Kathleen McCormick

There is no such thing as a generic reader or a generic literary work .... The reading of any work of literature is, of necessity, an individual and unique occurrence involving the mind and emotions of some particular reader.... The teacher of literature, above all, needs to keep a firm grasp on the central fact that he is seeking always to help specific human beings–not some generalized fiction called the student-to discover the pleasures and satisfactions of literature.
–Louise Rosenblatt (Literature As Exploration 34)

In these lines from Louise Rosenblatt, written in 1938, we see the anticipation of three significant issues with which contemporary theories of the reader and the reading process are still forcefully grappling. First, Rosenblatt argues that we should analyze and write about real, not hypothetical readers, suggesting the impracticality, if not, as she later states, the "downright condescension" (The Reader, the Text, the Poem 138) of constructing ideal reading models to teach students how to read literature. Contemporary reader-response critics tics still are divided according to whether they study real readers, as Norman Holland and David Bleich do (though their "subjective" criticism is clearly at odds with Rosenblatt's more socially-oriented approach), or whether they postulate ideal constructs such as Wolfgang Iser's "implied reader," Michael Riffaterre's "superreader," Stanley Fish's "informed reader," and Jonathan Culler's "competent reader."¹ Rosenblatt's less lofty term, "generic reader," more successfully connotes the intellectually suspect theorizations and (not incidentally) the repressive teaching practices such concepts can engender.

Second, Rosenblatt's remarks foreshadow what she is perhaps best known for, her transactional theory of reading. In The Reader, the Text, the Poem she argues that, as opposed to a theory of "interaction" which "implies separate, self-contained, and already defined entities acting on one another," a theory of "transaction" designates an "ongoing process in which the elements or factors are ... aspects of a total situation, each conditioned by and conditioning the other" (17). In the transactive experience, therefore, both readers and texts are "produced" by the reading context. Rosenblatt suggests that different readers will produce different texts in the reading transaction and that teachers can legitimate and help students give voice to their readings if they recognize that their students' responses are in no way "generic."

Finally, Rosenblatt's lines also legitimize "pleasure" as a reading goal for student readers of literature. Pleasure is an unusual concept in Anglo-American literary analysis. Since Rosenblatt's work, a number of theorists, most notably Norman Holland and Roland Barthes, have developed theories of reading pleasure. Norman Holland argues, for example, that all acts of interpretation result from the reader's "transforming" the text to meet his or her own fantasies and expectations, thereby avoiding .unpleasure" and anxiety, and achieving pleasure and gratification (Unity Identity Text Self 125). While Holland connects his theory closely to classroom practice, its general applicability is limited because it is bound by an adherence to a (rather narrow) reading of Freud and because it sees the individual as possessing an "unchanging essence," a unique "identity theme" (121). By contrast, in The Pleasure of the Text (PT), Roland Barthes develops a more extended theory of reading pleasure. He distinguishes between pleasure (plaisir) and bliss (jouissance), and connects them with readers' literary and cultural experiences. He also establishes a psychoanalytic typology of reading pleasures. His theory, however, has not been linked to classroom practice. I will argue in this essay that Barthes' theory can be applied to the teaching of literature, particularly if we see it as complementing and being complemented by Rosenblatt's more pragmatically and pedagogically based transactional theory of reading. Rosenblatt, more than any literary critic, has taught us the need for and the value of theorizing our students' reading processes. Barthes' theory of pleasure and bliss can be adapted to extend, in post-structuralist terms, some of the theorizing that Rosenblatt has developed. Rosenblatt is rightly critical of Barthes' approach to reading in S/Z, in which he distinguishes between readerly and writerly texts, noting "what starts out as an affirmation of the importance of the reader ends as a distinction between two kinds of texts" (RTP 169). As we shall see though, Barthes' text characteristics, if read through Rosenblatt's theory of reading, can be equally (or better) expressed as characteristics of reading.

An emphasis on the differences among student readers, on the transactive nature of reading, and on the pleasures students take in reading literature typify Rosenblatt's approach to reading and, as well, strongly influence the approach of this essay. It is unfortunate that the developments in American reader-centered criticism ignored Rosenblatt's work for so long. Thus it is all the more important now, when post-structuralist modes of criticism are so dominant, that we bring Rosenblatt's work into dialogue with them. Not only can such dialogue provide some compensation for earlier injustice, but (as I shall argue) Rosenblatt's work acts to critique and complement the pedagogical gaps in Barthes thinking. In this essay, I will therefore deliberately start from where Rosenblatt pointed us–in real students' responses. I will analyze three sets of my students' responses to the "Wandering Rocks" episode of Joyce's Ulysses that were written in an undergraduate class over the course of a week and a half. None of the students had read Ulysses before. In The Reader, the Text, the Poem, Rosenblatt insists that "much greater concern than is usual should be accorded the 'first step,' the registering or savoring of the literary transaction" (136). It is on the "first steps" of students' beginning to read "Wandering Rocks"–on their differences, their literary transactions, and their pleasures–that this essay will focus. I will then use Barthes' theory of pleasure both to account for my students' diverse reading pleasures and to demonstrate the benefits that can be derived from combining insights from reader-response and post-structuralist theory.

