In looking at the reader-response articles for class, I remembered my first "experience" with reader-response criticism. My 12th grade English teacher, Mr. Rosinski, was actively pursuing a graduate degree in the field. He liked to give us what amounted to literary sound bites and ask us to respond to them in no more than a double-spaced page as a means of teaching us how to get right into a problem (they were always problems, these quotes.) One class he brought up Roland Barthes, authors of "Death of the Author" and asked us to respond to the follow line from the essay, "text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination." We had no training in literary criticism, certainly nothing to put the quote into context but we were plucky AP students and assigning this was easier for him because it allowed him to use the pretense of teaching us as a means of going over his class notes. A real win-win. Anyhow, this it what I wrote (I'm not sure why I kept it, I have a lot of things I wrote in high school):
A teacher of mine once told me what I wrote reflected what I’d read. I was talented because I had good taste. He thought this was a compliment but that statement has haunted me since because it forces me to ask a question I don’t necessarily want an answer to— Could I ever write anything that is truly original or will it always be merely the product of a lifetime spent reading? In preparing a response I am immediately tempted to quote a novel I read years ago, “ Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everyone I have ever known.” So I suppose the answer is no.
This is a troubling thought mostly because I find myself at an impasse. A relentless curricular emphasis on originality of ideas over voice has stifled my ability to simply write. As a result, it feels, stylistically, like an abstraction of my bookshelves. A literary bricolage. But maybe this is not a personal flaw. Roland Barthes stated in his essay “The Death of the Author”, "The writer can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original. His only power is to mix writings [...] in such a way as never to rest on any one of them.” If this declaration holds true, this predicament is the inevitable result of being simultaneously a reader and writer. Barthes goes on to say that a writer cannot assert ultimate authority over a work because, in many ways, they did not write it. “A text is made of multiple writings…this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader, not, as was hitherto said, the author. The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text's unity lies not in its origin but in its destination.”
I got a B. I always got Bs in his class. Apparently I took the quote out of context. Funny because the only context I had was my own response to the abbreviated reading. It seems I took myself out of context. I don't mind the grade. Really, I didn't then. This is the beginning of a response at best. I don't even really explain the last quote I use. It feels thrown in because I don't really know how to articulate my point. I remember struggling to write this and feeling woefully incapable of doing so. Maybe that's why I bring it up now. Again, I had/have tools, and with enough time (or a better application of the time available to me, then and now) could probably have come up with something better. But I didn't and again feel like I don't.
The context comment bugged the hell out of me though.
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