11. David Bleich¹

[1. The key for Bleich citations is: LEE: “Literary Evaluation and the Epistemology of Symbolic Objects” (1981); RF: Readings and Feelings (1976); and SC: Subjective Criticism (1978).]

   David Bleich announces a “new paradigm" whereby “our present conception of language may be productively altered" (SC 9). We are promised not merely "new ways to understand the human ontogenesis of language and symbolic thought,” but also "new conceptions of the act of interpretation, the act of reading, and the pedagogy of language and literature” (SC 37, 9). Bleich asserts the generality of his "paradigm” on the grounds that human access to the world is necessarily subjective. "Objective reality” is a construction of, and hence a subordinate function of, our subjective perspective” (SC 15f, e.a.). “Any perspective as well as the possibilities for new perspectives are determined by the subjective capacities for perception and cognition” (SC 111f). By themselves, such theses hardly amount to a “new paradigm," since some version of them is adopted, by most of our other critics, especially Iser, Holland, Culler, Jameson, and the Yale group, plus many philosophers of science, Novelty can only be claimed if one draws genuinely innovative consequences for theory and practice.

       Like Hirsch,² [2. For a list of commonalities with Hirsch, see Note 6 to Ch. 7. These parallels are interesting in view of Bleich's thesis that Hirsch's “principle” “is inapplicable to literary study” (SC 94).] Bleich envisions a basic movement from individual toward communal, and, in parallel, from diversity toward consensus; and reserves the term “knowledge" for the outcome of this movement. This consensus disallows both impersonal objectivity and unguided subjectivity, and calls for a negotiation not of verbal meanings, but of personal perceptions, feelings, and thoughts.³ [3. At times, Bleich seems overly schematic in equating objectivity with sameness and subjectivity with difference or individual variation, as in: “rendering a reading experience as representative of a general human principle omits" “subjective immediacy” (SC 7f; cf. RF 3, 9; SC 19, 102, 116, 284, 295). His whole project after all assumes that subjectivity can and should be shared.]  Bleich stresses the extent to which “knowledge” is “strongly influenced by unspoken, collectively held psychological paradigms” (SC 283f). “The contexts of knowledge formation are always communal,” so that “knowledge depends ultimately on how individuals form groups”; "to know anything” is “to have assigned a part of one's self to a group of others who claim to know the same thing" (SC 133, 264, 296). Since “even" “professional psychological circles” are “uncertain about how individuals function in groups” (SC 81), Bleich tries to construct his model as he goes along.

      Probably to accentuate the urgency of his program, Bleich invokes the wide diversity of subjective experiences. He avers that "perceptual processes are different in each person"; “what is perceived is determined by the rules of the personality of the perceiver" (RF 3). A "major reason for the formation of the subjective paradigm” was the insight that “mutuality and collectivity made no sense without a prior awareness of individual subjectivity” (SC 264). Bleich's project is thus intended to help people “understand how and why each person sees differently" and make "public reality correspond to private reality" (RF 32, 95). “The synthesizing of communal knowledge” always “begins” with “the substrate of individual subjective knowledge" (SC 151). “Shared interests" are then "established” as a foundation for “authorizing” “new knowledge" (SC 283).

       Bleich attacks objectivity with some resourceful arguments. To deflect the commonplace charge that subjectivity is solipsistic, Bleich turns the tables by maintaining that "the objective paradigm” is the “solipsistic” one (SC 295). It “reiterates one's perceptions to no end" and “is considered independent of human ethics” in that "the individual" "suppresses” his or her "active role in creating” and “bears no responsibility” for “only affirming true things” (SC 295; RF 9). “The assumption derived from the objective paradigm that all observers have the same perceptual response to a symbolic object creates the illusion that the object is real and that its meaning must reside inside it” (SC 98). This illusion can be deployed to suppress negotiation (cf. Ch. 1).

       A still more striking move is to discredit objectivity by attributing to it essentially the same foundation as religion.⁴ [4 ,Culler too suspects “the concepts and structures” of “criticism are a displaced theology” (PS 160). Bloom and Hartman are quite frank in admitting this. Frye purports to take theology as an object to study rather than a method (compare Note 5), but the centrality he accords to the Bible suggests otherwise (Ch. 5).] The "religious" or “theological" "dimension of the objective paradigm” (SC 19, 21, 24) resides in assigning “the notion of objective truth" "the same epistemological status as God”: “an invented frame of reference aimed at maintaining prevailing social practices" (SC 15). Historically, the "predictability” that “Newtonian mechanics” provided for “terrestrial and celestial” motion, combined with “the certainty of mathematical logic''“ is said to have “boosted science” into “the status of absolute truth,” which “in turn demonstrated the certainty of divine control of the universe” (SC 14). This process engendered “the long-standing association of religious interests and the objective paradigm” (SC 34; cf. SC 12, 24, 26, 154, 158, 178; LEE 123f).

      We might protest here that organized religion fiercely opposed the rise of science, and that the “objective truth” of science enabled a technology that profoundly transformed "prevailing social practices." Actually, though, Bleich is not denouncing science, but only shadow-boxing with it; as we will see in a moment, he is eager to support his own enterprise with scientific conceptions. He is more concerned with protesting the authoritarian metaphysics popularly associated with scientific claims to privileged truth, especially when “these are imported, implicitly or explicitly, into his own field. He decries the “common critical practice” of combining "the religious assumption that ministers have a special access to the absolute truth and the scientistic assumption that an object of art is independent of human perception" (SC 33f), although again, this latter thesis is not held by many critics today, and by none at all in my survey.

       Bleich ends up with two major critical positions as antagonists: objectivism and moralism. Purported practitioners of these two are readily called to account, such as T.S. Eliot, the New Critics (SC 33, 35, 8), and Northrop Frye,⁵ [5. Bleich suggests that Frye keeps “knowledge” “objective” by situating the “subjective" in "value judgments” (SC 35), which, as we saw in Ch. 5, Frye would exclude from criticism. Bleich thinks it "no coincidence that Frye is an ordained minister,” though Frye is no ordinary Christian apologist, much less a salvational critic like Philip Wheelwright (1954).]

        But advocates of other approaches are also taken to task. I.A. Richards advanced an “argument” “in accord with the subjective paradigm," but did not follow it “in practice," “using only his assumption of his expertise in taste to authorize” his "judgments" (SC 34).⁶ [6, Wellek and Warren, however, praise Richards” "practice” and castigate his “psychological theory” (TL 147). De Man also prefers the practice, rejecting the theory for “postulating a perfect continuity between the sign and the thing signified” (BI 232).] Proponents of “Rezeptionsästhetik" are given scant notice, because “they present models of the reader without studying specific responses of specific readers, and without inquiring into their own mental processes as readers" (SC 101), though of the critics he mentions, these charges apply only partly to Ingarden and Iser, and still less to Jauss and Groeben.⁷ [7. Groeben (1980a, 1980b, 1982) has studied numerous reader responses, including those of critics. But much of this, like Jauss's attempt to report his “own mental processes” (pp. 375ff), was published after Bleich's book. Iser and Ingarden deploy their own processes in more  concealed ways.]

