I had a friend who grad school whose undergraduate majors were history and English. She chose to go to graduate school in history, she said, because she got tired of what we might call the theoretical excesses of some of her literature classmates. I particularly remember her saying that she had grown very tired of a classmate whose stock response to almost any literary conundrum was to point out "language’s fundamental inability to express."
There are times when it feels like the simplest of conversations online suffer significantly from "language’s fundamental inability to express."
One of my mantras about writing has always been that you don’t get to say, in response to criticism, "But they didn’t get it!" If you’re the author, it’s your responsibility to make your writing so obviously painfully staggeringly crystal clear that no one reading it can possibly "not get" your point. (I think I got this from Howard Becker’s Writing for Social Scientists,* an oldie but a goodie; he describes asking a class of graduate students to mark up each other’s writing, which they set to doing with gusto. He asks them what they thought of the writing they critiqued, and they complained about sloppiness and lack of clarity and weak arguments and whatnot. Then he asked them what they thought about the comments they got back, and they universally complained that the reader "didn’t get it" and was way too mean and didn’t understand them. Then they realized they were talking about themselves. Great anecdote. Even if it’s from another book entirely, which might be the case. But back to what I was saying…)
I really do believe that you don’t get to say, "But they didn’t get it."
And yet, I have also reluctantly come to the conclusion that no matter how hard you try to be just that painfully clear, you cannot control how other people read you work. Wait, let me be direct. I cannot control how other people read my work. I cannot control the circumstances under which they read it, and I cannot control the baggage they bring to the table. I cannot control the fact that some people will never "get" it when they read what I write, because somehow I’ve managed in blissful ignorance to push the right combinations of buttons in their brain that bring to the surface all kinds of things that I, in fact, neither said nor thought.
I think this is especially the case online, but it’s not restricted to the online world; readers’ reports prove this every day. I once saw two readers’ reports for the same set of essays, in which the first reader praised the collection up and down as an incredibly insightful compilation – except for essay X, which was a real stinker and totally out of place and which should be excised; the second reader trashed the collection and said it was pointless and added nothing to the scholarly conversation – except for essay X, which was really rather lovely and deserved to be placed in much better company. The poor author of essay X had no control over those reactions, and honestly, I don’t think they even had an awful lot to do with him/her. (No, I was not the author in question.)
Sadly, what this has also led me to conclude is that conversations about writing – especially online writing – can rapidly reach a point of diminishing returns, and it’s at this point that I have to give up on my mantra. Because the problem with believing that I actually can somehow make my writing crystal clear to EVERYONE, to every possible reader, is that sometimes I find myself spending waaaaaaaaay too much time trying to counter misinterpretations, and wasting an awful lot of energy continuing to try to explain and justify myself, long after it should be clear that basically nothing is going to convince this reader of what I actually meant.
I’m not talking about simple disagreements here – disagreement is fine; I have no problem agreeing to disagree. But there are times when people aren’t disagreeing, they just really aren’t getting it. And the emotional energy that goes into trying to make people "get it" – well, I need that for other things.
*You know what’s kind of scary? When I zipped over to Amazon to look up this book so I could provide the link, it was already listed on the front page under my recommendations.
New Kid on the Hallway 
Of course I think you’re right — but my first thought on reading this was “But of course! That’s the whole point of questioning the “authorial intention” approach to literature”. Whatever the skill of a writer, there is no way to control an audience response — you can do a lot to influence it, of course, but you can’t control it.
You make a good point — when we write something and publish it, whether it’s on our blog or printed in some academic venue, we’ve lost control. It’s out there and it can’t be taken back (you can excise blog posts, but if they’ve been screencapped or archived in the Wayback machine, goodbye deniability).
I would hope that a publication is just the start of a dialogue. And that when people respond in interesting ways, you can speak back. If something comes across poorly, you should be able to qualify what you’ve said.
I wish more scholars would encourage that type of academic dialogue. It should begin with constructive readings by your colleagues and move on to the more disinterested world of peer review before it goes out there — to catch as many mistakes or infelicities as possible before the rest of the world sees the final product.
Sadly, there are a lot of academic and blog readers who read to find fault in others. Then, once they’ve found fault (or offense), they jump up and down. And do it again, shrieking all the while. And waving their hands around. And you, as the writer, need to realize that you’re not involved in an interesting and worthy dialogue with peers, in this case, but you’re being abused. And that’s just plain wrong!
Well, clearly I know I can often write without making any sense to my intelligent friends!
You know, this kinda synchs up with the “Why do you teach [literature]?” meme floating around…
I always tried to teach my students [with varying degrees of success] that it’s their job as a READER to try and understand what a writer has written from the writer’s perspective…and separate that out from the baggage they bring as the reader.
It’s usually from that starting point I try to get them to understand that as WRITERS they must try to be as clear as possible so that their readers do not go astray. I use virtually the same rhetoric as you seem to in order to get this idea across.
To me, it seems far too many undergrads are taught to express themselves without being taught any self-reflexivity or that, you know, other people have thoughts different from their own.
And I won’t even mention the ones who have no opinions and refuse to cultivate any…ugh.
I think The Myth’s reaction here is very smart. It’s hard to learn to approach reading that’s difficult for us with a positive mindset, respecting the author, and yet also being ready to be critical. I don’t mean the jumping up and down critical but a respectful critical. It’s hard! (It’s especially hard for me when I’m reading some sexist so and so…).
When I read reader response folks, I get that the reader brings a lot to the text, but I want the reader to also bring an explicit responsibility, and I don’t seem to see that articulated.
Thoughtful reading today, thanks )
I suppose I should clarify — I’m not saying that the author’s intention is irrelevant, nor that we don’t have a responsibility as readers to try to recover that intention (just as we have a responsibility as writers to make our intention as clear as possible). In fact much of my own work (in Classics) is focussed on attempting to figure out what the author intended to communicate to his audience. But the fact is that, as you say, there is no writing so clear that it cannot be misinterpreted — or that the context of the reader can be irrelevant. We can’t put all the responsibility on either party — neither the reader nor the author is completely in charge of the meaning, no matter how much we try to anticipate all possible misreadings.
I completely agree, Aven, that neither reader nor author is in charge – that totally makes sense. I think sometimes even if one’s familiar with reader-response theory (which I only am a little bit), it’s one thing to apply that to a piece of writing you’re analyzing, and another to see that happening to writing you’ve created (but this is coming from someone outside of literature/comp/rhet/creative writing, who perhaps has to get used to things that are more commonly understood there!). I never think that I can completely recover what the author meant when I read a piece of writing, but I still expect readers of my work to get what I meant!
To be honest, I’d never really thought about it from the author’s perspective, either — that is, I’d had the same (unthinking) assumption that others *should* be able to understand me. And I deal with the converse all the time! So thanks for making me realise my own blind spot!
Yes: authors, especially bloggers, can say “But they didn’t get it!” I think that, too often, casual readers surf to a blog they don’t read, notice some single thought in the blogger’s entry, and respond to that one thought without trying to understand the whole entry. I know I’ve had that happen, I think that’s part of what happened to Dr. Crazy & the “why I teach” meme, I’ve read other bloggers bend over backwards to make sure people get it — and I almost didn’t get you even though I *do* read you faithfully!
There has been research done on how people read and some writing courses draw upon this information as a tool for helping writers decide how clear they want to be (some, like Kant, value a lack of clarity). As I recall this was not reader response theory (at least as far as I understand the term), but based on experimental data.
And now for my vaguely useless reference: I think most of the research was done by a guy at the University of Chicago, maybe in the 1980s. I am sure that it is a major part of the writing program at UChicago.
I love being almost sorta helpful.