Dull Readers?

Dulness calls out of Chaos the forms of bad literature, which possess “ductile dullness,” “motley images,” metaphors that are “mazy,” and incongruous pairings of classical genre elements. These “momentary monsters” are misshapen, or they cannot hold their shape, or their mosaic nature lacks the monolithic wholeness of a unified form. The fact that they are “dull,” or not “enlightened,” suggests that the content of the text is also flawed. Imperfect shape means imperfect content. Such a notion minimizes the role of the reader in constructing the narrative—a reader, through ingenious misreading, cannot derive or construct a perfect narrative from an imperfectly formed text. The dullness, then, appears on both sides of the text—in the dull, or unenlightened author who constructs the text, and in the dull, unenlightening narrative the reader finds when she reads the text. In the 1644 essay Areopagitica, Milton argues against the suppression of texts before printing, arguing that even if a book contains subversive or just artistically “bad” material, a “wise man like a good refiner can gather gold out of the drossiest volume, and that a fool will be a fool with the best book, yea or without book.” A good reader can find good content in a bad form. That’s eighty years before Pope’s Dunciad—almost a hundred years after, the active role of the reader is acknowledged in the censorship laws that put Romantic writers such as Lord Byron in constant danger. The laws stipulated that the level of subversion of a printed text depended upon who read it—according to this reasoning, a well educated aristocratic readership that was savvy enough to “get the joke” could read Jon Juan and Byron would be in the clear. If, however, a simple, uneducated audience got their hands on Byron’s text, they may very well misconstrue events of Don Juan as instructive, and derive “bad morals” from the text. Byron would then be subject to censorship. I am curious as to why there appears to be some acknowledgement of the role of the active reader both before and after Pope, but not within his own poem.