1

1The question remains: how to undertake research into the functioning of literature, how to undertake research into its concretisation or—generally speaking—the phenomenon of reception? This is a matter of fundamental importance, because it embraces the question: what materials must be taken into consideration to become aware of methods of reception that are specific to a particular period, and—next—to reveal the styles that are characteristic for such reception? This is a problem that is to a considerable degree a practical one. It relates to the very choice of material that must be analysed.

2 This question appears before the historian of literature in a much milder form if he/she sets as his/her task the description of literary texts without taking into consideration means of reception. Then the question, at most, refers to the borders of literature (see Markiewicz 1965) to the issue of how far the competence of the researcher reaches, and what he/she has to analyse when using the tools of the discipline. Today, this matter does not usually provoke substantial controversy or emotion. The borders of literature have been quite precisely set, although, of course, differently in the case of different literary-historical periods.

3 But when one starts to analyse a text, the situation becomes quite complicated. One cannot limit oneself to the analysis of texts; they are only one element—the most important one, to be sure—of the act of literary communication. The concretisation of a work is not a text in the literal sense of the word; it is not a text in the sense that a work of literature is a text. First, it is necessary to determine what materials make it possible to investigate reception, and, therefore, which should become the object of analysis. This is a matter that is also of fundamental practical import, especially when matters of reception are not treated solely as an object of theoretical reflection, but as a phenomenon that is also vital when individual literary-communicative situations are at the forefront of scrutiny. The following article is an attempt to grasp this particular practical issue, an attempt—and the author is fully aware of this—that is still very provisional and incomplete.

4 The fact of reception—let us repeat—is not in most cases directly given to the literary historian, as the work of literature is given to him/her. The fact of reception can only be reconstructed, and reconstructed on the basis of a specific kind of texts. That is, the type of texts that it is possible to interpret as evidences of reception. This is a sphere of highly differentiated phenomena; it is made up of varying and diverse messages. They can be divided into five basic groups:

1. utterances (literary, paraliterary, and critical), in which the process of reading itself is subject to thematisation;
2. metaliterary utterances of any kind that are of a discursive character (critical, literary-historical, theoretical, etc.), in which the act of reading is not thematised; indirectly, however, these utterances bear witness to methods of reception, make it possible to reveal ways of thinking about literature, and demonstrate the general categories that are used when considering literature;
3. texts of every kind that refer to other texts through their own structure, and thus, pastiches, parodies, stylisations, etc.;
4. transformations of various kinds that are carried out on the work of literature, and thus, translations, paraphrases, transcriptions, etc.;
5. empirical sociological research that deals with the circulation of works of literature among various social groups and with the ways of reading that are particular to these groups.

5The materials gathered together in the first point can be most easily reconstructed; they are almost directly given. One can distinguish here three types of message: utterances about a work within a work (see Danek 1972) that relate to ways of reception (“literary-critical literature“ or „literary methodology of literature”); all kinds of records of reading contained in correspondence, private diaries, and other personal documents of this kind (therefore, here the vast domain of para-literary texts is interesting); and that sort of literary criticism that I would be inclined to describe as “impressionistic”.

6 An example of a work the direct subject of which is reading, and, thus, a poetic relation concerning reception is Norwid’s “Our Epos” [Epos-nasza]. This long poem is, of course, something more than an account of reading or an anecdote from childhood, but it is still, however, a poetic record of the concretisation of Don Quixote. The title of Norwid’s poem already signals what direction this concretisation will go in. If one knows Norwid’s views on the novel (see Głowinski 1973),1 one will not be surprised that the poem devoted to Cervantes’s work, which is usually received as a novel, recalls in its title an ancient literary form. This is the first - and exceptionally important—indication of the concretisation performed by Norwid. Cervantes’s work is worth reading because it is ascribed values that for the poet mark the epic alone among the narrative genres. Such a reading made it possible to treat Don Quixote as a hero cut to the measure of the traditional epic, as figure at once mythic and symbolic. Reading Cervantes’s work as a novel, while it does not exclude such a reception, at least makes it more difficult. Indeed, the matter does not stop here. In his concretisation of Don Quixote, Norwid also realises other values that are characteristic for his period: Cervantes’s hero is not just an epic character; he is also—at least in some measure—the equivalent of the Romantic poet. Norwid is not interested in the matter that is fundamental for twentieth-century interpreters of the novel, that is the dissonance between illusion and reality. Norwid’s comments do not mention the false consciousness to which Cervantes’s hero falls victim. Illusion becomes a form of poetical activity; it becomes creation. It seems that the manner of reading Don Quixote that can be reconstructed from Norwid’s poem is an example of the Romantic reception of Cervantes’s novel.

