Reader Centred Reading
While I had my own views and expectations on what a film about the Holocaust would entail, the more I watched of Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, the more I seemed to find myself constructed as the implied reader of the text. My expectations and the meanings I made throughout the film seemed to be shaped by an ideology that matched my own. My cultural understandings of religion and ethnicity ensured that I felt sympathy towards the Jews suffering because of their religious and racial background. My dominant reading of the text was based upon my cultural assumption that everyone is equal and that humanity should strive to protect its more vulnerable members.
From my understanding of this genre, I could already tell from the beginning that this was going to be a very sad film. The use of symbolism alerted me to this. I found the film’s use of names and lists to be among its most potent motifs. These seemingly normal things took on an all new sinister meaning from what I was used to through my own experiences in life. The black and white colouring made me feel as though all light had gone out of the world, and that it was being slowly suffocated by horror and despair. I felt as though I was actually watching real footage from the war, as my intertextual readings associated black and white films with the war. This worked on me at a psychological level as I ceased to view the characters as merely figments of the author’s imagination, but as real people who lived and breathed just like me.
The character with whom my reading of the text led me to associate the most strongly was Schindler’s Jewish accountant Itzhak Stern, who acted both as a guardian for his people and a moral conscience for Schindler. However I recognise that other readings of this text might assign lesser importance to Stern’s role, and instead give credence to the women in Schindler’s life who set him along the path of his emotional metamorphosis. I saw Stern as a moral human who placated Schindler’s desire for material wealth in favour of saving lives, and I felt that from my own cultural expectations, this was the right thing to do.
While the privileged voice in the text is given to the German businessman Oskar Schindler who saved the lives of over a thousand Jews in the Second World War, at the beginning of the movie I could feel no empathy towards Schindler and his motives. I merely saw him as a pragmatic war profiteer; yet as the film progressed, I came to associate myself more and more closely with him. I could not connect with the earlier motives of this character because they were so removed from my own moral and emotional feelings and expectations. I saw him as being willing to put up with the inhuman treatment of the Jews so that he could profit from their labour. However as the film progressed, Schindler began to slowly realise the errors of his was, and I began to reconceptualise my view on the identity of this character. On a lesser extent I can associate this with my own life experiences, where people I have despised have turned out to be perfectly nice people and I have had to reappraise my opinion of them.
I found the contrasting composition of the characters Schindler and the villain Goeth to be one of the most fascinating binaries engendered throughout the film. Parallel editing and conversations between these two characters frequently changed my position towards them. For me this was emphasised by Schindler’s comment about Goeth, where he said: “War brings out the worst in people... under normal circumstances he wouldn’t be like this, he’d be alright” I found this to be the turning point in the movie for me in relation to the character Goeth, as I began to no longer see him as an inhuman monster, but as a real human being. It made me wonder how very different these two characters and their roles – protagonist and villain – were and whether had their positions been reversed, this film would have been called Goeth’s List.
Reader Centred Theory
The key notion underlying the reader centred approach is the reader’s role in creating meaning from a text. As the phenomenologist, Husserl wrote: “consciousness is not just a passive registration of the world, but actually constitutes it or ‘Intends’ it” (Eagleton 1983, p55) By examining the manner in which my “consciousness” has interpreted or “intended” the movie Schindler’s List, I can deepen my understanding of my reading practices and the meanings I made through them. To help with this process, I drew on the methods of the theorist Beach, who stated that “Reader-response theorists recognize that the meaning of responses varies considerably.” (Beach 1993, p.7) I drew on his five primary theoretical perspectives that are categorized as textual, experiential, psychological, social or cultural. I used these categories throughout my reading to defend my interpretation of the text.
According to Beach: “Cultural theorists focus on how readers’ cultural roles, attitudes, and values… shape responses.” This became evident during my reading of Schindler’s List, as I noted that I was able to easily adopt the role of the “implied reader” of the text. This notion was suggested by Iser, who described the implied reader as “the reader whom the text creates for itself and amounts to ‘a network of response-inviting structures.’” (A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Language Theory.) By structuring my responses, the text predisposed me to read in a certain way, as I was willing to accept the ideologies that it mobilized by drawing on my cultural assumptions. However my ability to become the implied reader of the text was limited by my own “horizon of meaning.” According to Gadamer, this concept occurs because “as the work passes from one cultural or historical context to another, new meanings may be culled from it.” (Eagleton 1983, p71) My cultural upbringing at this point of time ensured that I was able to accept the ideologies and cultural assumptions mobilized throughout Schindler’s List.
