BOOKS
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of the kind unearthed by diligent scholars. Furthermore, it is largely the clas–
sics that are subjected to both the theory and practice of endless interpreta–
tions, while what the common reader reads are usually contemporary and
popular works of fiction. And these are read for what most critics consider to
be
pleasure, not for profound meanings. But here too many distinctions have
to
be
made between sophisticated and unsophisticated readers, and between
the alleged pleasure of both these groups and that ofwriters on the one hand
and academics on the other.
I am not aware of any satisfactory studies of the way people read.
There is Norman Holland's book,
The Dynamics of Literary Response,
but it
is mostly an exercise in the psychology of reading. My own experience leads
me to believe that most students who do not have a literary bent or ambition
and most "common" readers read either for escape or because of absorption
in
the story. Furthermore, they are influenced by television and popular re–
viewing which narrow the gap between life and literature. They tend to re–
act to the story and to judge the characters the same way they relate to
people they know, and to popular notions about "life," sometimes going so
fur
as to try to rewrite the story in their minds to correspond to their own
experience. This is not to deny that they get satisfaction from their reading,
but it is one that is distinguishable from other kinds of reading.
The reading of scholars and of writers is more complicated. Many
literary theorists, for example, often leave the text to pursue the logic of
their theoretical assumptions. The deconstructionists in particular are engaged
in
philosophical definitions and speculations that take place at some distance
from the experience ofwriting, and even of reading by sophisticated readers.
Writers, on the other hand,
n~ad
other writers, particularly the classics, to
grasp the nature of the experience that went into their writing and to ob–
serve the conversion of that experience into fiction. Both novelists and critics
read books in terms of their own writing. Thus literary critics and writers are
professional readers, and their pleasure is probably a combination of pro–
fessional concerns, and an immersion in a high level of performance, in
addition to the simple enjoyment not too different from that of an untrained
reader. But theorists differ from writers in that the former convert literature
into theory while the latter convert theory into literature.
Thus, though there are no absolute distinctions between the different
kinds of readers, there is clearly some difference at least in emphasis be–
tween professional and unprofessional readers. Deconstruction, for example,
is
aimed principally at readers who are interested primarily in theories of lit–
erature. The"common reader," if he exists, is the object of a more practical
type
ofcriticism, that emphasizes the experience of literature and is more in–
terested in the quality ofwriting than its hidden meanings. But such critics, as
distinguished from theorists, are, I am afraid, an endangered species.
WILLIAM PHILLIPS