7 The next huge area in which the phenomenon of reception is thematised consists of records of reading of various kinds, for example, in private diaries, in correspondence, etc. As documents that bear witness to the properties of reception they are usually more important than strictly literary works, because in them these matters often do not go beyond the literal, and are not subject to symbolization. Generally, these texts are not intended for publication, and they express the style of reception that obtains in a period very clearly. As an example, it is sufficient to refer to the records of reading in Żeromski’s Diaries [Dzienniki].

8 I would also add to the group of messages in which matters of reading and reception are thematised a certain type of critical utterances, specifically that which one can describe as impressionistic criticism. However, in this case it is not just a matter of a movement known by this name in the history of criticism, but rather of all critical utterances in which the most important element is the transmission of the impressions experienced under the influence of a work that has been read. Criticism of this sort is much closer to private records than to critical discourse that is of an analytic or programmatic character.

9Let us now pass on to the second point, to metaliterary utterances of a discursive structure, in which ways of reading are not thematised. These ways of reading must be reconstructed on the basis of an analysis of what, how, and through what categories literature is dealt with. Here utterances of all kinds that refer to literature come into play: critical (apart from “impressionistic”), theoretical, literary-historical, philological, etc. Each of these, even the driest philological treatise, analysing textual variants, bears witness to a certain type of reading, to a certain manner of grasping the work of literature, even though this may not be rendered conscious. Indeed, it is often not conscious, since in the majority of cases the aim of the utterance, whether it is historical or theoretical, is to give an account of facts, to offer an objective description of the work of literature, its analysis free from any “lyricism”. Evidence of this type of reading is the language itself that is employed in this kind of utterance, and the descriptive categories that are employed in them. These categories are usually an ingredient of a specific literary culture. Methods of concretisation appear most clearly in critical utterances. These are by nature freer and are located closer to the empirical constituents of literary life than are strictly scholarly pieces. This is the case also in interpretations, and thus in analyses, of an individual work. These methods of concretisation speak out, however, and can be reconstructed also when the object of description are larger (or even the largest) literary wholes.

10 The discursive metaliterary messages discussed here, thus, reveal a new usefulness. They are of use to the literary historian not only as a history of creation, but also as a history of different methods of literary communi|cation. They allow the literary historian to recreate manners of reception that belong to a given period, and, thus, they become of interest not as an aggregate of correct or false judgments, but as evidence of how in a given period things were read, even though the process of reading itself is not thematised in them.2

11The third group contains non-discursive and non-systematic meta|literary utterances, so such as refer through their very own structure to another text or an aggregate of texts, and thereby attest to a particular concretisation of it (or them). Important here are pastiches, parodies, and stylisations of every kind. They demonstrate how the work that is referred to is received. In its own way, this factor is realised in pastiche since pastiche is in general not a simple copy, but constitutes an interpretation of its model according to the rules of reading that obtain in a given literary culture. To a higher degree than to pastiche, this applies to stylisation and parody; in these the features of contemporary style are not only not concealed, but they create a context that is essential for understanding the stylisation of those texts.

12Styles of reading, particular to a given literary culture, constitute a factor that defines a period’s possibilities in terms of parody and stylisation. An example is Thomas Mann’s “The Holy Sinner” [Der Erwählte], which is a parody of Hartmann von Aue’s Gregorius or the Good Sinner [Gregorius oder der gute Sünder], and at the same time a stylisation of a medieval hagiographic legend.3 This narrative is an example of the reception of a medieval legend, a reception performed in a cultural situation in which a text of this kind is read as a monument, because it does not correspond with a contemporary worldview. It corresponds with it, in fact, so little that one cannot simply bracket one’s own literary convictions and habits for the time of reading; a consciousness of the antiquity of the received text becomes a component of its concretisation. The reading, to which Mann’s narrative bears witness, would be unthinkable for example in the Romantic period, when references to the Middle Ages made it possible to formulate and express Romanticism’s own set of literary issues.

