9 READING THE OTHER, READING OTHER READINGS: BAKHTIN, WILLA CATHER, AND THE DIALOGICS OF CRITICAL RESPONSE
A meaning only reveals its depths once it has encountered and come into contact with another, foreign meaning: they engage in a kind of dialogue, which surmounts the closedness and one-sideness of these particular meanings, these cultures. (RQNM, 7)
To interpret a text is not to give it a (more or less justified, more or less free) meaning, but on the contrary to appreciate what plural constitutes it. (Barthes 1991, 6)
Pinning down the “three basic characteristics that fundamentally distinguish the novel in principle from other genres”, Bakhtin first draws our attention to “its stylistic multi-dimensionality, which is linked with the multi-languaged consciousness realized in the novel” (EN, 11). The “heteroglot” (see DN, 301–366) structure of this consciousness involves, in Bakhtin's view, a determining assimilation of the “other” in discourse:
The prose writer as a novelist does not strip away the intentions of others from the heteroglot language of his works, he does not violate those social-ideological cultural horizons (big and little worlds) that open up behind heteroglot languages — rather, he welcomes them into his work. The prose writer makes use of words that are already populated with the social intentions of others and compels them to serve his own new intentions, to serve a second master. Therefore the intentions of the prose writer are refracted, and refracted at different angles, depending on the degree to which the refracted, heteroglot languages he deals with are socio-ideologically alien, already embodied and already objectivized. (DN, 299–300)
According to Bakhtin, the “other” — in effect, a linguistic, cultural, and ideological conglomerate that includes various “others” — informs the text, and also, insofar as the latter expresses the author's “intentions”, orients the virtual reader's response. At this point, it seems to me, Bakhtin's dialogism, entirely dependent on the essential concept of otherness,1 and reception theory appear to converge.2 However, Bakhtin's notion of “creative understanding” places a stronger emphasis on the crucial role played by the “discursive” other and its associated frames of reference in the process of comprehension.3 As Michael Holquist maintains, the particular mode of the “co-authoring” performed by the reader is anticipated by the other's specific shaping of the discourse, the literary character being just one component of this very complex other.4 “It is the reader's reaction to reactions in the work of art that transforms a text into an event by giving it a meaning”, Holquist remarks (1991, xxx, emphasis added). Moreover, since the textual other is to be understood as a complex, plural reality, as an intricate texture of other(s) (idioms, discourses, styles, cultural codes, systems of representations, ideologies, etc.), our readings cannot disregard the heterogeneity of this discursive alterity, its interior dialogics. In other words, the same dialogic model of aesthetic response functions at different levels; its activity on distinct planes as well as its appropriate comprehension by the “external” reader are, from a Bakhtinian viewpoint, crucial to an authentic literary understanding. Conversely, any interpretation could be assessed according to its own conscious and/or unconscious evaluation of the discourse of alterity that, as Bakhtin indicates, models the readers' reaction.
Willa Cather's intensely debated canonical status, and particularly the impressive diversity of readings her novel My Ántonia has stimulated, ideally illustrate the relevance of the concept of the other and discursive otherness to literary hermeneutics. By its very origins, evolution, and structure the novel constitutes a specific canonical issue, as Bakhtin acknowledges (EN. 8 and passim): in the case of Cather its generic peculiarity is intensified. Sharon O'Brien has given us a general perspective on this peculiarity in her comprehensive survey of fluctuating and frequently contradictory assessments of Cather. The critic has traced the tortuous history of Cather's canonization (in the 1920s), decanonization (during the 1930s and 1940s), and partial recanonization (during the 1970s and 1980s) (O'Brien 1989). By examining several paradigmatic interpretations of Cather's My Ántonia, my essay will argue that these canonical oscillations make up a spectacular conversation and even contest of different readings, canonical and non-canonical, extant, in process, or virtual; I will also describe the hermeneutic difference proclaimed or implied by each reading as a consequence of distinct manners of “formulating” the otherness the novel incorporates. Furthermore, I will attempt a dialogic evaluation of sorts, seeking to reconstruct the strategy of producing this hermeneutic difference; in other words, I will analyze this difference's relations with other (actual and/or potential) interpretations by laying down its concrete reading of the other. This essay thus approaches the reception of Cather's novel as another “text”, as a dialogical discourse in whose production different voices (readers, critics) become involved, whether synchronically or diachronically.