       Perhaps motives of rivalry are involved. ⁸ [8. On Bleich's confused relation to Holland, see Note 4 to Ch. 10. The rivalry impels Bleich to distort Holland's ideas into more vulnerable versions, and to denounce even some ideas they both hold. Points of agreement include: personality is the most fundamental fact of life; individual style controls reading; reading proceeds through stages, first staying close to the text, then working through associations; intellectualising tends to disguise or conflict with genuine response; response can be detected through interviews; and Freud legitimised the study of subjective response.] Even the well-known subjectivists Holland and Rosenblatt are made targets of the suspicion, formulated by Whitehead (1925: 88f), that "everyone wants to struggle back to some sort of objectivist position” (SC 19, 112, 114, 124); and Rosenblatt is rebuked for being "moral" (SC 110). Philosophers are criticized too. "The religious interests" that “fostered the separation" of “subject and object" are said to have “limited the thought of Whitehead, Popper, Muller, and Polanyi” (SC 26), though Bleich acknowledges their concern for the problem of “subjectivity” (SC 19, 15, 18, 24). In exchange, Bleich recruits some more remote authoritative predecessors for his paradigm, though not without suggesting that they failed to realize or follow through the crucial line of argument. The paradigm is attributed to Kuhn, who “does not announce" it, and to Einstein, Bohr, and Heisenberg, whose “formulations” “make sense as a manifestation of the subjective paradigm,” because “the role of the observer is paramount" (SC 11, 18). Mannheim is said to have .outlined” “the form of the subjective paradigm without its content" (SC 25). Bridgman, Freud, and Fish are judged to subscribe to the paradigm rather in spite of their contrary intentions (SC 22, 3Off, 122ff). Freud gets special praise because his “interpretation of dreams" provided “rational systematic knowledge without objective epistemology" and established that “interpretive knowledge is as scientifically authoritative as any other knowledge" (LEE 126; SC 69).

         Of the sources discussed in any detail, only a few are apparently accepted as full-fledged predecessors: Waddington, Eddington, Heisenberg, Poole, Piaget, and Gombrich (SC 13, 17, 2Off, 27f, 30, 32f) – plus Leon Edel, Bleich's revered teacher and (as we find out elsewhere) father figure (SC 35f, RF 76). “Marxism, psychoanalysis,” and “structuralism” are acknowledged as “independent systems of thought" offering a means to eliminate the “moral character" of “judgments of meaning"; but in order to “gain an explanatory dimension” and not be a mere “formulated application of a received dogma to literature," they must be “articulated in conjunction with a response statement" (SC 156, 158).

       By disqualifying ostensible subjectivists and rnarshalling sources from less proximate areas, Bleich conveys the impression that he has personally discovered and elaborated the “subjective paradigm." In case this ambition might collide with his broad claims for its generality and necessity, he likes to present his own views as if the paradigm itself were addressing us. We read, for example, that “the subjective paradigm” “views,” “aims," “says,” “assumes," or “holds" (SC 13, 19, 88, 98, 110f). This tendency softens Bleich's own subjective intrusions without having to share the paradigm with other bonafide creators and contributors. To keep his territorial instincts in the background, he paradoxically objectivises subjectivity itself.

       Though he vows to have turned away from the search for “objective” or “religious” truth in favour of a “subjective criticism” that "supersedes the traditional authority of quantitative science” (SC 297), Bleich essays to base his framework of explanation and motivation on two sciences that emphasize objectivity, namely, genetic biology and developmental psychology. The act of “paradigm formation" is judged "Darwinian”: “a human form of organismic adaptation” whose "purpose is to better insure human survival as a species” -- a view Bleich attributes to Kuhn (1970) (SC 12).⁹ [9. This attribution is not well justified. For Kuhn, the Darwinian process applies best to the survival of scientists, even despite the unfitness of their theories.] Bleich makes the Darwinian outlook a further criterion for choosing his allies: Poole and Piaget are annexed on these grounds, while Habermas is repudiated as “utopian," not “Darwinian” (SC 27, 30, 26).

        Bleich seems relieved that “the Darwinian paradigm” renders the “notion of objective truth” “unnecessary” and “evolution toward an ideal not viable” (SC 12, 26). Now, actions and views can be disparaged not as untrue or immoral, but as “maladaptive" -- the misprized “objective paradigm” in particular (SC 27, 13). Yet a utopian aspect persists in the injunction to select a recommended course of evolution. In a genuinely Darwinian paradigm, evolution follows not choice or persuasion, but hard necessity. Bleich is obliged to argue on the one hand that his paradigm must evolve from all others, even such objectifying ones as operationalism (SC 220); and on the other hand that a major deliberate effort will be needed to establish and uphold it against the “fraudulent" paths of evolution that actually occurred and were so successful that they “have not changed appreciably over the centuries” (LFE 123, 110). Such a survival of the unfittest is unaccountable within strictly Darwinian models.

        Aligning Darwinism with psychology, Bleich sketches a parallel between the evolution of the race and the development of the person from child to adult. Piaget's (1967: 368) contention is cited that “the social environment” does “for the intelligence what genetic recombinations of the population did for evolutionary variation of the transindividual cycle of the instincts” (SC 29). The same alignment is repeatedly projected in Bleich's books: “the activity of developing knowledge is as phylogenctically founded as the formation of new families”; “the construction of meaning is motivated by organismic adaptation”; “the need of symbolization is analogous to the needs for food, air, or exercise”; and so on (SC 133, 30, 44).

       Biology and psychology are further linked by Bleich's thesis, again ascribed to Piaget, and this time to Chomsky too, that “intelligence" “is best conceived as an organ of the body” (SC 29, 40). That Bleich would link subjective capacities to body parts and processes seems curious for at least two reasons. First, the same problem recurs that I noted regarding Darwinism: Bleich has to advocate the explicit development of knowledge which, if a genuine organic or genetic process were at work, would emerge of its own evolutionary necessity. Second, he falls right back into objectification by conflating the mental with the physiological, e.g. “intelligence” with “an organ.” In that view, intelligence should grow automatically just as an "organ” reproduces cells, and we wouldn't need “new paradigms. "

       The way “the organ of consciousness functions" is offered as proof that “the level of primary reality is symbolic” (SC 88). “Only subjects are capable of initiating action”¹⁰ [10. Equating “subjects” with “people” (SC 111) oddly debars animals from actions, a thesis no biologist, however Darwinian, would accept. Compare Bleich's idea that “self-consciousness and the capacity for objectification” are “developed” in a way that is “species-specific for human beings” (SC 42); and “the most fundamental form of that action is the motivated division of experience” into “three classes”: “real objects, symbolic objects, and subjects (i.e. people)” (SC 110f; cf. LEE 101). “Reality is defined subjectively," because “subjects” “decide what shall be real objects and what symbolic objects” (SC 88). “Consciousness" "takes real objects for granted and directs its efforts" toward “symbolic manipulation” of “real” or "symbolic” “objects.” “The symbolic object stands not for a real object or person, but for a person's concept of that object or person” and is “always” "detachable” from experience” (LEE 102, e.d.). Until “the end of the second year of life,” the “object” retains an attachment to the body, in much the same way as “real objects” and “people” elicit only “sensorimotor comprehension" (LEE 101). After that, the “category” of “symbolic objects appears” “at the same time as the acquisition of syntactic language." This temporal scheme is a main argument for assigning priority to child experiences in the functions of language (see below).

       Since this three-part classification is not logical (what the entities are), but functional (how people deal with them), the possibilities for shifting among the classes are a problematic factor that causes Bleich some inconsistencies. When assailing his rival subjectivists Rosenblatt and Holland, Bleich avers that the classes do not get confused: “the distinction a subject feels between himself and the symbols he uses is the basis of sanity and conscious functioning”; in a “linguistic person,” “there is never a blur between real objects and symbolic objects, or between either of these and people (subjects)"; “the reader already has a well-established sense of just which objects are real and which are symbolic”; and so on (SC 111, 113f).

       In such forays of attack, Bleich overstates the matter. Elsewhere, he keeps admitting how unstable the three classes are. He acknowledges “our natural tendency to objectify experience” and “to confuse the effects of symbolic and real objects”; and “the commonsense attitude that both the responding subject and the aesthetic object may be conceived as real objects” (SC 37; LEE 106; SC 107). Indeed, he avers that “the habit of objectification is fundamental in human mental functioning, and no one does without it” (RF 48). He speculates that this “habit of viewing the world objectively” is “connected with though not caused by” “the acquisition of the ability to objectify experience which appears in the infant at about eighteen months of age” (SC 15) -- another appeal to timing.

