What to Reader Response Theory Uncovered in The Professor and the Madman
While the events and details in, The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary, may seem unfocused and pointless, the unorganized structure of the plot is connected and important to the understanding of the story. I found this fact to be proven when using the reader response theory throughout the book.
(For more information on the Reader Response Theory, visit https://www.poetryfoundation.org/learn/glossary-terms/reader-response-theory)
The reader response theory uncovered the unorganized development of the story when it was applied to the first few chapters. This was clear when I struggled to answer reader response questions, such as “What sort of things could happen in the short and long term?”. This particular question was hard for me to answer because the first few chapters didn’t give enough information to predict where the story was heading. The only prediction I could make was that James Murray and Willam Minor would eventually meet in person, since the novel kept mentioning their courses would collide. As the chapters continued, I was able to understand more of the story, but the information was still a bit indistinct and frustrating to follow.
That being said, the trivial details allowed certain aspects of the theory to be highlighted in the text. It allowed me to have no trouble answering, “What connections are you making between events in your own experience and events in the novel?” I made a connection to William Minor when he was organizing the words he found in books that he thought were worth defining. He had a unique method of doing so; every time he found a word the piqued his interest, he wrote it down along with its book title and page number, leaving vertical space between words because he anticipation that he would find another word that came alphabetically before or after the one he just wrote down. This was a very helpful method that only he, “given his particular position, his leisure, his library…” (138), could realistically prosecute. Instead of sending a list to the Scriptorium once a book was complete, Minor kept going through books upon books until he had skimmed through several and had a very heavy list of words.
At first, I didn’t understand why the author bothered to include such a lengthy description of a fairly simple task. However, I then realized that I follow a similar method as Minor while doing my own research. Instead of writing an idea or large piece of information from a source, I write a key word or concept along with the page or paragraph number, so I can go back to it later if I deem it may be useful. This saves precious time when I don’t have to write down an entire quotation or explanation that I might not even end up using. After making this connection, I could understand why Minor’s method made him so special.
By using Minor’s method, he would have perfectly organized - in alphabetical order - a list of interesting and common words, each written with the page location of several different phrases containing the word within several different books. Rather than having the repetition of one word in different locations on the list of words - each repetition with a different phrase. Once satisfied with his sturdy collection, he contacted the Scriptorium and asked what words they requested more quotations for. Thanks to his method, Minor could search his lists, be directed by a page number he wrote with the word he desired, and look firsthand at the sentence that contained the word he wish for.
By being able to relate this trivial detail to my own life, I understood more why this process made Willam Minor so outstanding to James Murray and others working on the OED. As well as how extremely helpful Minor was to creating the vastness of the OED. Between the author including this key feature and the reader response theory highlighting it, I was able to increase my depth in understanding of the story. Despite the confusion that develops from a scattered plot, the scattered features ended up contributing to my entire understanding of the novel.
Winchester, Simon. The Professor and the Madman: a Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary. Harper Perennial, 1999.