13 Let us now consider the fourth group, a quite non-homogenous one, that of transformation.4 This contains three basic fields: a) translations; b) paraphrases, and c) transcriptions. This grouping is particularly important for the analysis of reception, because all transformations of a literary work can be interpreted as a manifestation of a particular reading. This is so since they are undertaken according to certain—conscious or unconscious—directives relating to concretisation, ones that are particular to a given literary culture.

14 As is well known, every translation, even the most faithful, is an interpretation of the translated text. It is never a carbon copy, but rather a field of choices. The choices tell us not only of the translator’s conscious decisions, and they do not only reveal his/her literary taste, but they also indicate ways of reading that are particular to the period in which the translation is made. A good example are two translations of Rimbaud’s “Bateau ivre”—that by Miriam and that by Ważyk. This is an interesting case because both translators remain fundamentally faithful to the original, but, nonetheless, both Polish versions of Rimbaud’s poem differ from each other quite substantially. One can say that Miriam’s version is an example of a Młoda Polska concretisation of a Symbolist poem, while Ważyk’s version is an example of an avant-garde concretisation. Both translators refer to different concepts of poetic language and actualise different traditions. Often disputes about translation reveal different concepts of reception: in Polish literature, the clearest example is the polemic between Tuwim and Ważyk relating to the translation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin.

15 If one analyses a translation as an example of evidence of reception, one must consider one vital element. A factor that limits this analysis is the fact that certain properties of a translation are a consequence not of a translator’s decision nor of the literary culture to which it belongs, but they result from the properties of the language into which the translation is made. These consequences cannot be interpreted as evidence of reading, but are the result of linguistic necessities. As an example, we can consider the simplification of time relations in the Polish translation of Proust, which result from the fact that in the area of grammatical tense Polish has other possibilities than French does5 and is, in fact, less rich in possibilities than French. But despite this substantial limitation, translations still offer important evidence of reception, and make it possible to reveal ways of reading.

16 From this point of view, an even more effective object of analysis is made up of any kind of paraphrase of literary works, both done within one language, and when the prototype and the transformed version belong to different languages. In the latter case, paraphrases should not be identified with translations, since here it is not faithfulness to the original that is important, but the making of a new version, a new version usually of a work that is well known and assimilated within a given literary culture (here one can mention the very numerous paraphrases of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe). In terms of reconstructing principles of reception, an analysis of Horace’s Odes would be extremely interesting. They have been paraphrased in the majority of European languages since the Renaissance. Romantic paraphrases certainly reveal methods of reading that are quite different from those practiced by Renaissance poets who produced re-workings of the same texts.6 The author of paraphrases is not subject to the same rigorous constraints that a translator must observe; his/her doings are, thus, of particular interest for the subject we are dealing with here. A special case of paraphrase is the transferring of a work that is representative for a specific level of literary culture into the field of a genre that belongs to another level. The movement that is characteristic for this type of paraphrase usually runs from high to low: tragedy becomes a popular musical (Romeo and Juliet transformed into West Side Story), and adapts itself to rules of reception that are not contained within it. This type of re-working is analysed by Hannah Arendt (1972, 266) as a phenomenon that is characteristic of mass culture.

17 The phenomenon that we have designated as transcription is a wide and varied field. By transcription I understand every transfer of a work from one system of signs into another, and, thus, in our case from the system of language to the sign system of other arts. Of course, from the point of view of the matter under discussion here, not all transfers of this type are equally important. Evidence of reception is certainly the treatment of a poetic work as a song text (for example, the poems of Goethe and Heine in innumerable Lieder by German Romantic composers, or poems of Młoda Polska in Szymanowski’s songs). Here, of course, an analysis demands musicological approach, which is highly specialised and is, in general, unavailable to the historian of literature. Another piece of evidence of reception are illustrations to literary texts. To give one clear example: Romantic illustrations to Don Quixote are evidence of a wholly different reading of the novel from twentieth-century illustrations.

