The incomplete sculpture

Reader-response criticism does not ask “What does a text mean?” but rather “What does a text do?”. What does a text do to the reader’s mind, that is, which ideas, thoughts, feelings, associations does in trigger. Needless to say, this allows a great deal of subjectivity. Individual readers may react differently to a text. This subjectivity has been the target of criticism from formalist scholars who think meaning is to be found in the text itself. They see as fallacious the notion that a reader’s response is part of the meaning of a literary work. Such an idea has been condemned as the Affective Fallacy. Both approaches, it seems to me, are appealing, though incompatible. Both approaches also beg at least one important question. For the formalists: How can different interpretations to one and the same text be explained if meaning is embedded in the text? For the reader-response critics: Why do individual readers come up with such similar interpretations if meaning is not embedded in the text? A rather nice image, which allows for different interpretations but at the same time curbs subjectivity is the one proposed by Adena Rosmarin. According to this view, a text is like an incomplete sculpture. In order to see it fully, we must complete it imaginatively. (Schwarz, Daniel R.: James Joyce: The Dead. Boston and New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1994: 125-129)