Reading Literature After Deconstruction By Robert Lumsden

In this case, containment of a (Marxian) sort would be freely chosen, in preference to the apparent larger freedom of self-reflection implied in Iser’s phenomenological project.

The Associational Pattern

The reader’s experience in an ‘associational’ mode will probably be of enjoying a relatively undisturbed access to the mind of an author (or, just as contentiously, the ‘mind’ of the work). Readings of this sort admit less difficulty in communication than the other types, perhaps remarkably little.¹² This is a manner of reading characterised by the components of a text—images, figures of speech, ideas—seeming to flow into and to suggest others naturally and without obstruction.

Three concepts strike me at the moment as useful in localising this sense of a text. T. S. Eliot’s objective correlative, Michael Polanyi’s tactic knowing, and the idea, variously named, of a contrast between “intuitive” and “logical” knowledge.¹³

Each of these approaches or modes or moods of reception makes of the text a thing which is, somewhat paradoxically, both implicitly complete and insufficient as given in its surface features. Perhaps Alan Tate’s knowledge of the whole object best summarises these aspects of a reading in this ‘associational’ mode.¹⁴

In the objective correlative, Eliot’s attempt to standardise the effect of a work of art on its audience, it is clear that he is supposing both a certainty in the location of the message and immediacy in its apprehension. These two elements, the items as given in the text and the reception they meet in the reader, converge in a meaning which is experienced as immediate, complete in itself, and evocative of other meanings. Its immediacy circumvents the need for further extended consideration, and its apparent naturalness of sequence is intended to persuade that it is a reliable picture of a real—the real—world. In a phrase, it is both objective and linguistically mediated.