18 From the point of view of our topic, however, theatrical and film transcriptions of literary plots are the most interesting. (The same is true of such transcriptions of poetic texts, although by the nature of things there are many fewer of these.) Here one must make the same reservation that I made with regard to translations: not all elements of such transcriptions can be interpreted as evidence of reception. Several are a consequence of necessities resulting from adopting the language of theatre or film, and, thus, do not depend directly on the author of the transcription, but rather bear witness at most to the demands and properties of the language.7 Even limited in this way, transcriptions do not cease to be a particularly clear piece of evidence of concretisation. For example, film adaptations (see Hopfinger 1974; on theatrical adaptations see Bluestone 1974) of Dosto|evskij’s novels reveal quite differing methods of reception. The novels may be treated either as a realistic picture of social behaviour, or as a psychological drama, or as a philosophical treatise. In this case, they do not document only individual interpretations of readers of Dostoevskij’s novels, but rather attest to certain tendencies in literary culture.

19 The fifth group of evidence substantially differs from all the previously discussed ones. They are made up of the results of empirical research of sociologists who are concerned with the circulation of literary works within different social groups. These differ in terms of at least two elements: first, these pieces of evidence are consciously organised, and they are thought out in advance as messages that speak of socially differentiated types of reception; second, they can apply to readings that are particular to all social groups, whereas the previous kind of evidence really did not go beyond a circle that one might call that of connoisseurs.8 The importance of such research lies in this, even though they are limited only to contemporary times (fundamentally, the materials previously analysed do not know this limitation). For our range of concerns, such research is useful only when it does not lead to exclusively numerical information relating to books read; just looking through public library index cards is insufficient. Such information is useful when it relates to real ways of reading, belonging to individual social groups. One example is Bogusław Sułkowski’s valuable book (Sułkowski 1972). Sociological studies of this kind usually demand literary-historical interpretation. The literary scholar may set up problems that to the sociologist seem of little import—such as the relationship of the ways of reading practiced by readers that belong to various social groups to the concretisation directives contained in a work and to analogical directives functioning within a given literary culture.

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20 Let us emphasise this: an analysis of reception on the basis of this or that evidence of it does not basically aim to reveal the individual properties of reading. Its purpose is to make clear the character of reception as a social phenomenon and its character in a given literary culture. Here one can speak of style of reception, as one speaks of literary styles. When we consider the matter of literary communication, their mutual relations become a question of considerable importance.

The issue of research into reading should be organised parallel to that of the history of literature conducted from the point of view of creative activities. Here, too, one can aim at diachronic framings, illustrating the shaping of a given set of norms, its evolution, stages of stabilisation and decay. One can also aim at synchronic framings that make clear that there co-exist in a certain time various collateral or even competing systems of reading. In the latter case, it is a matter, above all, of recognising the social stratification of norms of reading—their disposition relative to levels of literary culture that can be distinguished within publics (Sławiński 1974, 17).

21 If these propositions seem correct, then one must look for styles of reception on the basis of the types of evidence discussed in the first part of this paper. These styles9 do not have to run parallel to the styles of creation that rule in the periods in which given works are received. The field of reading is much broader than the field of literary creation of a given period, and comprises all the works that are read at that time. In addition, it is important to take into account that not all works written and published in a given period become an object of reading. The directions for concretisation that they contain may be in conflict with norms of reading that, at that time, regulate processes of reception. This is mainly the case if they go beyond the average reading practice of the period.

22 Provisionally one can distinguish seven basic styles of reception. The list set out here is not exhaustive. It aims to point to a certain repertoire of possibilities, and, thus, to what is only an initial orientation. This list will certainly change substantially, to the degree that the issue of reception becomes an object of concrete historical analyses. I think it is possible to distinguish the following styles.

231. MYTHICAL STYLE. In its purest form, this appears when a literary work is received as a religious message, declaring the truths of belief. In a certain sense, this work does not have an autonomous existence, but is directly inscribed to a certain world-view totality. This style of reception was obligatory in archaic societies, ones that did not yet know literature as a specific and autonomous phenomenon. A mythic style was then the exclusive style; archaic culture did not permit the formulation of other styles. Later, in more complex social configurations, this style lost the privilege of exclusivity; it appeared alongside others. Its domain became, above all, the reception of works connected with the sacred. However, not only. It designates the reception of all those messages that are treated as an actualization of existing and approved world views, of messages that not only confirm those world views, but also in their own way establish them.