Ideally, each new voice — each new interpretation — negotiates its own territory on the map of Cather scholarship by consciously engaging existing readings. Likewise, it attempts to figure its place and stance in a historical perspective, as a critical view that further views will inescapably take up, challenge, displace. The critical text generated by Cather's novel may be seen as a dialogical locus par excellence, a readerly site in which interpretations rely on, take issue with, interpolate or largely interpellate each other. Every new reading is of course a reading of Cather's narrative, but also a reading of, and at times a polemical reaction to, its own other: a previous reading, method of interpretation, canonical perspective, and so forth. In this light, dialogics, alterity, and canonicity, essential factors in any “reading community”,5 are also at the core of the readerly system Cather criticism has, step by step, set up.
I am of course not unaware that the juxtaposition of reader-response theory and Bakhtinian dialogics, a theoretical move which undergirds this project, is far from being unproblematic. As David Shepherd has argued, the reader's role in Bakhtin is not completely clear; Bakhtin's “theory of reading” in general is hard to pin down (1989, 105), notwithstanding his general definition of understanding and similar processes apparently implying the intervention of an “external” reader, the “actualization” (AH, 207–208) or “co-authoring” supervening in the act of reading (see Holquist 1991, xxx). To be sure, one can find “striking” similarities between Bakhtin, on the one hand, and Hans Robert Jauss and Stanley Fish, on the other hand (Shepherd 1989, 92ߝ99 and passim). Nonetheless, in “Discourse in the Novel”, on which Shepherd largely draws, but also elsewhere, there is a “strong attachment […] to the notion of authorial authority over textual meaning, and a concomitant reluctance to confront the implications for this authority of a full theorised notion of reception”. It is this attachment that explains the “striking absence of any mention of a reader, and the predominant use of the passive voice to describe the process and effects of reaccentuation” which takes place in literary reception (95). However, as Shepherd demonstrates, one could use Bakhtin to “giv[e] Fish's model some of the rigour it so perversely eschews” (97), a rigor that may prevent the “imperialism of agreement” Fish's “interpretive communities” tend to cultivate. More importantly, the “active understanding” at work in the reading process that Bakhtin envisages enables, in Shepherd's words, “the dialogic encounter of historically determinate utterances, each of which not only takes account of what has already been said about its object, but is also always oriented towards and shaped by an anticipated response” (92). It is this unavoidable encounter between critical tradition and new readings, the shaping/anticipation of future responses by established approaches (critical “utterances”) that informs my argument here. As Stanley Fish has pointed out, “the space in which a critic works has been marked out for him by his predecessors, even though he is obliged by the conventions of the institution to dislodge them. It is only by their prevenience or prepossession that there is something for him to say; that is, it is only because something has already been said that he can now say something different” (1980, 35).
