Theory and Practice 2. How Can We Help Students & Teachers Read Better?
Robert Crosman and Stacy Read Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily”
Context. In the first part of this exploration of theory and practice, I suggested that literary theory can be helpful in our teaching, but only when it creates dialogue and synergy between both. In other words, we should neither try to teach directly and mechanically from a specific theory nor should we let a theory remain unscathed by genuine contact with the realities of students and classrooms. Each can shape and modify the other and both become enlivened. For example, one of the most dreaded aspects of our teaching is the plowing through stacks of student papers, but if we read with the issues of Reader Response in mind, the task of grading and “correcting” becomes an intellectual challenge to observe and conceptualize the similarities and differences behind how students make meanings. A powerful example of this interaction is Robert Crosman’s article, “How Readers Make Meaning,” published in College Literature 9 (1982): 207-15. It is based on a comparison of two readings of William Faulkner’s short story, “A Rose for Emily.”
If you haven’t read the story yourself, you would find this posting more involving if you read the story before you read the article and jot down some of your responses. Having taught the story and the article together in undergraduate and graduate classrooms I’ve found that both groups see more deeply into the story as well as understand some of the uses and complexities of the theory than either would by itself—you can see if you have a similar response.
Robert Crosman begins “How Readers Make Meaning” with two antithetical readings of William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily,” and much like Kermode’s reading of the James piece in the previous posting, Crosman argues that “both are valid.” The article starts with a long response by Crosman himself, which reads in part:
The whole feeling of the story is of a mystery one doesn’t entirely want solved, something to do with male-female relationships, as well as time, perhaps, but a mystery one doesn’t entirely want solved. Perhaps because I knew what was coming my mind wandered, putting even further distance between myself and the disgusting (but fascinating) revelation of the “bedroom” scene at the end. But the distancing is there in the story itself. The time-lags, the mysteriousness, the indirection, all put barriers between you and the story’s subject.
Crosman registers not only his ambivalent feelings but something of his deeper confusions and disorientations as a reader and the strategies he uses to overcome them— “there were paragraphs I had to reread several times.” The passage above also touches on one of the cruxes of Reader Response criticism—how much of the “meaning” is in the reader and how much in the text—but Crosman does not stop to worry the issue or theorize about it; he is more interested in recording the experience in a more direct immediate way, before “subject” and “object” are conceptually divided.
Crosman then compares his own response to that of his student Stacy; although Stacy’s notebook remains in her own possession, Crosman recalls her entry in detail and her subsequent discussion of it with him:
Surprisingly, Stacy did not mention the terrible denouement of the story—the discovery of Homer Barron’s remains in Emily’s bed. On questioning, she said that Emily’s poisoning of Homer remained shadowy and hypothetical in her mind, and she had completely missed the implication of the strand of Emily’s hair found on the pillow next to the corpse. Instead, Stacy had written a rather poetic reverie about her grandmother, of whom she was strongly reminded by Emily. The grandmother lived, Stacy wrote, shut away in a house full of relics and mementos of the past. Events of long ago and people long dead, were more real to her than the world of the present, but Stacy found very positive things in her grandmother (and by implication) in Emily as well: endurance, faith, love. She even identified the frail, pretty woman with Faulkner’s picture of Emily when young: “a slender figure in white.”
Crosman admits that “in a more conventional course, I might have been tearing my hair over a student who so ‘missed the point’ of the story.” The name of the course in which this happened was “Response to Literature,” but I still imagine that the Crosman who wrote this article would now not have responded in a “conventional” way. In any case, Crosman goes on to give his response to Stacy’s response.
What I found myself doing. . . was to go back over the story and see how much of the meaning I had missed, how much there was in Faulkner’s picture of Emily that was attractive, noble, tragic. Deprived of all normal suitors by a domineering father, she had clung to that father, even in death; deprived of her father, she had found a suitor outside the limits of respectability for a woman of her class and background; threatened with his loss as well she found a way to keep him, and then she remained true to him all the days of her life.
Crosman found himself going back to the text to see it in the light of Stacy’s response, recognizing the selective perception of his own reading of the story and how Stacy could pop out the cube in an opposite way.