242. ALLEGORICAL STYLE. While the mythical style, above all, brought the reception of a work within the scope of a greater world-view totality, and, in principle, did not have to accept any assumptions as to their structure (in essence, every text can be received via a mythical model), an allegorical style of reception, in a fundamental manner, is organised around a thesis that refers, in fact, to the structure of the work. At the roots of this style, there lies a conviction that the literary work is marked by its two-dimensionality. The first dimension is important to the extent that it reveals the second, the dimension that contains the vital contents, which by their nature are stabilised and solid. The reader’s task is to reach them and to understand them. The allegorical style of reception, which consists of a search for a “hidden agenda”, does not only take shape when we are dealing with works of a genuine allegorical structure. It is designed to be a universal style, and, thus, to be able to deal with all kinds of utterances. In allegorical reading of a non-allegorical work, we are dealing with something that has been called imposed allegory (see Tuve 1966, especially the chapter “Imposed Allegory”). The allegorical style is not just a supposition relating to the structure of a work of literature; it also brings the work within a certain set of conceptions, and even within a specific world-view system. This happens principally because it assumes a permanence of relations between the two dimensions of the literary work. Here the second dimension (“the hidden agenda”) overlaps with a general complex of professed convictions. It is, thus, no accident that the allegorical style of reception belongs, above all, to periods that are marked by a high degree of stability of world views. A specific variant of allegorical style is a style that assumes that texts are written in Aesopian language, and, thus, under the surface there lie concealed contents that for this or that reason cannot be communicated in a given society. Thus, what is found in the first dimension is treated as a mask, serving to deceive a despot (In this manner of reading, Wallenrod could become Belweder10).

253. SYMBOLIC STYLE. Just as the allegorical style does, this style assumes a two-dimensional structure in the literary text. However this structure is understood completely differently. A conviction fundamental for the allegorical style is rejected, that is, the belief that the relations between the two levels are set exactly and for all time, and in consequence, they refer to a stable system of views. Quite the reverse, the symbolic style of concretisation accepts that these relations are not clear and not defined. Thus, the first dimension is not transparent, and does not open out onto a domain of clear and solid. It is at most to suggest meanings that are anchored in the second dimension. This style, therefore, ascribes a more active role to the reader, and leaves much greater freedom for his/her initiative. The symbolic style may also be of a universal character. Not only works of an actual symbolic structure may be received according to its rules. Certain texts can be read in two ways, either allegorically or symbolically. In the former case, the reader aims to decode what, for example, the story of Joseph K. in Kafka’s The Trial means (for example, the human situation in relation to God). In the latter case, however, the reader is aware that this story is furnished with a set of fluid and unclear meanings, and that there is no way in which it can be rendered unambiguous. The symbolic style of reception is, thus, to some degree an open style, and it respects the possibility of many meanings.

264. INSTRUMENTAL STYLE. Within the scope of this style of reception, the literary work, to some extent, loses its autonomy, although in a different way from how that occurs in the mythical style and—partly—in the allegorical style. Here the most important matter is not so much the direct including of received texts into the totality of a worldview, but rather treating them (in consequence of the demands of this or that ideology) as means of action. Here we are dealing with reading understood as a utilitarian act, referring to a common worldview, which is not so much moral as moralising. In consequence, a work—often independently of its real character—becomes in the course of reading something in the manner of an elevating example, an element of a sui generis didacticism. Within the operation of this style, there appears a tendency toward dichotomous division, even when this is not substantiated in a concretised work (a black-and-white world in which there are drawn exact lines of demarcation between what s positive and what is negative).

