This last weekend here in SLC has involved a lot of hiking and outdoors time. I wouldn’t have wanted it any other way. Since the day I arrived here and saw the mountain ranges immediately on the horizon, seemingly within close reach of the city’s freeways, I knew I wanted to get up into those hills and explore these new surroundings. With a rental car in tow (rather comically, a gigantic Jeep Wrangler that feels straight out of Jurassic Park), Kevin and I managed to snake our way up the mountain passes to climb through evergreen groves, slabs of red granite, and fields of wildflowers.

A panoramic view of what is, to me, the most beautiful part of the Willow Heights Trail, part of Big Cottonwood Canyon, in Salt Lake City, UT.

Today, I found myself taking as many pictures as I could in an attempt to grandeur of the mountain valleys surrounding our short hike through the Willow Heights Trail in Big Cottonwood Canyon, an area within the major ski resorts of SLC. Part of this was an impulse to remember the experiences from this trip, but I found myself thinking not just about my own memories, but of what I would share with people after this trip is over. Part of what makes a photograph so powerful to share in particular is that it seems like an easy way to help other people know what the places you’ve been to are like. I know I certainly feel that way when I see other people’s photos; they are an opportunity to attempt to see the world through the photographer’s eyes and to imagine myself in their place at their time.

Photos, of course, always fall short of the lived, embodied experience (though the “realness” of a photograph is a topic media scholars have wrestled with for ages – see Barthes, Sontag, etc.). But it especially struck me today that my impulse to try and help others understand my experience or transport them to the hikes I’ve been to is a part of my desire to control my particular narrative too. All writing – perhaps all art – has that impulse, I think. A creator always attempts to bring an audience along for the journey, to try and guide the audience through the steps, the ideas, the narratives that the creator devises.

In my reading for this final week of the institute, I’ve been learning about the intellectual debate between French poet Stéphan Mallarmé and German composer Richard Wagner. 19th century contemporaries, Mallarmé and Wagner approached understandings of audience reception very differently. Mallarmé believed that the audience played a critical role in the reception of his work; in fact, he invited active audience responses to his work by creating interactive books with a mixture of poems, images, and diagrams that the reader would have to take an active role in interpreting. Wagner, on the other hand, believed that his music should fully “control” the audience. By relying largely on popular Western myths for his stories, Wagner’s operatic books – and his dramatic, often overbearing scores – were meant to completely enrapture the audience and absorb them in the operatic experience.

To Mallarmé, Wagner was imposing what he called an “intellectual despotism” on his audience, imposing his perspectives on a particular time, place, and story, that do not allow audiences to think independently about what they are seeing. Mallarmé’s critique suggests that audiences are too passive in their engagements, and indeed, he even makes the claim that it is absurd for Wagner to expect his audience to imagine that they are “there” in the place where Wagner’s stories and operas take place.

I have to admit, I found Mallarmé’s perspective rather annoying. Why is it such a big deal for a creator to want to control the narrative that they create? Why is it necessarily a problem for a creator of any kind to want agency in their act of creation? Beyond that, why is it a problem for audiences to want to be “there” with the work of art itself, to appreciate it as part of an act of absorption? Indeed, Wagner’s compulsion towards absorption, towards bringing the audience forward in his work reminds me of how most audience’s today expect their art to function. Movie theaters, virtual reality experiences, and even bestselling novels, are meant to bring the audience into an entirely different world and keep them there until the experience is complete.

But reading Mallarmé’s perspective made me think about perhaps the unrealistic expectation of complete audience absorption into a narrative itself. Mallarmé has a point insofar as audiences can never truly be “there” in the same way that a creator might want them to be, and a creator likely needs to respect the fact that their agency in the reception of their work is limited, insofar as they cannot directly guide a person through the experience. Indeed, when I post pictures of my travel online or even when I write and publish one of these blog posts, I don’t really know how you are responding to it exactly, nor do I know exactly what you’re going to do with this work (you’ll probably just read it through quickly and think, “That’s nice” or “I didn’t quite get that” or “Ugh, Jenae is rambling on again,” etc.). But I’m also crafting these posts in linear paragraphs or I’m posting my photographs in a particular way in the expectation that you will feel at least somewhat absorbed in this reading experience, that you will mostly enjoy this in a rather passive sense, as you take in what I’ve written and move on with your day.

I’m also sympathetic to Mallarmé insofar as I can see that it is a rather impossible goal to expect that all readers will all feel absorbed in the same ways by the same narratives. Unfortunately, I think a Wagnerian perspective assumes that all people will recognize certain kinds of stories, myths, or narratives and accept or appreciate them without question. Yet I’m coming to recognize that in an increasingly diverse and globalized world, we have to be thinking so much of all of the diverse audiences that will come into the things creators share and not necessarily have a shared understanding with the creator about what’s being referenced or produced.

To that end, I think that literacy education in the U.S. often suffers because of the assumption that all students will find some common ground or meaning in a set of particular texts. Does this mean that we shouldn’t have students read certain texts (i.e. certain novels, essays, poems, etc.) at particular ages? No, but I think that we should help students recognize sooner the contexts that might shape their appreciation for or investment in certain kinds of experiences. As educators, we perhaps give over too much control to the authors to guide students through reading experiences. The more that we can ground certain texts in the moment of their composition, in the audiences for whom the texts were intended, the better off I think we’ll be. Similarly, helping students understand the roles as audience members, as active participants in the reading experience (per Mallarmé’s conception) may also help more students feel invested in whatever content they’re finding and in whatever medium (print or digital) that they’re encountering.

Well, those are a few more big thoughts for a final weekend of big, mountain adventures! I recognize that if you’ve reached the end of the post, you’ve managed to follow along with some of these thoughts, but as a creator here, I will not be offended if you only caught some bits or found meaning in some portions. If you have found something of meaning from this text, the image that precedes it, or the story that opens here, then kudos to you, you’ve engaged as an active reader!