1We know what a scandalous artist looks like. We understand what motivates him or her. But what do we know of a scandalous readership? In the study of all aspects of artistic communication, a question like this is necessary. Of course, the history of culture commemorates the particularly drastic behavior of receivers repulsed by new voices in art. It records recitals whistled off stage, boycotted art exhibits, repudiated writers’ works. But let us notice: when art wins and “all ends well”, these excesses are treated as vagaries, which—fortunately—it has been possible to show up. Usually, at this point, reflection on the nature of the phenomenon ceases. Finally justice triumphs, the stars of the concert platform burn even brighter, the prices of once despised or damaged paintings rise, writers once unread find both fame and a place in the encyclopedias: those receivers’ boycotts seem something incidental—outside the system of culture.
2 But is that right?
3 Maybe the system is still being reconstructed with bias, and, contrary to notions of the objectivity of research, in a somewhat too literary fashion. With bias, because the thinking of connoisseurs of art mainly accompany masterpieces. It analyzes works from the perspective of the masters who were successful in breaking through the blockade. In their lifetimes or after their deaths. In this way, the history of art becomes—on the level of synthesis, in the formulation of the bases of the worldview of research—a history of successes. (The fashion today for ennobling trivial stylistics and second-rate works does not undermine this regularity; on the contrary, work “on the bottom” takes place in the shadow of the heights, and takes meaning against their background.) Breakdowns in literary communication are evaluated in relation to success—as embarrassing episodes, which impair the crystallizations of a system of real values, delay its constitution, but occur as it were outside it. If not in a completely different world, then on distant and unsavory peripheries. At the same time, the cases of intolerance are intriguing as offering possibilities of talking about art in a para-literary manner. They form a dramaturgical node in the research story. The protagonist eye to eye with the enemy. In a struggle with the tyranny of the despotic father, the rabid soap maker, the dull official, the coarse gendarme, the cynical publisher, the overweening reviewer, etc. Such formulations give scholarly utterances an ethical message, something in the way of a lesson in facts, which teaches that to dwell in culture requires heroism, that it is necessary to defend real values to the end, until the base are amazed and afeared. The researcher’s moral engagement—that indispensable attribute of humanist activity—may be a source of simplifications. Under the influence of emotions, the researcher enters into the role of the critic, a somewhat singular role, and begin to conduct criticism ex post. Justice is done to the invisible world of the past. The vision of the cultural system is as a result an “overdriven” vision. It becomes a tale with thesis.
4 Forms of receivers’ intolerance are difficult to define. Today, research into the poetics of reception emphasises, above all, hermeneutic pro|cedures, and reconstruct the cognitive effort of the trustworthy receiver, who aims to include a text in the sphere of his/her own existential problems. This research dissolves the issue of artistic communication in categories of labor. Thus, at the base of the reception experience there is, we might say, a minimum of toleration toward a text as an artifact. Reception means an approach that accepts the fact of the text’s existence, and, in any event, does not posit a longing to annihilate its material embodiments. Refusal to accept a text as a structure of values is a natural privilege of the receiver: destroying or trying to destroy an artistic utterance seems something outside the system of culture. Conduct that annihilates art is difficult to reconcile with the conceptions of “reception” that predominate today. That would require the determining of questions of artistic communication in categories of combat. Although I do not want to sound ridiculous, could we not boldly talk of the devastation of monumental ruins, the burning of manuscripts, the damaging of paintings as specific “variants of reception”? Common sense urges us to analyze such events in extra-cultural spaces, in the dark abysses of “nature”, in the vortex of blind elements.
5 But this is surely a misleading point of view: it is an ethical threshold that scholarship must cross—for this reason, that in the evolutions of culture itself it is a threshold that is all too often crossed.
