrence or James Joyce. Richter points out that rejected or misunderstood works “may succeed in entering the canon later when the literary horizon has, in effect, caught up with them” (118). Literary works change horizons, and horizons in turn change receptions.

It is exactly this notion of “change” that Terry Eagleton objects to in his book Literary Theory: not that change does not occur in transactions between texts and readers, but that “change” presumes certain contradictory assumptions and happens in ways that reception critics seldom admit. “If one considers the ‘text in itself’ as a . . . set of ‘schemata’ waiting to be concretized in various ways by various readers, how can one discuss these schemata at all without having already concretized them?” writes Eagleton. “In speaking of the ‘text itself’, measuring it as a norm against particular interpretations of it, is one ever dealing with anything more than one’s own concretization?” More specifically, Eagleton locates a facet of “change” that is a weakness in Jauss’s new version of literary history: “It is not that literary works themselves remain constant, while interpretations of them change: texts and literary traditions are themselves actively altered according to the various historical horizons within which they are received.” To add relevant examples to Eagleton’s point, when modern critics read Clarissa they are responding to a text that Richardson substantially revised from the time of its initial appearance and peak popularity (not to mention abridged editions). Also, when modern readers refer to Pamela they are virtually always referring to only the first part of what an eighteenth-century reader might have known as Pamela. As for literary traditions changing, the clearest example is the fact that Richardson’s novels are now seen as pioneering works in the history of the feminist novel; a category wholly alien to Richardson himself, who was more inclined to see himself working out of the conservative conduct book tradition.

Jauss is aware of the difficulties that the “horizon of expectations” entails. It is not fair to reception theory, Jauss’s version at least, to accuse it of being naÎve or blind about the subjectivity inherent to the hermeneutic process. To the contrary, how we interpret the past through the eyes of the present is precisely what reception theory sets out to study and reveal. Jauss aims to celebrate the distance between two cultures, not repress or narrow it. Since earlier assumptions are by necessity already contained within our own, historical understanding is possible only when we are able to differentiate between what is created and what is inherited. “The work of historical understanding requires a conscious, fully implemented mediation between the two horizons,” writes Jauss. In other words, Jauss acknowledges that subjectivity is inevitable in works of literary history, but the critic should nevertheless lean toward objectivity by making that subjectivity a “conscious, fully implemented mediation.”

Identifying the precise parameters of a horizon of expectations requires that its analysis be “objectified” as much as possible. Pure objectivity may indeed be an illusory goal, but some opinions are nevertheless more objective than others. Jauss proposes a way that the inevitable subjectivity can be objectified. The general principle is, not surprisingly, one of mediation: conflicting horizons between readers can be transcended easier than they can be resolved. Like a true diplomat, Jauss suggests that there is always a level of shared experience behind any difference, and that questions of the subjectivity, taste, types, and levels of readers can be asked meaningfully “only when one has first clarified which transsubjective horizon of understanding conditions the influence of the text.” Extrapolating principles from Jauss’s account of the ways a novel constructs a horizon for its new readers, there are three things that we can look for in a text to arrive at the level of the “transsubjective horizon”: the familiar norms of the genre, the connections to familiar works within the literary-historical surroundings, and the opposition between “the poetic and the practical uses of language.”

These three levels of reading may provide a map to the “transsubjective horizon,” but they nevertheless remain primarily within the realm of the reader’s private experience (or “concretization”) of the text. Jauss is on firmer ground asserting his differences from Iser and the reader-response critics, basing his reception studies on the more conventionally “objective” groundwork of historical data. For example, Jauss provides sample areas of research that could produce a reception history of Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse: anecdotes of how busy people made time to read it, crowds at the bookstalls, inflated prices of new editions because of the demand, spurious continuations by obsessive readers, anecdotes of dramatically sentimental reactions, blow-by-blow accounts of the reading process found in people’s letters, sales figures, rapid reprint schedules, and accounts of people “converted” morally by the book. These are roughly the types of receptions I will be tracing for Richardson and Fielding.

Just because Jauss is able to provide an example of the research required to identify an objectifiable reception history does not necessarily mean that he is prepared to do the research himself. Jauss’s own criticism of individual works is almost always directed toward locating the receptions of the gipfelsebene, the body of authors who read one another’s works for source material. Jauss thereby leaves out the vast majority of “ordinary” leisure readers who have committed their reactions to paper. Iris Zavala points out an important player who is often left out of this and all other reception models, putting his finger on what is perhaps the single greatest problem in Jauss’s claims for reception theory as a new model for literary history: “We have so far not mentioned the silenced readers, those who could not make public their reception of other texts. We must await . . . those textual strategies that allow the initiated to slip into the borderland of what cannot be said.” In other words, there is something less than purely democratic about a literary history that limits itself to the study of only those readers who write. “The Murphy’s Law of reception-theory is that the most naÎve readers are the least likely to leave evidence of their response to texts,” claims Richter.

