Writers and Readers as Collaborators

Long before the controversial heyday of reader response criticism in the eighties,  I stumbled upon a variation of this idea in 1963.  I turned in a paper on George Eliot's Adam Bede to Dr. Mary Burton, our primary 19th century scholar at the University of Louisville, and received a B+. Her complaint about my paper was that I was too kind in my evaluation of Arthur Dunnithorne, the seducer of Hetty Sorrel.  Now I have never been an admirer or defender of seducers, but I felt that Dunnithorne showed ample penitence for his sin by trying to help Hetty. I was a bit confused by my professor's comment.. Of course, those were the high water mark days of the New Criticism and the idea that a complex work of literature could not be reduced to a moral or simple statement,. yet so often works of literature were analysed as though they were mathematical problems to be solved so that everyone got the same view of a character or action.  I must say that  Dr. Burton did not teach me the novel; I choose it for my term paper. But we disagreed about how one of the major characters ought to be judged. She felt him irreparable; I thought he had redeeming characteristics. (I must also mention that I haven't reread the novel; perhaps if I did so, I would agree with Dr. Burton.)  Hence, we were both allowing our subjective views  to color our understanding of a major character. It seemed to me then that neither one of us could be "proved" wrong. Our sensibilities reacted with and modified in different ways Eliot's portrayal of a character. Hence, each of us in a way was a co-creator with George Eliot. I believed thereafter in this view that situations and characters in novels could be ambiguous, and that readers could been given some leeway in their interpretations. Of course, this view cannot be applied to all characters and all novels.  Some characters are nearly 100% evil, like the Harpe brothers in my Wilderness of Tigers,  Francis Edward Sweeney, the mad butcher in my historicalEliot Ness novel Trickster, and the psychopathic country prosecutor in The Fall of the House of Spade, just to point out that I have created characters who are overwhelmingly evil and shouldn't be applauded by a sane person.. Still, most of my characters are mixtures of good and evil who can be understood in different ways by different readers. The course of action Earl Hollo, my detective, takes in No Marriages in Heaven could create different reactions in different readers. I might point out that I do not believe that all  literary interpretations are equally valid, but this is a very complex matter that perhaps I'll touch on some other day.