       Plainly, Bleich thinks people can and do confuse the three classes, but chiefly for motives that are alienating or maladaptive. The conversion from “symbolic” to “real” can help to secure “value judgments,” to “guard against emotion,” and “to conserve political, economic, and religious authority” exerted by “the judge, the censor, and the priest” (LEE 120, 123, 110; cf. LEE 105ff). If “literacy is knowing how to use symbolic objects” and “to distinguish between real objects, symbolic objects, and people,” then “only universal literacy can de-authorise” such practices (LEE 125, 110). In the meantime, readers might be made less vulnerable through Bleich's program for explicitly negotiating subjective experiences about objects.

       Bleich's use of organic development and Piagetian psychology emphasizes the determining role of childhood. The child's “first eighteen months” merit special scrutiny as a time when “life is almost entirely physiological and emotional" (RF 4f). “Thought and knowledge do not begin until some time after" “the ongoing experience of peremptory feelings.” Hence, "the personality is grounded in the emotional history of an individual. " “This basic developmental fact finds its aftermath in adult life in the peremptory nature of emotional experience, its automatic presence in our consciousness” (RF 5). Bleich insists on the continuity from infant to adult so much as to suggest that despite his respect for emotions, he can't quite help seeing them as a primitive or regressive aspect of adulthood, rather than as a mature or productive one.¹¹ [11. In one, passage, the show of emotions is linked to “bad manners” (RF 10). Or, “collectivity's best image” is said to exclude “conflictual or painful feelings" (SC 278). Bleich's students also worry about seeming “corny or melodramatic,” or “lowering” themselves to a sordid level” (SC 278; RF 84).]

      Using the infant as a model wherein we need not “distinguish between the affective and the cognitive,” Bleich proffers a motive for closely integrating feelings with our readings: “language is the means through which we provide ourselves with an emotional orientation in life” (SC 48; RF 112). “Language” is predictably treated in terms of organic evolution, as “part of the human means of adaptation in nature” (SC 28f). Along with Piaget, Bleich thinks that “the child's body, and his consciousness of it,” play an "important role" in the “motives for and the means of symbol formation" (SC 52).¹² [12. As a basis for an “ethics” without “religion or Marxism," Bleich looks to “the human body,” “the primary unit” in Roger Poole's (1972) notion of “ethical space” (SC 26f).] Before “the onset of language and symbolic representational thought in the infant," both "the affective and the cognitive” are “directly dependent on experience”; afterwards, only “affect remains experience-dependent," “while conceptual thought takes place independently of experience" (SC 45, 48). “Representational intelligence” is depicted as .an internalisation, or mentalization,” of the child's “sensorimotor behaviors" (SC 29). More specifically, the “overall emotional condition” of “infantile frustration" regarding "absent objects and people” is designated "the motive for the development of representational thought" (SC 50, 53). This referral of the conceptual to the sensorial parallels that of the mental to the physiological and implies that feelings afford the closest contact with reality'.

       Another strategic referral is the claim that “large-scale intellectual construction is achieved” via "methods identical to those used by infants in small-scale constructions" (SC 30). Similar derivations appear thematically: “reading is an outgrowth of childhood conversational activity; commenting on reading experiences is likewise derived from infantile talking habits and motives"; the “reading activity" "grows from interpersonal language contexts of early childhood"; “more complex adult functions are psychologically shaped in the example of early syntactic predications”; “the principles of taste development are the same in child and adult” (SC 297, 135, 155).

      These derivations invite us to regard a temporally prior stage as a miniature model or reduced correlate for the later ones, despite changes in functional complexity -- a problem I raised for the orthodox Freudian framework embraced by Holland. Darwinian and Piagetian theorizing are not sufficient to support any such implication, according to which the mind of the fetus or the ape ought to be a still more basic model than the infant's, being prior in evolution. Motives of expediency in designing simpler theories of cognition and affect favour the belief that the difference between the child and the adult is more quantitative than qualitative.

       Bleich himself occasionally gives reasons to suspect incisive divergences between child and adult. He allows that in “a child's language,” "meanings are arbitrary and idiosyncratic much of the time"; and in infancy, "each demand is signalled in the same way -- by crying” (SC 49, 155). If so, the child's language system is significantly different in regard to negotiation and differentiation, factors to which Bleich's theory assigns much prominence (cf. SC 168f, 184f, 32; LEE 127). If “it is easier to understand the connections between subjectivity and taste” (SC 155) in the child, the latter would also be less likely to manifest the “personal style” which determines one's “special way of seeing things” (RF 32) and which is supposed to make Bleich's project so urgent. If adult minds were really so childlike, Bleich's project would be pointless.

        As we saw, Bleich views the adult's language as an enlarged derivate of the child's. In fact, the same “affective frustrations”¹³ [13. Bleich's connection,between “ftustration" and "controlling the use of excremental matter” (SC 52) recalls Holland's link between the rise of language and “toilet training” (DY 39)” But mercifully, neither critic suggests that effusive writers must have suffered from diarrhoea as infants, or laconic ones from constipation.],  to which Bleich attributes the rise of cognition is credited with “motivating into existence" "the first acts of predication” (SC 50). We are referred to the “widely held" thesis that "all human languages seem to be founded” on this kind of “act,” which is "not simply a linguistic structure,” but "the elemental form of conceptual thought" (SC 50). Unlike Holland's more Freudian approach, Bleich's sees language forms providing satisfaction more than defense.

         Bleich follows standard linguistics when he divides the predication into two constituents, “topic" and “comment,” but not when he claims that their "linkage” “creates a dependent relationship between two ideas that reduces the frustration of, and substitutes for, each idea's dependency on real experience" (SC 51). As evidence, Bleich contrasts “the transience of the object" with “the invariance of the name” (though this view would occur to a nominalist or idealist philosopher sooner than to a child), and notes the timing “at eighteen months" of the “change" from "one-word utterances, usually naming, to two-or-more-word grammatical usages” (SC 49, 46). “In the pre-syntactic period, the naming activity is at first only a coordination of vocal schemata with perceptual or motor schemata”; then comes the stage of "symbolic formation" requiring “predication” (SC 51). Bleich allows that “the comment” of a predication may be only a “behaviour" and uses one such case (from Piaget) as his prime example (SC 51f). Yet he stipulates that the “comment” must be “verbal" in order to “complete the prototypical adult predication by rendering the topic independent of sensorimotor experience and establishing the autonomy of mental action" (SC 51). Still, his linguistic criteria are not too rigid: for a response statement, “just as in infantile speech, the two parts of the predication need not be grammatical in the traditional noun-verb sense" (SC 217).

       These manoeuvres show Bleich's ambivalence about linguistics. On the one hand, he cites the “number of linguists who have begun to question whether formal linguistic description leads to the kind of knowledge demanded by many observers’ intuitive experiences of language” (SC 100). He endorses pointed critiques of the discipline: “the better a description is from a linguistic point of view, the less likely it is to reflect subjective processes" (Kintgen 1977: 11); and “the objectively descriptive language" in "linguistic philosophy is shown to be a fiction" (Fish 1973: 50) (SC 100, 123). Such problems are only to be expected, because despite its advertised concern for human intuition, post-Chomskyan grammar is a strongly objectifying theory “in the tradition of positive science" (LEE 125f). The “epistemology of transformational linguistics" is thus deemed “the same" as "the epistemology” of the "formalist criticism” Bleich roundly rejects, in which “textual evidence is gathered” “without consideration of the motivated character of each opinion” (SC 130f, 178).