It has been a long time since most teachers of Ulysses have read the novel for the first time, and it may be impossible for us to remember what our early reactions to the text were. But much of what we do is probably greatly influenced by those early readings. What kinds of things about the text "hooked" us, intrigued us, frustrated us, made us want to read it again and again? What kinds of readers were (and are) we? What designs did (and do) we feel Ulysses has on us and we on it? And why do some people find Ulysses a bore while others are endlessly stimulated by it? Of course, answers to these questions are over-determined, but our "first steps" in reading Ulysses, whether alone or with a teacher, may have played a significant role in our choosing to pay extra attention to it, and as well, to read criticism on it.

I can't, of course, re-create our "individual" (let alone "collective") first reading experiences of "Wandering Rocks," but I can offer a close study of some highlights and low points of my students' reading and responding to "Wandering Rocks" for their first, second, and third time. It is important to recognize that this essay is not a search for origins or an investigation of the exact cognitive processes by which these readings were constructed. While I cannot objectively construct my students' reading experiences, I can explore how they reported responding to "Wandering Rocks" and attempt some speculations as to why they responded as they did.

As a teacher, my primary goal is to encourage students to enjoy the experience of reading Joyce. I think "Wandering Rocks," the tenth and central chapter of Ulysses, is an excellent text for introducing students to the process of negotiating reader traps of various kinds and to the pleasure and play that reading such a text can engender. Divided into eighteen separate vignettes and a coda, each of which focuses on a different character or group of characters generally wandering the streets of Dublin, "Wandering Rocks" defies traditional unities of plot and character and creates a labyrinthine experience for readers and characters alike. One of its major structural features is its 31 interpolations, lines which appear out of context in one vignette but which generally occur in context somewhere else in the text, frequently in another vignette. The insertion of an interpolation into a vignette indicates that two events are occurring simultaneously, and many critics –and some student readers–further suggest that the interpolations help to establish causal or thematic connections among the vignettes.²

"Wandering Rocks" is not inherently "pleasurable" or even coherent: it can be read and, indeed, encourages its readers to read it in a variety of ways. To use Barthes' terms, which I will explore throughout this essay, it can be read for pleasure or bliss. According to Barthes, the text of pleasure is one that can be naturalized or easily mastered; it is linked, he states, to a "comfortable practice of reading" (PT 14). We will see that turning "Wandering Rocks" into a text of pleasure is a satisfying achievement for many readers, fulfilling a desire to master and create coherence in the texts they read. While the text of pleasure "contents, fills, [and] grants euphoria" to the reader because it conforms to cultural practices with which the reader is familiar, the text of bliss "unsettles the reader's historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, the consistency of his tastes, values, [and] memories" (PT 14). In addition to imposing a state of loss and discomforting the reader, the text of bliss also provides the reader with jouissance. Jouissance is a difficult word to translate into English. As Barthes' translators and editors point out, it has a distinctive sexual suggestion and is clearly related, by analogy, with orgasm. It suggests what becomes so important in Barthes' work, the metaphorical equating of the text with the body, the reader with the lover. The usual translation is, however, the broader term bliss. That term, of course, still retains a rich sexuality. Barthes contends that the reader, like the lover, wants to know every part of his/her beloved, wants to be able to name it, understand it, control it (the desire for pleasure). And yet the greatest enjoyment–what keeps the lover fascinated –is the unexpected gesture, the ambiguous sign, the uncertainty of his/her beloved (the desire for bliss). It is only in recognizing that signs will always be conflicting–while still feeling the pain of that recognition–that the reader/lover can experience bliss.

Barthes has been criticized for implying at times that pleasure and bliss are intrinsic properties of texts rather than reading experiences. Rosenblatt's transactional theory of reading and indeed her own distinction between efferent and aesthetic reading can help us to extend Barthes' notions of pleasure and bliss from characteristics of texts to characteristics of reading. In developing her analysis of efferent and aesthetic reading, Rosenblatt contends that the distinction between the two "derives ultimately from what the reader does, the stance that he adopts and the activities he carries out in relation to the text" (RTP 27). Rosenblatt argues forcefully that those who seek in "texts alone the elements that differentiate between the aesthetic and the nonaesthetic [will] arrive at only partial or arbitrary answers" (RTP 23). She recognizes that in trying to categorize types of texts, theorists miss the crucial point; "that the text may be read either efferently or aesthetically" (RTP 25). If we apply Rosenblatt's insights to Barthes' distinction between pleasure and bliss, we can only enrich it–both theoretically and in terms of its pedagogical implications.