6 Of course, among the acts of the criminal history of art, several turn out to be informationally empty. They are material for quite different research: on social psychopathology, on evidence of the theory of aggression, on symptoms—we might say—of the Herostratus Complex. But not all. There remains a host of documents indicating that an attempted assault on art—on the art of some society, some period, or on the work of a specific tendency or author—has been an effect of reception. It was an answer to reception, and a fully conscious answer. Cases of this kind cannot be omitted in the typological assignations of the semiotics of art. At any rate, this also applies to all other fields of human creative activity: scholarly-scientific, philosophical, ideological, customary, etc. A hypothesis relating to intention determines the qualification of the act. We are interested in a receiver who knows he/she is dealing with a text of culture, and knows that the given text of culture in the consciousness of other recipients is or may be accepted as something positive. This receiver, however, feels that the effect of this text will be completely pernicious on those who will lap it up, succumb to the hypnotic power of a false beauty, surrender to the deceptions of factious ideas, begin to imitate the unbecoming posturings of the characters, or pass through the world under the dictates of a degenerate imagination. Our receiver decides to avert this. He/she wishes to choke off the disease-bearing stench, save others from sin, and help the naïve and the credulous. He/she slashes the picture with a knife, throws the manuscript into the fire, with stamping and whistling drowns out the performance of the virtuoso…
7 That’s the point—immediately one sees the necessity of distinguishing the conduct of the outraged receiver who sows havoc in the world of art, but who sows it to diverse effect and in a diverse manner. Totally destroyed works, subjected to irreversible annihilation—this is a drastic and extreme example. “Manuscripts do not burn”, Michail Bulgakov called out. Alas, they do burn, though not easily, and reluctantly one must acknowledge that it is hard to kill art, but easy to cripple and to defame it. In the public’s dialog with art, there functions an extraordinary wealth of repressive codes—controlled by specialised rhetorics. To describe this conglomerate of rhetorics—that’s the trick! On one hand, it would be a soothing act, directed toward the sender; on the other hand, it would be directed toward the finished artistic product. In both configurations, there runs a minutely calibrated strip, on which the conventions of the time are indicated, the customs of permissible and impermissible forms of intolerance. Of course, here we see most of all ritual murders, which take place “as if”, when a text continues materially to exist, but is cast out from the circulation of accepted values: it is and it is not. Variants of half-hearted existences, incomplete states, presences condemned—by what? derision? the aspersion of degeneracy? indifference?—would also require solid classificatory descriptions, descriptions that penetrated the deepest mechanisms of the ontology of a work of art. Meanwhile, the state of reflection on antagonistic aspects of culture is still—to put it meta|phorically—at a “neogrammarian”, pre-Saussurian stage: the accumulation of variously configured phenomena does not create a coherent whole.
8 A particularly important role in organising such a whole would certainly be played by the parallelisms that exist between sender and receiver strategies. How many times do we read that someone’s creative work shakes established hierarchies, blasphemes against the sacred, smashes moulds, corrupts custom. Invasions of new artistic energies are by no means bloodless affairs, and they are not always a matter of a collision-free multiplication of cultural goods. Here some people’s convictions really die, some people’s sense of matters comes in for abuse. Norms of frankness, norms of reticence. There are poètes maudits, and there are, too, lecteurs maudits. Of a public attacked by an art that suddenly overthrows the hierarchies of its receivers, and painfully derides misconceptions, one generally speaks with a tone of superior indulgence. But, in fact, the balance sheet of the history of art should consider the possibility too that the triumphal processions of new currents can become for some minds utter horrors. The spasmodic spurts of Romanticism, the offensive of twentieth-century avant-gardes, the expansion of new music. Superior indulgence—Michail Bachtin has written of this—is the scholar’s worst counsellor, irrespective of whether it embraces the entirety of the art of the distant past, or, let us add, if it refers to the styles of perception discredited by contemporaneity. The isomorphisms of the codes of conduct—of art vis-à-vis the receiver and of the receiver vis-à-vis art—are not always clear. The variety of means at the disposal of both sides disorients: receivers’ answers are usually rather crude, perhaps even hysterical, and time and again simply incoherent. Nonetheless the similarities of the principles for participating in a culture are beyond dispute. Creativity has its demonisations, cults of Evil, anarchies, terrorist tactics, and consumption, too, has analogical weapons. War is war. Who imitates whom here, we cannot say. Perhaps art’s intolerances are a mirror image of the intolerances of receivers; perhaps it is the other way round. On both sides of the panorama—and here the central problem lies—there is not just an unlimited auction of offers, but compulsion too. How much unconstraint, how much compulsion? This is a further question, and one that is equally important. In any case, attempts at aggression—conversion by the sword, unification by blackmail, intimidation by disparagement—create a closed circuit. This can be seen in an excessively sharp form in histories of scandalous doctrines. The Futurists scandalise the public, and are themselves scandalised by it (in Russia during the premiere of Vladimir Majakovskij’s Futurist tragedy entitled Vladimir Majakovskij, the public called the police). But the consequences of actions and reactions do not fit into one scheme; the initiative for the scandal sometimes comes from the artists, sometimes from the auditorium; the circuit closes. One could easily suppose that the same interactions, although not as visible as in the reception of Futurism, always play out in the biographies of all avant gardes, and they are part of the life of any creative originality.