Cather's “case” is illuminating precisely insofar as it forcefully brings to the fore the dynamic of critical negotiations, the ways in which various readings anticipate and prepare — or exclude — other readings, revealing or contradicting, depending on the circumstances, a Bakhtinian logic. Granted, Cather represents an “anomaly” which is very suggestive for the dialogic implications of the history of her reception. As Deborah Carlin insists,
Cather, because she “belongs to no school”, is especially subject to the revision, reification, and renunciation of widely disparate readerly contingents. Whether viewed as an American icon, a woman writer, a lesbian, a cosmopolitan Midwesterner, a conservative Republican, a scathing journalist, an antimodernist, or an embittered elegiast, Cather remains an anomaly in American literature and her fiction is peculiarly hard to place. Despite her popular appeal, Cather lingers on the margins of the American canon. (1992, 6, quoting Parrington 1927, 383)
These observations indirectly focus on the treatment of Cather herself as an “other”. In fact, one could argue, she has often been assigned, in Bakhtin's terminology, a sort of repressed exotopic6 identity. Accordingly, she has occupied a marginal or even “external” status with respect to the canonical system. Her “peculiarity” and “anomalousness”, her “marginality” and “hard-to-place” fiction, that is, her “deviation” from the rules and principles that regulate the existence of any “reading community” — all set off her frequent mistreatment as an “other” of this community. Generally, she has been (consciously and/or unconsciously) constructed as an unassimilated other, having been dogmatically expelled to a kind of non-dialogic “outsideness”. Nevertheless, interpretations of Cather, albeit considerably different, are not impossible to classify, as Carlin contends:
The academic reading communities fall, broadly, into four categories: those concerned with art, style, and form in Cather's fiction; those who attempt to place Cather historically and thematically in the “main currents” of twentieth-century American literature; feminist critics; and lesbian feminist scholars. Each of these contingents has a vested interest in the politics of its own reading(s), and each represents the idea of Willa Cather in a radically different way. (1992, 8)
In her turn, Sharon O'Brien completes the image of this typological diversity with a historical account of Cather scholarship. She sketches out three distinct phases of critical appraisal: (1) Cather's valuation as an important writer by traditional critics such as H. L. Menken, Randolph Bourne, Heywood Broun, or Carl Van Doren; (2) her becoming a minor and even contested author during the 1930s and the 1940s, when she was rejected especially by commentators like Newton Arvin, Alfred Kazin, Granville Hicks, Maxwell Geismar, Henry Seidel Canby, and Lionel Trilling; and (3) her partial recanonization in recent decades. However, O'Brien adds,
although Cather has won a place in the American literary canon, it is not a high one; she has been considered an important writer and yet somehow not a “major one”, somehow not an equal colleague of Hawthorne, James, or Faulkner, and perhaps not even in the same realm as Fitzgerald, Hemingway, or Dreiser. (1989, 240–241)
At the same time, both Carlin and O'Brien lay bare the ideological infrastructures of literary interpretations, the “politics of reading(s)” that generates multiple “ideas” of Cather — ideas which contain a “radical” hermeneutic difference most critics have insistently pursued. However, in certain representative cases, this difference does not take into account, in Bakhtinian terms, its real and/or potential otherness. It proclaims its own distinctiveness, but, by the same token, somewhat ignores (discounts/misrepresents/represses) that very readerly alterity which in fact inscribes in Cather's fiction the possibility of a particular interpretation.
Cather's celebration of ambiguity, semiotic abundance, and plural approaches ostensibly stimulates this discourse of alterity (“le discours de l'altérité”: see Labarrière 1982). The problem, I would argue, is locating and assuming this discourse, in the process of reading, as a necessary “hermeneutic” partner, as an actual or virtual source of an other type of comprehension, whether it is its concrete presence, implicitness, or even absence that strikes us. As Joyce Elaine King and Carolyn Ann Mitchell have pointed out while commenting on Toni Morrison, we often come across textual absences that are so “stressed, so ornate, so planned” that “they call attention to themselves” (1990, 68). Interestingly enough, these “gaps” seem to be especially cultivated by Cather in My Ántonia perhaps more emphatically than in other works. What is more, they are to be seized against the background of the novelistic poetics outlined in her widely quoted essay “The Novel Démeublé”:
