Multiple Readers, Multiple Texts, Multiple Keats
Jack Stillinger
I. THE IDEA OF INCONGRUITY
My topic is the multiple meanings of Keats's poems, the multiple Keats who created the multiple meanings, and what I think is the real reason for the yearlong tribute of admiration and affection that marked the bicentennial of his birth in 1995.1 The argument involves a notion of comic misfittingness, and I shall begin with one epitomizing example in the form of a joke.
Here is the joke:
Two fishermen are out in the middle of a
reservoir in a rented boat, catching fish hand over fist, pulling them in as
fast as they can get their lines back in the water.
First fisherman: "This is
a great place to fish. Don't you think we should mark the exact spot?"
Second
fisherman: "Sure, I'll put an X right here on the side of the boat." (Marks an X
on the side of the boat.)
First fisherman: "That's a stupid thing to do,
that's dumb. [Pause.] What if we don't get the same boat?"
This will sound like something from a standup comedian on TV. In fact I have appropriated it from a piece by my colleague Mike Madonick that appeared a few years ago in Cimarron Review.2 In Madonick's telling, the fishermen are literary theorists named Jacques and Harold. As the dialogue continues, the two of them decide that the fish they have caught are not real fish at all but are merely linguistic constructs.
I use the joke to introduce the basic idea of incongruity. Everything funny has a central element of incongruity: something does not fit with something else. In Madonick's joke, the first incongruity is the stupid idea of marking the spot with an X on the side of the boat. Then there is a second incongruity when the other fisherman thinks putting an X on the boat is stupid for the wrong reason: they might not get the same boat next time. When we add the implied identities of the fishermen to two of the most famous literary theorists of our time-the result is a still more complicated set of incongruities. Why would these two be out fishing together? Why would they say such dumb things?
In literary art itself, both unity and disunity have major roles, of course; but in literary criticism, over the long haul-up until a couple of decades ago, say-the idea of unity has been much more emphasized. We have been constructing unity in works, in groups of works, in single authors, in groups of authors, in whole periods and whole centuries, and making much of these unities, as if we had found them instead of constructed them. Throughout much of its history, the critical enterprise has absolutely depended on several kinds of oneness: a single author for each work; a single text of each work; a (hypothetical) single reader for the work-usually each critic individually, positing himself or herself as an ideal reader; and then, what obviously follows from the concept of single reader, a single interpretation of the work, which was of course the reading of the critic as ideal reader.
What has happened more recently, as we all know, is that each of these onenesses has been supplanted by a plural. We now have multiple authors rather than single solitary geniuses. We now acknowledge the existence of multiple versions of important works rather than just one text per work.3 Instead of a single real or ideal reader, we have multiple readers all over the place-classrooms full of individual readers in our college and high school literature courses, journals and books full of readers in our academic libraries, auditoriums full of readers at our conferences. And all of these readers are constructing interpretations as fast as they read. As one might imagine, when it is a complex work that is being read, the interpretations differ from one another as much as the readers do. It is not possible that only one of the interpretations is correct and all the others are wrong.
I am interested in what happens when each of the principal elements of the literary transaction-author, text, and reader-is viewed as a complex of multiples: multiple authorship, multiple versions of text, and multiple readership. My aim is to explain, in the first place, why there are so many different ideas of what a Keats poem means; and, in the second place, why we think Keats was a "great" poet and therefore why we expended so much energy in the celebration of his two hundredth birthday.
<!--pagebreak-->II. MULTIPLE TEXTSI shall take up multiple texts first, and briefly. Keats is not one of the famous revisers of English poetry. Coleridge and Wordsworth, in contrast, were obsessive revisers all their lives; some eighteen separate versions of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner have been identified, all of them authored by Coleridge, and there are as many as twenty or more separate texts of The Prelude. Keats of course never had the chance to revise over a span of decades, or a succession of editions, the way Coleridge and Wordsworth did. But his practice while he was alive and his comments emphasizing the importance of spontaneity in writing make it seem unlikely that he would have produced radically altered versions of his major poems even if he had lived as long as the older poets.
Nevertheless, virtually all of Keats's poems do exist in multiple texts. For Endymion there are three principal authorial versions: the text of the original draft, the text of the revised fair copy that Keats wrote out for the printer, and then the first printed text, representing the words of the fair copy plus subsequent changes by the publisher and the printer (as well as still further changes by Keats in reaction to those by the publisher and the printer). For the other complete long narratives-Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Lamia-there is the same kind of three-version array: draft, fair copy, and first printed text. For La Belle Dame, we have two principal versions in manuscripts by Keats and his friends and the first printing of the poem in Leigh Hunt's Indicator. For Ode to a Nightingale and Ode on a Grecian Urn, there are the first published versions in a magazine, the next published versions in Keats's Lamia volume of 1820, and then still other versions that differ from these in authoritative manuscripts. For the one hundred poems and fragments that were first published posthumously, there are almost always variant versions in the surviving sources-the two quite different endings of the Bright star sonnet, for example, where in one version the speaker lives on forever and in the other the speaker dies.