9 Let us note that this closed circuit that we have spoken of does not only link sending strategies with reception strategies, but simultaneously embraces internal conflicts within artistic circles. Behind the “accursed receiver” there stands a section of the ensemble of creators—banned, losers, withdrawn from the national team. They do not yet know that it’s all over, a change of authorities, the twilight of conventions; they still flinch at the collapse of artistic manners, calling out their “Begone!” and wringing their hands. How would a synthesis of the history of art look like, if we were to describe its metamorphoses from the perspective of critics defending hopeless positions? The thing is to find a place for this perspective in holistic reconstructions of particular periods. In conservative reactions, and not just in accurate recognition of the direction of cultural change, there function universal psychological participatory mechanisms: both creative participation, and that of reception.
10 Thus the invariable motif of all boycotts that are organised around art, from acts that are openly gangster-like to ostentatious refusals of reception—such as leaving the cinema in the middle of a showing—remains one feeling, an excessively unpleasant one, humiliating even, and that is the feeling of exclusion from the world that is in a collusion; that threatens us personally. Nothing hurts so much as a conspiring culture. Innovations in narrative forms, the oddity of montage of colors and lines in a painting, the intrusion of music into unforeseen fields of hearing, even the surprising appearances of the heroes of a new mythology—all this is easy to domesticate, on condition that the person doing the domestication feels him/herself initiated into the conspiracy. The entrance ticket to the circle of the initiate—that is a distinction. A sudden realization that your place is outside the borders of initiation—that insults one so severely that to boycott seems the only thing to do, and the choice of the form of the boycott is just a personal matter, demanding individual debates, all woven in singular determinants.
11 The language stereotype demands that we speak of the recipient’s lack of consent to a text. Of an attack on the creator. But our comments above must make us review the stereotype. In substance, the receiver protests against receivers. He/she is not irritated that someone writes such books; but it cuts to the quick that there are people who want to read such books. Other people’s understanding is unforgivable—in the face of our own incomprehension. Other people’s fascinations seem anarchic, when within ourselves there is an emptiness of thought, an impossibility of activating imagination, a paralysis of intuition. Being cast out beyond the collusion of the initiate means being cast out from culture. In a state of wildness and savagery. The higher the ambitions to participate in a culture—the truth, of course, is that these ambitions are justified to varying degrees—that have accompanied the receiver’s biography, the more threatening he/she sees his/her own suddenly recognised situation, one that was neither expected nor desired. Nor is it strange that in certain circumstances banishment leads to a collapse of ethical norms, something that occurs, also, to professional receivers, that is, critics. For the scholar, the most interesting matter is that every process of reception—not excluding here that of austere connoisseurs potentially repeats this very mechanism of artistry in its refined variants: that of a game of initiation, which is infinitude itself. Thus, the central aspect of every opening up to art must be, even if it is very deeply repressed, the probability of breaking off contact with what is artistically on offer now. The threat of falling back into pre-art, outside the system, into savagery. Reception cannot be reduced to operation of decoding or recoding a message. It is work, but it is also a struggle for a place within culture, a struggle for one’s own self.