        On the other hand, he needs some linguistic concepts for his own project. His solution is to borrow what he requires, while dissociating it from its original theoretical contexts. “Sentences are describable with transformational rules,” he maintains, but “logical explanations” are “least convincing with psychological events” (SC 131). Also, he takes care to deflate a presumption which, I surmise, few scholars defend today: “at the complex level of functioning where interpretation takes place, the subject/predicate breakdown of all sentences will not necessarily add up, through transformational calculations, to the fundamental judgment” (SC 217).

       A similar linguistic ambivalence emerges in Bleich's tendency to objectify language, just the practice he ought to disown. He calls a text “an objective set of sentences” (SC 129). He tells us that “the main clause of the sentence is clear as a piece of knowledge” (apparently without communal negotiation); that "doubleness" “appears in a variety of grammatical forms,” such as "two-part sentences”; or that "a pair of ambivalent feelings” inheres "in the semantic predicate” (SC 218, 129f). He casts “sentences” as independent agents that “announce” or “formulate” the “meaning,” “reflect feelings,” have “a superstitious character,” or "represent" “different psychological initiatives" “taken with the main perception” (SC 225, 232, 129, 130). Even nontextual entities get translated into sentence categories (after the fashion of structuralism, cf. p. 234), as when “the actual interpretation" becomes "a subordinate clause in the implicit predication “The novel means that.."“; or when “a subjective dialectic eventuates in a motivated piece of new knowledge that is observable as a predication"; or when “the act of explanatory symbolization is the same as an act of linguistic predication” (SC 217, 137; LEE 104).

         This tendency is interesting because it reveals how deeply ingrained the objectification of language is in both linguistics and criticism. Even an avowed subjectivist cannot manage to escape it. A deconstructionist might discover here an instance of an "unreadable” criticism  which continues to use the concepts it attacks, and which undercuts at some points what it asserts at others (Ch.14). However, Bleich does not purport to have devised a new mode of non-objectifying discourse. On the contrary, he acknowledges that the very "foundation of language is its continual development of new objectification”; in order to “function,” "the mind” requires that “the subjective construction” of “meaning” be “removed from consciousness,” encouraging the “normal capacity for objectification" (SC 237, 149f). He only intends to make readers more aware of how this factor is essential for applying language to any symbolic object -- an intent perhaps akin to the deconstructionist project of making readers aware how the literal is an imposition upon the figural (also Ch.14f).

       Bleich diverges again from standard linguistics when he states that “every individual has his own idiosyncratic language system determined by the relationships in which his language developed" (SC 149). This claim befits Bleich's concern for subjective variation (that demands negotiation) and for “the emotional importance of the situations” where words “are first learned" by a “child.” Bleich seems to postulate a fairly uniform language core he calls "denotation" or “nominal verbal meaning,” about which “consensus” is a fairly “trivial” matter (LEE 102f; SC 95; cf. SC 112, 131) (so that Hirsch's project is superfluous). This core can be documented by “dictionary definitions," which "have no reference to particulars" (SC 149).

        But aside perhaps from "formal expository discourse," "the functional meaning” of a word is rarely of this kind: “any time a word is used anew, there is a slightly new meaning for it." Bleich's “interest” is in "unique contributions" during an “act of reading where comprehension of nominal meanings is not an issue" (SC 131, 96), e. g., for an “artistic symbol,” whose “purpose” is “connotation" rather than “denotation" (LEE 103).¹⁴ [14 Bleich splits “denotation" from “connotation” along the axis of "real" and “imaginary” (LEE 102). This division is not the usual sense of the terms, and would be decidable only through an impractical reality test.] He wants readers to explore their “peremptory memories and thoughts” and “bring to consciousness” their “subjective etymology” of “words,” especially those that “name” “feelings" and “affects” (SC 149).

      It is uncertain just how many “language systems" Bleich postulates. His usage variously assigns such a system to a whole "community," to a “family,” to one “author” or “reader,” or to a single "new experience" or "poem" (SC 160, 166, 137). A “system” is said to inhere in the author's "work" or in his “biography," or in both (SC 165, 161, 160). Bleich hypothesizes occasions “when a person is motivated to make another's language his own” or to “fully integrate" the "reading experience into one's own language system" (SC 165, 137) -- considerable operations if the systems are substantially idiosyncratic. Contrarily, if “knowledge of the language” of “another mind rests on knowledge of the language of one's own" (SC 263), convergence might be trivial. Bleich may, of course, be exaggerating multiplicity and difference in order to make his project of explicit negotiation seem more urgent.

       The proliferation and fractionation of social and linguistic systems leaves it unclear how the author fits into an ostensibly reader-oriented theory. Sometimes, Bleich demotes the author's intention outright. “The logic of interpretation excludes consideration of whether and how the author is communicating anything to us and explains, instead, the motives and processes developed by the interpreter(s) on the interpretive occasion" (SC 95f). "The interpretation of an aesthetic object is not motivated by a wish to know the author's intention --- though this is an admissible enterprise in a different context -- but by the desire to create knowledge on one's own behalf and on behalf of one's community from the subjective experience of the work of art" (SC 93).

       Bleich deconstructs Hirsch's “validation” project with the observation that “any procedure for recovering the author's meaning is necessarily either personally or culturally subjective”; besides, "the concept of intention is different in each language relationship" (SC 94, 238). Bleich further argues that the “real" author is “permanently unavailable”; that “the reader symbolizes the author,” an act “as much a perception of the text as the isolation of formal or thematic units"; and that "'knowing an author” means knowing one's own conception of the author" (SC 263, 159, 161, 259). These claims add up to a logical corollary of his thesis (cited above) that knowing a symbolic object means knowing one's concept of it -- provided we overlook his denial that persons (authors) and symbolic objects get confused.

       On the other hand, Bleich can't completely dispense with the author, having been initiated into his profession by Leon Edel, whose compendious research on Henry James's life must have promoted Bleich's utterly incongruous declaration that “for me, biographical understanding becomes the starting point for response, interpretation, and literary pedagogy” (SC 160).¹⁵ [15. Bleich attained “a different conception of the author” by using “the same” “documentation” as Edel (SC 262, e.d.)] -- the point here apparently being the subjective aspect of using biographical facts. Bleich projects three schemes for solving the dilemma of how to "bring the author back into a method focused on readers’ experiences.”

       The first scheme is derived from the general motto: “the role of personality in response is the most fundamental fact of criticism” (RF 4). "Analogously" to his principle that “understanding” “a work of literature" can be seen as an “expression of the personalities of the readers," Bleich says: "biographies of important authors have shown that even the greatest works of literature are most comprehensively understood as expressions of the personalities of the authors.” Even if we discount the self-serving desire of such “biographies” to “show" this, we find sparse evidence in Bleich's books for the dictum. He claims for example that certain “poems” of Jonathan Swift “were written in consequence" of "attempts to reconstitute parent-child relationships,” Swift "being an author by profession” with “satiric talents” (SC 292). The diagnoses of psychoanalytic critics that Swift was acting under "anal fixation" due to “regression” are accepted as “similar conclusions in more technical terms.” In either form, such accounts hardly deserve to be called the "most comprehensive": they adduce broad motives for picking a theme, but not for creating the specific poem in its attested form.

        Also quite general is the thesis that a "work may be conceived” as an author's effort to consolidate his sense of self” "at that developmental phase of his life” (SC 160). Bleich hopes that if “biographical material” is “believed to have motivated this author,” “the initial acts of perception and response are that much more integrated with natural communal interest in the motives it can associate with the symbolic object” (SC 161) (a turgid way, I guess, of saying that if readers could find out the work's original motivation, their reading would be more engaging). In my view, this scheme for re-importing the author as a personality doesn't carry much conviction. Hardly anybody studies biography before “the initial acts of perception and response" to the work. Besides, Bleich implies that a biographically-oriented subjectivity is better or more legitimate -- a jarring element in a theory saluting the immediate reactions of naive readers.

