Ika Willis, University of Melbourne

When my father died, we put him in the ground.

When my father died, it was like a whole library burned down.

Laurie Anderson, ‘World Without End’

I.

Books were always the connection between my father and me. He read me J. D. Salinger’s short stories. He fed me Wodehouse and Shakespeare. His favourite Wodehouse story was ‘Lord Emsworth and the Girl-Friend’, set at Blandings Castle on the day it opens its grounds to the schoolchildren of Blandings Parva for their annual treat: the castle’s owner, Lord Emsworth, forges an unlikely alliance with a small working-class girl called Gladys against the forces of conformity and uncomfortable clothing embodied by Emsworth’s sister/antagonist Constance. My dad, who had gone to boarding schools and Oxford University on scholarships, was both Lord Emsworth and Gladys: a gentle, unworldly, inconstant man lost, and quietly resentful, in an upper-class milieu, and a small angry working-class kid.

I could read when I was three. I read The Hobbit when I was five and Pride and Prejudice when I was eight and Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights when I was ten and when I was sixteen I went to see Macbeth on my own because it was a play my father and I had read together, and now he was thousands of miles away and I was at boarding school myself. (No, I didn’t understand Pride and Prejudice when I was eight, but I did understand what counted as ‘reading’ to my dad, who was never very clear on the difference between adults and children – or perhaps it was that he never came to terms with the irritating tendency of children not to be adults.)

So I was never too young for most books, but there were a few that my father always said I mustn’t read till I was sixteen, or eighteen; that I wouldn’t understand until I was older. Three of those books have a particular memory-frisson around them, and they formed a strange set in my mind: King Lear; William Styron’s Holocaust novel Sophie’s Choice; and the less well-known erotic-literary-horror novel The Girl in a Swing, one of the few books about humans by Richard ‘Watership Down’ Adams. The Girl in a Swing is about the romance between an uptight Englishman, Alan Desland, and a Danish woman, Karin Forster, who is (perhaps literally) a sex goddess.

I read them all some time in my teens. They were pretty different as books and they all landed differently. King Lear is awesome, obviously, and is now deeply assimilated into my mental architecture. The Girl in A Swing is a great book for a teenager learning how to read critically: it’s full of subtle connections and hidden meanings and Greek puns that you can spot excitedly and proudly underline. Sophie’s Choice is a misogynistic piece of shit.

II.

Within days of my father’s death in 2011, when I was thirty-six, I found out that my mother was not his first wife, but his third, and I was not his second child, but his fourth, and I realised what these books have in common: they are all about parents who abandon – or, in the case of The Girl in a Swing, murder – a child. Cordelia; Eva Zawistowska; Karin Forster’s unnamed daughter. This was what I would always be too young to be told.

III.

Because of the unliterary, contingent events of my father’s life, these books came together in 2011 to form a tiny genre, like the ‘women-in-pain books’ that ‘became a routine part of the… generic mapping of modern literature’ for the Leisure Learning Group in Houston studied in the 1980s by Elizabeth Long (2003: 132), or the books themed around risk that cluster together in the library borrowing records of settlers in early twentieth-century Lambton, New South Wales (Lamond 2014).

We read texts in relation to the conventions of their genre: the theorist and literary critic E. D. Hirsch goes so far as to say that ‘all understanding of verbal meaning is necessarily genre-bound’ (76). Genre works like the screen or filter that Carlo Ginzburg writes about in his historical exploration of the reading practices of a sixteenth-century miller and heretic, Menocchio: ‘a screen that he unconsciously placed between himself and the printed page: a filter that emphasized certain words while obscuring others’ (1980: 33). Ginzburg sees this filter as a ‘distortion’ or a misreading of the ‘text itself’, but Tony Bennett (1983) sees it as a generative process, a making-visible of a potential in the text, like the multispectral imaging that enables us to read obscured words in medieval or ancient manuscripts. Or like Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes, which cuts out a new story from the words of Bruno Schulz’s The Street of Crocodiles.  

I see it that way too.

Filtered through each other, then, the three books my father asked me not to read, in case I misunderstood, make visible a certain set of conventions for this microgenre. For example: the person who abandons the child is a tragic hero. It is their suffering we focus on. (The novel is called Sophie’s Choice, not Eva’s Death.) The child’s abandonment comes about because of huge, political forces: the dissolution of a kingdom, a genocide. In one book the reason seems smaller, it’s true: in The Girl in a Swing, Karin murders her daughter because of a throwaway remark that Alan makes about being less than comfortable with the idea of marrying someone with a child. But Adams scales up the action – makes it primal, even cosmic – through the novel’s supernatural elements which suggest, among other things, that Karin is an incarnation of a goddess of sex in all its destructive power: Aphrodite, or, increasingly, as the book goes on, Kali.

IV.

This is a paradigmatically ‘wrong’ way to read. Conspiracist, dehistoricised, assigning agency and meaning to the wrong person, I read these novels, this Shakespeare tragedy, as messages from my father to me. But it’s also one of the ways we do read: books reach us (via recommendations, gifts, association) always already embedded in broader social and emotional relationships which orient us towards their contents in a certain way. When I read a book you loved, I am looking for what you loved in the book. I am looking for you.

V.

Around the anniversary of my father’s death this year, this Guardian piece did the rounds on Bluesky: a startup that aims to eliminate grief by recreating our loved ones from their social media posts.

Leaving aside the absurd notion of my father (born 1933, stopped engaging in the world circa 1996) posting on social media, I find it hard to believe that anything based on his public persona could ever, authentically, sound like him. And anyway, of course, such a recreation of my father would not be able to answer the questions I have for him, because he did not speak publicly, or at all, about his first two children.