12 Literary culture seeks to elevate interpersonal rapport above everyday speech, but the profusion of the codes of that culture means that artistic utterances, in the views of the generality, must place themselves time and again below common language. This means that they are seen as texts without meaning, games with diction, calligraphic showing off, communications that have only one function—a phatic one. If we look at the phenomenon in terms of “guilt”—seeing in the wasting of all values and, thus, also the values of a work of art, a socially harmful procedure—it would be a difficult task to point to the “guilty party”. Is the “pest” the receiver, who is not able or does not want to raise in him/herself a spark of interest in this or that work, because he/she lacks internal impulse to make the effort of understand the alien word? Or should “guilt” be laid on the writer, since in expressing him/herself by the intermediary of art the writer was true to his/her—by schools, own biography, but to a lesser degree surrender to the pressures of the applicable conjunctions in a given period. One thing is not in doubt: only education can cut this knot—hermeneutic exercises. The consent of the receiver and the consent of the sender to take on the role of student.
13 Today no one needs to be convinced that reading is a gathering of knowledge about writers’ codes. Whatever we would say about defects in education in relation to the art of reception—by schools, popularising outreach on the part of Polish studies, literary criticism, etc.—it is impossible to deny that we have at our disposal in this field material that is thoroughly known. Or at least, more modestly: we know possibilities of knowing it. We can imagine the places in which it would be worth opening up car diagnostic-service stations. But that is not sufficient for research into literary communication. For the writer, the process of writing also constitutes an “educational” sphere—a form of specific self-education for the creative writer. And selected issues in the poetics of reception are, actually, the most difficult subject of his silent lessons. The person of letters studies the perceptual customs of the contemporary world (but what sources does he/she draw on?), gets to the secrets of another’s experiencing of poetry and prose (by what paths?), solves the puzzles of the norms of reception (according to what methods?). In a word: where do his/her universities begin, and where do they end?
14 This issue is indirectly clarified by scholarly reconnaissance devoted to the typology of “norms of reading” (Sławiński 1974) and of “styles of reception” (Głowiński 1973). They elucidate matters indirectly, through parallels, because someone who does research into contemporary literature and the contemporary writer both have access to what are basically the same pieces of evidence. One could think that what the former says of the receiver, the latter already in his/her own way knows: by feeling, by guess-work. However, the scholar—and appropriately so, for he/she must start from this—is concerned with the determinants of the autonomy of reading rules. He/she defines the borders of schools of reading—within the cultural order. Formulated poetics draw his/her attention—above all, the guidelines of professional criticism—and subsequently figures of reception that can be constructed somehow from the interpretative calculations of connoisseurs. The scholar aims, in consequence, to explain him/herself in the role of the reader—in this sense that the scholar takes account of the functions of ready products, independent of their creator. In this phase of research, the matter of the process of creation as knowing and revising what readers are accustomed to remains in shadow. Or at least in half-light.
15 There is no doubt that the recommendations and admonitions of professional criticism inform a writer of the course that reading is taking. However, a creator does not always accept their reliability. On the contrary—the writer wants to believe that a “true” understanding of his/her works is taking place beyond the circles of connoisseurs, in completely different social strata. He/she really needs such a belief. As often as a critic speaks out in the name of the literary public, that critic indicates the ultimate ends of verbal art. He/she is able to name the situations that ought to occur in reception, to describe the results of reception, for example, a “lifting of hearts” or a “building up of mistrust”. If asked how can one achieve those states in the spiritual lives of contemporary readers, the critic answers that he/she does not know the recipe for that and does not wish to know it, but can offer examples of works that can meet with favor in this game with the receiver.
16 Yes. Both in literary-critical and writerly guess-work concerning the reader the main bank of information is composed of model communiqués. They give rise to the suspicion that they have found the optimum approbation of a wide circle of readers. The objective fact counts. The fact of the successful direction of a publicly performed play. Model communiqués are the scripts of the realised conduct of a collective of readers. They are not visions of a utopia—as are authors’ manifestos and the demands of reviewers. They represent the same system of signs in which new generations of literary persons work. In connection with this, they are subject to “translation” manipulations. The particular stamp of the transformation of the prototype is a matter of a writer’s individual strategy. From uncritical imitations through parodic distortions to utter frustration of widespread taste.