Thus, even though Keats was not an obsessive reviser, still he-and sometimes he and his helpers-created multiple texts of his poems. We are becoming increasingly sophisticated about these texts. We have long known about the two main versions of La Belle Dame, and recently Elizabeth Cook in her Oxford Authors John Keats printed an alternative text of The Eve of St. Agnes in an appendix. Nicholas Roe in his new Everyman Selected Poems of Keats is well aware of the existence of competing versions, and has made some interesting departures from what has hitherto been the standard.4
This multiplicity of versions bears on the constitution of the Keats canon (How many Eves of St. Agnes did Keats actually write?), and on questions like the ontological identity-sometimes called the "mode of existence"-of any specific work in the canon (Is The Eve of St. Agnes a single version of the work or all the versions taken together?-and if it is all the versions taken together, is the work constituted by the process of its revisions, one after another, or by all the versions considered as existing simultaneously?). Multiplicity of versions raises practical questions about the editorial treatment of the poems (most obviously, which version to choose for reprinting, in a standard edition or an anthology, when we are allowed only one version per title); and it certainly complicates the business of interpretation-as when critics expound composite rather than discrete versions of a work, or cite one version to help interpret another (an earlier text to explain a later, for example, or vice versa). It also enters into matters of basic communication, as when critics argue about significant details in a work but in fact are using different versions from one another and therefore may be said to be actually talking about different works.
But this is enough about multiple texts for present purposes. I wish to turn to a more problematic element of the transaction.
III. MULTIPLE READERS AND THEIR MULTIPLE READERS AND THEIR MULTIPLE READINGS
As everyone knows from plentiful practical experience, there are, and have been, a great many readers of Keats's poems-the number would be many hundreds of thousands over the past 180 years. What makes multiple reading a professional problem is that each of these readers has an experience of the poems that is different in some respects from the experiences of all the others, and this produces a great many different personal readings and, when the readings are publicly described-as in classroom discussions, lectures, conference papers, and journal articles, a great many different interpretations are being launched into the air.
This situation has been widely acknowledged only recently. In the Golden Age of literary criticism-by which I mean the last couple of decades of the nineteenth century and the first sixty or seventy years of the present century-virtually everybody's professional work was based on a simple notion of a single perfect text and a single ideal reader. The interaction of a single reader with a single text produced a single (most nearly correct) interpretation. As criticism progressed in its treatment of any particular work, the first ideal reader was supplanted by a second ideal reader, the first having been found to be wrong (or less nearly correct than the second), and then the second was supplanted by a third, and so on. The result, historically, is that readers succeeded readers, one after another, but still there was always just one text and one reader.
<!--pagebreak-->I shall give some examples from criticism of The Eve of St. Agnes. For the first 130 years after it was published, readers viewed The Eve of St. Agnes mainly as a series of pretty pictures-a rich Romantic tapestry, as critics sometimes called it, beginning with Leigh Hunt in Keats's own time.5 The pretty pictures were the Beadsman praying in his chapel; Porphyro entering the castle; Porphyro and Angela sitting by the fireplace; Madeline and Angela meeting on the stairs; Madeline undressing in her bedchamber; Madeline praying before she gets into bed; Porphyro setting out the banquet; Porphyro and Madeline tiptoeing out of the castle. Then in 1953 there appeared Earl Wasserman's brilliant and provocative reading of the poem as a metaphysical allegory based on two passages in Keats's letters.6 The first of these passages compares the imagination to Adam's dream of the creation of Eve in Paradise Lost: Adam "awoke and found it truth." This is a type of dreaming, or visionary, imagination, and for Keats it prefigures an earthly happiness repeated spiritually in a finer tone somewhere else. In Wasserman's application to the poem, Madeline is having just such a prefigurative dream when she practices her St. Agnes Eve ritual: she dreams of the lover she will marry, then awakens-and there he is in truth. The other passage that Wasserman uses from the letters is the famous simile comparing human life to a "Mansion of Many Apartments." In Wasserman's interpretation, Madeline's castle represents human life, and Porphyro, passing upward to a closet adjoining her bedchamber and thence into the bedchamber itself, is progressing from apartment to apartment in the mansion of life, on a spiritual journey to join Madeline in some kind of higher (transcendental) reality.There seemed at the time to be a number of things wrong with Wasserman's interpretation, and I launched my own career as a Keats critic by pointing them out in an essay first published thirty-five years ago called "The Hoodwinking of Madeline."7 Madeline, when she awakens, is not happy to find a real Porphyro in her bed. Porphyro has been sneaking around the castle like a peeping Tom. Rather than experiencing spiritual repetition in a finer tone, leading to a higher reality, the two principals seem to be having sex with only one of the partners conscious of what is going on. And the story is full of echoes of bad happenings in earlier works: the rape of Philomel, Satan seducing Eve, Lovelace raping the unconscious Clarissa Harlowe, and others.
