The "Bliss" of reading

Author

David J. Tulis

Date of Award

3-1986

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts

Major

English

Major Professor

William Shurr

Abstract

Bertha, heroine of Katherine Mansfield's story, "Bliss," today feels extravagant felicity—hilarious and bright bliss. A reader who receives the work of art (rather than studying it, exploiting it for the exercise of his own genius) feels it too. How intoxicating! Bliss manipulates the reading, in fact. Serious-minded critics who labor over this work, however, who explain Bertha's "psychology," too often end up scorning the bliss; they give the impression of having never felt it. They work underneath the surface impression, or sensation, of the story, and often against it. For them, intricate fabri cations and analyses fill what is, to a reader of "Bliss" engrossed in his "negative capability," only a void, one occupied by the indirect light of suggestion and unexamined assumption. The critics analyze Bertha as if she were a real person who can be known and discussed apart from the refractory narratoral glass of the story through which each reader conceives her. The result: criticism which often fails entirely to bring to the "Bliss" read er's mind the Bertha that he or she conceived in an open reading of the tale itself. To read criticism that does not deal in some way with reading can distort art, flatten the "Bliss" reader's memory of his reception. Criticism absorbs Bertha into its own—new—fiction, reincarnating her as part of the unavoidable hazard of critical composition.

This thesis is an experiment. It mates the critic's writing to the artist's in a kind of fluid plagiarism, rendering the reader-critic's immediate and superficial sensation of his own reading experience as it develops from line to line. The thesis's decentralized form impinges on the critic's content and conclusions. The construction of "Bliss" in the reader's receptive mind can be seen by the reader to neatly evade the constricting clasp of "objective" criticism and leave the work of art (as it exists for that reader) safely inside the realm of the un-nameable. As Barthes says, art unexpresses the expressible. Criticism, then, as shown here, expresses the inexpressible, and so suffers from the error which is its justification for its pursuit of itself.

Recommended Citation

Tulis, David J., "The "Bliss" of reading. " Master's Thesis, University of Tennessee, 1986.
https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_gradthes/13822