AGAINST THE SOLITARY--AND SOLIPSISTIC-- PURSUIT OF MEANING *REBECCA THOMAS ANKENY* Assistant Professor of English Westmont College Perhaps the most irritating response a student can have to a piece of literature, from my point of view, is that "it can mean whatever a reader wants it to mean." "Oh no, it can't," is my testy reply. "There are only a limited possibility of meanings, and yours is not one of them." And this is not only an undergraduate response to literature, either. Grown-up publishing reader-response critics writing at this time say that every reader discovers meaning in literature by finding his/her own identity trace in it. This implies that there is no other meaning to be had; the reader simply reads him or herself. How can I respond to such solipsistic reading to move those readers toward community? I have tried in my introduction to literature classes to embody my belief that poetry is a community activity rather than a solitary search for self by requiring my students to meet in poetry reading groups. This presumably illustrates the fact that two heads may be better than one when it comes to understanding E. E. Cummings. On the other hand, they may reinforce each other in solipsism by saying, "I don't see that in the poem, but you can get whatever you want to out of poetry anyway." Nevertheless, these small groups communicate one truth about my discipline: that we discover meaning together, not all on our own. Other points of view can keep us from error and embarrassment in misreading a poem, or even life itself. Another irritating response to literature is that "it isn't important to find out which side the author is on in any conflict he or she presents." This response reveals a lack of respect for the writer as a human being with a message of some kind. And this again is not an undergraduate response alone. The idea of the "intentional fallacy" circulated by the New Criticism suggested that it was a mistake to say, "Cummings intended to condemn conformity in this poem." A reader could only guess at intention based on form and pattern in the work. This guessing is now undercut by the deconstructionist position that even if the author had intentions, the nature of language itself undercuts any possibility of those intentions being fulfilled for any reader. The point of literary art is that it resolves nothing and communicates to no one, and "here's another work that shows this to be true." It is a game of solitaire on both sides. What can provide an alternative to this? Perhaps incorporating that old standby of biographical information about the writer will help students see that these are human beings reaching out to other human beings with a message that cannot just be anything a reader wants it to be. The necessity of knowing the author as a person came home to me recently when a student came in to talk about Byron's "So We'll Go No More A-Roving." She had on the basis of its internal evidence interpreted it quite adequately as a love poem spoken by one member of an aging couple to another, a couple given in the past to walking together in the moonlight. Anyone who knows Byron knows he wrote no such thing. And that is the key--"anyone who knows Byron." It is impossible to understand that poem as Byron meant it without knowing that he had lived at the time of its composition a dissolute twenty-nine years, that he wrote it to a male friend, Tom Moore, in a letter describing his new "invalid regimen," and that for him "roving" was the kind of thing a tomcat does. Small groups can teach them how much help another point of view can be, but I have to teach them that knowing the author and context of a poem are helpful to understanding it more nearly the way the author meant it. Finally, each genre of literature has its own history and traditions. This may be the most difficult connection to work into a course introducing students to literature. But surely they need to realize when they read a modern play that they are connected in very important ways to medieval audiences celebrating the mysteries of the faith and to Greek audiences worshipping their gods by means of drama. Surely it is important to the student idea of the poet to know about the bards who carried the community history in their poems, who articulated the ideals of the community, and who kept the gods relevant to their hearers through their stories. Poetry requires from its reader the most sensitivity to tradition of any genre, and this may be why the undereducated reader defensively insists that his meaning is as good as anyone's. How can we participate in tradition, which is what good reading literature forces us to do, when we are still uninitiated to the tradition? Yet what does it accomplish for us to participate in literature? Perhaps most immediately apparent is that we find we are not the first humans to feel the way we do. Every reader who has patience and persistence will find that some poem, essay, character, or story does reflect his or her own life. This is different from the approach where we find our own lives in everything we read. Instead this reader discovers that another person has lived through similar experiences. The reader can leave knowing his or her particular experiences are those common to humanity. A connection forms. Second, a reader can gain a sense or origins. This is my culture, my history, my roots. I can know what people hundreds of years ago were thinking, how they were living, and what things have changed or remained constant from them to me. The problems of how humans exercise power transcend the fact that we Americans have no king, so that we also take warning from Shakespeare's King Richard III. As a Quaker child, I read historical fiction about Quakers moving to Ohio, about the childhood of Lucretia Mott, Jessamyn West's The Friendly Persuasion, as well as non-fiction histories of the Quaker movement. As a college student, I read journals by Quakers Laura Haviland, who smuggled slaves across the Mason-Dixon line, and Stephen Grellet, who travelled all over the world in response to God's call. As a graduate student, I researched and presented the hangings of Quakers on Boston Commons from the Quaker point of view. All these reading experiences of fiction, biography, journal, history, linked me to my heritage and made me value traditions. I value particularly, and find appropriate in the context of this conference, the faith Quakers give form to in their business meetings that an individual can hear the word of God directly, but the same Spirit of God will also guide a group of seekers in the same direction. In other words, individual revelation of truth can--and will--be discovered and confirmed by that individual's community. This model of finding truth has been most recently articulated by Richard Foster in The Celebration of Discipline, but it is the result of over 300 years of Quaker heritage. My students in introduction to literature this semester are reading Lewis Thomas's The Lives of a Cell. A central preoccupation for Thomas is how interdependent biologically all of life is, and he interprets the biological facts to apply to all realms of our lives. The fundamental current of the universe may be to "come together," with immunological responses instituted primarily to keep symbiosis from going to far. We do not live in our bodies by ourselves, but we share them with microscopic creatures who depend on us and on whom we depend for life. Likewise, we do not live our lives unto ourselves, but what we do takes its meaning from the context of the community in which we do it. Thomas describes the present working model of how science arrives at new truth as being very much like the way ants get their hills built: each scientist contributes a fragment of information out of which a grand whole can be built. Perhaps if we can help our students see that when they study they are participating in a grand community effort to internalize our history and discover truth, they will be drawn out of their individualism and into something considerably more like a celebration.