John Bryant: Handicapped as a reader by training and theory.

I used to be a metatextualist before I was driven to become a biographer. Now in reflecting on the notion current in the 1970s that the Reader creates the meaning of a text, I resort to the mother of all literary histories, Wikipedia, not from anything by me or Tanselle or Bryant's teacher McGann:

There are multiple approaches within the theoretical branch of reader-response criticism, yet all are unified in their belief that the meaning of a text is derived from the reader through the reading process. Lois Tyson endeavors to define the variations into five recognized reader-response criticism approaches whilst warning that categorizing reader-response theorists explicitly invites difficultly due to their overlapping beliefs and practices. Transactional reader-response theory, led by Louise Rosenblatt and supported by Wolfgang Iser, involves a transaction between the text's inferred meaning and the individual interpretation by the reader influenced by their personal emotions and knowledge. Affective stylistics, established by Fish, believe that a text can only come into existence as it is read; therefore, a text cannot have meaning independent of the reader. Subjective reader-response theory, associated with David Bleich, looks entirely to the reader's response for literary meaning as individual written responses to a text are then compared to other individual interpretations to find continuity of meaning. Psychological reader-response theory, employed by Norman Holland, believes that a reader’s motives heavily affect how they read, and subsequently use this reading to analyze the psychological response of the reader. Social reader-response theory is Stanley Fish's extension of his earlier work, stating that any individual interpretation of a text is created in an interpretive community of minds consisting of participants who share a specific reading and interpretation strategy. In all interpretive communities, readers are predisposed to a particular form of interpretation as a consequence of strategies used at the time of reading.

If you reflect a little on this you realize that you can save yourself a lot of work trying to figure out what the author meant and at the same time enhance your self-esteem mightily by seeing yourself as the creator of the text. If we are already predisposed to self-aggrandizement, we may find it hard to be fair to the author or to be fair with our colleagues who are creating their own meaning from the same text we are creating ours from.

It is not many steps from this theorizing about printed texts to which many graduate students were exposed in the 1970s to John Bryant’s theory that we all transcribe literary manuscripts according to our own rhetorical agendas (Bryant’s term). One way of putting this is that Bryant makes a principle not of reading what the author put there but of reading what he wants to see there. This is fine, if you want to be reading Bryant but not if you want even more to be reading, say, Melville.

      In Fluid Text (p. 19) Bryant says, “I read a crucial, illegible word in the Typee manuscript as ‘promotion’; whereas Hershel Parker sees it as ‘peroration.’”  Two initial problems. There is no “Typee manuscript” as Bryant so often phrases it--there exists to our knowledge a dozen plus leaves from the draft of Typee.  Something like self-aggrandizement results from using a phrase that could suggest something like a full manuscript. Second, no word in a deliberately formed literary passage should be called “illegible.” Many critics describe words as illegible which other readers can simply glance at and read. I told students for decades not to call something illegible because they could not read it. You can say you can’t read it (yet, because often you can) or you can say no one has yet read it convincingly. It’s not illegible. It’s something like having a 1930s group portrait where no one knows who one woman is and to have another person look at it and say, “That’s Hester. She gave me that dress when it got too small for her.” I have wasted hours on one word only to start from the top of the letter and read steadily down, paying attention, and to understand the word perfectly. So, no full manuscript and no illegible word.

      Bryant continues: “the readings we give to it [the “illegible” word] vary with our differing rhetorical agendas.” When I checked Bryant’s transcription of the surviving leaves from the draft of Typee I found that he differed from my reading at 2 points of the first eleven lines, and now it is not hard for me to see that his “rhetorical agenda” was indeed pushing him to see what he wanted to fit his personal reading of Melville.

      By contrast, I think my “agenda” was simply to transcribe what was in any family manuscript I was dealing with. I always assumed meaning had been put there by the writer--that the writer had created the meaning--and that my job was to transcribe what the writer wrote regardless of whether or not I wanted him or her to say whatever it was. Now, I am not a perfect reader of 19^th century handwriting, and was not even in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when I was transcribing letters every day, but I tell you that my intention was always pure: I wanted to read what was there. And along the way I found astonishing misreadings that had been repeated over and over, as when at the NYPL I saw that Hawthorne had not been looking “mildly about for the great Carbuncle” but looking “wildly” about--which I took as evidence that Hawthorne that quickly was much more excited about meeting Melville than anyone had thought.  If along they way I misread some words, those words can be corrected.

