რეზო ყარალაშვილი – ლიტერატურის თეორეტიკოსი (რეცეფციული ესთეტიკა)

აბსტრაქტი

სტატიიდან აღებული ავტორის ინგლისურენოვანი რეზიუმე:

Key words: reader-response criticism, author, reader, addressee, language.

The start of poststructuralist literary studies in Georgia is associated with the name of Reso Karalaschwili. In the 1970s he published several articles and in 1977 – the book titled “The book and the reader” in which the fundamentalsof reader-response criticism were represented and which has expanded our knowledge onthe essence of a literary text and the interrelationship between components of triad -author– text – reader. This doctrine significantly raised the status of a reader by having drawn attention not only to thereader’s role in perceiving a textin the process of”bringing to life” the author’s work, but alsoto the reader’smysterious participation in the textcreating process – a reader became a co-author of the text.

Reso Karalaschwili introducedthe names of deep-thinking foreign scholars inGeor- gian literary studies such as Roman Ingarden, Hans Robert Jauss,Wolfgang Iser and others. According to the reader-response criticism, the reader is a co-author of a literary text. Such a view of a literary work does not call for a voluntary, arbitrary interpretation of the text. Reso Karalaschwili used to emphasize: “… it should not be understood that the reader is entitled to put any content into a literary work”, a correct interpretation of a literary work requires from the reader the knowledge, finding, discovery of the artistic code, – explains the author and to illustrate this thought, he uses following comparison: “In this respect, a literary work may be compared with a box.

To put something into the box, you need the key that can open it. An attempt to open the box with any other key may result only in ruining the box (i.e. artistic system)”. The opinions cited above caused indignation of the scholar elite back then, which was accustomed to search for the meaning put into the literary text once and for all by the author, while in fact we will never be able to say for sure whether or not we have detected “the objective meaning”, since our interests, our wishes and even the direction of our at- tention play a role of a assigner of the meaning. On the other hand, a very interesting thing happens: A competition of interpretations begins, in which the interpretation grounded best wins.

We cannot exclude the possibility of emerging several equally convincing interpretations, which, to say the least, enlivens literary life. Reso Karalaschwili writes: “There are fundamental studies on literary communica- tion, the relationship between the author and a reader (...). I tried to make one more step in this direction and to review artistic system in relation with a reader.” Let us decode the aforesaid. Reader-response criticism, on the one hand, implies concretization-reconstruction of a literary text by a reader in a reading process, and the co-authorship of the reader is reflected in the fact, that that the reader fills the “omitted” areas(which are innumerable in aliterarytext) with his/her own imagination.

This segment of reader-response criticismhas been processed scrupulously by Roman Ingarden. On the other hand, the reader’s co-par- ticipation is supposed still in the process of text creation. This is one of the most mysteri- ous aspects of creativity and henceis the least studied segment. Reso Karalaschwili speaks just about this sphere, when he writes: “I tried to make one more step in this direction and to review artistic system in relation with a reader.” The issue raised by Reso Karalaschwili includes three questions: 1. Does a (potential) reader participate in the text creating process? 2. If he/she does, in which form does he/she participate?

3. On which stage/stages of the text creating process doeshe/she participates? Reso Karalaschwili’sanswer to all these questions isas follows: 1. A (potential) reader participates in a text creating process(although some authors categorically deny this and consider the creative act aspontaneous self-revealing process). 2. A (potential) readerparticipates in the text creating processasan “addressee”. This is evident when the author directly addresses a reader or involves a reader as a character. It is clearly noticeable also in the adventure, especially detective literature, where theauthor clearly plays on the reader’s nerves.In some cases an addressee is hidden, is not obvious.

3. A (potential) readerparticipatesat all stages of the text creating process– some- times explicitly, sometimes implicitly. It is essential to single out, to name such textual element, which is indispensable for all texts and at the same time undoubtedly has the dialogue nature, i.e. this element inher- ently excludes that the author acts completely separately froma future recipient of thetext. Reso Karalaschwili finds and names such indispensabletextual element:The language. He says: “The addresseeis now asindispensable moment ofcreating process, as gen- erally ofthe language, and communicationbetween themis the basic function and purpose of the poeticlanguage.Communication, as a concept, suggests in itself the existence of a transmitter and a recipient.

Thus, the existence of an addressee follows from thevery nature of the language.” By this reasoning Reso Karalaschwili made serious contribution in the develop- ment of reader-response criticism. Unlike the Roland Barthes’ viewpoint, that he expressed in the article ”The death ofthe author” (1967), Reso Karalaschwili does not consider the writing (in contrast with reading)to be animpersonal activity, because awork of artis a tool ofself-cognitionand self-reflection as well,hence it objectifies thecreative person’scomplicated inner-spiri- tual processin the form of language, which means that the text addressee can alsobe the authorhimself/herself.(Here the second function of the language emerges:The language as a tool of thinking, in this case – of self-cognition.) Thus, thecommunication function of the language does not allow writing to be a process isolated from a future recipient of the text, and the language as a tool of thinking, in this case – of self-cognition, makes it possible writing not to be an impersonal activity.

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გამოქვეყნებულია ჟურნალში „სჯანი“, ტ. 18 (2017), გვ. 54–63. ნაშრომის გახსნა