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.
taking a connection between the writer and the reader is the critical thing I think. Communicating what you want to communicate is the purpose of the writing. Making the reader understand a point of view, or an emotion, or a thought in a story is the reason we write. I like what you say about providing readers with the beginning of a converation that can go on.
There are also the Eastern Europeans who became vet adept at reading and writing between the lines. Mikhail Bulgakov is an example of an author who does this with panache. A theorist on this mold is Bakhtin who wrote his threes in the 1930s under the gaze of Stalin’s thought police. Where indeed is the meaning of a text? I think each text does carry the limits of it’s interpretations but the nuances can shift and change according to context, social milieux and time.
As a writer, I love when someone “gets me” but I certainly agree with your point that we aren’t offering them anything new. Sometimes I am delighted by a reader’s interpretation that fits, but was not close to what I meant. Sometimes my ego gets in the way and I think they are idiots… that my meaning was so obvious, how could they get it so wrong?
As a reader, I’m always thrilled when the author replies to my comment saying I understood exactly what they meant or even when they say that my favorite phrase was also theirs.
I’m going to have to reread this several times I’m sure, and I still won’t see everything you meant. Fascinating article.
“I still won’t see everything you meant” …hahah. and you’ll see several things I didn’t mean, too, I’m sure. *massive grin*
And hugs for being so honest. Actually, what I love is when someone reads a really different but totally clever thing into what I’ve written. It always makes me think: Hey, I’m smarter than I thought! Well, at least until I calm down and realize…. wow, that was lucky!
Your last sentence is, as far as I’m concerned, the key point.
Poststructuralist objections aside, the fact is that language does its job pretty well, on the whole. People manage to communicate in a more or less satisfactory way most of the time, it seems to me. I saw a quote somewhere, very recently, from the novelist David Mitchell. He was discussing the things readers say about his books and how surprised he was at some their interpretations. But he was happy about this, and acknowledged that the author may well be expressing things he/she is unaware of but manage to communicate themselves to readers. I didn’t read the whole piece, so I don’t know if he was positing the existence of an unconscious narrative or suggesting that any text is inherently ambiguous. Either way, it’s inevitable that there is a free space between the mind of the author and that of the reader, and I agree that this is where literature, or any artform, creates its effects.
Even if they do ‘get what you have written’ I’m sure at times even those ones will be shocked at the clarity of thought that hits at the point of reading certain lines. Those precious moments that do resonate bring writers and readers together and the magic does indeed happen in those precise moments. Reading can be an emotive point of discovery not just for the reader but a deeper understanding of the writer also. Perhaps that is what creates that addictive need to read more and more of one’s favourite writers because something does indeed fuel the muse inside. Or perhaps I’m just rambling. 😉
No, you make a good point. And isn’t it pleasing that at some deep level, we yearn for accord. But I think that writing, like a lot of things, can be more creative in the conflicts it creates than the unity it can engender. So…yes, revel in the accord, but don’t disdain the distances – they’re fertile places.
I also think Eco was on to something, but I also have come to see the whole field of literary studies as suffering from a kind of self-parody (listen to a post-structuralist proclaim the death of the author one minute, then vociferously argue for a highly nit-picky [insert-name-of-favorite-minority-here] studies reading the next and you can’t do much but laugh).
Perhaps the root is that the field of literary hermeneutics suffers from a persistent reductio ad absurdem, because it ignores one of the fundamental functions of literature: communication.
In communication, inherent meaning is (as the semioticians have spotted) difficult to establish: if you don’t speak English in a particular era, the words I’m using now won’t mean much to you (and if they do, they’ll likely mean something different than what they mean to me). So, to ask what something means is the semantic equivalent of asking “what is being communicated?”
Of the range of potential communication, you have the true (where the sender and the receiver arrive at similar understandings), the false (where the sender and receiver arrive at fundamentally different, yet plausible, understandings), and, coming in orthogonally, the subtextual (where non-explicit context is telegraphed through context-dependent nuance rather than through the surface reading of the words). On this scale, it is the fidelity of the communication that determines the success of the work, and so long as language IS a form of communication, then a work’s meaning must be understood primarily in terms of the fidelity of transmission of intended ideas/thoughts/feelings/experiences/etc.
