Further Reading – Creative Reading

Just a warning, domestic abuse is mentioned throughout this post.

While we were reading and discussing reader response theory, there was one poem that I continually thought about, which was My Papa’s Waltz by Theodore Roethke. The reason I kept coming back to this particular poem was because of the drastically different responses I have seen people have after reading it for the first time. The majority of people, after reading this, seem to think it is a cute poem about a father teaching his child how to dance. Others interpret it as a child being physically abused by the father. Since these are two very different interpretations, I think this poem could benefit from some reader response criticism. Reader response criticism has many different subsections, all of which are useful, but the most useful here are transactional reader response theory and psychological reader response theory.

Transactional response theory looks at both the text and how the reader reacts to it, which could explain how there are two different interpretations. My Papa’s Waltz has a lot of “indeterminate meaning, or… ‘gaps’ in the text… which allow or even invite readers to create their own interpretation.”[1] The images of the drunk father moving around while the child clings to them, the pots and pans falling in the kitchen, the frowning mother, and the father’s battered hand can either lend themselves to a picture of an abusive family or a father that is having fun with his child despite hard times. This piece also has a lot of syntax that can be interpreted multiple ways. The father “beats time on [the child’s] head / with a palm caked hard by dirt”.[2] Beat, here, can be used to describe some sort of tapping or similar motion to keep time with the music they are dancing to, or to describe the father hitting the child. “At every step you missed / My right ear scraped a buckle” can similarly be interpreted two ways.[3] Either the child is being hit with a belt, or the child is so small that their ear only comes up to the father’s belt. This poem leaves a lot of what is being shown up to the reader to interpret, which is what makes it a good candidate for reader response criticism.

Psychological response theory looks at how the reader’s motives and experiences influence how the reader interacts with the text, which could explain how the readers are coming to different responses. Everyone brings their own experiences and biases with them when they go to read something. In my experience, someone who has a less than good home life is more likely to read this poem through the domestic abuse lens than someone who has a great home life. It could be that the reader is projecting their own experiences onto the poem or that their experiences just set them up to see it a certain way. Either way, something psychological seems to be at play in reader interpretation of this poem.

[1] “Reader-Response Criticsim.” Critical Theory Today: a User-Friendly Guide, by Lois Tyson, Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2015, pp. 161–197.

[2] [3] Roethke, Theodore. “My Papa’s Waltz by Theodore Roethke.” Poetry Foundation, Poetry Foundation, http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43330/my-papas-waltz.

In his essay, T. S. Eliot takes a very New Critical stance by insisting that one must focus on the technical prowess of the text alone to find value in a work of literature. He made the case that the value of poetry can only be found in the text and not anything around it. This excludes a lot of context, history, and biographical information that could help lead a reader to a better understanding of the text and to gain a better appreciation for the work. New Criticism limits the ways one can look at a text and excludes many different lenses that can help contribute to an analysis of why a text is written the way it is. I don’t agree with Eliot’s insistence that background and history don’t matter. I think that they provide valuable insight or context to an author’s decisions in their writing. Authors are a product of their time, just like anyone else. Many things that they include in their writing are influenced by the time period they live in, the societal expectations, and the events happening around them. It is impossible to separate a work from its time because you loose so much valuable context.

The Odyssey is one such text that does benefit from having contextual information. Throughout the epic poem, many lines, phrases, or images are repeated. From a purely textual basis, this would make these repetitions seem unnecessary, drawing attention to things that don’t have much of an impact on the story at large. Most of these repetitions refer to the changing of time or already established details about the characters. Homer’s famous epithets do the famous faux pas of telling instead of showing. Yet the Odyssey is still treated as a prevailing classic across centuries despite these textual flaws. The important context here is that the Odyssey used to be memorized and performed aloud more than the actual text was sat down with and read or studied. The repeating lines, phrases, and images made the poem easier to memorize and to be listened to. The Odyssey was not even conceived by Homer himself. The Odyssey began as an oral tradition that Homer recorded, and that record was used as the basis for the oral retellings from there on out. The Odyssey also takes place just after the Trojan War, which holds valuable context for why Odysseus is in the predicament he is in. Without studying the background of the Trojan War or the events of the Iliad, which is almost like a prequel for the Odyssey, a lot of the background for the text would be lost and the events of the narrative, both past and present, would be confusing. In the case of the Odyssey, it is beneficial to study the history and background of the text as well as analyzing it. Many of the important details of this text would be lost without studying them.
-Lauren Souder