275. MIMETIC STYLE. This is based on a conviction that between the objects and situations presented in a literary text and objects and situations belonging to the real world, there is a relation of similarity, imitation, or reflection. Thus, this style fundamentally situates the text differently in relation to the extra-literary world from the way that the previous styles do. Here the point of reference is not this or that world-view complex, but rather “reality”. And more precisely, it is what in a given culture is considered reality, for reality is filtered through this or that set of convictions and beliefs, and “reality” is always here an interpreted reality. Mimetic style leads to a situation in which a central factor in reading is truth, understood on the surface as it is in its classic definition. The history of mimetic conceptions, however, shows that the links with that definition are wholly deceptive. To convince oneself of this, it is sufficient to recall that reality was something different for archaic theoreticians of mimesis and their classical successors, and something different for theoreticians of realism. Something unchanging, however, is the fact that every mimetic style of reception takes reality as the basic point of reference, and does not realise that the idea of reality is here—to a greater or lesser degree—a result of assumptions adopted a priori, a result of an interpretation made in accord with certain principles. This style is actualised not only in the reception of works in which a mimetic aesthetics is the permanent grounding, but—it seems in a manner that is more difficult than that of the styles discussed above—it subordinates to itself works that are distant to that aesthetics. Erected, above all, on common sense, this style is inclined to reject what can be considered to come into conflict with it.

286. EXPRESSIVE STYLE. Within the scope of this style, the most important phenomenon is the situating of the read text in relation to the sender. Here the author is someone quite different from a distant perpetrator from whom one can disconnect an utterance, and argue that it has acquired an autonomous being. The author is treated as a sui generis component of the text, since the entire reading process is meant to lead to a revelation of his/her attributes. All that is contained in the work is interpreted as a syndrome, and often even as a direct message of his/her individuality. The expressive style of reception, thus, assumes the unceasing presence of the author, and every element of the text can be interpreted as a—conscious or unconscious—manifestation of his/her intimate world, his/her feelings, his/her exceptional and by the very nature of things unique internal situation. The basic attribute of this style is, accordingly, that it aims at individualization.

297. AESTHETICISING STYLE. At the base of this style11 there is an aim at receiving the literary work, above all, as a work of literature. Thus, one can speak here of a particular kind of autotelic reading. In no case does this mean that the consciousness that a literary utterance is a specific type of text cannot accompany the styles of reception mentioned above (it may, indeed, accompany every one of them). However, here it takes on a particular shape. In certain cases, the idea of art for art’s sake becomes a concretising directive, and beauty and form, however understood, become the basic categories. Reading concentrates, above all, on the work itself and excludes any understanding of it that possesses an instrumental character. One of the shapes of the aesthetic style of reception is a ludic manner of reading: the work is received, above all, within categories of play, as a source of delight and entertainment. A certain type of literature may be designed, above all, for this kind of reading; such reading, however, may have a much broader scope and bring in almost all types of utterance. Within an aestheticising style are especially clear functional and social differentiations: its ludic variant is usually a component of popular culture.

30 The repertoire of styles of reception set out here requires some commentary. Above all, in their actual historical existence, these styles generally do not appear in a pure form. It is necessary to understand them not as an absolute and rigorously observed set of rules, but rather as bundles of tendencies, which guide the processes of reading. Individual styles in concrete historical situations complement each other mutually, creating aggregates of different types, often of a hierarchical character.

31 A basic problem is the issue of the possibility of bringing together individual styles of reception or their elements. This basically involves two questions:

1. what styles of reception in general can enter into connections with each other, and how within these connections do their mutual relations take shape?;
2. in what literary-historical situations, accordingly, do certain styles of reception enjoy conditions that permit them to join with each other, and in what situations do they decidedly exclude each other?

32 The second question is, substantially, a more detailed version of the first question, inasmuch as it brings the matter down to a question of literary-historical empirical data. At first glance it is clear that certain styles are mutually exclusive. The clearest example here are the relations between an instrumental style and an aesthetic style. Understood outside a concrete historical context, they have no features that would allow them to co-exist or even so function that elements of the former might be subordinated to elements of the latter. And indeed, in literary history it is difficult to find an example of the bringing together an instrumental reading with an aestheticising reading in that variant that is linked with the slogan art for art’s sake, understood as a directive for concretisation. However, matters are different when we are dealing with the ludic variant of aestheticising reading. The literary work may be so programed that on the surface it seems to appeal to itself, but in fact it is so devised to be a vehicle serving the propagation of certain social positions or the advocacy of summary tasks, and, thus, aiming to subordinate a ludic reading to an instrumental reading (this is a phenomenon typical for contemporary mass culture).