There is, however, another, more abstract level on which meaning could be carried — that which operates on meta-levels: tapping into human universals through aesthetics, expressing deep aspirations, or using symbols where the referent drifts across cultures while the icon remains relatively static. In such situations, the loss of context of the original work means a loss of most of the communication value, but doesn’t rob the work of its value to the reader. In this case, the reader *invents* a meaning for the work (often a highly personal one) and it becomes part of his internal symbolic vocabulary. However, this invention and incorporation does not change the meaning of the work (such a thing is lexically incoherent), it rather changes the significance of the work (as it is the understood symbolic content which takes on a life of its own) and this change of significance confers on the reader the experience of “meaning” (i.e. purpose, connection, and understanding of self/society/etc.) without conferring on the reader the actual meaning (i.e. the communicated content as intended by the author) of the text.
Which is a long way of saying “Yeah, Eco rules, and the author will always live” while adding a few caveats of my own.
Thanks for the essay!
-Dan
You make so many good points. So many!
“literary hermeneutics suffers from a persistent reductio ad absurdem” Well, they have to keep their positions somehow. 😛
Sorry for the length of the comment — this is the kind of stuff that keeps me awake at night 😉
How can you apologize? It’s a brilliant addition to the discussion. Intelligent, challenging, and I think pragmatic. (If you’re going to be a writer, you are going to have to believe you have some value, otherwise we could just program computers to spew out streams of words and readers could interpret them as they liked, with as much depth as they liked, taking endless fascination in coincidences that led to meaning. Sooner or later someone would proclaim a ghost in the machine and proclaim it a new God.)
I’m reminded of people putting on Macbeth in modern dress and giving it entirely new meanings. But then playwright > actor > audience gives even more room for that sort of reinterpretation.
Hi rg,
I love your survey of the timeline of the idea. I’m read up on Eco after you mentioned him in a previous post and I find his idea of the model reader comforting. You and I seem to have many similar cultural reference points to draw on, so I can be fairly sure whether your writing is alluding to Keats or to Elliot but I would be blind to reference to most French literature.
I think that the “Model reader” is a concept to for writers. It makes it possible to believe that we might be understood.
I think it is a less good concept for explaining readers. Think of reading as a process whereby you continuously rewrite yourself through the filter of the emotional, cultural and factual impact of the discourse you have with the author.
Multiply that by the fact that the reader will be re-writing themselves not from a single book but from all the things they read (and the media that they use). The reader cannot control their own remodelling unless they restrict their literary diet to the familiar and the bland. Those who choose more stimulating fare will be remodelling themselves as they go. They will be affected not just by which book they read but what sequence they read the books in.
One way of looking at this is that the reader’s experience is fractal and dynamic while the writer’s experience is mostly linear and static (within the context of a single text).
I think David Lodge got close to this point of view in his novel “Small World” which is a romance in the classical sense and which takes a satirical view of academia. One of Lodge’s characters wants to spice up his acadewnmic book,so, instead of writing about the impact of Shakespeare on T S Elliott, he writes about the impact of T.S. Elliott on Shakespeare.
Given the arguementation that you’ve set out, I will put asides Lodge’s intent to be satirical (that, I now see, is his problem not mine) and look at the literal truth of the hypothesis. I believe that reading T.S. Elliot could easily influence the meaning that I give to the works of Shakespeare. In fact, how could it be otherwise if I read Elliot first?
One last thing, and I know just how arrogant this will sound, but I believe Descartes and Kant largely missed the point. Modern pychology posits the idea that the self is an artificial construct, designed largely as a defence against the world. In this context, thinking is there precisely to ensure that we are not subjected to too much direct contact with reality. Thinking forms the walls of our cave.
I believe it would be more accurate to say that I am because I feel and I think because feeling alone is too intense and needs its impact to be diluted.
I believe that writers have the opportunity to smash through all those intellectual defences and cause the reader to have an emotional response that they cannot decline or moderate: lust, anger, joy, sadness, hope, shame, fear.
Writers who can reach our emotions in this way are touching something relatively timeless and unchanging.
Some would say it is the animal part of us. They are not my model reader. My model reader knows that our humanity lies in the emotions we struggle most to control.
Perhaps the relationship between writer and reader changes when it is not the writers intent to be understood but to provoke an emotion in the reader, to guide, for a while the fractal pattern of their experience and connect them with the only things that we all have in common.
“I believe it would be more accurate to say that I am because I feel and I think because feeling alone is too intense and needs its impact to be diluted.”
Ah, you’ve encapsulated probably my favourite poem of all time, by Robert Graves: The Cool Web.