Whatever is felt upon the page without being specifically named there — that, one might say. is created. It is the inexplicable presence of the thing not named, of the overtone divined by the ear but not heard by it, the verbal mood, the emotional aura of the fact or the thing or the deed, that gives high quality to the novel or the drama, as well as to poetry itself. (1949, 41–42)
What we are dealing with in this brief passage may recall the emphasis that reception theory bestows upon the concepts of indeterminacy, gap, and “vacant spaces” (Iser 1978, 38–42). Moreover, Cather's techniques of communicating through “un-naming” produce, especially in My Ántonia, “significant absences” which should be addressed, as Jo Ann Middleton insists, by any attempt at “consistency-building” (Iser 1978, xiii). “Willa Cather's design relies”, Middleton specifies,
as much on what has been left out as on these elements of juxtaposition or details of plot that have been left in. In the past it has been difficult to discuss the effect of these gaps on the reader, although their effect has been observed, because we have not had critical language that aptly describes something that is not there. Therefore, I have proposed that we borrow from science the term vacuole to demonstrate the significant absences in Cather's text. (Middleton 1990, 130)
These veritable “reader-involving techniques” (Iser 1978, 11) lead, I would stress, in one way or another, to a special type of dialogic appropriation of the “other-voicedness” (Holquist 1981, xvi) “hosted” in the text. It is true that, although they deal with “unnamed”, “absent” referents, these procedures are regulated by the heteroglot constituents of the novel. They accordingly orient the comprehension and limit the range of readings by developing these readings within the semiotic and ideological frame of otherness. But, at the same time, as David Lodge has put it, they grant an effective “interpretive freedom for the reader”:
The import of Bakhtin's concept of dialogics goes. I think, even further. Instead of trying desperately to defend the notion that individual utterances, or texts, have a fixed, original meaning which it is the business of criticism to recover, we can locate meaning in the dialogic process of interaction between speaking subjects, between texts and readers, between texts and themselves. If it is true, as Bakhtin asserts, that no utterance stands absolutely alone, that every utterance must be understood in relation to that which provoked it, and shapes itself in anticipation of a future response, that is also true of literary texts. (1990. 86),
This principle, bearing on criticism in general, should be observed by any approach to Cather's works, especially as these works are shaped by the aforementioned writerly procedures. Both Cather's “filled” and “empty” textual spots establish, although in different ways and involving correspondingly distinct capabilities of critical perception, a dialectic readerly relation: they both provoke reading, stir the interpretive imagination, and guide it, direct it on productive paths, accomplish their own dialogic consummation7 and complete — also in Bakhtin's sense — that specific reading by confining it to a determined set of meanings.
Readings of Willa Cather could be read in their turn, as I have proposed, according to their inscribing in, and/or ignoring of, this dialogics. In other words, several questions are raised. How do these various approaches and interpretations position themselves with respect to the other (if they do)? How do they respond to what I would call readerly heteroglossia, an element already inscribed in the text together with the multiplicity of languages — languages that, as Bakhtin insists (PND, 47), inevitably constitute an object of literary representation? Furthermore, as Bakhtin also pointed out — as will Iser, in fact — “the work faces outward away from itself, toward the listener-reader, and to a certain extent thus anticipates possible reactions to itself” (FTC, 257). If so, I would ask, then how do the numerous readings of Cather's work “face” each other, since the dialogic model of interaction rules both the work-reader relation and the relations between multiple constituents of the alterity situated within the work, constituents that mold these numerous and frequently contrasting readings?
To be sure, it would be impossible to answer these questions by simply reviewing all eloquent samples of Cather scholarship. As Susan J. Rosowski points out,
critics have discovered that Willa Cather's lucid, apparently simple fiction is a fertile field for the most sophisticated and intellectual of theories. She is, it turns out, grist for the academic mill, which [has unleashed] an avalanche of writing about her — now averaging over 60 articles and several books a year. (1990, 31)
Most significantly, this abundance of recent readings accomplishes a recanonization through non-canonical interpretations, which could explain, to a certain extent, why Cather's marginality is still obvious to certain commentators. As for my present purposes, although I will draw on certain readings that aim at shedding new light on My Ántonia, I will also refer to other interpretive types set forth in Carlin's classification.