       The second scheme is to split the author into a symbolic and a historical component. Bleich vows that “public knowledge cannot proceed” “unless there is a deliberate separation of the individually symbolized author from the author synthesized by communally accepted documentation" (SC 162). “Most criticism” “formulates interpretive judgments" “as if they were deliberately intended by the author,” and does not “separate” "biographical facts from perceptual inference” (SC 159).

       But this scheme doesn't fare terribly well either. For one thing, “there is no final way to decide that a particular biographical formulation” is “objectively true” (SC 259). If a "biographer" can only produce a “motivated re-symbolization of the author," and the result has only the “value” of the “subjective interest the biographer has applied to the task" (SC 262f), then it's hard to imagine how “biographical facts” can be delivered at all, and hence how history could be separated from subjective projections of it. Bleich stumbles over this problem when he declares that one aspect of “Victorian" literature is “a matter of fact and not of judgment,” yet a few pages later that "what is meant by 'Victorian' can only be defined as a reaction to unspoken, collective, and subjective values” (RF 90, 94; cf. RF 87).¹⁶ [16. Wellek and Warren, as well as Paris, consider the trait in question -- authorial intrusions -- a peculiar habit or personality of Thackeray, not a general one of the Victorian age (TL 223; PAF 86ff).]

       Bleich's third scheme is to blur the split again between historicizing versus symbolizing access to the author. The inspiration this time is the work of Freud, whom Bleich eulogizes, as we saw, for having made an early “attempt to change our conception of knowledge in the direction of subjectivity” (SC 31). Bleich likens the “historicity” of "authorship” to “the exact past of a patient in therapy, or the exact cause of a dream” via the reasoning that each is “a matter secondary to the productive handling of an ongoing relation” (SC 146). “Interpretation” does “not function as the recovery of original factual causes of feelings and behaviors”; it should be “conceived as independent of actual facts and as a subjectively motivated construction by both patient and therapist after either fact or fantasy" (SC 30f).

       This “logic of interpretation" is in turn "applied” to “aesthetic objects”: “the interpretation explains the effect" on the perceiver, “regardless of the artist's intention" (SC 89, e.d.). The logic is the same when Bleich insists that a “feeling is not produced by the author telling us anything,” but by our own “capacity for response" (RF 53).¹⁷ [17. But “subjectively, it is not the words themselves which either conceal or reveal, but the author” (RF 92).] An analogy is proposed: “the work of art corresponds to a dream; the artist's intention to the wish motivating the dream” (SC 89). Here, the activity of imagining authors’ intentions becomes an object of inquiry without worrying about historical proof or “validity” in Hirsch's sense.

       In this third scheme, biographical data can hardly be as crucial as Bleich, in reverence toward Edel, said it was for responding to Henry James. Such data can help to mould one's affective reaction to the text: “respondents perceive their feelings as being regulated by an authoritative person”; “the response is caused by the individual's perception of what the statement represents about the person making it”; and “if you don't like the author as a person, you can't like the novel” (RF 92, 14). Yet if these speculations are too literally combined with Bleich's notion that it is "impossible to recover an author only by reading his work" (SC 163), we get the odd conclusion that you have to read the author's biography (say, Edel’s five volumes on Henry James) before you can properly “respond to” or “like" the works.¹⁸ [18. Surely the "liking" of an author is hardly relevant. I like the novels of James Joyce and Thomas Mann, but believe them to have been very unlikable people. Conversely, I liked Günther Grass and Martin Walser as people, but don’t see much to like in their works.]

       All in all, Bleich's three schemes to restore the author fit neither each other nor the rest of his theory. Just as he bends one way to move away from Holland, he bends another to get closer to Edel; and neither move improves the coherence of his model of reading, to which we now turn in detail..

        This model matches his view of "language” as "the instrument of subjectivity and intersubjectivity" (SC 28). With “symbolic works,” "all aspects of their existence, function, and effect depend on the processes by which they are assimilated by an observer” (RF 3, e.a.). Hence, "no work even exists unless someone is reading it”; the "text” has to be “conceived as a function of some reader's mind” (SC 109). However, Bleich does not always manage to maintain so extreme a position. If a reader "converts the text into a literary work" or “produces a subjective change in the text" (SC 111; RF 21), something must have "existed” before the reader got started. Calling it a “stimulus” in behaviourist parlance (RF 5, 12, 69) only repeats the fundamental objectifying misconception of Bloomfield's (1933) linguistics, one Bleich of all people should avoid: that the comprehension of a text can sensibly be compared to the physical stimulation of a lower-order organism, with no regard for intervening cognitive processes. If Bleich genuinely can't believe that “a text actually does act on the reader” (SC 110), then "stimulus" is an egregiously unfitting designation for a text.

       The "subjective re-creation" of the "work" "by a reader" is “divided into three phases -- perception, affective response, and associative response” (SC 21). The initial "sensory perception of words" gets “translated" “into consciousness," that is, “converted into an imaginary context or system that is clearly within the purview" of the respondent's “subjectivity" (SC 97, 113). “The second level of feeling,” the “affective response," subsumes “whatever the reader actually felt while reading" (RF 33). Finally, “associations” “complete the subjective definition of the affect by bringing to mind" “personal and interpersonal relationships, including the “personal meanings" of words (SC 149f).

       Apparently, Bleich envisions a more text-centred initial stage of reading "the text as immediately and evaluatively perceived” (SC 125), followed by a more self-centered stage. “The first perceptual initiative toward a symbolic object" expands into “the more deliberate conceptualization” (Bleich terms it “resymbolization") which “we try to synthesize from these initiatives" (SC 96). Thence, “readers of the same text will agree" about “their sensorimotor experience of the text" and “the nominal meaning of the words" (SC 111).

       This vision of the first stage is similar to that propounded by several of our critics. But the events in later stages are pictured in different ways. Bleich expects an increase in consensus, although his “associative" phrase should logically encourage greater diversity among individual readers. For Iser and Holland, the sequel moves ever further into the private sphere. For Jauss and Jameson (and maybe Frye), the sequel is instead a rising historical and social awareness. Thus, our critics dispute less about reading in the everyday sense than about its effects and consequences.

       This divided model of reading, as well as Bleich's divided loyalty between biology and subjectivity, occasions some ambivalence about how evidence can be gathered. On one side, Bleich acts confident: “there will always be a direct correspondence between the nature of the response and the manner in which it is offered"; "there is a discoverable causal relationship between the conscious judgment and the earlier subjective reaction”; "the affective evaluation of any perceived literary unit can be observed and recorded”; “the feelings” of “affect" “are usually accompanied by physiological correlatives" including “changes in heart-rate, perspiration, respiration” that are “easy to spot" (RF 10, 19; SC 148; RF 11).

       But on the other side, he expresses reservations: "the actual reading experience is as unsusceptible of recording as the actual dream"; "it is not easy to distinguish immediately the exact causes of these responses"; “it is difficult to estimate the role that perception of the reading experience plays in the response”; “it is usually not possible to observe exactly” what “objects” “mean to children at any given moment”; “there is no way we can tell if the language of the work occasions Ms. B.'s thoughts" (SC 148; RF 10; SC 173, 113, 188).

      We are thus left in doubt about the means for “learning to disclose the series of subjective events which always precedes the announcement of a judgment" and for "demonstrating their causal relationship with this judgment” (RF 9). Bleich must know that it is hardly feasible to observe a meaning, or the cause of a meaning; at most, we can observe human actions which, in our interpretation, indicate or presuppose that a meaning has been activated. As he says, “interpretation is not a decoding or an analytical process; it is a synthesis of a new meaning" within “the experiential circumstance" “created" by "the present perception” (SC 95, e.d.).

        I can't help wondering if Bleich's emphasis on feelings and bodily correlates might not after all betray a concealed desire to trade meaning for a more readily observable and, in the traditional sense, objective, substrate -- just what he accuses other subjectivists of wanting to do (cf. SC 19, 112, 114, 124). Certainly, positivistic biology and psychology deemed it more scientific to study emotions and organic responses than meanings.