Barthes, in effect, suggests that pleasure and bliss are not completely dichotomous: they can supplement each other. But surely this can only be true if pleasure and bliss are characteristics of reading rather than of texts. Barthes hints at this but does not quite have a vocabulary to express it. It is clearly possible, according to Barthes, for readers to read for both pleasure and bliss. He, indeed, argues that the reader who sustains both ongoing pleasure and flashes of bliss is "a subject split twice over, doubly perverse" because he simultaneously "enjoys the consistency of his selfhood (this is his pleasure) and seeks its loss (that is his bliss)" (PT 14). Again the analogy he is using is not unrelated to the erotic. To produce a text that continually creates a tension between pleasure and bliss is to combine mastery and mystery, hedonism and loss, comfort and frustration, and for some readers, but not all, to insure excitement and challenge, and an infinite desire to reread. Rereading is the result of bliss–we want to return again and again to the site of that bliss, our encounters with the text.

Barthes' distinction between the reader of pleasure, the reader of bliss, and the doubly perverse reader of pleasure and bliss is not a "scientific" one but provides a highly suggestive analogy. Moreover, it proves useful to explore the great diversity of reading pleasures that student readers might experience in the act of reading a challenging text like 'Wandering Rocks." Barthes' psychoanalytic typology of the pleasures of reading–fetishistic, obsessive, paranoid, hysterical–can also help us to analyze students' responses, not to categorize them rigidly, but to help us savor and perhaps better understand the array of factors that might enter into a reader's early literary transactions with a difficult text. It can also encourage us and our students to incorporate into our analysis "as much as possible the personal matrix within which the work crystallized" (RTP 136). As Rosenblatt has taught us, we can expand students' repertoires of reading pleasures only by allowing them to display their own pleasures and observe the pleasures of others. This display of pleasure (and, indeed, pain)–and perhaps more importantly the debates about how they were constituted–was the primary goal of our class discussions on "Wandering Rocks."

Rosenblatt (like I.A. Richards before her, but within a richer educational context) argued fifty years ago that we should begin with real readers. Over the course of a week and a half I asked my students to read 'Wandering Rocks" three times. After each reading, I asked them to write a response statement in which they discussed the text strategies to which they most responded, the reading strategies they employed, and their overall reading experiences. I also asked them to relate their reading experience either to other texts they had read or, on their second and third responses, to their earlier readings of 'Wandering Rocks." Following Rosenblatt, however, I try to "avoid placing undue importance upon the particular form" in which students couched their responses (LAE 82), so that students were free to simply write a general response if these guidelines were not helpful to them. From their discussions, debates, and responses, I can loosely identify five moments of pleasure or displeasure that my students experienced–adapting Barthes' distinctions–pleasure, negative pleasure, negative bliss, bliss, and (doubly perverse) pleasure and bliss. I call these "moments" of pleasure, implying that they are fleeting, unstable, and alterable experiences, not rigid categories. Such terminology helps us to remember that a text is, as Rosenblatt points out, "an event in time... not an object" (RTP 12). It further requires us to recognize both that students' pleasures shifted over their three readings of "Wandering Rocks" and that one reader's cause for contentment may be another's cause for anguish, that what evokes pleasure or pain is not an intrinsic, predetermined property of the text. As Rosenblatt notes: 'We must ... avoid imposing a set of preconceived notions as to the proper way to react to any work. The student must be free to grapple with his [or her] own reaction" (LAE 80).

Most students at one time or another during their three responses expressed pleasure in reading "Wandering Rocks." For some students, pleasure occurred on a first reading, but for many others, it came only after some initial discomfort, when they suddenly discovered that they could naturalize the text and apparently master it quite easily. Readers who experience pleasure are obviously gratifying to the teacher. I often discovered, however, that underlying their expressions of pleasure was a reluctance to reread the text, and many of these students needed a fair amount of encouragement from me to do so. For out of a combination of fear that they will be unable to interpret the text and sudden relief that they have found some way to do so, they may prematurely break off their relationship with the text. They generally tended to adopt one reading strategy, and if it appeared to work, did not try any others, feeling for the most part quite satisfied and relieved. Given the strong institutional pressures on students to build immediate textual coherence, which Rosenblatt criticizes in Literature As Exploration but which still prevail in many classrooms today, such responses are hardly surprising. Many of these students, particularly those whose first response was negative, were extremely proud to have discovered on their own some strategy whereby they could naturalize the text, i.e., make sense of it, make it "natural," or reduce its strangeness. From these student responses, we glimpse the comfort of reading for pleasure, the satisfaction and the personal sense of fulfillment that comes from creating but believing that you are really finding coherence in a seemingly incoherent text.