A decade after my "Hoodwinking of Madeline" first appeared, Stuart Sperry published his fine essay entitled "Romance as Wish-Fulfillment," establishing Wasserman and me as two extremes of critical opinion on the poem-Wasserman being too romantically metaphysical and I being too antiromantically realistic.8 Sperry's interpretation skillfully steered a middle course between these extremes, and so for the next two decades the standard opening for an essay on The Eve of St. Agnes was to recite a kind of Three-Bears litany in which Wasserman was too highflying, I was too down-to-earth, and Sperry, like the reiterated judgment of the third of the Three Bears, was "just right." This was, of course, always followed by a "but": Sperry was `just right" in his way, but all previous critics, including Sperry, had overlooked such-and-such . . . which then led into yet another new reading, whatever it was.
The notable thing about this activity is that each successive interpretation of the poem was intended to supersede all the previous interpretations-Wasserman making obsolete the idea that the poem is merely a rich Romantic tapestry; I making quite clear that Wasserman's reading was "wrong" in all the major particulars; Sperry showing how both Wasserman and I were oversimplifying the important points; and each subsequent critic again putting down an ever-growing body of predecessors. This was the era of single-meaning interpretation, and to some extent it continues to the present day.
With Keats's poems, there is still another condition in addition to large numbers of readers and the text's excess of meaning, and this is the characteristically Keatsian frequency of ambiguous and contradictory details in the texts. The opening description of the Beadsman can serve as an example. Certain details in the first two stanzas emphasize the Beadsman's piety, patience, and sympathy for the dead who lie about the chapel where he is praying; from these a reader might get the idea that the Beadsman is to be admired. Other details, tending to make him pitiable rather than admirable, stress the Beadsman's joyless self-denial, harsh penance, and the fact that he has no shoes, this last an especially painful detail, given the emphasis on bitter cold in the opening stanzas. The different kinds of detail produce conflicting views of the Beadsman, and these in turn have a bearing on the reader's view of important matters that come up later in the poem, because the ritualistic self-denying Beadsman prefigures the ritualistic self-denying Madeline in the main narrative. What one thinks of the Beadsman to an extent carries over into what one thinks of Madeline.
<!--pagebreak-->For more complicated examples of contradictory detail in the poem, consider these statements about the two main characters:
Porphyro is Prince Charming, on a mission to
rescue an imprisoned maiden.
He is a confederate of sorcerers, a worker of
evil magic.
He is a peeping Tom.
He is an ardent lover.
He is a
rapist.
He is Madeline's future husband.
Madeline is beautiful and desirable, the
belle of the ball.
She is hoodwinked with faery fancy, shutting herself off
from the real world.
She is a pious Christian.
She is a victim of
self-deception.
She is a victim of Porphyro's stratagem.
She is Porphyro's
happy bride.
About half of these statements do not "fit"-are not congruent with the other half, but each of them is true in the sense that there is support in the text and agreement among some of the readers and critics. Oppositions of this sort are central to the plot, the characterizations, the speeches, and descriptions. No wonder different readers have different ideas of what is going on in the poem.
In my lecture in Los Angeles I went on at some length concerning the reading process; how Coleridge's concept of unity underlies the activity; how Keats's various statements about reading support the idea of multiple interpretation; and how, despite the fact that we always expect new readings from students and critics, much of our current teaching and writing about literature continues to endorse the traditional goal of single-meaning interpretation. I set forth a practical theory of multiple interpretation, and discussed the principal objection that arises whenever one favors a reader-response system of meaning and value: namely, the problem of the validity, or truth, of an interpretation. On what grounds does one decide what is correct and what is not correct? On what grounds does a teacher tell a student that the student's interpretation is wrong? How can literature be a field of knowledge when anybody and everybody can be a player? There are several defenses against this general objection, and I brought in all the ones that I knew of, including one that I invented myself-a concept of no-fault reading, whereby even the freshman who thinks that Angela and the Beadsman are having an affair is not really doing any damage and could actually, if the discussion were focusing too exclusively on Madeline and Porphyro, be making a positive contribution by shifting the focus to the minor characters and raising questions about what they are doing in the poem.
IV. MULTIPLE KEATS
The remaining element of the transaction is the multiple of authorship, and here I shall be focusing on the responsibility for the excess of textual meaning and abundance of contradictory details illustrated in the preceding section.