       Unlike Fish, Bleich doubts that "any interpretive communities exist as organized, ongoing forums for the development of new knowledge outside the quantitative sciences” (SC 164f). However, “interpretive communities and other societal groupings” might he “defined” by “collective interests" whose “complex fluctuations" can be explored by means of “response statements” (SC 265). “Habits of thought” might be the “instruments" for this project, such as: “the fundamental human tendency to perceive automatically" through “unconsciously established patterns of perception"; the “cultural habit” of “announcing interpretive judgments in moral terms"; “the universal wish to validate" “our own feelings by discovering them in others”; fostering “the collective establishment of values"; the "universal psychological habit" of “de-personalizing” when reporting a “response"; the “common” “psychological habits” of "shifting the discussion" to “large terms" in order to “dissolve the personal issue”; or of “breaking up" one's .experience of the story" into oneself, "the author, the author's opinions, and the “facts” that the story relates"; "the natural tendency” “to see the work in terms of one overriding thought” "and then to reconstruct the poem according to this thought”; and so on (SC 265, 158; RF 67, 81, 48, 47, 52, 28).

        Since these “tendencies” or "habits” are typically invoked when Bleich wants to account for respondents’ reports, his discovery of cultural parameters appears chiefly heuristic, drawing on plausible motivations for specific data. Whether these parameters are “common” or even "universal,” as he claims (cf. RF 45, 47, 52, 88, 91), is not demonstrable on that basis alone; they may be extrapolated from “professional criticism” (cf. RF 48). In any case, the implication would be that negotiation is called for not merely because responses vary, but because they coincide in ways that deny or conceal one's own creative contributions. Readers might profit by becoming aware of such “habits,” and trying to counteract them by injecting more creativity and personal nuance into their experiences.

      To probe the empirical status of response, Bleich is developing a detailed practical methodology for “actively integrating” the “study of reading and interpretation” with the "experience" (SC 99). He declares his willingness to recognize ”a truth value in any seriously given reading," according to the categories “disclosed by” the “response statements” (SC 112, 266). Like most of the critics I survey (and like me too), he feels that "to find complexity and value in a variety of readings” is "more relevant to literary study than the use of standards of interpretive accuracy” (SC 104). Moreover, he views “motives” as “more decisive in determining correctness" than the “objective perception of meaning” (SC 95). “Idiosyncratic readings" -- those which, for instance, “stress certain features over others” or include “personal embellishments of something which most professional critics agree is there” -- offer “instances of negotiable subjective knowledge and collective interest” (SC 273, 285; RF 28f). "So-called “mistakes” are a part of the individual's perceptual style just as are the omissions, the exaggerations, and the superfluous material that almost everyone will insert” (RF 32; cf. RF 25f). This conclusion may sound vaguely Freudian, although Bleich, unlike Holland, does not propose to infer and analyse the reader's personality from the response (cf. RF 12f).

       Despite his proclaimed tolerance, Bleich won't accept all responses indiscriminately. “Once the personal dimensions of literary meaning constructions are introduced," he reassures his colleagues, "it is an utter necessity to discipline their presentation”; otherwise, the “discussion" may become "irresponsible or lawless” and “any claim would be permissible” (SC 227, 189). “One cannot write just anything and expect it to be received as a genuine emotional response"; “superficial or trivial” material indicates a failure to “respond" (RF 107).

       Although Bleich warns that “all feelings and responses are not equally valuable," “honest,” or “consequential” (RF 15), his demonstrations provide only very rough criteria to judge response statements. He is impressed when a response is produced with “fluency and eagerness,” or when it seems “articulate,” "thoughtful,” “careful," "intelligent," or “observant” (SC 109; RF 51, 54) -- much the same criteria English teachers traditionally use to judge compositions about literature. Yet he realizes he may be relying on indicators of “verbal skill” rather than of a “strong desire to express" oneself, and can't see how “teachers” might "distinguish” between these factors (RF 37).

      The importance of authenticity in response is plain. Bleich sounds optimistic: once an experience is subject to articulation, it loses its intractable quality and becomes susceptible to systematic comprehension” (RF 112). "The thoughts following the recording of an affective response” may not be the latter's “subjective definition,” but “when thoughts appear, the conscious mind will test through simple acts of memory to see if the new thoughts do symbolize the named feeling” (SC 150). As further guidelines, Bleich opines that "long and substantial responses cannot be produced by someone who is “lying” emotionally"; and that "the authenticity of the response is documented by the fluency of the associations, their conversational presentation, their line-by-line sequence, and most importantly, by the single theme they present” (RF 107, 43).¹⁹ [19. A student's “answering my initiating questions comprehensively” provides a “narcissistic reason” to “consider it psychologically authentic” (SC 141).]

       Still, I can't tell if these are the criteria Bleich really uses when he claims a respondent is “describing the actual effect he felt while reading the poem” and “reporting directly on his perceptions during the reading experience” (RF 33; SC 178); or whether Bleich is just relying on his own “authority" as an “observer” with "experience in this kind of situation” (SC 169). As an added resource, he feels able to "check" and “validate” "inferences” and “proposals” about “a reading experience” through “discussion” with the respondent (SC 178, ISS, 236; cf. SC 198). For example, he might learn from “further discussion with her” whether a student “felt more deeply and complexly” than she reported (RF 35).

       All this presupposes that people are able to express what they feel in reliable ways. My own impression from studying readers' protocols is that the reporting is quite capable of shaping or transforming the cognitive and emotive activities it purports to present. Several reasons may apply: unfamiliarity with such reporting, wishful thinking about one's own mind or personality, desire to impress the interviewer, or simple lack of clear data about one's own mentations, past or present.

        Even Bleich's own books contain numerous theses implying problems for respondents. A “difficulty" can "appear in trying to distinguish original feelings from feelings about feelings” (SC 236). Moreover, if Bleich subscribes to Freudian theory, he would have to assume that reports may entail repression and defense, as he seems to do when admonishing that “feelings appearing in response to symbolic objects are frequently not to be taken at face value, since feelings of pathos and fear are commonly the motives for our perceptual initiative" (SC 120). If “conflictual or painful feelings," such as "adolescent loneliness in American culture,” “are rarely included” among “a society's collective interests” (SC 278, 281), people's “natural resistance” against giving "major credit" to “emotional" events (RF 67f) should be particularly strong here. A comparable dilemma is implied by Bleich's thesis that “certain collective values inhibit the search for facts” (SC 266).

       If “perceptual distortion and idiosyncratic interpretation" are “universal facts,” as Bleich contends (SC 110), then he is again deconstructing himself by using his own version as the undistorted one for rating others. Sometimes, he singles out students” “misinterpretations,” remarking that "the “real” [!] parts of the poem got distorted,"²⁰ [20. Yet Bleich warns that "distortion" “is just the word to be avoided” (RF 32)!] "exaggerated," or “altogether misinterpreted" (SC 103f; RF 29, 31, 28). Other times, he decides the “poem" has been “perceived correctly” (RF 24). He must also be applying his personal expertise to detect practical obstacles: a “denial” “covers up the real analogy"; an "individual's preoccupations interfered with perception”; “the need for an intellectual thesis created an intervening idea that was untrue to her response”; and so forth (RF 38, 31, 69).