Students who achieved such moments of pleasure by naturalizing the text diverged greatly in the nature of their reading pleasures. Some, for example, took what Barthes calls fetishistic delight in the text's invention of new words, unusual usages, puns, odd descriptive phrases. These are readers who single out "quotations, formulae, turns of phrase," who take pleasure in "the word" itself (PT 63). "One of my favorite lines," said one student, "is 'a tiny yawn opened the mouth of the wife of the gentleman with the glasses.' All he was saying was 'she yawned,' but what a way to say it!" Another said he 'liked the use of unfamiliar, but playful and interesting words. For instance, 'The boys sixeyed Father Conmee and laughed.' I reread the line wondering 'what was that word?' Then I realized six eyes–three boys (with two eyes each) looking at Father Conmee." These students seemed fascinated by the language of "Wandering Rocks," and I should note that more students commented on language than any other feature of the text in their first response, and the majority of the responses were positive. Why might this be? One student wrote that in her reading of "Wandering Rocks" she "picked out certain lines or words which seemed unique, interesting, or meaningful. This was a necessary process since the plot seems to be disjointed. Thus [she] focused on comprehending specific lines or words rather than the chapter as a whole." If this student is at all representative, then perhaps teachers need to recognize the extent to which students can enjoy linguistically challenging texts. It seems as if many students fetishized the language of the text in part because it was what they could best understand, but also, and not to be underestimated, what they could best enjoy, at least at a given reading moment. Rosenblatt argues powerfully for the value of allowing students to explore what they have "lived through" in reading a text rather than forcing them to impose a set of preconceived notions on the text (LAE 82; RTP 143). I think it is primarily because students recognized that they did not have to develop a definitive reading of "Wandering Rocks" that they felt free to enjoy the text's language.

Other students who experienced pleasure tended to be more obsessive than fetishistic–taking pleasure in what Barthes terms the return, the repetition, of language. These students focused on individual lines in the text, particularly the interpolations. Some, for example, noticed the repetition of the interpolated lines in and out of context, but did not attempt to explain their oddity, even if they found them very disconcerting. One student, after commenting in her first response that all of the out-of-place sentences in the chapter had made her feel "helpless," wrote in her second response that she thought herself "extremely clever" when she recognized a character from a phrase previously mentioned. She wrote, "This odd repetition can be really confusing, but when you remember the references you're fine. It's just like a memory test and I'm happy to report I passed." This student offered no interpretation of the possible significance of these lines; she was satisfied simply to have noticed their repetition. Nonetheless, while she closed off all other interpretive problems, the fact that she was able to become pleasurably engaged with the text at all constituted a significant step forward in her becoming an active, self-confident reader, and she needed to be told not that she was being overly simplistic, but that perhaps she might derive even more pleasure if she became more adventurous. This student may be ready to begin what Rosenblatt calls the "dual process of clarification" of her response–to study the text more closely and to examine her reading experiences and basic assumptions (LAE 1461). But she will be motivated to do this only because she found herself capable of experiencing the pleasure of mastery.

For fetishistic readers, then, the pleasure of mastery arose from understanding the meaning of new or unusual words and phrases, for obsessive readers from recognizing the repetition of particular lines. For what Barthes calls paranoid readers (again, the term is provocative rather than scientific) to take pleasure in the text, however, they must, unlike fetishistic or obsessive readers, develop an interpretation of some kind. But characteristic of these readers, like all who experienced pleasure, was the almost instantaneous stopping of inquiry when they felt they had mastered the text. They saw, for example, that the interpolations indicate simultaneity of action, and this recognition led them to feel pride and satisfaction, and to close off all further questions. 'Normally," said one, "I prefer a clear sequence of events. But instead of being frustrated, I was so proud of myself when I made a connection that it encouraged me to look for more cross-references. I figured that I must be doing something right because that 'orderly story' I want in a novel was developing after all." This student was surprised that she liked the text on her second reading, and I, as a teacher, had to be careful not to mitigate either her surprise or pleasure. She responded positively to 'Wandering Rocks" because she found a way to make sense and order out of it. When we look at what she actually did, however, the picture is not quite so dramatic as she suggested: she complained in her first response about the separate sections and the misplaced lines; in her second response, she noticed four interpolations, came to the conclusion that the events were occurring simultaneously, was thrilled with herself, and promptly stopped looking further. Her third response was basically a recapitulation of her second, with increased emphasis on her pleasure and pride in enjoying the text.

In comparison to those of many students, some of which I'll discuss subsequently, these students' responses may seem relatively superficial. And yet we see that they could be encouraged, slowly, to perform deeper investigations so long as they are allowed to enjoy a certain reassuring contentment that they achieve from turning 'Wandering Rocks" into a text of pleasure. Most of these students are not interested or perhaps not ready to confront the "unreadability" of the text–this is exactly what they are trying to avoid. Thus they remain in the world of pleasure. And, indeed, they may always remain readers of pleasure, which is not to imply that their readings can't be deepened or that they will, of necessity, be inferior to readings of bliss. (After all, many fine upstanding literary critics avoid jouissance like the plague!)