Throughout my reading, I acknowledged how I analogized and identified with characters in Schindler’s List. This worked on me at a psychological level, as Beach asserted that responses to texts vary according to “the readers’ cognitive or subconscious processes and how these processes vary according to both unique individual personality and development level.” (Beach 1993, p.8) Therefore my inability to identify with the character Schindler was because psychologically I was unable to associate my personality with his. As Holland stated, “Identity governs feedback,” (Holland, N. 1995) and as I could not identify with this character my feedback was profoundly negative. However as character was developed throughout the text, I was able to reconceptualise my subjectivity towards him. This psychological and experiential match as reader with the text was expressed by Holland, who stated “readers make meaning… by exploring a passive text with schemas. These range from simple codes… up to complex, individual ideas about character, plot, genre, themes, or values. (Holland, N. 1995)
My reading was shaped by my ability to match my personal experiences with those found within the text. This was evident in my reading when I stated that “I can associate this with my own life experiences.” Beach stated that “the nature of the readers’ engagement or experiences with texts [shapes] the ways in which… readers identify with the characters, visualize images, relate personal experiences to the text, or construct the world of the text” (Beach 1993, 8) When I made connections with other texts during my reading, I drew on Julia Kristeva’s theory of “Intertextuallity” where she stated that “a literary text is not an isolated phenomenon but is made up of a mosaic of quotations, and that any text is an ‘absorption and transformation of another’” (Literary Terms & Literary Theory. P.424) This was evident in my reading where I stated that I “associated black and white films with the war.” As Beach stated, “Social theorists focus on the influence of the social context on the reader. (Beach 1993, p.8) I was influenced by my exposure to other texts relating to the topic.
Author Centred Reading
Steven Spielberg has been listed by Premier Magazine as “the most powerful and influential figure in the motion picture industry,” (Wikipedia. 2008) and his name is more than enough to ensure that a movie is a hit. Critics have written how “His films have been so popular, so consistently entertaining, that people rush to see anything tagged Steven Spielberg.” (Tiskali. 2008) The auteur Spielberg has had his name associated with a successful body of work because of his strong personal style. It is incorrect to label Spielberg as the “author” of his films, due to the highly collaborative nature of a work in the motion picture industry.
I knew from previous experience that as Schindler’s List was classified as a drama, this genre would be dominated by seriousness of tone and purpose. The development of characters is very important in this genre, and when I hear about films directed by Steven Spielberg, I immediately think of an adventure story where the protagonist triumphs against monumental odds. This characteristic seems to frequently manifest itself in his films, and I felt myself constructing Spielberg like the protagonists that he portrays. I formed my own “implied author” from my reading, where I saw some characteristics of Schindler as manifesting themselves in the author. I could see Spielberg triumphing against great odds in his life to become an acclaimed film director, just like how Schindler triumphed against great odds.
A motif that Steven Spielberg frequently employs in his films is the portrayal of children in some sort of danger. In Schindler’s List screaming children were depicted being separated from their parents in the concentration camps. I saw this as evidence of Spielberg the auteur being revealed in his film, as he symbolised his childhood experience of his parents breaking up. This motif manifests itself in other such notable films of his, such as E.T and Catch Me If You Can, where the main characters came from fragmented families. Spielberg also mobilized a number of ideologies in Schindler’s List which I saw as another manner in which he revealed himself throughout the film. Spielberg privileged his view on religion and ethnicity, which I interpreted as paying homage to his Jewish ancestry and personal beliefs.
I was aware of how Spielberg author is socially constructed and how he is not a free individual as he is unable to step out of his culture. I could detect this in the film through the discourses that were mobilized. Spielberg’s cultural background was that of an upbringing in a Jewish family, where he was teased for being a Jew and had even lost relatives during the Holocaust. He mobilized the discourse of the evil and corrupt Nazis, while he constructed the Jews as being naïve and helpless. He marginalized other ethnic groups that were being exterminated by the Nazis, and instead focused purely on the plight of the Jews. My knowledge of his cultural background helped me to develop me interpretation of him as the “implied author.” I could see him being abused throughout his childhood and after his rise to prominence, wanting to promote a movie about this issue. The saw the theme of racism in Schindler’s List as an extension of the author’s own personal experiences.
