Arrested Pulse

This article provides a generalized version of game theory (popularized by behaviorist Eric Berne's Games People Play) as a context for understanding how readers respond to texts. I argue that when readers transact with (in nonacademic terms, when they read) literary texts they unconsciously negotiate subject positions which they occupy in the social sphere. Such an interpretation assumes that human subjectivity is socially constructed and that personal identity is constituted by gender, age, racial/ethnic background, and socio-economic status. Transacting with texts is actually a form of social interaction--not with others, as in real social situations, but with the culturally inscribed "roles" readers themselves play in life. In this sense, it is possible to conceive as reading as a kind of game, not so much between text and reader but between the social roles evoked in readers as they transact with texts. Below, I will show how game theory fits nicely with views by some reader-response critics that reading is a social act. To demonstrate the fruitfulness of such an approach, I will provide actual college students' written responses to a literary text which show how their "personal" readings are actually very much informed by socially constituted subjectivities they bring to their reading process. Note: this is a vastly condensed version of a longer academic essay.

Transactions as Interactions
Reader-response critics have offered many theories of how readers "read" texts. Reading involves "transacting" with texts, which Norman Holland argues readers do by bringing "extra-textual, extraliterary facts to the supposedly fixed text" (364) Louise Rosenblatt sees the transaction process as creative in a literary sense; readers engage texts aesthetically and the result of that engagement she calls "the poem." Steven Mailloux's evaluation of the "subject matter" of what he terms affective stylistics "involves ethical values formed by the reader in his [or her] interaction with the text."

Mailloux uses the term "interaction" in lieu of "transaction"--an important distinction. In my view, readers are engaged not so much by texts, but by their own unconscious social responses to texts. This is similar to Eric Berne's distinction between "transactional response" and "transactional stimulus." In Games People Play, transactional stimulus is when a person (a perceiver or "reader" of social situations) acknowledges the presence of others; a transactional response is how that person relates to the stimulus in the form of social interaction (29). I believe that readers interact with texts in a manner similar to how they respond to others in social situations.

The only difference is that the interaction is not with an actual other, but with a socially constituted subjectivity they themselves bring to the text. This subjectivity projects an imagined others onto the text, and it is with these others that readers interact.

Game Theory as Reader-Response
Sigmund Freud believed that imaginative creativity could be seen in the games children played. As people grew up, they ceased playing games; but Freud believed that "we can never give anything up; we only exchange one thing for another" (37). Adults exchanged playing for fantasizing, a process of working out infantile wishes that had been shaped by game-playing.

Behaviorist Eric Berne suggests that this working-out process involves constructing multiple "agents" of the self. He sees the self as a social entity who plays various roles in social situations that are governed by an overriding set of conventions which determine stimulus and response. When a surgeon says to an assistant, "Scaple," and the assistant hands it back to him or her saying, "Scaple," the interaction is different from a situation in which the surgeon says to the assistant, "At some point, I think we should discuss your drinking," and the assistant's response is "Who do you think you are, my mother?" The first transaction mirrors a professional-to-professional interaction, whereas the second one mirrors a parent-to-child and child-to-parent type of interaction. The people are the same--it's their "selves" (parent, child) who are interacting.

Similar interactions occur between readers and texts. Wolfgang Iser suggests as much in his own assessment of the reading process:



Human subjectivity is the result of complex interactions with social situations. Psychologists have long argued that because we are required to play different "roles" in life, our selves (or "psyches") is multifaceted. In more structuralist terms, we assume different subject positions at different times. How I interact with my best friend, for one simple example, is different from how I interact with my boss. Texts, I would like to suggest, reflect back at us the different subject positions we occupy in life, and these interact with each other during the complex process of responding to texts.

Norman Holland's assessment of his own reading (and teaching) of Edgar Allen Poe's "The Purloined Letter" demonstrates the game-like social process of reading. He hovers between teaching "it" (the story itself) and "someone" (the socially constructed identity of the text). He responds to the text from a variety of different vantage points: a "relator" (a sensitive reader), an "authority" (a college professor), and even as "Dupin" (the protagonist of the story.) These social selves interact in a complex reading process that he likens to a "game of hide and seek" (359). Reading, in other words, is a continual interaction of roles brought to the text by readers. These roles interact with each other while a reader transacts with a text. Let's look at this phenomenon in more detail.

Preliminaries: Some Sample Responses to Sherwood Anderson's "Hands"
In the late 1980s, while teaching an introductory literature class at Northeastern University, I conducted a study on the social interactions between readers and texts. In order to study this interaction, I compared my students' written responses to specific texts with a biography they had composed of themselves in the first few weeks of the course. This biography was in the form of a questionaire in which students identified themselves not by name but by a color, a number between one and one-hundred, and a letter from the alphabet. They did, however, represent themselves by age, gender, hobbies and interests, socio-economic, family, and ethnic background. They voluntarily answered a number of questions designed to elicit representations of their individual identities. I used this questionaire later when reading students' responses to texts.