There were students whose responses were characterized by what I am calling "negative pleasure." I use the term both to suggest the general lack of enjoyment that these students felt while reading and also to indicate that this lack of enjoyment occurred specifically because they desired pleasure in the Barthesian sense–the comfort and satisfaction of mastery–and were thwarted. Readers who experienced negative pleasure tended by and large to be text bound. They made the mistake Rosenblatt helps us to characterize in her distinction between "aesthetic" and "efferent" reading. Beginning readers too often try to read for content, hoping to summarize the "correct" meaning or "facts" of a text.³ These students tried to do just that. They encountered and observed text strategies but waited for the text to explain them. If it didn't, they eventually gave up. Most had little sense of their active roles in the reading process, and many had a minimal sense of reading as play. They wanted the text to encourage them to have feelings of mastery and control in their reading without their having actively and self-consciously to take control. After an extended period of patience, many responded with violence and anger to "Wandering Rocks" for not finally exposing itself to them. They feel about "Wandering Rocks" as Joyce's character Miss Dunne does about The Woman in White, that it has "too much mystery business in it" (U 10.371; 229.13).⁴

We should, at this point, heed one of Rosenblatt's useful warnings and not imagine that these students are somehow all alike, all "generic" readers. Their degrees and kinds of displeasure varied significantly. "It really 'gets my goat,'" wrote one, "when I see non-words such as 'sunny winking,' 'tall white hatted,' or 'stickumbrella dustcoat'–they contradict my specific knowledge about the English language." This mild displeasure or annoyance–for it does not appear to be violent disappointment or anger�may seem naive, but it appears to be characteristic of those would-be fetishistic readers who want to take pleasure in the word itself or who miss that pleasure when they do not find it in the words they read. These readers, as opposed to the fetishistic readers discussed above who enjoyed Joyce's language, obviously require a certain kind of language–apparently clever usages of Standard English–as part of their reading pleasure. Implicit in their comments is that the writer establishes a contract with the reader in which an agreed-upon lexicon is used: it is the reassurance of familiarity that gives them pleasure. Such language affords them a sense of mastery, and in violating his linguistic contract, Joyce has obviously Violated the trust of some of his readers: "Did he use the James Joyce Dictionary when he wrote this? Sorry James, but we all don't have that version," wrote one student. The condescending use of Joyce's first name appears to constitute an attempt to level and dismiss the threatening Joyce before he dismisses the reader.

Implicit in these readers' responses is that the text has consciously done something to exclude them, that they feel rejected and are acting this out by rejecting it. Neither of these students, however, was as explicit about his or her alienation and sense of rejection as the students whose responses are closest to Barthes' hysterical reader who "throws him [or her] self across the text" (PT 63). One such student wrote: 'Wandering is what this chapter did all right, and with no apparent goal. I was patient, waiting for Mr. Joyce to tie it together, but he didn't oblige .... there is nothing in this hemisphere that will drive me to read another word." Another wrote: "If I ever met James Joyce, I'd slap him! Who does he think he is manipulating readers into recognizing that their textual assumptions are conventional? So what–I like nice, neat, tied up stories and I hate this meaningless fragmentation." The violence of such comments suggests that these students are objecting to a lot more than textual techniques. Their main reading strategy was to wait for comfort and so achieve closure; such students feel betrayed, threatened, somehow shown up by the text or even by Joyce himself.

Rosenblatt observes that "the teacher's personal love of literature ... has not always been proof against the influence of the routine, pedantic notions concerning teaching methods" (LAE 80). Even a theoretically innovative pedagogy provides no insurance that students will enjoy the texts the teacher may love best; but it can, as Rosenblatt suggests, help students better grapple with their own responses. While 1, like most of us, would like my students to enjoy the texts in which I take most pleasure, focus most closely on the textual strategies about which I obsess, develop complex interpretations of what I feel are the most significant aspects of the text, if students are going to react negatively, I prefer that it be in the extreme, for such reactions are interested, interesting, and sometimes negotiable.

Although these students were angry about different aspects of the text (its language, its fragmentation, its general lack of conventional strategies), and the violence of their anger necessarily spanned a great range, their written responses and comments in class discussion indicated a general confusion about the issue of textual mastery, about the kinds of texts that allow them to feel a sense of mastery, and the kinds of reading strategies they "naturally" adopt to effect that end. Most students argued–and we see evidence for this even in the brief comments quoted here–that they prefer classical realist texts in which, sopposedly, "it an tits together in the end." Such "texts of pleasure" give readers a profound sense of control: they employ language that is accessible (or at least in some dictionarv); they frequently confirm the reader's cultural (and almost always literary) values; they appear to reveal all their secrets in the end. "Wandering Rocks" did none of this for these students, and what particularly disconcerted some of them who tried to remember various cross references was that they had been tricked into believing that the text would finally Cohere. The students, therefore, were hostile to the text because it seemed to have mastered them.

