Friday night at Stubbs... I'm standing in sweaty, smoky crowd, sandwiched between happy strangers who are screaming and swaying their way through the lived experience of a Sonic Youth show. It's the
"condition of music to which the literary work of art should aspire: a complete absorption in the process of evoking a work from the text, and in sensing, clarifying, structuring, savoring, that experience as it unfolds" (see Rosenblatt's The Reader, The Text, The Poem, p. 29).
Admittedly, I have to shift away from my own evocation, from the aesthetic end of the continuum toward the efferent, to notice this. I'm hopeless (I know): thinking about Rosenblatt at the rock show. But as I watch the faces of these happy strangers, living through this moment, I think of the primacy of the evocation, with "what happens during the actual reading event" (p. 24). It's easiest to achieve with music, Pater suggests, but Rosenblatt reminds us that this experience is at the heart of the aesthetic transaction with text. It all starts here, at the meeting of the text and what we bring to it... and, undoubtedly, each individual has a different experience of that text, including the last 20 minutes of the controlled chaos of amplifier feedback noises. Wicked.
Of course, this metaphor only goes so far... Rosenblatt, as always, brings us back to the text, to the language, that "essential trait of literary art" that points to something outside of ourselves (p. 29). When thinking of literary text, then, we are constrained by a "closed" form that is open to diverse interpretations (p. 88). More boundaries here than the more subjective experience of the rock show.
After the "evocation," I came home and looked up Sonic Youth on Wikipedia. Having only limited prior knowledge of the band (this was my husband's choice), I shifted in to a more efferent stance, wanting to see other people's responses and interpretations of this body of work and this genre of music (sometimes called noise rock). I sought out the background knowledge to have a vision of the larger context (beyond my personal response) - the purpose of my efferent reading here being to enhance and extend my own aesthetic experience.
I chastised myself for being such a nerd, for interrupting my lived-through experience with thoughts that are too analytical for a Friday night. But Rosenblatt wouldn't judge me:
"The reader may stop at times simply to register more fully the experience that has been elicited - to savor the qualities of the images or state of mind produced, to clarify the relationships that have been sensed, or to see implications." (p. 68)
So there I was standing in that crowd of concurrent responses, evoking and reacting. It was a raw, sweaty, lived-through, aesthetic kind of experience, followed up with some efferent thinking that actually makes my Friday night more interesting by the moment. Rock on.
3 comments:
Dude- You should write rock-and-roll reviews for the New Yorker. :)
And don't feel bad: we're all nerds here. Really, why get a graduate degree (not in business) if you're not, deep down, a nerd.
I agree that you could try your hand at reviews -- this is good!
And think of all the nerds in the world -- there are certainly music nerds, computer nerds, medicine nerds, art nerds...hey! It's a big boat with a lot of excited people in it!
Anyway, I love how you made the connection between what was being lived on Friday night in an EXPERIENCE of music, to what LMR wrote about as reading AS a transactional experience. Methinks she woud approve of the connection...in fact she made a similar one in the intereview of actors, where one described his in-the-moment-ness with the words on the page and "rode the current -- not from LMR, but from an old musician friend.
I totally hear you--I went to a Radiohead concert that was supernatural, religious, orgasmic. There is something to be said for the "concert effect" (and by this I'm not referring to the habit of dismissing trace amounts of marijuana that turn up in drug test results). Don't worry, I'm a nerd too--I was looking for pictures of Byzantium because Rosenblatt referenced the text of the same name so often.
We should find a way to make reading more like music for kids.
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