Zen: Denying the Theoretical in Favor of the Experiential

Thoughts on Louise M. Rosenblatt’s, "The Reader, the Text, the Poem"

Rosenblatt avers that, “the reader’s attention to the text activates certain elements in his past experience…. [and] meaning will emerge from a network of relationships among the things symbolized as he senses them” (11). As I assayed absorbing Rosenblatt’s theory I was reminded of the Zen concept which “de-emphasizes theoretical knowledge in favor of direct, experiential realization.” It appeared as though everything to which Rosenblatt referred, as in “the text is the stimulus…so that elements of past experience…are activated” (11), illuminated the Zen mechanism that functions in all of us. The argument is further reinforced by Rosenblatt’s elaboration that, “the essence – of language is the fact that it must be internalized by each individual human being” (20). These concepts extend to the listener where the speaker’s “nonverbal cues…through emphasis, pitch, inflection, rhythm, and…facial expression and gesture” are those which help to “decode” the text. All of these are virtually instinctual human reactions based on a lifetime of experience. Our experience defines us and what we perceive and understand. Where Rosenblatt sparks a new idea is that in which the reader “finds it necessary to construct the speaker (emphasis added)…as part of what he decodes from the text” (20). But, even so, the idea of Zen as a modus operandi, if not the method, works for even the reader because his understanding of the author, the “transaction between the reader and the author’s text,” is predicated on the reader’s ability to concretize his idea of the speaker. This concretization is again a transactional one based on the reader’s “past experience” and his “present state and interests” (20).