Reading Response – The Scarlatti Tilt
CLB322 Reading Response
The Scarlatti Tilt
The short story The Scarlatti Tilt gives true meaning to the term ‘short story’ as the text is constructed with as few as thirty-four words. My initial response to this text was that I found it odd. I wondered why we were given this text to read when we had previously been looking at short stories with conventional narratives consisting of a complication, climax and ending with a conclusion. Unlike the other texts I had been looking at this text did not have any of those functions and its unconventional form did not meet my expectations. Its open nature made me question the author’s intended reading as it didn’t provide me with answers. I could not identify the dominant reading as easily as I could with the other closed texts. It made me re-read the story to look for clues within the text that could help me piece together and formulate my own meaning.
From my first glance at the size of the text I immediately came to the assumption that this text would be filled with gaps and silences. It is obvious that a text so short is incapable of going into detail. This fact alone is what led me to assume that this story would rely on common sense assumptions by the reader to fill in the gaps and go places where the author has purposely not bothered to go. My first reading of the text solidified this assumption as whilst I was reading I unconsciously filled in the gaps of the text with my own ideals of what has happened.
As I re-read the text a few times I was convinced that my assumptions of the text were the desired or dominant reading which the author obviously intended. I came to the conclusion that what has happened in this text is a husband and wife were living together in their studio apartment in San Jose, the wife could no longer put up with her husband’s awful violin playing so she simply pulled out the revolver and shot him. Although, The Scarlatti Tilt is quite short my reading of the plot, setting and characters was quite detailed. I pictured their studio apartment to be small, cluttered, hot and claustrophobic. I envisioned the characters to be a newly married couple, who are financially struggling because the husband believed that practising his art was more important than working for a regular income. My immediate reaction to this text was a giggle – I read it as a humorous piece, a sort of parody of what newly wedded life is like. I did not at all read the text as a piece of realism rather I read at as a stretch of reality and therefore seeing it as comedic in style. I found it funny because it challenges the dominant ideology of the culture which I am from. In the society I live in violence against women is considered wrong as women are seen to be inferior and weak in comparison to men. Therefore a woman murdering her husband to me seems odd and challenges the dominant ideology of hegemonic masculinity. It was not until I discussed my detailed reading with other students in my class that I realised that my reading was not exactly the same as theirs.
The fact that all texts are polysemes was reinforced in my mind whilst listening to my peers speak about how they read the text. I realised that intertextuality influenced the way in which I filled in the gaps. I subconsciously related my reading of the text to one of my favourite musicals Chicago. Chicago has similarities to The Scarlatti Tilt as both stories have a woman murdering a male companion. Intertextuality also influenced the way some of my peers read the text as they related it to an episode of CSI and therefore read the text as a crime scene investigation. Through class discussion it was agreed that the main way we as readers constructed our readings of The Scarlatti Tilt was by filling in the gaps with already available texts with similar themes or conventions. This text would be useful to teach in the classroom as it can demonstrate the conventions of open texts to students. Role playing with this text would be a productive exercise as students could come up with many differing scenes due to the text’s scope for many different readings.
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