When I teach this article to our graduate students going out to teach, I stress this dynamic and suggest to them that everything a student says is data, both about themselves and the text. Crossman used Stacy’s data as the basis for creating a teachable moment both for Stacy and himself and to create a pedagogically effective response:
We communicated our differing interpretations to each other and learned from the exchange. I wasn’t right and she wasn’t wrong, nor vice versa. Nor did we emerge from the exchange with identical interpretations of the story: Emily will doubtless never be as noble a character for me as she is for Stacy. Nonetheless, each of us improved his or her sense of understanding the story by sharing it with the other. Similarly, I can imagine no essay that I might read on “A Rose for Emily” that would leave my sense of the story entirely unchanged, nor any essay that would completely obliterate my old sense of the story. Meaning, as David Bleich has so eloquently argued, is constituted by individual readers as a response, and is then negotiated by them into group knowledge. Readers, first individually and then collectively, make meaning.
One of the problems with most Reader Response theorists contemporary with Crosman is that they analyzed students’ responses more clinically, as revealing to the professor how students read without cycling those insights back to the students themselves to help deepen and reflect on their first responses. It is important to have the students write informal journals, but it is just as crucial that they, their peers, and the instructor reread them and use them as the basis for further discussion and writing.
But Crosman uses this pedagogic exploration to provide in lucid terms an incisive summary of Reader Response theory building on this case study to present larger concepts and metaphors.
Indeed, I find it tempting to picture Faulkner’s story as a series of widening concentric rings with the dead/alive loves at their center. As we move outward, we reach progressively wider polarities: the family (Emily/Father), the community (individual/group; men/women; older/younger generations), the nation (North/South) and the universe (past/present; life/death). But what (I ask) is true at the center? Those lovers on their bed seem to be a hieroglyph of some profound truth about life, death, time—about everything, in fact. But any attempt to pin it down, state its meaning, excludes other equally possible interpretations—which doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t interpret, but only that we should have some humility about the status of our result.
Crosman’s sense that both writers and readers tend to think and feel in polarities that sometimes are reconciled, sometimes not, is also illustrated from a more structuralist point of view in a contemporaneous article, Jonathan Culler, “Prolegomena to a Theory of Reading.” The New Critics recognized the use of binaries in poetic and interpretive thinking but felt that such binaries should be eventually unified or at least reconciled.
Crosman admits here that any reconciliation might falsify the text and that readers should confront the fact that each sees the cube in different ways; there’s no imperative or sometimes even possibility to “settle” one way or the other.
Another helpful aspect in the Reader Response approach that seems to be have been lost over the years is to locate and emphasize acts of reading within the text itself, as Crosman does in this example:
The narrator is himself a “reader” of Emily’s story, trying to put together from fragments a complete picture, trying to find the meaning of her life in its impact upon an audience, the citizens of Jefferson, of which he is a member. He disregards chronology, working generally backward from recent events to every earlier ones, as if seeking their explanation in a receding past that never throws quite enough light. Displaced chronology and the narrator’s carefully limited point of view are the two sources of the story’s murkiness, which leaves us constantly guessing about events.
In this story it is difficult to find a character to “identify” with or at least share some kind common feeling with—except, of courses, the narrator who is struggling with the same human and epistemological puzzles that we are.
Crosman’s analysis suggests the more general idea that when Faulkner puts within the story an observer or “reader” with a positioned and limited point of view he underlines and makes more reflective the position of us as readers facing parallel dilemmas and possibilities.
I use this insight also in teaching The Scarlet Letter, the title of which refers to no character or plot but the act of writing and reading itself. The word it most obviously stands for, “adultery,” is used nowhere in the text; almost every character is challenged to create her or his own reading; the narrator suggests “able,” and “angel and we as readers could add “Ann Hutchinson,” “Arthur,” “America,” “ambiguity” or “anything,” fluidity of the unknown, both in text and life. To structure this kind of reflectivity further in my classroom, I often have undergraduates read “A Rose for Emily,” do their own writing and discussing of it, then have them read and discuss this Crosman piece as one further turn of the screw. If, as Reader Response suggests, the meaning of a text resides in its transaction with the reader, we have to give our student readers more practice in reading themselves and their peers along with the text.
Questions for your comments and response
When I teach this article, especially in my courses on teaching, students often ask, “What do you do if a student comes up with an answer you feel if ‘wrong’ or at least misleading.” What do you do?
Conversely, how do you present students with your own readings without making them feel that theirs is “wrong,” thus helping extinguish their own responses in the future and/or preface their own comments with the formulaic, “I don’t know if this is what you’re looking for, but. . .”?
How do you minimize your own time in giving the elaborate kinds of response to your individual students that Crosman does here? And what is the relation of this kind of response to more evaluative feedback that might help the students’ writing in the future?