In preparation for putting together my PhD proposal, I’ve had to do a survey of the theories surrounding reading. At the core of it lies the question of who has the right to interpret and determine what any given piece of text means.
You’d think this would be obvious, but of course it’s not and discussing it inevitably ends in unanswerable questions of, for instance, how reliably we perceive and understand reality.
It has helped me to organize this as a narrative, chronologically and, within a Western context, it all starts at the bible – the Old Testament. Which, until fairly recently, we believed that God wrote, and we read, with God having final say on what it all meant. The problem is, the writer is not around to explain it.
So, bring in the commentarists: the writers of the Talmud and the Midrash, to propose understandable interpretations to make the information contained in that book useful and implementable.
Meanwhile, in Ancient Greece, someone (Plato) decided to mess with our heads by proposing that, perhaps our perception of reality was just a pale imitation of it. A projection on a cave wall. And that, outside of the cave, the real world carries on in bigger and more awesome ways that most of us can feasibly handle.
Well, if we can’t be relied upon to interpret our reality correctly, then only god knows how we’re fucking up when it comes to reading (a form of mediated reality).
Enter the Church, who took over the interpretation of the bible, and claimed to be the only reliable arbiters of its meaning, because they could read, they were educated and they had our best interests (and our immortal souls) at heart.
None of this stopped people from getting confused about the meaning of certain things they read. And none of this permanently stopped people from wondering if – possibly – we might be unreliable when it came to perceiving reality.
Along came Descartes. After much thought, he became so utterly doubtful about this that he made his famous statement: I think, therefore I am. It sounds positive, but what the poor man really meant was that this was the only thing he could actually KNOW for sure. He was having a thought, so he must exist. Things that don’t exist can’t have thoughts.
You may feel that having these sorts of doubts is entirely impractical and you’d be right. However someone had to say it: what you see is not always what you get.
Kant critiqued Descartes and took things a little further. He proposed a method of interrogating perception to test the reliability of our perceptions. I have to tell you that, personally, I have my doubts that he really answered his own questions.
The big problem was that both Descartes and Kant were Christians and Deists. Radical thinkers, certainly, but nonetheless, both men of their time. If you are stuck with this fixed piece of fact – that there is a god, and he exists, and he made reality – it gets dangerous to start prodding at the fabric of it because you get very close to heresy.
Moreover, Descartes and Kant were also living through, and sometimes participating in, the birth of modern science. The response to their doubts was – science and experimentation can provide us with reliable answers to push through the veil of our subjective perceptions and give us some answers to what is really real.
However, if we accept that our perceptions of reality are subjective and therefore unreliable, how much more subjective and unreliable are the perceptions of the writer who – after having subjective perceptions of reality – is now trying to communicate those perceptions through the sieve of language – which is limited and subject to misinterpretation.
With the birth of the novel, things only because more dubious. If we couldn’t be relied upon to write about real things objectively, how much less dependable would a work of fiction (a blend of the real and the ficticious) be?
Freudian theorists felt that our subconscious would surely filter into our writing, and our reading, and skew meaning.
Feminists felt that we were so repressed by an overarching masculinist hegemony, that we would never be able to escape its domination as the arbiter of what things we read or wrote meant.
Marxists felt that we were so brainwashed by capitalism, that we would write and read through a set of ingrained lenses that gave authority to the rich, the priviledged and the powerful.
In the field of linguistics, the very tool we use to read and write – language – was deemed to be so imprecise and unreliable that it was impossible that meaning could be reliably transferred from writer to reader. Culture, language, and personal lived experience would cause us to re-write the text as we read it.
But the 1960’s, as the students in Paris were rioting, Roland Barthes said that “… the death of the author was the birth of the reader,” transferring the authority of meaning making from the writer to the reader.
The debate question because this: who has the right to determine what the meaning of the text is: the writer who penned it, the reader who read it, both or neither?
Certainly the rejection of traditional authority structures caused the likes of Barthes want to put the power in the hands of those who had none.
Stanley Fish, among others, suggested that, perhaps it didn’t matter what a writer wrote; that the reader would interpret the text, whatever it was, to mean what they wanted it to mean.
Umberto Eco said that there were ‘Model Readers’ who had similar cultural encyclopedias (education, experience, cultural upbringing) to the writer and that would enable a more efficient reading of the text. He also said that, although readers brought their own meanings to the text, the way a piece of text might be interpreted couldn’t be absolutely unlimited. Ode to A Grecian Urn can be interpreted many different ways by many readers, but if you believe it is an explanation on the Laws of Thermodynamics…well, you’ve just read it wrong.
I’m part elitist bitch and partly devoutly democratic – so I can feel the pull of both sides of this debate. It would be great if every reader interpreted my stories anyway they liked, but I don’t buy Fish’s theory that the meaning of the text is WHOLLY dependent on the reader, because if, as readers, we were only stuck with our own culture and lived experience to make meaning, we’d never get any new ideas from reading anything. And, as a reader, I know with absolute certainty, that in reading I have been introduced to ideas, situations and characters that were utterly alien to me before I read about them.
At the same time, I only have to take a look at the comments on my blog to see that readers do take away vastly different interpretations of a single story. And sometimes it is a long way off from what I intended.
I accept Eco’s definition of the model reader. There are certain people who read my stories and get even my subtlest allusion with such reliability it’s astonishing. And I have to admit, it is also comforting to find a reader who so ‘gets’ me as a writer. But as cozy as the relationship is, there is also, I know, something frighteningly infertile about it. It feels like we have nothing to offer each other, other than agreement. I’ll never lead them anywhere new. I’ll never shock or surprise them.
There are always going to be readers who absolutely ‘get’ my writing, and for them I am a confirmation of how they perceive reality. There are also going to be readers who absolutely don’t ‘get’ my writing. For them, my world is so alien, so lacking in resonance in their own, that we can’t participate in this reading/writing interaction in a way that is pleasant or challenging to either of us.
I am my first reader. That I must produce texts that have meaning and resonance for me. But I also can’t be satisfied with only that. I must produce texts that challenge and disorient my readers, or else I have nothing to offer them.
I have to believe that I’m not producing unintelligible nonsense. My aim is to provide readers with the beginning of a conversation that can go on, internally in the reader, or with me in the comments area of my blog, or on the Mentions feed of Twitter. I have an intention of meaning, and my readers either accept or reject it by degrees.
But it is in the gap between my intentions and the readers interpretation that the garden grows, where the magic happens.
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