The original, remarkably dense texture of Willa Cather's 1918 novel has ensnared readers from various quarters. While this very density of her narrative has traditionally represented a challenge to generations of critics, the problematic “absences” with which Cather's text seems to be fraught have also attracted tenacious interpreters. Jo Ann Middleton's book on Cather's “modernist” style shows that these absences are truly very “significant”. Likewise, in Deborah G. Lambert's view the novel is “marred by strange flaws and omissions” (1982, 676) that bear on the text as a whole. In a previous and influential reading of the novel, Blanche H. Gelfant recommends that we “begin to look at My Ántonia, long considered a representative American novel, not only for its beauty of art and for its affirmation of history, but also, and instructively, for its negations and evasions” (1984, 163). It is noteworthy, I believe, that both studies, which insist on the textual “gaps” and “omissions”, are among the first gender-and sexuality-oriented — in Lambert's case, overtly lesbian — readings in Cather bibliography. These “empty spots”, “distortions”, “denials”, or “exclusions”, Lambert insists, are due to Cather's being a “lesbian who could not, or did not, acknowledge her homosexuality and who, in her fiction, transformed her emotional life and experiences into acceptable, heterosexual forms and guises”. My Ántonia, she goes on, “written at a time of great stress in her life, is a crucial and revealing work, for in it we can discern the consequences of Cather's dilemma as a lesbian writer in a patriarchal society” (1982, 666–667, 676). The protagonist's ultimate marriage, her domestic and maternal “confinement”, for instance, have been unequivocally seen as attempts to contain lesbian dissent within patriarchal, “familistic” society. Nevertheless, there is also enough textual evidence for Antonia's successful “resistance” to communitarian, “phallo-centric” pressures throughout the novel. To take just one example, the second snake scene of the novel (Cather 1988, 230), centered around Ántonia's husband, Mr Cuzak, and contrasting with a previous, similar episode whose protagonist is Jim Burden, symbolically derides Mr Cuzak's authority as a paterfamilias. At this point, the novel seems to suggest a disruption of Cuzak's “power”, which is opposed to the force Jim Burden proved in his confrontation with a real snake (31–32). Such passages highlight a more complex structure of alterity, a structure that certain critics oversimplify. Their readings “essentialize” the complicated and ambiguous structure of sexual and intellectual alterity embedded in the novel, and, from a Bakhtinian viewpoint, thus jeopardize their own validity.
In any case, the author's intensely disputed lesbianism and her intuition of the other seem to have entered a particular relation that has determined a proliferation of what I have designated as hermeneutic difference. Together with the confrontation with additional aspects of social and cultural otherness, Cather's mode of assuming her own alterity has aroused distinct critical attempts to come to terms with the plurality of readings virtually contained by the novel's heteroglot texture. “The sense of otherness” Cather “derived from her lesbianism”, Frances W. Kaye writes, “ought to be considered by our reading, otherwise “many of the nuances of the work are unintelligible” (1993, 186).