17 Currently, three groups of model communiqués—three sources of knowledge of reading habits—are marked by particular activity. Literary tradition. Mass culture. Folklore in statu nascendi.
18 From the point of view of the processes that interest us here, we will take “tradition” to be a selection from a heritage—a selection made not by an artist, but by the public. Thus, it consists of—besides undoubted masterpieces—the offspring of somewhat problematic talents, and indeed commonplace kitsch, as long as it is long-lasting. The measure of hierarchy here is spontaneity of acceptance, and, to a lesser degree, the canon defined by institutional preferences (of the kind that is embodied in a list of required readings for the school-leaving examination).
19 When a procedure of inferring the receiver on the basis of a tradition approved by a community of readers is dominant in the creative process, we are dealing, so to speak, with a “literary literature”. It does not wish to grow on stony ground; it needs tilled soil. Here the writer is not tempted to spread his/her work widely beyond a circle of tried and tested book lovers: he/she goes deeper, cultivates an art of perfecting an established, ready sensitivity.
20 In Polish literature today, Teodor Parnicki has brought this method to perfection. It is interesting and worth reflecting on—Parnicki’s receiver, learnt from ancient volumes, foreseen out of the dust of libraries, does not just appear in fictions like Strange even among the Mighty [I u možnych dżiwny], but also in his utterances that are not specifically devoted to artistic matters, for example, in lectures directed to students of Polish literature. How does a historical novelist imagine an auditorium of young people in 1972? What experiences does he appeal to here? He imagines—at the very start of his lecturing adventure—today’s academic young persons as if their spiritual existence had been shaped—in a fashion unchanged for centuries—by the same rituals, symbols, languages. And he speaks to them in these very words:
I will permit myself, indeed, a certain apostrophe, the paraphrase of an
apostrophe, which I address to the Gracious lady of University
Scholarship.
But, ladies and gentlemen, not just to the Gracious Lady, but also to
the Elegant lady. For, indeed, she is adorned with both the Rector’s cap
and the golden chain and the white of ermine, and further the violet of
theology, the ebon of law, the scarlet of medicine, the bright blue of
the Litterarum, the green of Scientaum... And, indeed, it is to this
Gracious and Elegant Lady - si magna majoribus
comparari licet—that I will permit myself to address my
paraphrased apostrophe, and that apostrophe hails from the third part of
Dziady... (Parnicki 1974, 26)
21“Literary literature” ensures the continuity of the historical process in the evolution of verbal art. It extends—by the past, by the most ancient times immemorial—our readerly cognition of culture. However, not every artist is satisfied by a dialog with a receiver “brought up” on tradition. Many realise that widespread perceptual customs are a product of habits, including extra-cultural and extra-linguistic ones, which are often more enduring than literary experience sensu stricto.
22“The reader plays the saxophone on top of the Tatras”, declares Jerzy Harasymowicz . “He reads nothing but Sport, Joe Alex, he adores cutlets, boxers, and Violetta Kaliban, he longs for a small car, he has dreamed of Kalina Jędrusik. So what use is this grey cannibal to me? You shouldn’t suck up to such a dullard”. (Harasymowicz 1972, 400)
23 But from this kind of observation one could actually draw other conclusions. One could argue that the forms of mass culture still make up a flexible building material that can be exploited in the architecture of contemporary art. The new housing estates of the literary imagination do not at all have to imitate “low-rise” models; on the contrary, they will transform them in a variety of ways. And to a variety of ends. Beginning an investigation into the reader’s likes—the reader of newspapers and illustrated magazines, an attendee of academic reports and training lessons, a participant in recreational sports, etc.—poets, mainly poets, after the futurists, after Różewicz’s experiments, the younger ones, are becoming today the editors of their own Morning Diaries [Dzienniki poranne] and Lyrical Messages [Komunikaty liryczne]: they want an art that exercises control over the clichés.