33 We conclude that one can reply to both questions only when one treats styles of reception not as independently existing sets of directives for reading, but as components of literary-historical situations. When undertaking to look at this issue, literary history can consider the “reader’s point of view” that is postulated by scholars (Weinrich 1967).

34 In concrete literary-historical analysis, too, a range of possibilities may appear that each of the styles of reception brings with it, and also—to put it thus—a type of possibility that opens in the face of receptive practice. Drawing on the work of the English linguistic sociologist Basil Bernstein, who divided linguistic codes into two basic types (Bernstein 1972; 1975), restricted codes and elaborated codes, we can speak of restricted and of elaborated styles of reception. “Restriction” and “elaboration” cannot be reduced to the number of components that appear within each of these styles. It is rather a matter of the connections that form among these components. Bernstein’s theory of two codes is rich and quite complicated. Here, let us look, above all, at one of its elements, specifically at the way in which relations form among components within each of the styles identified by Bernstein.

35 The characteristic feature of restricted styles is that the relations between elements are to a large degree simplified and—above all—have been schematised and are readily predictable. One can be certain that within a given style after A will come B, and that the relations between them will develop in a manner that is fixed in advance. This high degree of predictability, resulting, inter alia, from the social stabilisation of a given style, is in the case of restricted style a fact of basic importance. Elaborated styles are marked, however, by less predictability, and create more favourable conditions for innovations of all kinds. They are to a lesser extent socially iced-over and congealed. Bernstein argues that a given type of style is not prescribed to one social group for all time, but is connected, above all, with changing social roles.

36 Can one a priori designate certain styles of reception as restricted, and others as elaborated? Every a priori division of this type would miss the vital properties of the styles, and, above all, would obscure their role in the process of literary development. Whether a given style of reception can be included among restricted styles or elaborated ones is not determined by their properties viewed in isolation from concrete historical circumstances. Each style can potentially be either one or the other. The real affiliation of a given style in a given period is determined by the manner in which it regulates reading processes. A given style of reception, if it so directs the course of concretisation that the result is that in a read text only predictable links and sequences are perceived, is without any doubt a restricted style. (Its perceptions are often independent of the real character of the read work.) If, however, a style does not guarantee such an advanced degree of predictability, if it is open to increasingly new cognitive and aesthetic values, and, thus, makes it possible to receive literary phenomena of various kinds, then this is without any doubt an elaborated style. For literary history that wishes to consider the matter of reception, it becomes a central issue in what literary-historical situations a given style of reception fulfils the conditions of a restricted style, and in what conditions those of an elaborated one. (Or, if we conceptualise this in more detail, what elements of a given style are connected with one type of reception, a what elements are connected with the other?) Correct answers to these questions can only be given by concrete literary-historical analysis.

37 Thus, for this reason a vital matter is the relation of styles of reception to the classic tools of analysis used in literary history. In the first place, we should consider the relation of styles suggested by particular trends or periods in literary history. This is an important problem, since we have assumed that phenomena of reception and reading should be analysed as parallel to the development of literature itself.12 Styles of reception are meant by no means to replace such concepts as, for example, the Baroque or Romantic style of reading. The relations among these categories are differently disposed. Styles of reception are never limited to one period. Their central feature is that they may occur in synchronic configurations of varying kinds, and in each of them they take on a specific shape because, inter alia, they can combine with other styles. The style of reading specific to a given period (the Baroque, Romanticism, etc.) is, thus, an actualisation of selected elements of a repertoire of concretising styles. This formulation makes it possible to show the peculiarities of methods of reading that are characteristic for a given period, and also to present their transformations in a diachronic perspective.

38 One more factor has to be taken into account: literary genre. Genre is also a certain proposition for the reader.13 It encourages an appropriate reading of a text, which is accepted as a representative of that genre. Thus, genres stand in some relation to styles of reception; certain styles cleave more to some of these, others to others. Lyric poetry is more connected with the expressive style of reception; the novel is more connected with the mimetic style. These links must be seen as the result of a tendency, and not as a consequence of an absolute ascription. Considered in terms of their relations in terms of genre, styles of reception may basically have a universal character. So, for example, a novel may be received via rules of expressive reading. (An example are works by representatives of French thematic criticism on the subject of narrative texts: in this conception, narrative is, above all, an expression of the author’s attitudes, and only on a further level is an account.) Despite the fundamental orientations of genre, despite the fact that a genre is a specifically structured challenge to the reader, a genre’s links with this or that style of reception depend to a large measure (and sometimes entirely) on the properties of a given literary culture. A genre that is so developed and variegated as the novel can be received in accordance with the instructions of all seven styles of concretisation.