      A problem with thinking the reader creates the text himself or herself  is that you relinquish the responsibility of paying close attention to what you have read and what you are saying. I have protested already that in his review of the NN Edition in Leviathan for June 2019 he slighted the fact that three reviewers of my biography in 2002 had simply lied about me and the state of scholarship. I had not all alone perceived POEMS (1860) in my “black hole” as Richard Brodhead said in the most influential place possible, then, the New York Times. I had not invented The Isle of the Cross and Poems, both, as Andrew Delbanco seemed to think.

      In the light of  Bryant’s transcribing by his “rhetorical agenda,” I see that “surmises” is a word he uses to submerge that evidence that reviewers had ignored mounds of evidence which I had put right into the book they were reviewing. This was not just careless. Read the “black hole” in Brodhead’s review and the contempt in Delbanco’s review. With “surmises” Bryant was is covering up false attacks on my work. When he wrote, as he in the grip of his rhetorical agenda?

      But let’s look at another instance of Bryant as a reader. In the Leviathan review Bryant has this passage which weirdly misrepresents what I was saying:

Drawing upon ideas first suggested by Sealts, Parker in his “Historical Note” for the volume considers the possibility that at some point in the late 1870s Melville interspersed prose headnotes throughout his Parthenope poems and created longer prose pieces introducing the Marquis de Grandvin and Jack Gentian as speakers for the poems. If Melville actually had such a “brainstorm,” as Parker puts it, “it was one of the worst ideas of his literary life” (349).

It’s hard to untangle what all is wrong with these two sentences. I remember why Hayford used to shake his head . In the passage on 349 I was trying to be clear but delicate in treating Sealts, who had assumed that Melville began writing the prose sketches with the purpose of introducing fictional narrators for two long much earlier poems.  Think about that. This would imply that because Melville wrote passages putting characters from some written prose sketches into earlier poems, he must have written  all the prose sketches for that purpose, to create fictional narrators. I was being delicate, I thought:

It cannot be proven that Melville did not think one dark day, “Aha! The way to salvage these two poems is to write a series of sketches on characters I will call Gentian and Grandvin and introduce them as the narrators of the poems!” If he had such a brainstorm, it was one of the worst ideas of his literary life.

In the Historical Note I pushed the importance of the death of Evert Duyckinck. In recent years Melville had had some social connections with important people which were lost to him once Duyckinck died. The timing would have fit with Melville’s creating fictional companions for himself, the men Sealts had written about as forming the Burgundy Club. What I did not want to say, out loud, was that Mert had made a very dubious mistake of assuming that something used for a literary purpose had been written to be used for just that literary purpose.  I assumed that any careful reader of what I had written would understand.  I assumed that most of the prose sketches had been written, perhaps for a few years, before he thought of using any of the characters in the early poems.

      What Bryant did with this was imply that I was following Sealts in ideas about the relationship of the prose sketches to their use in earlier poems. He seems to imply that I was associating myself with Sealts’s ideas when in fact I was very carefully distancing myself from them. Anyone reading Bryant’s passage on me and Sealts would go away with a totally erroneous sense of what I had been laying out for many pages in the Historical Note. Was Bryant deliberately trying to make me look bad? You would not want to think so. Or was he simply creating the text he was reading, and reading it according to his personal agenda?

      I will repeat some of what I said before. In his review in Leviathan, Bryant says that I am personally affronted by “academic reviewers” who in 2002 “seemed skeptical of the existence of Melville’s projected volume of poetry.” Bryant  excuses the reviewers by his choice of words--“scholars”: “scholars can only deduce from the indirect evidence of the letters that Melville composed this volume of poems.” What would it take to establish the FACT that Melville wrote a book he called POEMS? What you would need, Bryant offers, would be “rejection slips, a bundle of manuscripts, or the actual publication of a book.” But we DO have a rejection letter from a New York City publisher and we know there was at least one more! And some people might be satisfied by Melville’s letter to his brother Allan on 22 May 1860: “Memoranda for Allan concerning the publication of my verses.” This covers 12 points, including #6, “Let the title-page be simply, Poems / by / Herman Melville.” In this list Melville is about as specific as a scholar would want: “In the M. S. S. each piece is on a page by itself, however small the piece.” Bryant is not so easily persuaded: “In discussing  Parker’s treatment of Poems 1860, one reviewer stated that Parker ‘surmises’ the existence of the volume--a fair-enough verb given the indirect though conclusive evidence at hand--but the perceived derogation angered Parker, and for two decades he has not relented in licking the wound, to the detriment of the opening of his Historical Note.”