It is important to remember at this point that reception theory is based not upon individual instances of reception, but upon the chains of reception which constitute the collective fate of a literary work. “Silenced” readers may not leave written records of their opinions, but if their views of a work have had any influence on other readers who influenced other readers who at some point wrote literary criticism, then they have had their small role in the modification of a literary horizon. Works that inspire no commentary or cause no change in behavior are doomed to have no reception history beyond the moment of their initial appearance. (Jauss is proposing a new theory of literary history, not a new theory of literature.) Ideally, therefore, no reader of a significant book is ever truly “silenced,” and the power of influence is traced directly to the work itself.

Question and Answer

Jauss does detail one method for locating how historically distant audiences probably saw their contemporary literature. The last of his major books, Question and Answer: Forms of Dialogic Understanding, explains a straightforward procedure: simply investigate what questions to which the work is an answer. Although he does not cite Jauss directly, a good recent example of the technique is Hunter’s Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century English Fiction. Hunter’s literary history is structured by starting with literary texts and working backwards, investigating what cultural forces (or horizons of expectations) were at work in prompting the emergence of the English novel.

Jauss’s version of question-and-answer is more dialogic and interactive than that of his source, Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Truth and Method. Gadamer claims that the reader does not address the text directly, but instead addresses the same questions along with the text, bringing his or her own “horizon of interrogation” to the text. There is an inevitable tension between the text of the past and the reader of the present. This tension can be overcome by the question-and-answer dialogue between author, text and reader which “concretizes meaning in ever different ways, and therefore more richly.” I hope to emphasize yet another dimension of dialogue implicit in Jauss’s dialogic model: that of reader-to-reader. New readers of Richardson and Fielding respond not only to the questions within and outside of the texts, but also to questions posed by other readers. Modern critics of Richardson and Fielding are, for example, just as likely to be responding to questions posed by Ian Watt as they are to be responding to questions posed by Richardson and Fielding or the times in which they lived.

Types of Readers; Modes of Reading

The “dialogic” nature of Jauss’s theory may need to be clarified at this point and dissociated from Mikhail Bakhtin’s more familiar use of the word. Jauss’s theory posits that there are three types of readers who act in the question-and-answer dialogue with the text. For each of these three types of interactive readers, there are three modes (or “attitudes”) of aesthetic appreciation.

The first type of reader is the type mentioned above as the most frequent subject of Jauss’s own practical criticism: the gipfelsebene, or readers who are also themselves creative writers. The second type is the mittlere ebene, or those professional readers and critics who have influence without being creative writers themselves. The third type of reader is the präreflexive ebene, the body of general readers that serves as the market of production for the gipfelsebene and the unconverted audience for the mittlere ebene. While all three levels naturally coexist within any one moment, my own reading of the reception history of Richardson and Fielding suggests that they are never exact equals, creating a diachronic element to Jauss’s synchronic model. Different types of readers ascend over others across time, one type having more influence than another at any one moment.

The three types of readers operate within three modes of aesthetic enjoyment: poiesis, aesthesis and catharsis. Jauss borrows his terminology from Aristotle’s Poetics and is faithful to their original Aristotelian meanings. The first mode is “poiesis,” the attitude of experiencing art as an active process. Jauss describes it as “the producing consciousness, in the production of world as its own work.” Quoting Hegel, Jauss writes that the reader “’strips the external world of its inflexible foreignness,’ makes it into his own product, and by this activity acquires knowledge that differs from the conceptual knowledge of science and the instrumental practice of self-reproducing craft”. The reception theorist who has the most to say about the subtleties of this mode is Iser, not Jauss. Although he does not use the word “poiesis,” Iser focuses almost exclusively on this attitude, detailing how the reader actively fills in indeterminacies and creates (rather than “finds”) a coherence within the text. Jauss’s theory allows room for the other two aesthetic modes, however, and (perhaps more importantly) for the junctures, overlap and conflict between them.

The second mode is in contrast to poiesis. “Aesthesis” is a passive and contemplative appreciation from the reader, the mode of reading we use for admiration and pleasure. Jauss writes:

Aesthesis as the fundamental receptive aesthetic experience thus corresponds to various definitions of art as ‘pure visibility’ (Konrad Fiedler) which understand the pleasurable reception of the aesthetic object as an enhanced, deconceptualized seeing . . . a ‘disinterested contemplation of the object in its plenitude’ (Moritz Geiger).