One story that students read and reflected on in writing was Sherwood Anderson's short story "Hands" in which the protagonist, the fastest strawberry-picker in the county, was once a popular schoolmaster in a Pennsylvania town. As he taught, he would walk about the classroom and lay his hands on his students' shoulders. This inspired one boy to contrive passionate dreams about his teacher which he then reported as fact, causing an uproar that resulted in Wing's escaping from a lynch mob in the dead of night. Now he lives a quiet life of seclusion on the outskirts of Winesburg, Ohio, stuffing his hands neurotically into his pockets whenever engaged in interpersonal activity.

One nineteen year-old female reader wrote that the story made her feel lonely:



On her questionaire, this student gave little information about herself--an interesting event in itself. She did, though, identify herself as being from a middle-class family and wrote: "I am very shy, because when I was younger, even today at times, my mother and grandmother spoke for me. My father is also shy." This response suggests that she interacted with the story--specifically with the main character, who is immensely shy--from the vantage point of her own constructed identity.

Another student, a nineteen year-old female who described herself as "very serious" on her questionaire, responded to "Hands" in this manner:



This student picks up on the religious theme in the story. She uses the term "sin" and references the image readers are left with at the end of the story when Wing, picking up peas he has spilled by candlelight: his shadow on the wall makes him appear to be saying a rosary. Interestingly, on her questionaire this student wrote that she had "gone through six years of Catholic schooling" and was "very involved with [her] church ... [and] with college fellowship and Sunday service."

Methodology
Before writing their in-class responses to "Hands," I asked students to brainstorm several adjectives that described how the story made them feel. After doing this, I asked them to cross out all but one, then to write a response describing why they stuck with this adjective. An eighteen year-old male student, who described his socioeconomic background as "upper middle-class" and added that his "father own[ed] a corporation," after crossing out the adjectives "upsetting" and "angry," chose "disturbing." This is his response:



It is important to note that this reader responds to the story (in the first part of his paragraph) from a parental point of view: "people" could be rewritten as "parents" who are being paranoid about the welfare of their children. In his questionaire, the student described himself as having a "knack of getting along with almost anyone. I owe this to my father, who everyone admires, not only for monetary of business accomplishments, but for her personality. A very honest person, who can always trust and will always come through for you."

This reader's parental vantage point dissolves, however, in the second part of his response to the story when he worries about "what this story was supposed to teach me." Here another subjectivity emerges--one that is more childlike and doubtful. On his questionaire, he wrote that one way he would change society would be to "make academics less important." When describing his childhood, he mentioned that he "struggled thru highschool." We see him continue to struggle as he searches for, and doesn't find, some esoteric meaning that is supposed to "teach" him something.

A fourth student, a self-described "perfectionist" who lists as one of his hobbies "playing games," wrote on his questionaire that he had been "used as a scapegoat for other kids [sic] pleasure for approximately 4 years." He added: "It took years to recover and prevents me from making friends quickly." After crossing out "sad," "disgusted," "confused," and "indignant," he settled on "repulsed," and this is what he wrote:



The first part of this student's response reflects the statement he made on his questionaire that "we live in a morally deprived society; he rails against "perversion" and insinuated that his "disgust" by the protagonist's actions reflects his having been "approached by fags." However, he loses his steam in the second part of his response when he seems much more sympathetic toward Wing. In this part of his response, the reader seems to respond to Wing's victimization by others--something he himself writes of having experienced in his own life.

Conclusion
The differences in these responses to the same text point out the uniqueness of each reader's identity and the extent to which facets of that identity inform their transactions with it. Again, this transaction gives rise to complex social interaction readers have with themselves during the reading process, coloring the text and informing their responses to it.



Works Cited

Berne, Eric. Games People Play. (New York: Pantheon, 1978)

Freud, Sigmund. "Creative Writers and Day Dreaming." Creativity. Ed. P.E. Vernon. (Penguin, 1970)

Holland, Norman. "Re-Covering 'The Purloined Letter': Reading as a Personal Transaction." The Reader in the Text. Eds. Suleiman and Crossman. (Princeton UP, 1980) 106-109

Mailloux, Steven. "Evaluation and Reader Response Criticism: Values Implicit in Affective Stylistics." STYLE. 10:3 (November 1973)

Rosenblatt, Louise M. The Reader, the Text, the Poem. (Sourthern Illinois UP: 1978)