39 Entering into this or that relation with the concretising directives that belong to literary trends and genres, styles of reception may be marked by universality when one looks at their functioning within a given synchrony, but particularly within a given social group (understood synchronically). Universality, however, does not constitute an innate feature, but belongs to a sphere of possibilities. So it is worth pointing out that in certain situations, styles of reception may become criteria of choice. They may favour, for example, a rejection of what would conflict with a given style, and especially when the subordination to itself of resistant messages would require a particularly advanced effort of interpretation, they reveal at that moment their axiological character.

40 A problem of particular import, which I do no more than touch on here, is change in styles of reception. This topic demands an extensive diachronic framing. It may be that the process of change matches changes in style in the way that they take shape within language, and recently these have been an object of interest to socio-linguistics.14 Certainly, however, they match, to a certain degree, evolutions in styles of creation. One might suppose that this process, considered not just within small synchronic segments, but also from the point of view of the “longue durée”,15 can attain the status of one of the fundamental objects of literary-historical analysis. In any case, if literary history were not to undertake this kind of research, it would have no chance of becoming a full and many-sided history of literary processes and evolution.

Notes

• 1 In a letter to Jadwiga Łuszczewska from October 1871, the poet writes: “the first book that I read in my life was Cervantes’s hero” (Norwid 1971, 497).
• 2 I analyze this issue on the example of Kleiner’s work on Słowacki in the next essay in this book (Głowiński 1977a). One is forced to concur with the opinion that “criticism is a metaphor for the act of reading, and the act itself is inexhaustible” (de Man 1971, 107).
• 3 See Mann’s own comments on this subject, scattered throughout letters written while working on the novel (Mann 1961).
• 4 Edward Balcerzan presents an interesting analysis of the phenomenon of transformation (Balcerzan 1972, 59-61).
• 5 Harald Weinrich writes on the importance of grammatical tenses that belong to a given language for the structure of a narrative (Weinrich 1973).
• 6 For the Romantic reception of Horace, see Marnier (1965).
• 7 Émile Benveniste writes of the non-convertibility of particular semiotic systems in his study “Sémiologie de la langue” (Benveniste 1974).
• 8 See Sławiński (1974). See pp. 18-19 for a discussion of the usefulness of sociological research for analysis of reception. Here there is a clear outline of the possibility of cooperation between sociologists and literary scholars, since sociologists, too, express an interest for what literary historians do in this field. Antonina Kłoskowska points to the possibility of such working together in the introductory part of Kłoskowska (1976, I), which is tellingly entitled “Socjologia a teoria literatury”.
• 9 I understand style broadly in the same way as—frequently—art historians do: e.g. Shapiro (1961). Cultural anthropologists also use the category of style in a similarly broad sense.
• 10 [Głowiński alludes here to the belief of the conspirators from 1830, who stylised their attack on the Belweder (the residence of the Russian governor in Warsaw)—an attack, which led the outbreak of the November uprising against Russian rule—as a realization of the intention of Adam Mickiewicz’s epic poem Konrad Wallenrod. (translator's note)]
• 11 The possibility of distinguishing this style was suggested to me by Karlheinz Stierle in the discussion after my paper on the subject of reception, which I gave at the Ruhr-Universität in Bochum in July 1974. My attention was further drawn to the ludic sub-variant of this style in a discussion at the Literary Theory Conference in Ślemień in February 1975.
• 12 I also write about these matters in the last part of my essay “Komunikacja literacka jako sfera napięć” (Głowiński 1977).
• 13 I deal with this issue in the first chapter of Głowiński (1969)
• 14 Here I refer especially to two studies published in Pride & Holmes (1972), that is: Labov (1972) and Bright & Ramanujan (1972)
• 15 Here I refer to F. Braudel’s term (Braudel 1969).