But when I asked such students what their primary strategy was for interacting with the text, they responded, quite unaware of the paradox they were setting up, that it was "patience." Patience is a stance that is best suited to texts whose language is transparent, and from which the reader can easily develop closure, unity, and significance. Such a stance is not passive, but is rather cooperative–especially with certain text strategies: it is, to adapt Barthes, a "readerly" way of responding to a text. If the text conforms to the reader's expectations, the reader is frequently not conscious of exerting any effort in the reading process at all, for such cooperative strategies seem "natural." "Wandering Rocks," however, is a text that foregrounds its manipulative nature, in Barthes' term its "writerliness," its unwillingness to cooperate in the meaning-making process, and it did not reward many students who waited for it to reveal itself to them. I suggested to these students that alternative, more "writerly" and apparently confrontative strategies (which we will discuss subsequently) existed for interacting with an aggressive text like 'Wandering Rocks." But more persuasive than my remarks were those of other students who had themselves been more confrontative in reading 'Wandering Rocks." Many students experiencing negative pleasure were quite aghast in class when they heard that other students actually enjoyed the chapter, but as Rosenblatt states: "a free exchange of ideas will lead each student to scrutinize his own sense of the literary work in the light of the others' opinions. The very fact that other students stress things that he may not have noticed, or report a different general impression, will suggest that perhaps he has not done ful1 justice to the work" (LAE 129). Some students strongly resisted doing anything that might change their negative reaction to "Wandering Rocks," but others tried to develop different types of reading transactions and did experience pleasure on their next reading, which seemed to them (and at times to me) like an interpretive leap of tremendous magnitude.

The students we have just discussed experienced what I am calling negative pleasure, an unsatisfied yearning for the comfort, coziness, completion, and satisfaction of traditional texts and traditional interpretations. They acknowledged the goal of pleasure as desirable and approved–it is a goal announced and reinforced by the established rules and procedures of traditional reading. When pleasure is not experienced, but still desired, then the reader experiences negative pleasure. "Negative bliss," the reading moment I shall discuss next, is somewhat more complex. Readers experiencing negative bliss are yearning for something more than pleasure–something other than comfor entices and beckons them. Negative bliss is evidenced by dislocation, disruption, frustration, even rejection, but coupled with fascination: "there must be something more." Whereas for Barthes this reading that disturbs and fascinates can lead to jouissance, the bliss of recognizing the unattainability of complete meaning, for my student readers, such experiences resulted only in frustration, in negative bliss. None of my students experienced jouissance–at least in their reading pleasure! Bliss is perhaps only detectable in its absence, but for readers to experience jouissance, it seems that they must, as Barthes does, take pleasure in the self-conscious knowledge that they will forever experience a sense of lack. Student readers who found themselves caught in such a recognition desired strongly to find some way out of it. This is why Barthes' "doubly perverse" reader sums up the best attainable pleasure of reading–the alternation between the discomfort/thrill of promised bliss and the coherence of pleasure, a systole and diastole that never ends. One always breaks with comfort because it is too satisfying; one can never stay, except momentarily, in bliss because it is impossible.

Those students who experienced moments of negative bliss were, I believe, the most challenging pedagogically. Their reading experiences were almost the opposite of readers who experienced pleasure: they developed distinctive reading strategies and interpretations of the text but felt continually dissatisfied with them, assuming that there was something more that they were "missing." Here, once again, Rosenblatt's concern with the pedagogical, not just the theoretical, context of reading is helpful. She comments, with regard to readers' desire for coherence, that "if such a putting-together, such a com-position, does not eventually happen, the cause may be felt to be either a weakness in the text, or a failure on the reader's part" (RTP 55). While readers who experienced negative pleasure seemed always to blame the text, readers experiencing negative bliss blamed themselves for not making the text fit together. Readers of negative bliss also appeared to feel minimal pleasure in the mastery they did gain over the text. They can be seen as extreme examples of Barthes' paranoid readers, seeing the text as a kind of game, discovering some of its secret constraints, but always believing that there are more secrets that the text is hiding. They gained the discomfort and the sense of loss of the reader of bliss but none of the pleasure because they were on an intellectual border line–they saw that things cannot all work out smoothly, but they would still have preferred that they would. They appeared to want to be active readers who create meaning but, contradictorily, they were still bound to the idea of finding meaning in the text. Hence, the text continually discomforted them, continually imposed a sense of loss upon them, and it truly brought to the fore what Barthes terms the "crisis" of their "relation to language" (PT 14): to what extent is language simply a conduit through which meaning will pass? To what extent does language infinitely defer meaning? Rosenblatt comments that "we shall not help the student to understand if we keep him functioning merely on the plane of verbalization, or translation of the literary work into generalizations and abstractions" (LAE, 130). Her argument is addressed to teachers, but it frequently needs to be translated to our students, particularly those students experiencing negative bliss whose interpretive frustration can make "generalizations and abstractions," at least when presented by an authority figure such as the teacher, all too appealing. These student readers, unlike Barthes' sophisticated readers who might turn such a sense of loss into jouissance, are upset and frustrated at their inability to find a consistency that can satisfy them. Without knowing it, they are enacting a major debate in recent literary theory and criticism: whether meaning is always infinitely deferred. Their current reading experiences suggest that it is, but much of their education, their prior literary experiences, almost always with realist texts, as well as their "non-literary" reading experiences, all tell them that meaning is somehow "present" to them in texts.