This last remark seems to confirm an increasing tendency in Cather criticism, a tendency that might be defined as a form of “methodological heteroglossia”. Various discourses and related critical viewpoints articulate a methodologically complex arena in which new readings are bound to encounter — and to position themselves with respect to — both the novel's treatment of otherness and previous readings that have already drawn on this issue. Especially over the last ten years, poststructuralism and reader-response theory have met within the more general and socially informed frame of gay and lesbian studies. All these can make up a comprehensive and refined analytic model, ideal, by virtue of its theoretical complexity, for explicit or implicit critical negotiation of the other. In this respect, Kaye's unintelligibility joins Gelfant's misreading (1984, 147) and Deborah Carlin's terminology. Discussing “The Novel Démeublé”, for example, Carlin argues that the essay “raises the problem of unnameability in general” (emphasis added). She also quotes Sharon O'Brien's attempts to describe Cather as “the lesbian writer forced to disguise or to conceal the emotional aura of her fiction, reassuring herself that the reader fills the absence in the text by intuiting the subterranean, unwritten text” (O'Brien quoted in Carlin 1992, 19, emphasis added). All these Iserian suggestions8 evoke the de Manian concept of unreadability which also surfaces in Carlin's use of Ross Chambers' notions of readability and “readerly” text:
Incorporating within the narrative a multiplicity of contradictory perspectives and interpretations, Cather's late texts then are essentially at odds with the limits of interpretability posed throughout their narratives. They desire comprehension and readability, while they simultaneously encode a sense of narrative deferral and artistic self-referentiality. They both are and are not readable, and they incorporate this difference within their own complex and complicated narratives. (1992, 25)9
In point of fact, this view can be extended to the whole of Cather's fiction, and it deserves our full attention: the critic ostensibly takes into consideration the readerly heteroglossia of Cather's discourse, insisting that we do the same thing when dealing with the writer she deals with. True, our interpretation is grounded in, as well as limited by, its own notion of readability; however, the activation of this interpretation, as a real event, as Bakhtin insists, “always develops on the boundary between two consciousness, two subjects” (PT, 106). This “event” has to address, directly or not, its limits, that is, in our case, Cather's unreadability as an/other type of readability. In other words, it has to face the presence of the other in fiction. Implicitly, Carlin incriminates what Bakhtin has called “the false tendency toward reducing everything to a single consciousness, toward dissolving in it the other's consciousness (while being understood)” (PT, 106). She openly opposes such a tendency, as does O'Brien, or Katrina Irving when speaking of the main character's resistance to the critics' attempts at “constructing” Ántonia (1990, 91). Most remarkably, Irving rejects the unilateral account that can be located in both traditional and feminist commentaries which “elide the tension in the book”. She cites Robert F. Nelson (1988, 140) as an example of the risk run by some recent analyses of simply moving “from a phallocentric interpretation of the text to a vaginocentric one” (Irving 1990, 94). Rejecting the “smoothing out of the conflicts in the text”, that is, working with a more comprehensive definition of the other absorbed by My Ántonia, the critic backs up a broader understanding of the novel:
By casting the splits in her own psyche in the form of two characters, Cather is able to dramatize and play out a personal conflict while at the same time raising larger issues. For, if part of the animus against homosexuality derives from its abrogation of the “responsibility” of procreation, thus placing itself outside and as a threat to the heterosexual economy of productivity, this also is the concern that emerges with the figure of the “ethnic” other. Thus, Cather's displacement of sexual “deviance” onto ethnicity enables her to raise a whole series of sociocultural and economic issues. (93–94, emphasis added)
At this point, Irving places herself at an equal distance between “classical” (“canonical”) Cather scholarship (exemplified by the first reviewers of Cather listed in Sharon O'Brien's account, or by later critics such as David Stouck (1975), Donald Sutherland (1973), Philip Gerber (1975), or John H. Randall III (1960)), and non-canonical, radically lesbian readings such as Judith Fetterly's (1990). Irving's position conveys a very keen sense of the other perceived as both sexual and cultural difference. In her view,
the novel shows how American culture manages to efface the threatening difference of European culture and to harness its energy to the cause of American prosperity and material values. In the course of the narrative, Ántonia — with her foreign and female difference — moves from the position of menace to the community to that of vital prop for the culture of materiality: despite her clinging to vestiges of marginality, she becomes the term on which society predicates itself. (1990,99).
This “self-predicating” logic of social assimilation appears to some extent as a form of “decarnivalization” through which the other is incorporated into communitarian life. Paying attention to this process, the critic implicitly acknowledges a more refined structure of novelistic alterity. Although sustained by semantic elements like ethnicity, race, cultural identity, and social practice, this structure does not write off traditional themes, formal issues, or sexual topics. On the contrary, it implies them, adopts them as necessary components of that alterity enabling distinct readings to proclaim their own hermeneutic difference, to constitute their own object, the specificity of their own argument, etc. Briefly, this specificity is virtually already inscribed (and, as an “inscription”, already written) in the hermeneutic individuality of other readings. It follows that, from the standpoint of a Bakhtinian ethics of interpretation, our comprehension must be aware of its “dialogic” responsibilities; as a consequence, the emergence of alterity in our reading finally appears as both an intellectual and an ethical matter.