The third mode is “catharsis,” the part of a reading experience that brings about a pragmatic change in our beliefs or behavior. Jauss defines this familiar “instruct-and-delight” mode of reading by combining Aristotle’s and Gorgias’ meanings:

Catharsis as the fundamental communicative aesthetic experience thus corresponds to the practical employment of the arts for the social functions of conveying, inaugurating, and justifying norms of action. Catharsis also corresponds to the ideal object of all autonomous art which is to free the viewer from the practical interests and entanglements of his everyday reality and to give him aesthetic freedom of judgment by affording him self-enjoyment of what is other.

It may initially seem that the three types of readers (poet, critic, and general) neatly parallel the three kinds of reading (active, passive, and didactic). Creative writers may indeed read “actively” insofar as their own works are part of a fuller realization of what they have previously read, and the general public may indeed read passively for entertainment or didactically to experience alien situations and “the other.” It is the second kind of reader, the critic, who seems most unaccounted for in Jauss’s model.

Theoria

“[T]he requirement that one evaluate for a mass publication with rapid-fire deadlines a heavy pile of fiction is not likely to encourage a stance of reverie and escape,” writes Richter. “The reviewer is not escaping the workaday world in reading: reading is the reviewer’s workaday world.” Professional critics read actively insofar as it is their vocation, but this is not the “Iserian” sense of the word “poiesis” that Jauss defines. They read passively insofar as they give themselves over to the text for as full of an experience as possible, but this is secondary to what makes them a unique class of readers. They read didactically, but it is they who hope to do the teaching. I am adding, therefore, a fourth category of aesthetic experience to Jauss’s model: “theoria,” Aristotle’s word for “sight” or “study and investigation.”

Jauss is unclear as to the true nature of critical reading. He states in Toward an Aesthetic of Reception that the critic and literary historian are “first simply readers before their reflexive relationship to literature can become productive again,” dismissing the critical mode of reading as ancillary to “the reader in his genuine role.” This is a puzzling assertion because it uses a sequential distinction as a basis for the analysis of reading, as if people are physically or psychologically unable to experience a text in two or more ways simultaneously. The elevation of one kind of reception as being more “genuine” than another also seems contradictory to Jauss’s empirical aims. Jauss cites Walther Bulst saying “no text was ever written to be read and interpreted philologically by philologists,” but I see no reason why such a reading should not be valid. (There are certainly many contemporary works of literature that seem to court critical readings by literary theorists, and for generations books have been written with an eye toward “pleasing the critics.”) Later in the same section of Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, Jauss writes that “it is only through the process of its mediation that the work enters into the changing horizon-of-experience,” bringing about the “perpetual inversion . . . from simple reception to critical understanding” that is the essence of a reception-based literary history. Who “mediates” literature and works toward “critical understanding” more directly than professional critics and academics? I therefore intend no contradiction or insult to Jauss by asserting that the critical mode of reading be given equal standing, even at times priority, as a valid mode of appreciation and reception.

The theoria mode — which I am defining as “reading for insight, understanding, or professional purposes” — also accounts for two other omissions in Jauss’s theory, one minor and one major. The minor omission is the failure to discuss readers (professional or otherwise) who read non-literary texts, that body of publications that make up the vast majority of the body of the printed word. Jauss does not mention texts such as instruction manuals, news magazines, medical journals, biographies, military histories, etc. The omission is relatively minor because Jauss claims only to advance a theory of literary history based upon a certain approach of aesthetics, not a theory of mass communication in general. Even so, there is no reason why some readers should not be able to find a personally meaningful aesthetic value in any of these genres which may effect their world view more concretely than any poem or novel. There is certainly an “art” to writing a clear, creative, and well-designed cookbook, for example, which is read primarily for information but entertains and inspires nevertheless. This is one reason why the theoria mode, while dealing with the potentially dry concerns of insight and understanding, nevertheless remains alongside Jauss’s categories of aesthetic appreciation.

Politics, Conflict, and Domination

The second and more important omission in Jauss’s categories of aesthetics is one that several readers have singled out as the greatest single weakness in reception theory overall: the absence of a political dimension. “Without a model of society or history, non-Marxist advocates of reception have trouble steering a course between a complete relativity and an uncritical legitimation of tradition,” writes Holub. Jauss’s general argument in Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutics is that the aesthetic function of pleasure makes the text resist ideological determination. As we have seen, however, Jauss also believes that “it is only through the process of its mediation that the work enters into the changing horizon-of-experience.” In today’s critical climate it is difficult to accept that any kind of mediation is free from a political dimension pushing the work toward some kind of ideological determination. The theoria mode of aesthetic appreciation allows room for the political dimension, as reading for knowledge is never a wholly neutral process.