Author Centred Theory
Traditional views on the author centred approach to reading criticize and judge “a work of literature by attempting to assess what the writer’s intention was and whether or not he has fulfilled it.” (Literary Terms & Literary Theory, p.421) Today this notion is regarded as “Intentional Fallacy,” as the biographical author’s intention was deemed to originate and impart meaning in the text. However, as Barthes argued in The Death of the Author, “a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination.” (Bennett 2005. P.18) Today, the reader is deemed to make meaning from a text and the actual biographical author of the text has lost its power as the sole source of meaning in the text. However, the role of the author is not as defunct as many theorists believe it to be. It still fulfills a number of important functions that I drew on throughout my author centred reading of Schindler’s List.
When I discussed in my reading that Spielberg as the auteur of a film has the ability to make it a massive success simply by lending his name to the work, I was examining the value of an author’s name in society. According to Foucault, this is because “Texts are eliminated from the list of belonging to a particular author if they are markedly superior or inferior to other texts on the list” (Klages, M. 2001) I, and numerous other people associate Spielberg’s name with a certain level of quality that we know we can expect from one of his films. However this standard varies between different cultures and moments of time. Hans Jauss suggested the notion of a “Horizon of expectations,” that governs the criteria that readers use to judge a text. As Jauss stated, “a literary work is not an object which stands by itself and which offers the same face to each reader in each period.” (Literary Terms & Literary Theory, p.487) We are all constructed by the discourses that operate in our time, and these affect how we view a text at any given period.
I described my view on Spielberg as the “implied author” of the text in my reading. I was able to construct my own opinion as to the identity of this author from the discourses and associated cultural assumptions that he mobilized in the text. The concept of the “implied author” was proposed by Wayne Booth, who asserted that the “‘implied author’ is the image or idea of the author suggested by the text.” (Bennett 2005. P. 13) From my own bibliographic knowledge of Spielberg, I was able to supplement this image that I had of him. As John Lye stated, “We construct an author out of our reading of her… The author is ‘in’ the text only insofar as we try to read her ‘out’ of it.” (Lye, J. 2000)
In my reading of I remarked how the genre of Schindler’s List was used to classify the film as serious and sombre. In the same way, Schindler can be classified according to his style and any recurring motifs that he employs in his films. As Foucault contended, “the author’s name has a ‘classificatory function,’ it defines an oeuvre.” (Bennett 2005. P.23) Spielberg’s oeuvre defines his personal style of directing and is his total artistic output as an auteur. Foucault asserted that a “text is eliminated from belonging to a particular author when the style is different from that of other texts belonging to that author.” (Klages, M. 2001) Without an organizing authorical origin, there can be no concept of the oeuvre. Steven Spielberg’s directing style classifies his work under a visage of stylistic uniformity.
The author is socially constructed and is not always aware of the ideologies operating in the text. As John Lye questioned, “We still need to know the relation between an ‘individual’s’ meaning and the social meanings which have constructed her life.” (Lye, J. 2000) The themes and discourses mobilized by Spielberg in Schindler’s List were consistent with those I had found in other films of his that I had watched. This enabled me to attribute the ideas inherent in the text to Spielberg’s oeuvre, due to my knowledge and experiences with the style and ideas in other Spielberg films. As Foucault explained, “a text is eliminated from the list of belonging to a particular author when the ideas in that text contradict or conflict with the ideas presented in other texts.” (Klages, M. 2001) The conceptual or theoretical coherence of the films directed by Spielberg group his works together in his oeuvre. Georges Poulet argued in Phenomenology of reading that “One goes not from the work to the psychology of the author, but rather to “a certain power of organization, inherent in the work itself.”” (Patten, J. 2007.) The organization of Spielberg’s works enable the reader to attribute certain themes and discourse to his name.
Bibliography
Beach, R. (1993). A teacher’s introduction to reader-response theories : NCTE
Bennett, A. (2005). The Author. Oxon : Routledge
Dictionary of Literary Terms & Literary Theory. Penguin Reference
Eagleton, T. (1983). Literary Theory : An Introduction. Oxford
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Beach, R. (1993). A teacher’s introduction to reader-response theories : NCTE
Bennett, A. (2005). The Author. Oxon : Routledge
Dictionary of Literary Terms & Literary Theory. Penguin Reference
Eagleton, T. (1983). Literary Theory : An Introduction. Oxford
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Klages, M. (2001). Michel Foucault: “What is an Author?” Referenced 2008
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Lye, J. (2000). The ‘death of the author’ as an instance of theory. Referenced 2008
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Patten, J. (2007). A summary of Georges Poulet’s “A Phenomenology of Reading
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Tiscali. (2008). Steven Spielberg Biography. Referenced 2008
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Wikipedia. (2008). Steven Spielberg. Referenced 2008
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