       Bleich's global thesis that “the true scope of feeling” is “essentially denied by intellectual reformulations” (RF 69) seems indeed to drive a wedge between the childlike responding and the adultlike reporting -- and possibly to split off “feelings" from critical discussion altogether. If readers must "abandon customary habits of abstractive definition” and “revoke” “familiar social constraints of conversation” in order to “report without censorship" (SC 150), then they will need to learn to navigate unfamiliar tasks -- whether or not “the use of perception, affect, and association as a means of determining interpretive responsibility is rooted in the normal function of language” (SC 189, e.d.). Hence, Bleich has to train his readers, not just observe and record them. Though he deprecates Holland for “ruling out” the "relationship between himself and the respondents as a salient factor in the creation of response” (SC 116), he concedes the “importance" of his own “image and relationship to the respondent” (SC 116, 215, 174). He allows that "most respondents" “have no way of translating the vague idea of response into an actual document without discussing the matter” (SC 198). On occasion, he notes when a respondent's “cordial relationship with me and a cooperative attitude toward the ideas I propose obviously contributed,” especially when “she read my book" and “heard my discussions of it.” Bleich may not pay his respondents as Holland did, but students are after all performing for a grade. At the very least, they are likely to be selective in preferring certain kinds of materials to report.

      After Bleich's students read, they get requests like: "record all your feelings about the story-your affective and associative responses" (RF 101).²¹ [21 Bleich elicits two sets of responses, one he considers "affective” (RF 33-39) and one he considers "associative" (RF 39-48). The latter are adjudged “the most complex but the most useful form for expressing feelings about literature” and the clearest exhibition of the “demands of the personality at the time of the reading” (RF 48).]  A protocol is made as a second text about how it felt to read the original text, the central problem now becoming the relationship between these two texts. To be consistent, Bleich should expect his students” protocols to manifest the same high degree of subjectivity as their responses to a poem or a story. But Bleich is optimistic, as we noticed, that the report can be a fairly close approximation of what happened while reading. Provided that the "response statement does not have an independent logic or meaning" (SC 198), as Bleich thinks (and I don't), it should be a transparent derivative of the original.

       Similarly, he feels we can "safely assume" that "the prose presentation of a poem represents the reader's subjective perception of it” (RF 21). As long as “the original perception” of some “motif” was "spontaneous,” an “increase in consciousness” "does not detract from involvement” (RF 56). If a "delay in recording the response" intervenes, “a judgmental overlay will become part of what seems to be the response” (SC 236). Just as Freud regarded dreamers” reports as integral parts of their dreams, Bleich can include his students” protocols within their total experience. Yet since, along with Wittgenstein, Bleich would include the entire work of interpretation in the dream (cf. SC 69-84), he ought to incorporate his own analysis and commentary for student responses as part of his theory; and he does so only marginally in his books.

       Bleich's avowed goal is “the development of knowledge about a reading experience,” not about the "reader” or “some “reality” outside” (SC 169). He wants “to establish a conceptual constraint on the tendency to discuss each reader's personal problems," and to avoid “clinical judgments in the classroom" or "clinically articulated intrusions into personality" (SC 169, 150). “In no instance is one ever analysing a person,” he warns; "no respondent is a patient" (RF 13). But he admits the difficulty of “developing knowledge from their responses without making the respondents themselves” "the primary objects of investigation" and "attention" (SC 188, 179). Such is likely to occur once we assume that "associations" “represent a sample of what aspect of the personality was engaged in this experience" (RF 15).

        Bleich's analyses do contain statements which resemble judgments about persons (though he may not offer them to the students): “Ms. M. is in Erikson's 'intimacy-isolation' stage"²² [22. Bleich expresses a reservation here: “in general, such judgments should be reserved for the discussion of children's responses," or for “face-to-face negotiation" (SC 201), and “must feel that part of her child-rearing responsibility is “displaced” onto the importance of finishing at the university"; “Ms. R." feels “frustration as a result of masculine shortcomings"; when “Ms. A.” “observes aggression and hostility emerging, guilt and fear follow immediately”; and so forth (SC 200, 186, 233). Nonetheless, these, occasional remarks are side-products of an intensely experiential focus on reading, rather than, as in Holland's research (5RR), the central findings of a deliberate personality probe. The respondents report profusely on their childhood. They talk about “when I was a little kid” or “when I was a small child,” giving such ages as "five" and "eight" (SC 182, 140, 177). They tell about their parents, ranging from the prosaic ("my mother never shouted at me”) to the fantastic (“I did have fears of my mother turning into a werewolf”) (SC 207, 203). They make admissions, such as: “I'm extremely ashamed of this, but I am still unable to escape the nostalgia of childhood daydreams” (SC 220). I suspect the influence of Bleich's training when a student makes an announcement like: “notably, my responses are childhood recollections” (SC 231). One respondent who brings in a flurry of personal incidents finally gets stuck: “I've been trying desperately to come up with some kind of counterpart incident in my life," “but I can't” (SC 247). Such statements hint at the pressure Bleich's students sense to report private associations, whether or not the latter occurred spontaneously during reading. Some reports suggest that readers improved their attitudes, in conformity with Bleich's thesis that “the recording of response” can be “the agency of change” or an “instance of growth" (SC 211). Here too, an un-Darwinian “progress toward an ideal" may be implied (cf. SC 26) “Knowledge of one's taste greatly increases its versatility” and renders it an "instrument of self-enhancement and self-possession" (SC 210f). People who realize the “relativity” of "judgment" can "minimize the number of negative value judgments” and "reduce the tendency to communicate" "taste” "in moral terms” (SC 210). In one case, the therapeutic benefit was clear: "repeated contact with me” “helped to precipitate in Mr. D. a shift in self-identification from author to teacher, a profession be subsequently followed” (SC 258).

       However, most of Bleich's illustrations of benefits are more specifically concerned with literary appreciation, maybe so as to attract teachers to his method. After “recording the response,” one reader attained "fascination, and “perhaps satisfaction and enjoyment" in place of “her previous dislike” for the work (SC 200). One asserted: "my imagination transports me beyond reality into a creation of my own making” (SC 175). Another reader found "her interest is now more commensurate with her belief that the work is a masterpiece” (SC 208). Still another got the “clear premium” of a “more satisfying sense of why he was interested in the author and his work” (SC 245). And another had the “enormous comfort and pleasure” of "knowing that the world-famous artist James Joyce had had a boyhood” like his, and that "his analogous frustrations" might well be "the origins of great success" (SC 240).

       A different benefit might accrue if a reader “uses the response to “confess“ (SC 243), or to analyse one's preoccupations (a commonality, as Freud perceived, of Catholic confessional and psychotherapy). One reader admitted “the urge to surrender myself” “to the most demonic and evil wishes of my mind” (SC 252). Another diagnosed "two fiercely irreconcilable strains which run through my character" (SC 2 5 3). Bleich's theory got dutifully played back when a student commented that through a subjective approach  “I accept the responsibility for focusing on particular features of a story and attempt to understand why I have done so” (SC 197). Students also offered lay psychoanalysis: “the quest for peak experiences” ²³ [23. “Peak experiences is a conception of Abraham Maslow's (cf Paris, Ch.12)] in a Hawthorne story "can only be a defense for the real wish for total regression”; or a James story "allows me to identify with strength, purge some guilt, and displace some personal responsibility" (SC 177, 197).

        Though Bleich's theory may cite Piaget more than Freud, the latter's ideas turn up in practice. However, since Bleich denounces “intrusions” into the “personality" of students, (SC 150), he, like the early Holland, practices on himself. His response to a D.H. Lawrence story includes such Freudian self-displays as this: “when Paul names the horse, he brings my unnamed fears to consciousness and thus into control”; “to preserve” a “psychological pleasure” "which exists on a permanent basis in my personality,” “I hide the nature of my own fears” (RF 59, 62). Bleich assumes that “in a boy or young man, there is a special guilt associated with the death of his father, the suspicion that he wished it all along” (RF 60).