As is well known, Bakhtin lays especial emphasis on the author-hero dialogic relation. As he insists in “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity”, this relation entails an unavoidable projection of the writer into his or her character. This projection is followed by the author's “return” into him- or herself, which signals the beginning of “aesthetic activity” (AH, 25–26). Creation thus appears inseparable from representing the other. Authors become authors — become themselves, able to experience their own selves — by going through the decisive experience of otherness. This experience, this positioning of the author with respect to her other, bears a clear relevance to any reading of My Ántonia, especially in light of Cather's supposed “deviance” and related “sense of otherness” (Kaye 1993, 186). The diversity of interpretations and polemics aroused by the plot, ending, epic frame, the included stories of Peter and Pavel, the main characters and their evolution is ultimately an effect of Cather's complex, simultaneously determined and ambiguous approach to the other and to her own otherness. To give an example, Cather's hero Jim Burden may be, and in fact has been constructed as, the author's other. It is noteworthy, in this regard, that Jim's narrative and symbolic status has provoked many contradictory critical responses, which are illuminating for our discussion. My Ántonia begins with an “Introduction” that announces the main narrative convention (it is Jim Burden, Ántonia's old friend, who supplies us with narrative information through a “manuscript” handed to the author). There are critics who reject Jim's reliability as a storyteller, claiming, as Blanche H. Gelfant does, that “our persistent misreading of Willa Cather's My Ántonia rises from a belief that Jim Burden is a reliable narrator. Because we trust his unequivocal narrative manner, we see the novel as a splendid celebration of American frontier life” (1984, 147, emphasis added). Questioning Jim's narrative reliability, that is, qualifying in a specific way one important component of authorial alterity, Gelfant by the same token opposes a precise, traditional and “unequivocal” reading. Yet distrusting the narrator, eliminating the potential implications of his credibility and also ethically devaluing his voice, she risks reducing the novel's discursive otherness too. We could — and perhaps should — keep suspecting Jim's rhetoric, much like any rhetoric, any voice in general. Nonetheless, Jim's voice is the source of information in the novel. Granted, this information needs to be processed, interpreted — and of course so does the voice delivering it. Yet simply positing its unreliability may not be the most productive approach in this case, as it paradoxically risks “recuperating” textual voices at the expense of generating new silences (for similar views see Rosowski 1981, 265 and Schwind 1985).
As one might anticipate, the readers who espouse an opposite view cannot avoid the danger of unilaterality either. In fact, John L. Selzer's and Richard C. Harris' absolute confidence in Jim's narrative (Selzer 1989, Harris 1986) leaves unquestioned many disputable and ambiguous epic segments, ignores numerous “gaps” and textual “vacuoles” that contain important sequences of discursive otherness and support complementary readings. Consequently, viewpoints like those embraced by Patrick W. Shaw (1984), Sharon O'Brien (1987, 140, passage quoted in Harris 1990, 82), or Jeanne Harris (1990) retain a greater chance of retrieving the paradigm of the other from Cather's writings. In these cases the critical discourse designates, in its own body, that space of alterity which generates heteroglot readings. Significantly, Harris', for instance, is a non-canonical reading that addresses sexual issues in a very subtle fashion. It copes with Cather's “odd” otherness by highlighting the complex forces that struggle within her psyche, including misogyny, supposed female homosexuality, and attraction for “male-identified values” (Harris 1990, 83). The critic does not assign the author a rigid psycho-sexual model, or, to put it in Bakhtinian terms, does not limit her potential relationships with the other. She also leaves, like Frances W. Kaye, generous room for alternative responses to Cather's novel. “The female reader”, “the lesbian reader”, “the heterosexual female reader”, “the male reader” (Kaye 1993, 187–188) — and, I would also add, the “old-fashioned” reader — have indeed the right to participate, although in distinct ways, in the Bakhtinian “consummation” of the text, in the critical negotiation of meaning. Our “fulfilling” of the text, our critical standpoint, as Wolfgang Iser has put it, must accommodate “all kinds of different readers”, since the text allows, as Cather's novel exemplarily does, “for different ways of fulfillment” (1978, 35, 37). As Cather scholarship proves, the more these readers and interpreters listen for the discursive “other-voicedness”, the more profound their comprehension, which is to say, the more this comprehension will reveal itself as a fundamental comprehension of the other. “The critical dialogue about Cather” mentioned by one of her critics (Carlin 1992, 25), if it is to be effective, needs to be founded on what I have called her readerly heteroglossia. Within the theoretical and textual heteroglot horizon, the critical project — and Cather criticism is a good example in this respect — seems to become more a Barthesian affirmation of the text's essential plurality than the obstinate achievement of one, albeit spectacular, interpretation.