What a discussion. I’d love to be in a room with all of you to unfold this al faster and richer. Two things most on my mind:
Mike’s Fractal writer vs linear reader. I don’t know if I agree with that perception. I think the reader sees the fractal path as well – in the part of the story extending beyond the most recently read word. Any reader who pauses to wonder what will come next before starting the next paragraph or chapter, or who puts the story down to sleep, is spinning out the sphere of possibilities in the story. The difference here is that the reader has a path (not _the_ path) shown to them; thw one the writer created. The reader may well not follow that path strictly, however. spinning their own meaning which may well be parallel, but _could_ also diverge significantly.
RG’s point about programmed writing. I’d love to see the following experiment – a presentation of fictional writings to a variety of readers where the authors are presented differently. SOmething with a classic feel, something with a modern feel, and something _actually_ computer generated – programs for that do in fact exist. Present those things to readers, but misrepresent the authors. Would a reader who read, say, Elliot (never having read him before) but _told_ it was written by a computer program come up with the same interpretation as a similar person reading Elliot and knowing who he was? What about a computer program represented as a modernist author of repute? Such an experiment can, I think, be only a thought experiment unless you can get a large population of culturally/contextually similar readers… However I would posit (long-windedly) that a readers perception of the author also affects their interpretation of the text. I’ve seen, for example, many discussions of the reception of writers of different gender in popular fiction, and the success of and kudos for male vs. female authors in different genres.
Hehe, I just got off Skype where we had a great discussion about this! Because the Alexa issue brings this up. It’s not that her TEXT was false, it’s that the AUTHOR of the text was false. What we decided was that what has evolved i this medium is that the responsibility is held neither by the reader nor the writer but the relationship between them, and in essence that is what broke when Alexa because revealed as not Alexa. This put the totality of her text in doubt.
What I think is fascinating here is the notion of the author as a reliable narrator. In Australia, a few years back we had a huge fuss about Helen Demidenko who purported to be the child of an illiterate Ukrainian father. She said she was writing stories based on stories her father had told her. She wrote an award winning book called the “Hand that Signed the Paper”. It turned out she was actually the daughter of English migrants, Helen Darville. This caused a huge furor and the integrity and quality of her novel was put into question. Robert Mann raises some really good points about the importance of the relationship between tale and the teller: http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/demidenko/manne.1.html.
I agree with Monocle that a reader’s perception of the author still does affect they way they will read a book. The outcry about Helen Darville writing about the Holocaust masquerading as a daughter of a Ukrainian was enormous. The teller had become entwined and identified with the tale. The book had won a Miles Franklin Award based on the identity of the author rather than the quality of the novel’s subject matter. And this happened in the age of postmodernity.
You make an extremely good point and cite a great example. What strikes me powerfully about it is that there seems to be a presumptive doubt that we are unable, as human beings, to step into the shoes of others. That our skills as empaths, as imaginators, as having solidarity cannot get us to the place where we can get enough of a sense of other people’s experiences to write about them. I don’t believe that. I think we can. – you can imagine, I hate Gadamer
RG,
Have you considered the role of political power in being the arbiter of meaning? Gobbels didn’t just try to dictate the message, he also dictated the interpretation of the message. Even today, certain interpretations of plainly articulated messages are considered taboo through enforcement of political correctness. There is power in the control of the message and the contol of interpretation. It stands to reason there would be linkage.
Without a doubt. I really wasn’t very exhaustive in my listing, but the structuralist and post structuralist movement was born in the shadow of WWII and the effect that fascist propaganda had on received meaning.
Wonderful post, and wonderful responses! These days I’m working with the notion that “meaning” arises from the cloud of relationships that form around a text. New media are helping us understand this. Elements of that cloud, those relationships, do include the author (let’s call him/her the writer instead), the reader of course, the text itself (and we may have to think bigger about what that entails), history/culture/society/values that may or may not be shared, and so on. The writer, or the writer’s persona, stands not as an authority, but as information that a reader may or may not bring into play, and may have “authority” not by virtue of having made the text, but to the extent that others in relationship to the writer invest him or her with authority. (The case of Alexa is a good example here. We all present ourselves to the world via personas–it’s the only way. The issue is not whether they’re “true,” but whether they are an attempt to relate genuinely. This for me was the problem with Alexa; The persona was not genuine, not an effort to reveal oneself; it was a ploy to deceive and take advantage. It was not information, but misinformation.) Eco’s model reader makes sense to me in this context, as someone who comes to the relationship equipped with relevant information (for lack of a better term at this moment).
Someone with patience and time–oh, to be that someone!–could tease this out further. I’m sure I’ll keep playing with it. Thanks, Rgrl, for another provocative post!