When critics approach a text, they know roughly what kind of insight they expect or want to prioritize. A critic reading a text with a self-conscious feminist identification, for example, will find in that text some kind of insight into feminist issues. (Catharsis allows the work to bring a new ideology to the reader; theoria allows the reader to bring a new ideology to the work.) Ideology is not simply an academic issue, however, as the political attraction or repugnancy of a text is inextricably bound up in a critic’s aesthetic appreciations. There is no clearer proof of this than the fascinating history of the moral criticism of Fielding and Richardson. “It contains such a surprising variety of nature, wit, morality, and good sense, as is scarcely to be met with in any one composition, and there is such a spirit of benevolence runs through the whole, as I think renders it peculiarly charming,” writes Elizabeth Carter of Joseph Andrews in 1743. “It must surely be a marvelous wrongheadedness and perplexity of understanding that can make any one consider this complete satire as a very immoral thing.”

The polarized, political rhetoric that marks the opposition of Richardson and Fielding from their day to this suggests another necessary modification to Jauss’s paradigm. Jauss writes that his three modes of aesthetic pleasure “are not to be conceived hierarchically, as a structure of layers but as a nexus of independent functions.” A study of readers themselves, at least the highly-motivated ones of Richardson and Fielding, suggests otherwise. If reception-based literary history is to be truly based upon the collective judgments of the readers rather than the individual judgments of the trained historian, then we must allow that readers are seldom as fair-minded and judicious about acknowledging that others’ aesthetic appreciations are just as valid as their own. Richardson’s and Fielding’s audience is among the most hierarchically-thinking body of readers in the history of the novel. Aesthesis, poiesis, catharsis, and theoria may be a network of independent functions, but they conflict more often than they cooperate.

Tracing the reception history of a dichotomized pair of authors and their opinionated readers requires a methodology that can identify which readers stand on which side of the boundary, when the majority is on what side and why, and who is sitting in the middle. Richter writes that Jauss’s aesthetic modes are “dialectical alternatives” and the “shifting of the audience’s motivation for reading from one of these alternatives to another is one of the chief causes of literary change.” As the critical history of Richardson and Fielding is so polarized, one author being read constantly against the grain of the other, it is useful to loosely categorize readers’ aesthetic modes as being as dialectical as the Richardson/Fielding opposition itself. In other words, when one mode of reading leads to an aesthetic appreciation of one author, another mode of reading usually works to simultaneously denigrate the other author.

As an example of this dialectical approach, consider the following passage from the anonymous Critical Remarks on Sir Charles Grandison, Clarissa, and Pamela (1754):

Grandison’s benevolence has something showy and ostentatious in it; nothing in short of that graceful and beautiful nature which appears in Fielding’s Allworthy. . . . To conclude [addressing Richardson], I think your writings have corrupted our language and our taste; that the composition of them all, except Clarissa, is bad; and that they all, particularly that [Clarissa], have a manifest tendency to corrupt morals. (18–19)

The reader is obviously a type-two reader, a professional critic, as general readers rarely go to the trouble of publishing entire works of literary criticism. Fielding is privileged because his character shows “graceful and beautiful nature,” whereas Richardson’s characters “have a manifest tendency to corrupt morals.” Appreciation of “grace” and “beauty” in Allworthy’s nature is a passive mode of appreciation, while concern for the integrity of the English language and the purity of British morality is a socially active and pragmatic mode of appreciation. In Jauss’s terms, therefore, the Fielding/Richardson opposition for this mittlere ebene falls most readily into the aesthesis/catharsis opposition.

Taking my cue from Richter’s observation, I will trace the turning points in the predominantly British and American reception history of Richardson and Fielding by documenting which type of reader transitions to and from which mode of reading. (Clearly it is better to think of these “modes” as orientations rather than categorical imperatives. There are few perfect examples of each mode, and I will make an effort to value clarity over the imposition of artificial structures.) Different types of readers and reading were clearly dominant at different periods. My results tend to validate Levin Schücking’s argument in The Sociology of Literary Taste that opinion does not really evolve; rather, one body of readers becomes dominant over another body and received literary “taste” changes accordingly. It is therefore a mistake to look too hard for a unified horizon of expectation (or “spirit of the age”), as there are really only differing bodies of readers: “What happens is not as a rule that a taste is modified, but that other persons become the advocates of a new taste. . . . Only constancy of the social structure guarantees a certain constancy of taste.” Because shifts between dominating bodies of readers naturally affect the literary horizons of expectation that are used for and against Richardson and Fielding, I will devote a chapter to each major critical era in the debate. Shifts in who controls the discourse of reception fall coincidentally and conveniently into the rough parameters of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. Generally speaking, the most articulate readership of Richardson and Fielding in the twentieth century is the professional literary critic. In the nineteenth century, it is the creative writer.

In the eighteenth century, as the next chapter illustrates, the “general readers” for whom Richardson’s and Fielding’s novels were carefully tailored naturally dominate the critical landscape. The nature of that landscape, however, rapidly became more volatile than either Richardson or Fielding could have anticipated.