August Rubrecht's Research Projects
Reading and Seeing
“People can see only what they are predisposed to see.”
Charles Hanson, coffee room conversation, 6 April 1999.
Theory as optical filter
Particular critical theories are often metaphorically called “filters”; when we view literary works through them, they alter our perception in particular ways, much as colored photographic filters alter our perception of scenes. The metaphor is a useful one, especially because it alludes to the benefits astronomers and earth science researchers (among others) derive from filters. By limiting their view to particular wavelengths of light, they can identify features that would never show up otherwise. By taking successive views with different filters, they can build up a composite picture of a galaxy or a patch of terrain that is far more detailed and informative than any single broad-spectrum view could make possible.
The trouble with too many literary critics is that they have never recognized the benefits of building up composite views. They think the metaphoric filter they have discovered or been given is the only one worth looking through. Focus for a moment not on an abstract theory, but on a literal filter. Consider what happens when we use that one and no other.
Through a red filter, a puddle of milk and a puddle of blood look almost exactly alike. This similarity is due to a simple optical principle: since a red filter transmits no other color, it reveals to us only the red light shining from or reflected by whatever we view through it. As a result, we see everything as a lighter or darker shade of red, depending on how much red light it gives off. The reason milk and blood look the same is that they reflect the same amount of red light.
This lesson is important, but its importance is purely optical. We should not try to draw conclusions that it does not teach. The fact that milk and blood share an unsuspected similarity when viewed in a special way does not mean they share the same chemical composition or biological function or symbolic associations. And notice how narrow even the merely optical similarity is: through a green filter milk and blood look like opposites.
Literary critics who never use but one approach remind me of a child who, playing with a piece of transparent red plastic, has just discovered this effect. “Look, mommy,” she says, “the refrigerator is red!” “Look, mommy, the stove is red too!” “Look, mommy, the dish towel is light red and dark red!” “Look, mommy, the floor is dark red with bright red spots!” “Look, Mommy, my green socks are black and my legs are red!” And so on. Nobody but a doting parent could put up with such talk for very long. Well, maybe a grandparent too. But since I count none of today’s crop of literary critics among my descendants, my patience quickly wears thin.
Reader reactions as color blindness
When I showed the paragraphs above to my colleague Jennifer Shaddock, she reminded me that readers—both students and professional critics—who think they read without using theory at all distort things as much as those who consciously read through a theoretical filter. In this case, though, the distortion is more pernicious because it is more subtle. Such readers assume they simply see things as they really are, and they expect everyone else to see them the same way.
Let me stick with the optical motif here but switch metaphors from the media through which light is transmitted—filters—to the way it is received by the retina—the perceptual system. My colleague John Buchholz and I sometimes hunt together. If it becomes necessary for us to follow a blood trail, I always have to do the tracking. John doesn’t see things the way I do because he is colorblind. To him blood hardly shows up at all against the leaves, whether they are dry and brown or fresh and green. My way of seeing is clearly superior.
Yet even I, with normal human color vision, don’t see things the way they really are. I too am colorblind. We all are.
Consider honeybees. Some flower petals reflect ultraviolet light in startling patterns. Bees can see ultraviolet. Human beings are blind to it, however, so what to a bee is a variegated flower may look to us plain yellow. And rattlesnakes. They have an extra pair of “eyes”—the pits that give them the name pit viper—that perceive infrared rays from warm-blooded animals. The snakes’ visual system superimposes the images from their pits on those that come through their eyes, so that mice glow bright against a background of cool debris where to us they would be thoroughly camouflaged. Considering the way bees and snakes make their living, these ways of seeing are clearly superior.
Now come back to my friend John, poor man. Sometimes we hunt grouse and woodcock, two birds that live in thick brushy cover and whose mottled colors make highly effective camouflage. If one of those birds falls to earth very far away, I have a devil of a time finding it. The colors of the feathers are so close to those of the forest floor that they fool my eye completely. John is not fooled, though; he can find dead birds far more easily than I. I don’t know whether he has learned to compensate for low color contrasts by picking up on subtle cues of shade and texture that escape me, or whether he actually perceives color differences I am blind to. Whichever the case, his way of seeing is clearly superior.
You can see where all this is heading. Whatever we read, we see with skewed perceptual systems, just as we see the world around us with retinas sensitive to some wavelengths and blind to others. There is an important difference, though. We inherit our retinas biologically, but we learn how to read—and how to respond to what we read—from the people we grow up with. We hear their gossip, the comments they make about movies and news stories. We pay close attention to the points where both our peers and our elders laugh or cry or stiffen with disapproval. You learned your own values that way, and now you react to situations (both factual and fictional) according to those values. If you are a white woman from a Midwestern suburb, you do not notice the same things in Zora Neale Hurston’s Of Mules and Men that a black woman from rural northern Florida sees. If you went to Catholic schools, you see things in the stories of Catholic author J. F. Powers that I, who grew up among fundamentalist Protestants and attended public schools, cannot. And both you and I will miss things in Bernard Malamud’s “The Jewbird” that Jewish readers pick up on at once.
Nobody has found a way to do much about literal biologically-determined colorblindness, but the prognosis for the cultural kind is good. We have two remedies: choose theoretical filters and get others to show us what they see. As I hinted in the first part above, theories, like literal optical filters, can highlight contrasts and reveal similarities we would never notice without them. And by expanding our circle of peers and elders to include those in other tribes and ways of life and those in generations now long dead, we can expand the range of our vision far beyond what we acquired from our childhood circle. Though John Buchholz can never let me see through his literal eyes, no matter how many dead grouse he picks up for me, he can show me what he sees in the Grangerford episode of Huckleberry Finn. If I pay close attention, I can learn to read that part of the book (and other parts too, and whole other books) with new sensitivity. I can broaden, metaphorically speaking, my ability to see across the whole spectrum of textual colors.