NOTES
1. “In dialogism”, Michael Holquist writes, “the very capacity to have consciousness is based on otherness. This otherness is not merely a dialectical alienation on its way to a sublation that will endow it with a unifying identity in higher consciousness. On the contrary: in dialogism consciousness is otherness” (1990, 18).
2. Allon White speaks of Bakhtinian “rhetorical” dialogism as a “distinctive form imparted to an utterance when it shapes itself to penetrate as deeply as possible the imagined resistance of its addressee. A kind of reader-oriented self-consciousness, it can be compared to the effect created in discourse by the ‘implicit reader’ spoken of by Wolfgang Iser. Every utterance is for or to someone, even if s/he is not actually present, and the dialogic anticipation of response is always already inscribed in language as it is spoken. […] Bakhtin thus anticipated much of the current German thinking about reception and there are various points at which reception theory and dialogism may he connected up” (1984. 128–129, emphasis added).
3. “In order to understand”, Bakhtin maintains, “it is immensely important for the person who understands to be located outside the object of his or her creative understanding — in time, in space, in culture. For one cannot even really see one's own exterior and comprehend it as a whole, and no mirrors or photographs can help; our real exterior can be seen and understood only by other people, because they are located outside us in space, because they are others. In the realm of culture, outsideness is a most powerful factor in understanding. It is only in the eyes of another culture that foreign culture reveals itself fully and profoundly (but not maximally fully, because there will be cultures that see and understand even more)” (RQNM, 7, emphases added).
4. Describing the Bakhtinian “architectonics of answerability”. Holquist observes that “the relation of author and hero in a literary text, when re- or co-authored by readers, that is, when appropriated by them as the tensile relation of T to another, serves as a particularly clear-cut paradigm of what Bakhtin means by architectonics of answerability; for 1 give life to the text by seeking to find the appropriate balance of relations (architectonics as aesthetics) between author and hero in the lived experience of my reading” (1991, xxx).
5. See Lauter 1991, 85. Lauter also points out the interrelations I am focusing on by recommending the “central perception of difference” as one of the main criteria for recanonizalion.
6. For a deeonstructive approach to Bakhtinian exotopy or outsideness, see de Man 1989. For a critical assessment of de Man's own appropriation of the Bakhtinian concept, see Mathcw Roberts' reply (Roberts 1989).
7. For Bakhtin, as is well known, the other is a prerequisite of one's complete self-experiencing and self-understanding: see AH. 22–35. 188, and passim.
8. See. for instance, Iser on “the unwritten part of the book” (1978, 119), or his examination of the “extent to which the ‘unwritten’ part of a text stimulates the reader” (275).
9. On “readability”, see Chambers 1984; the concept is to be related to its Barthesian origins in S/Z (see Barthes 1991. especially 3–4).
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