In the end, though, I do know what story my father told himself about the children he abandoned. I know because he left me letters about it, letters to be opened in the event of his death, letters that only became visible as letters when I had the right filter to apply to the printed pages of three particular books.

This is a passage from the end of The Girl in a Swing. Karin has died, and Alan, her widower, now knows that she killed her child to be with him. His mind turns to another mysterious couple in his family’s past (‘And what was the truth, I wonder about Armand and Jeanette Leclerc?’) but realises the answer is: ‘No telling’.

But honestly, it also sounds just like my dad.

References

Bennett, Tony (1983) ‘Texts, Readers, Reading Formations’, The Bulletin of the Midwest Modern Language Association, 16:1.

Ginzburg, Carlo (1980 [1976]) The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-century Miller, trans. John and Anne Tedeschi, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Hirsch, E. D (1967) Validity in Interpretation, New Haven and London: Yale University Press.

Lamond, Julieanne (2014) ‘Forgotten Books and Local Readers: Popular Fiction in the Library at the Turn of the Twentieth Century’, Australian Literary Studies, 29(3).

Long, Elizabeth (2003) Book Clubs: Women and the Uses of Reading in Everyday Life, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

EDSEL PARKE: After giving a presentation on the gist of my PhD at a recent empirical literary studies conference, I was challenged by one of the audience members about the distinction between the ‘experimentalist’ and ‘naturalistic’ strands I identified within reception studies. This surprised me a little, given that the person in question was a scholar of some renown within audience and communications studies. I later reflected that, perhaps, that I had been viewing this distinction as an epistemological given throughout the whole of my project, seeing it as an intuitive enough way of reading the lay of the land within empirical reception. It seemed that this language of ‘experimentalist’ and (or contra) ‘naturalistic’ did not sit well with scholars whose work was based on mixed methods. Surely, your work sits in either one domain or the other, and you do what you can to downplay or even denigrate the opposing approach.

While I now see that there is more to the question than that, I do wish to uphold this way of ‘reading’ the different types of research within reception studies. I think it provides a more comprehensive account of research than the standard division between quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods. The following reflection is not an argument for which might be ‘better’ or more useful, but more a meditation on how we, as reception scholars of both empirical and theoretical persuasions, can better come to grips with our seemingly nebulous field.

I first came across the idea of this distinction in a stylistics article written by Whiteley and Canning (2017). They observed that: “Research into reader response tends to take place in two separate and oppositional fields: experimental and naturalistic […] both experimental and naturalistic approaches should be regarded as empirical” (p. 78). Experimentalist research, in a positivist vein, maintains a clear researcher–participant distinction; researchers typically provide set texts for readers to interpret, and responses are efficiently analysed via quantitative instruments. In other words, the laboratory is home base for the reader and the researcher. On the flipside, naturalistic research considers reading as something situated within the identity of readers, accounting for sociohistorical considerations and recounted experience. It tends toward the discursive and the qualitative, and seeks out those places where reading naturally occurs. 

Now, my own research and experience is firmly rooted in the latter tradition. When Schreier (2001) said that “research on reception […] requires the use of qualitative methods” (p. 49), that was enough for me to, by and large, push aside the experimentalist. But something quite remarkable has happened in my recent thinking. As I read over the drafts of my Literature Review and Methodology, I see a stance towards this experimentalist side of things that seems somewhat too dismissive and, at times, reductive. Of course, the rhetorical requirements of something like a Literature Review necessitate an author take a judicious and defensible position on things. However, having now met scholars within the experimentalist tradition (and putting a human face to that which I had heretofore perceived as clinical), I feel a renewed call to evaluate the place that experimentalist research might have in my own project—or, at least, to re-evaluate the way I have treated it in my Literature Review…

It now seems to me that much contemporary work within reception at large (not specifically empirical reception) feels much more comfortable with the naturalistic way of doing things, rather than with P-values and cold, hard statistics. And yet, as Schreier (2001) believes, due recognition must be given to both the experimentalist as well as the naturalistic. One thing I have had to learn over the course of my qualitative PhD is that just because the toolkit of the experimentalist researcher differs to my own—and just because this approach seems to be further removed from resemblance to the activity of reading itself—it is quite unfair to ignore, dismiss, and even fear it. The fact that my panel at the aforementioned conference had me presenting alongside a poetry therapist and a computational linguist attests to a rich complementarity across methodological boundaries.

Whiteley and Canning (2017) conclude by arguing that “stylistics is the only discipline that can embrace both naturalistic and experimental methods and theories of readers” (p. 78). As I reflect on things during the final drafting stages of my PhD, I challenge this claim a little: not only the stylistician, not only the empirical reception scholar, but all working within the field of reception studies should maintain a sense and an appreciation of the other, vastly different approaches at work parallel to them within this colossal field. A first step to this end is attempting to understand the strengths, limitations, and points of communication between what I have identified here as experimentalist and naturalistic stances toward reception research. In the end, all approaches, no matter their origin, converge as they confront that infinitely complex question: why does reading matter to us?

References

Schreier, M. (2001). Qualitative Methods in Studying Text Reception. In D. Schram & G. J. Steen (Eds.), The Psychology and Sociology of Literature (pp. 35–56). John Benjamins Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1075/upal.35

Whiteley, S., & Canning, P. (2017). Reader response research in stylistics. Language and Literature, 26(2), 71–87. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963947017704724