      There was no derogation, only my perception of derogation, Bryant thinks. Bryant portrays me as being angry merely because of being said merely to have surmised the existence of The Isle of the Cross (1853) and Poems: “when at the turn of the present century, knowledgeable Melvilleans seemed not so much to ignore or dismiss the fact of Poems 1860 as to relegate it from fact to deduction, or surmisal, Parker launched his hot heart’s shell upon the backs of criticism, and he has been riding that whale ever since.” That is extravagant language, Mr. Bryant, and not very sympathetic to someone who was lied  about in major reviewing organs.

      But what did these reviewers of my second  volume actually say? Richard Brodhead in the New York Times for 23 June 2002 disparaged my “surmises about works Melville never published that did not survive,” deeming one particular surmise dubious and another an outright fabrication. This is Brodhead:

[Parker] make the case that in 1852-53 Melville wrote a novel based on materials he shared with Hawthorne about a sailor who deserted his wife. If this is true, then the theory that Melville renounced writing after “Pierre” is just wrong, and the mysterious leap from “Pierre” to the work he published after a silence, the very different “Bartleby the Scrivener,” can be explained in a new way. Parker is also convinced that Melville prepared a volume of poems in 1860 that failed to be published. If this is so, a stretch that had seemed empty of literary striving was instead a time of new effort and new failure--a black hole Parker alone has the instruments to detect.

       What? “a black hole Parker alone has the instruments to detect”? Well, Meade Minnegerode in 1922 and every scholar since then, including Jay Leyda, who had in the 1951 The Melville Log, pp. 619-620, Charles Scribner’s rejection of “Melville’s Poems.” From that 1951 Log  we also knew that Evert Duyckinck had sent POEMS to Rudd & Carleton, who had possession of it on 23 June. I was not alone in a black hole, as the pages of the book Brodhead was reviewing made very clear. Yes, I was distressed to read lies in the New York TIMES, but I had some hope that other reviewers would quickly correct Brodhead. Instead, two others piled on me.

      What the biographer-to-be Andrew Delbanco in The New Republic for 30 September 2002 was even more sweeping. My entire second volume, like the first, “must be used with caution.” “For one thing,” Delbanco warns, “Parker is amazingly certain of his own conclusions.” I was sure that “immediately after completing Pierre Melville wrote an unpublished novel.” Well, not immediately, nearly a year passed before he began it. I was also sure that Melville had left a book of poems to be published in his absence.  Delbanco continued: “Such a book was never published--and it is a surmise that Melville ever wrote it.” He continued with this denunciation: “In short, Parker trusts his own intuition completely, and, presenting inferences as facts, he expects his readers to trust it, too.”

John Bryant’s sweetness toward the word “surmise” begins to sound stranger and  stranger.

      Notice: neither Brodhead nor Delbanco named The Isle of the Cross, as if the title gave it too much actuality.

      Elizabeth Schultz in The Common Review for Winter 2002 took up the criticism. Parker “contends Melville completed” two lost manuscripts, “a novel, putatively titled The Isle of the Cross, and his first collection of poems.”  I only contended that he finished a book of poems. Her next comment is very strange indeed: “Throughout his biography, Parker bemoans the loss of The Isle of the Cross’s ghostly manuscript.” My index shows a non-bemoaning reference on 2.686 but the other dozen and a half references seem concentrated in the time Melville was working on the book or trying to sell it to Harper’s. (He refers to it in a letter to the Harpers in November 1853.)  Can anyone else find that I bemoaned the loss of The Isle of the Cross “throughout” the biography?

      Words Matter. Words Matter. Facts Matter. That satanic red-bearded stranger who shouted FACTS DON’T MATTER! FACTS DON’T MATTER! from the doorway of the Melville Society meeting in Chicago in 1990 was looking right at John Bryant and Wai-chee Dimock and Harrison Hayford and me. Hayford had  just said words to the effect that Words Matter, Facts Matter, and that murmur of hate from the audience terrifies me still. I never dared to go to a Melville Society meeting in the United States again.