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PARTISAN REVIEW
that only some linguistic or rhetorical features are actually perceived
and finds in criticism a record of which these are for the most
competent readers . Hans Robert Jauss conducts historical research into
readers ' responses as they vary over time. This is not an exhaustive or
neat classification of current varieties. To my mind, the important
division is between the introspected subjectivity of an actual, empirical
reader and any rhetorical projection of an "implied" reader out of the
text itself. Only the former decisively breaks with New Criticism. I will
therefore concentrate on Norman Holland, whose significance lies
precisely in showing what happens when you pass over the barrier
to
subjectivity set up by objective rhetorical ana lysis.
Holland presents his theory in two books,
Poems in Persons: An
Introduction to the Psychoanalysis of Literature
(1973 ) and
Five
Readers Reading
(1975). He confesses his early fascination with ew
Criticism, which he gave up because he kept running up against one
fact: "Wherever one exchanges critical interpretations-in the class–
room, learned journals, literary quarterlies, professional meetings, or
casual conversation - one finds that different readers read differently
and there seems
to
be no way of laying the differences to rest."
Psychoanalysis seemed to Holland the richest and most promising
approach to the variety subjectivity generates.
It
teaches us two things
about the "reader": he is an organism in quest "for pleasure in
response to the multiple demands on the ego"; and this quest is shaped
and controlled by an "identity theme." The "identity theme" is "the
invariant that one can abstract from all of an individual's behavior."
It
"defines the organism's criterion for acceptab le and unacceptable
solutions" to his quest for pleasure. The reader is thus a pleasure seeker
limited by an invariant identity theme. In encountering a story-or
indeed any reality-the reader admits into his psyche "only what
precisely matches" his defenses. Once admitted, the "story becomes
swept up in the general press every human being has toward gratifica–
tion." Elaborated in wish-fulfi lling fantasies which are characteristic
for the individual, the fantasized story is then transformed by "higher"
ego functions into a synthesized intellectual product which is, again,
characteristic for this particular ego and pleasing to it. Holland
concludes, "The individual (considered as the continuing creator of
variations on an identity theme) relates to the world as he does
to
a
poem or a story: he uses its physical reality as grist with which to re–
create himself, that is,
to
make yet another variation in his single,
enduring identi ty. "
Holland's is, I think, one of many efforts to boost the private