Everybody is familiar with the idea of Keats's variety and versatility, and therefore with the idea of multiple Keatses (plural). There were several Keatses on view in 1995 at the Houghton Library, the Grolier Club in New York, the Dove Cottage Museum in Grasmere, and elsewhere: the Keats of the poetry drafts, produced, as he told his friend Richard Woodhouse, as if by magic; the Keats of the boldly inscribed fair copies; the Keats first known to the public in the magazines and the three original volumes; posthumous Keats, in his character as creator of the one hundred poems first published after his death; the personal Keats seen in the privacy of his surviving letters; Keats as beloved friend at the center of what we now call the Keats Circle; the Keats of the various portraits; and Keats the artistic collaborator, providing materials for subsequent nineteenth- and twentieth-century book designers, printers, and binders who created so many beautiful printings of his poems.9
<!--pagebreak--> These are just the most obvious types represented by the manuscripts, books, and memorabilia in the bicentennial exhibitions. To them we can add many more Keatses both from traditional criticism and scholarship over the years and from poststructuralist theory more recently. These include Aesthetic Keats, the champion of art for art's sake; Sensuous Keats, the burster of Joy's grape, with or without cayenne pepper on his tongue, and the creator of some of the most palpable imagery in all of English poetry; Philosophic Keats, the describer of the vale of soul-making, for example, and life as a mansion of many apartments; Theoretical Keats, the formulator of negative capability and chameleon poetry; Topographical Keats, the well-traveled tourist who wrote a sonnet while dangling his legs from a precipice at the top of Ben Nevis; Theatrical Keats, the theatre reviewer and unproduced playwright; Intertextual Keats, including Spenserian Keats, Leigh Huntian Keats, Shakespearean Keats, Miltonic Keats, and Dantesque Keats (this is a sublisting that could be extended almost indefinitely). There are Political Keats, especially in his early poems and letters, but through the rest of his career as well; Radical Keats, which is a sharper focusing of Political Keats; Vulgar Keats, the only canonical male Romantic poet besides Blake who did not attend a university, and the one who had the lowliest upbringing; Masculine (even excessively masculine, or macho) Keats; Consumptive Keats, the one who dies so movingly and heroically every time we read a biography or make our way to the end of the letters.The list could go on and on. But still these multiple Keatses are a random sampling of single Keatses-now one, now another, according to the approach, the method, the occasion, and the texts at hand.
NOTES
1 This essay is a revised version of the keynote address delivered at the John Keats Bicentennial Conference, Harvard University, 8 September 1 995, and is the basis of a book currently in progress, Reading "The Eve of St. Agnes": The Multiples of Complex Literary Transaction. Its purpose in this centennial issue of JEGP is both to commemorate some of the older ways of reading and writing about literature (e.g., from the dozen years when I was principal English editor of the Journal, 1961-72) and to show off some of the results of theoretical interventions in the interim, most obviously from deconstruction and reception theory.
2 Michael David Madonick, "The Pirate Map." Cimarron Review, 103 (April 1993), 83-85.
3 For recent examples of these newer lines of thinking, see Jack Stillinger, Multiple Authorship and the Myth of Solitary Genius (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1 99 1), and Coleridge and Textual Instability: The Multiple Versions of the Major Poems (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1994).
4 John Keats, ed. Elizabeth Cook, Oxford Authors (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1990), pp. 544-54;.John Seats: Selected Poems, ed. Nicholas Roe, Everyman ed. (London: J. M. Dent, 1995).
5 Reviewing Keats's 1820 volume in the Indicator, 2, 9 August 1820, Hunt described the poem as "rather a picture than a story" (Keats: The Critical Heritage, ed. G. M. Matthews [New York: Barnes and Noble, 1971], p. 172). The idea gets general support from Keats's own comments in a letter to John Taylor, 17 November 1 819, concerning "colouring" and "drapery" in the poem (Letters, Il, 234).
6 Earl R. Wasserman, The Finer Tone: Keats's Major Poems (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 195',), drawing especially on Keats's letters to Benjamin Bailey, 22 November 1817, and to John Hamilton Reynolds, 3 May i818 (Letters, 1, 183-87, 275-83).
7 "The Hoodwinking of Madeline: Skepticism in The Eve of St. Agnes," Studies in Philology, 58 (196i), 533-55; reprinted in The Hoodwinking of Madeline and Other Essays on Keats's Poems (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1971), pp. 67-93.
8 Stuart M. Sperry, "Romance as Wish-Fulfillment: Keats's The Eve of St. Agnes," Studies in Romanticism, lo (971), 27-43; revised in Sperry's Keats the Poet (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1973), pp. 198-220.
9 Some of this is recorded in John Keats, 1795-1995, with a Catalogue of the Harvard Keats Collection (Cambridge: Houghton Library, 1995); John Keats: Bicentennial Exhibition, September 19-November 22, 1995 (New York: Grolier Club, 1995); Robert Woof and Stephen Hebron, John Keats (Grasmere: Wordsworth Trust, 1995).