       Bleich has a field day with Turn of the Screw. Though he doesn't play upon the story's title (which seems to invite it), he reads “Peter Quint” as “male and female genitals” “(Peter, a slang word for penis, and Quint, from the Chaucerian “Quainte” for cunt)” (RF 76).²⁴ [24. Fiedler's opinion of James being “reluctant to make explicit the genital facts" of a story (LD 307) seems more plausible than that of James devising sexual anagrams from slang and philology. As Fiedler also says, James is “hopelessly innocent, an innocent voyeur," “a child” (LD 344).] He fantasizes himself “tremendously involved with a powerful sexual woman” (the governess) “who does not admit her sexuality to me"; this “represents” “in real life” “the feelings of the oedipal child toward his mother, conscious of her sexuality, yet confused by it" (RF 76). His “solution" is “the usual oedipal” one, “identifying with father,” represented here by Leon Edel, “the same age as my father" and "evoking the same response in me," also being “my first source of enlightenment about the story" (RF 76f, C. d.). At the conclusion, Bleich has “transformed” himself “from a naughty boy to knowledgeable man” (RF 78) -- an oddly happy ending for James's sinister tale.

       If “it is not possible to have an interpretation of a work in isolation from a community” (SC 296), then it would be useful for readers to negotiate their responses with their teacher and with each other. "The assumption of the subjective paradigm is that the collective similarity of responses can be determined only by each individual's announcement of his response and communally motivated negotiative comparison” (SC 98). “It is not likely that the development of subjective knowledge can proceed without a verbal document and its verbal negotiation” (SC 167). “Only the gradual disclosure of perception, response, and interpretation on each reader's part can maintain the discipline of an acknowledged subjectivity capable of being held in common” (SC 138).

       Since “language requires the least specialized interpretive skill," “subjective criticism" might "involve every interested individual" (SC 167, 297). "Any statement that a reader considers a response is negotiable into knowledge” (SC 168). “The principle of negotiation is that each new public perception of judgment is given in its subjective dimension and each new pedagogical purpose is considered acceptable by the community" (SC 189). Ideally, “each reader will alter his sense of reading as negotiations proceed, and take advantage of “a separate occasion for knowledge" (SC 188).

        One reward could be to become more aware of values. “Evaluation is a natural and automatic feature of perception," especially of “symbolic objects” (SC 153). The “affect" of "response" is a "visible form of valuation that cannot be separated from perception” (SC 120). Also, “motivation is more clearly seen" in evaluative acts” than in "interpretive” ones (LEE 105). Even if we suppose that “the critic always consciously serves personal and collective purposes by presenting his evaluative propositions” (LEE 101), these “motives” are "usually” "purposely ignored” (SC 266), particularly by critics who lay claim to an objective stance. As a result, “Plato's attitudes" were able to continue functioning as "automatic and unconscious  intellectual factors" in “literary evaluation” (LEE 105), ²⁵ [25. A moment ago, we were told that “collective purposes" were "consciously served" (LEE 100), but this later formulation seems more believable.], engendering a tradition of elitism, misogyny, and mistrust toward emotions, from Aristotle down to Arnold and Eliot (cf. LEE 106, 108ff, 112, 116f, 119). Bleich evidently hopes that a public negotiation of values may help dislodge this tradition and give people better insights for forming and regulating their taste -- more a utopian than a Darwinian projection, as I already suggested.

       Unlike many theoreticians, Bleich makes a direct appeal to teachers of literature. He cites studies showing "epistemology is decisively tied to how each teacher conceives his classroom authority” (SC 106). “Mutual awareness of the motives in the development of objective knowledge" would “involve significant changes” in "pedagogical relationships" and "institutions" (SC 146) -- of whose current state Bleich paints a bleak picture. “We expect that only in rare instances will students come to “enjoy” what we are teaching” (RF 1). “Classroom routine diverts the emotional demands of the classroom situation" (RF 2). “Even in graduate school, the process of learning is still through emulation rather than instruction” (RF 73). “The pre-established authority of the teacher to pass judgment” makes him “feel he need not give reasons for his evaluations” (SC 151). “The authority is automatically objective, which is authoritarianism."

        For Bleich's new method, teachers should have some “work in personality development and relevant psychologies,” but should not make any “prolonged classroom presentation of personality theory"; “it is far more important to demonstrate the importance of emotional response than to articulate it” (SC 15 5; RF 5). ²⁶ "[26. Elsewhere, "special psychological knowledge” is declared unnecessary -- "only traditional amounts of reading and patience are required” (SC 198).} “Subjective knowledge" should optimally be "developed independently" by the learner "without coaching or training”.

       Bleich's “course of study" “proceeds outward” “from the most primitive, automatic, and unconscious experiences to the most complex and lately developed capacities” (RF 5) -- imitating the putative evolution of mental development along Darwinian and Piagetian lines. It is “reassuring to most students to delay the application of traditional intellectual categories until the emotional groundwork has been laid” (RF 71). This tactic might help to “reduce or eliminate the normal diffidence most students have about intellectual or academic enterprises" (RF 70f).

       Specifically, teachers are advised to pose certain tasks for their students. The latter can explore their emotions by describing a “dream," an "argument with a parent,” “the most successful moment in your life,” a “moment of great embarrassment or shame," or the times when “you cried in a movie” or "rooted for a team”; or they can dwell upon their attachment to a “favourite doll” or “item of clothing" (RF 97ff). In a more literary domain, students might identify the “most important word," “passage," “aspect," or “element” in a text (cf. RF 5Off, 63ff, 7Off, 101); and the teacher can participate as well. The subjective viewpoint can be reinforced with further tactics: by testing whether students “put" the “meaning in the story”; by finding “opinions” in “critical interpretations” of a work; by sensing “the author's presence in the story"; by “drawing" an “object” “along with four or five other” students and seeing the “differences”; and so on (RF 100ff).

       Undoubtedly, this practical side must be considered when estimating the status of Bleich's model. His theoretical claims for his approach are somewhat too strong. He is forced into the self-deconstructive position of awarding his theory a degree of truth and validity the theory itself undercuts. He sees his “paradigm” as the right one; others, like the objectivist, theological, and moralist ones, are “fraudulent,” “false,” and “dangerous” (LEE 123; RF 3, 49). His stance is like purporting to hold the truth about the impossibility of purporting to hold the truth -- of giving the true reason why, “in literary response and judgment," “truth is not a viable goal," but at most something “all parties feel when an interpretation is accepted” (RF 48; SC 85).

      If “in subjective criticism, no existing standards are necessarily right or wrong" (SC 159), the rightness of his paradigm can only be the outcome of negotiation with other theorists and paradigms. So far, he has shown far more inclination to attack them than to negotiate, as we saw. Another duplicity might be sensed in levelling ethical arguments against moralists (cf. SC 110, 156ff, LEE 105ff, 118f); but he views his positive, adaptive ethics as the opposite of traditional constricting morality.

       In my view, all his biological and psychological latticework can't conceal the utopian nature of Bleich's undertaking. Like Arnold, he aspires to be “a critic” who acts as “a servant of evolution” (LEE 111), though the declared goals are radically different this time: not Arnold's elitist refinement of taste, but an involvement of “every interested individual -- of any age -- in the formulation of consequential knowledge” (SC 297). “Each person's most urgent motivations are to understand himself”; and “the simplest path” is the “awareness of one's own system as the agency of consciousness and self-direction” (SC 297f; cf. Ch. 2).

       If “we commonly read the work of others to know our own minds,” “reading can produce a new understanding of oneself,” and “a new conception of one's values and tastes as well as one's prejudices and learning difficulties” (RF 3f). And if "the cumulative nature of the reading experience acts out in miniature the cumulative nature of all subjective experience," the “cycle of literary evaluation" “creates new language initiatives" that are “contributions to the epistemology of language" (RF 67; LEE 128). We might “transform knowledge from something to be acquired into something that can be synthesized on behalf of oneself and one's community" (SC 99). In this manner, “subjectivity does not do away with the social goal of interpretive work,” but “gives" it “new authority and binding power” “while reducing its pretended scope to more realistic size” (RF 70).

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