24 A third vision of the receiver is the vision of the potential literary person, who does not stop short at contemplative literature, but seeks an opportunity to cooperate creatively with the author of a given book. Julian Przyboś stubbornly repeated that readers of poems are able independently, and most profoundly, to discern good writing even within the most refined complexities, on condition that they discover in their memories those moments when they themselves, in their intimate experiences of the world, built their own “poems”, although they perhaps did not actually realise that they were behaving as poets. In the zone of linguistic auto-communication, “poetry” becomes every single effort to go beyond the anonymity of speech—in the direction of the expression of personal experiences. The amazement at the word suddenly made one’s own and experienced as “my” word.
25 However, the writer does not have at his/her disposal any evidence of such amazements and experiences. The reality that is directly given, although it is a substitute one, is instead folklore in statu nascendi. The spontaneous “creative joy” that serves both closed communities (family, circle of friends, the workers of an institution, a holiday-camp group) and also open ones (for example, the community of sports fans, a throng of adherents of this or that generational or communal ideology). Jokes, anecdotes, interjections, verbal games, the “fables” popular at a particular time, rhyming slogans, paraphrases of well-known turns of phrase, parodies of songs and poems, the whole “carnivalesque” pulp of texts—all this makes up the third collection of information about the receiver.
26 Białoszewski wrote: “what I write is somehow connected with what happens around about, with spoken and captured language. I look for those living experiments” (Nastulanka 1975, 318).
27 Thus, the reader conjured up from tradition; the reader cut out of the newspaper; the reader captured in contemporary folklore—these three visions of the receiver, although they are quite different from each other, do in fact interpenetrate and complement each other. But which of them is broadest and most capacious? In my opinion, it is the third one. Because both the receiver shaped by artistic literature, and one molded by the specialist press are able to enter into communication with a new text only if he/she finds in him/herself even the most modest capability for creative thinking. There is common merry banter that among writers there are those who write for other writers. But of course, in fact, they all do. Literature is only understood by potential literary persons. If there’s a lot of them, and, indeed, increasing numbers of them, well, so much the better.
28So, for a writer what is the most desirable reader? One can formulate this issue differently: in the infinitude of individual human histories can I imagine a history so valueless, so unfortunate, so indifferent, that I would wish to call out: no, this is not important to me, I do not wish to have this enter into the world of my novels and poems? Not at all. I would consider this kind of selectivity as—to put it mildly—as contrary to the elementary grounds of a writer’s ethics.
29 I recall that a certain young, energetic writer once attacked the fiction of his predecessors on the grounds that it recounts lives that are now excessively peripheral. The fiction, he wrote, bothers with the dilemmas of people who are . . . what? Worse? Lower? From category “B”? (for example, he mentioned trainers and conscripts). He insisted on characters representative of the central issues of the day. A peculiar example of false consciousness. It is not my intention to make an apology for the “social margins”. However, I insist that authentic literature knows no “margins”. Neither for its characters, nor for its receivers. It is not permitted to adopt a priori ready hierarchies of human fates. This is particularly important today, when we so easily lose the human being—in signs. In designations such as “profession”, “affiliation”, “nationality”, etc.
30And, thus, reception is an answer to biography. An answer formulated, first of all, (as it were, on the “lowest” level) in the language of the humanist experiences of the literary public. The thing here is how we understand “biography”. Let us try to see in it the entirety of an individual’s experiences. Experiences compelled and freely chosen, factual and imaginary, deriving from observation of the phenomena of social life and from watching television, etc. In this formulation, the antagonism between “literature about an author” and “literature about reality” is discredited. No one can reconstruct and know the world outside the space of his/her own biography, because every new portion of knowledge—whatever source it comes from—immediately becomes a component of that biography.
31 If reception is an answer to biography, this means that there are justifications for semiotic analyses of the life of a creator. It is possible to ponder the rules of the dialog of artist with receiver by the mediation of biography, which thus becomes a kind of utterance, a form of text.