Compare the student who was happy just discovering cross references with the following student who observed a large number of the interpolations and comments, [I] scratched and clawed and pushed and stretched to find any meaning which may exist ... however I was successful in finding interpretations for only a few. But all I come up with is real Mickey Mouse, and... no interpretations may even exist. It's killing me that I don't know." This student's fascination and frustration is clear. He discovered two thirds of the interpolations on a second reading; he saw that they indicated simultaneity almost immediately when he first read the chapter; and he wanted to take the next critical step(developing causal or thematic connections between interpolations and vignettes. But without some absolute reassurance from the text of the correctness of this approach, he was inhibited. Confronting the unreadability of the text made him nervous: He did not feel sufficiently confident to play with that unreadability and simply go ahead with his "Mickey Mouse" connections. Though he is an active and perceptive reader, he wanted more information to come from the text. While performing a reading of bliss and infinitely deferring meaning by, as Barthes says, recognizing that "everything signifies," this student did not realize, as Barthes puts it, that "by this proposition, I entrap myself, I bend myself in calculations, I keep myself from enjoyment" (LD 63).

In discussing the diversity of ways in which readers re-create a work, Rosenblatt argues that readers 'vary greatly in the extent to which they hold fast to a central structure of ideas and attitudes while sensing a penumbra of overtones and associations" (RTP 60). We can see in the distinctions I have made thus far some of the ways in which Barthes' theory of pleasure can help us to tease out some of this variation among readers that Rosenblatt observes. Readers experiencing pleasure and negative pleasure were willing to overlook almost any overtone or association in order to perceive some structure in the text; they differed only in whether they were successful in discovering (or inventing) that structure. Readers experiencing negative bliss, in contrast, were so overwhelmed with the number of associations they can develop that they were unable to perceive or create a structure. Unlike students who experienced contentment at seeing language repeated or at recognizing that the interpolations indicate simultaneity, students experiencing negative bliss, such as the one quoted above, sensed that negotiating 'Wandering Rocks" is much more difficult than solving a single puzzle, but they resisted seeing that all puzzles do not have to be solvable in a single way or even solvable at all for reading to be enjoyable. My goal with these students, therefore, was to help them relinquish their belief in the text as the final determinant of meaning–to help them to confront the text's unreadability and do with it what they will–to take pleasure in the strategies by which they temporarily master the text, to attain bliss from the text's refusal to be pinned down. Facing and challenging the very unresolvability of a text can be a source of extreme pleasure (bliss) and need not result in a definitive naturalization of the text. Such a recognition seems necessary for such students in order to prevent them from becoming so frustrated that they give up on the text completely. These students, unlike others I have discussed so far, appeared to require models of reading that run counter to classical realism in order to be able to interact with pleasure and satisfaction with writerly texts like "Wandering Rocks," and they seemed ready to experience the doubly perverse moment of both pleasure and bliss.

Readers who did experience such moments enjoyed both feelings of mastery and feelings of mystery. They were able both to "hold fast to a central structure" and to sense "a penumbra of overtones and associations" because they did not find the central structure threatened by their associations or their associations threatened by the central structure. Unlike readers experiencing negative bliss, these readers revelled in the active role they must take in the creation of meaning. Readers who experienced doubly perverse pleasure and bliss were able to naturalize the text in ways that gave them some sense of mastery, but unlike readers of pleasure, they did not stop there. These readers saw the process of rereading as motivated by a desire to discover, not the "correct" meaning of the text, but rather new ways of reading it. They did not wait for the text to give answers and, unlike the reader who anticipates but cannot achieve bliss, they were pleased that the text did not solve all the problems it raised. They realize that reading and interpreting any text is theoretically an endless process. The doubly perverse reader was open to new possibilities and desires to reread, not out of dissatisfaction with past readings, but out of pleasure and the wish to continue the process of creating a plenitude of meaning.

Let's look at one of these readers on her first and second reading. In her first response, she noticed the interpolations, connected them with larger contexts, saw that they indicate simultaneity, and attempted to generalize about their overall effect on her, their contribution to the theme of the chapter, and the relationship of this theme to our everyday lives. This mode of reading is, of course, a traditional one, pleasurable in that it deals with textual techniques, plot, character, and theme. But as well she noted, even in this initial response, that 'Joyce includes both the relevant and the irrelevant." Her first response indicated that her reading pleasure combined Barthes' notion of the paranoiac and the hysteric: on the one hand, she wanted to produce a complicated text and discover its secrets; on the other, she was willing to go beyond critical scrutiny and join in "the bottomless, truthless comedy of language" (PT 63). While she knows that language is "truthless," this student does not forsake the pleasure of the paranoiac for the bliss of the hysteric: she truly sought both and was thus a doubly perverse reader. Her perspective was developed more clearly in this extract from her second response:

Interpreting an interpolation is much easier when the reader has readthrough the chapter twice (or even three times). Since there are both forward and backward looking interpolations, a thorough knowledge of earlier and later events and characters is very helpful.... The second reading of "Wandering Rocks" forces the reader to notice these connections. The forward looking interpolations now shout out to be noticed and interpreted. The episode becomes much more complex with a second reading instead of much simpler. There is more information to process and each piece brings several more alternative meanings with it, when one is able to use hindsight analysis. I think perhaps a good reading strategy to be learned from this reading is to realize that a seemingly simple piece can become as complex as the reader is willing to take it.

On her second reading, we can see this student self-consciously choosing particular reading strategies to master aspects of the text: This was her pleasure, her moment of mastery. But she was combining pleasure with a recognition that she was creating, not discovering, meaning and a sense that the process will go on forever, because there will always be those moments where, as she wrote later in her second response, "at times you just can't think of a single interesting thing to say–and that's OK by me." This was her bliss, her recognition of the unreadability of the text.

We see, therefore, how the doubly perverse reading moment differs from the other four reading moments I have isolated. While readers experiencing pleasure allege to enjoy the whole text simply by mastering a fragment of it, readers experiencing doubly perverse pleasure are spurred on by discovering fragments that don't fit into the whole. While readers experiencing negative pleasure are irritated by textual incongruities and wait patiently for the text to resolve itself, readers experiencing doubly perverse pleasure actively and self-consciously plunge into the text, reveling both in their own ingenuity at mastering the text and the text's ingenuity at refusing to be mastered. While readers of negative bliss refuse to acknowledge the active role they take in the production of the text (even as they confront the unresolvability of the text, they wish that the text would somehow take control and close off meanings), readers experiencing doubly perverse pleasure and bliss actively acknowledge their role in creating the text and rejoice that there is always more meaning to come.

Looking at the five moments of student readers' pleasure in reading "Wandering Rocks," we can perhaps glimpse the vast diversity of readers, texts, and poems that can be created in the reading transaction. In the past fifty years, two methodological traditions within literary criticism and theory have attempted to account for this diversity. In this paper, I have tried to sketch some of the ways in which these two traditions might–in a more detailed treatment–be brought into a productive dialogue. I have chosen, moreover, perhaps the pioneering theorist of one of these two traditions to help me focus on my students' reading practices. It is the achievement of Louise Rosenblatt to have recognized the flux and fluidity of the reading process well before other American literary theorists and educators. While the reader-response movement of the seventies legitimized the discussion of readers, returning (belatedly and often without acknowledgement) to her work, the project of analyzing the complex processes involved in reading is far from completion. One of the most exciting challenges we face now as scholars and educators is filling out the picture of readers that emerges through Rosenblatt's work and that of later reader-response critics in order to include some of the insights of post-structuralist theories of culture, language, history, and the subject. In this paper, I have sketched what I will elsewhere treat in more detailthe development and cultural situating of a taxonomy of reading pleasures of real readers. Rosenblatt herself argued that her transactional concept of reading could "only reinforce interest in the dynamics of the relationship between the author, the text, the reader, and their cultural environments" (RTP 174). Barthes' theory of the pleasure of the text is just one of many theories that can help us explore our students' reading processes, but it is a crucial one: It emphasizes and problematizes pleasure and mastery–two subjects of inquiry which are all too often neglected in the literature classroom, but which are significant factors in the reading transaction, and which themselves exist in a transactional relationship. In the students' "first steps" I have outlined here, we can see the material that lies waiting for the kind of analysis that Louise Rosenblatt initiated.

¹ Another, more scientific, direction of investigating the reading process of real readers would be to incorporate some of the powerful insights of cognitive psychology on schema theory by such researchers as John Bransford and Nancy McCarrell, Marcel just and Patricia Carpenter, and Allan Collins, et al., and on metacognition by such researchers as Linda Baker and Ann Brown, Shirley Wagoner, Peter Winograd and Peter Johnson. For an example of the analysis of reading literary and discursive texts that points in such a direction, see Linda Flower's "Interpretive Acts: Cognition and the Construction of Discourse."

² For critical studies of 'Wandering Rocks" and especially the interpolations, see in particular Marilyn French, Stuart Gilbert, Clive Hart, Leo Knuth, Paul Van Caspel, David Hayman, Edward Cronin, Mervin Lane, Michael Seidel, and Erwin Steinberg.

³ See McCormick, Reading Texts, Chapter 3.

⁴ The first parenthetical reference is to the episode and line number in the Gabler 1984 Garland edition of Ulysses, the second, to the page and line number in the 1961 Random House edition.

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