Text, Reader, Reading Richard Bear, M.S., M.A. University of Oregon Library

In a sense, what we're doing when reading is downloading a program. Because of our capacity for running the subroutines as we go, we feel we're comprehending the text, but actually we're simply compiling and running the subset of the program consisting of sentences read up to the present moment along with associations and references ("links" if you will) unique to each of us (but in some, perhaps many cases, common to a reading community). Once we have read, say, Paradise Lost and set down the book, we can now run the entire program (which requires those "natural tears" for its full impact) almost as a kind of extratemporal (as well as hypertextual and experiential) gestalt. The poem is never actually on the page, except as code, perhaps analogous to machine language; it is something, different upon each downloading, that moves from author to reader, and lives fully only in the life, individually and collectively, of its readers -- of whom the author is but one.

1. Text: Creating the Program

Writing is storage. We write in hopes of giving continuity to our transitory thoughts over time, but in a sense it is a vain hope. A thought is not a particular thing in the world, but partakes of the nature of a generalization, something which cannot exist as a stone does, but exists at best as a potential whereby events may be brought about that resemble other events because a system (or mind) requires for its continuation that there should be such similarities. Philip Sidney, writing in the 1500s, noted that this gulf between particularity and the generality of thought and knowledge holds true across all disciplines:

There is no Art delivered unto mankind that hath not the workes of nature for his principall object, without which they could not consist, and on which they so depend, as they become Actors & Plaiers, as it were of what nature will have set forth. So doth the Astronomer looke upon the starres, and by that he seeth set downe what order nature hath taken therein (157).

That is, the astronomer sets down an observation, in hopes of finding the order in heavenly things, but is ultimately deceived if he takes the observation as having any direct relation to the order, if any, that is actually present¹ in the heavens:

The Astronomer with his cousin the Geometrician, can hardly escape, when they take upon them to measure the height of the starres. How often thinke you do the Phisitians lie, when they averre things good for sicknesses, which afterwards send Charon a great number of soules drowned in a potion, before they come to his Ferrie? And no lesse of the rest, which take upon them to affirme (168).

So that those who work in knowledge do not work in the world, whatever that may be, but in building a model which it is hoped is like the world, from which we, as readers, may take away what we will. Sidney is arguing in favor of fiction, by the way, and suggests that the poet's model, in not asserting itself to be about particulars in the world, may have distinct advantages. The fiction writer

worketh, not onely to make a Cyrus, which had bene but a particular excellency as nature might have done, but to bestow a Cyrus upon the world to make many Cyrusses, if they will learne aright why and how that maker made him (157).

This is programming. The Cyrus that is to be bestowed is an encoded Cyrus, awaiting downloading by the reader.

2. Reader: Operating System

We hope to convey something, such as Cyrus, or rather an idea of Cyrus, from one place and time to another, from person to person. Notice the responsibility that is placed on the reader: "if they will learn aright." For Sidney, in his context, there was a universal standard of conduct and knowledge, rooted in the pervasive presence of the state religion and in an educational system that had little to go on beyond the Judeo-Christian scriptures and the Greek and Roman classics (still true for many of us today), so that the "fit reader" would be apt to be one whose goals in reading did not clash with what Queen Elizabeth I, and the power apparatus she represented, would wish them to be. Today's fit reader of Sidney is perhaps the historian of Renaissance thought or literature, who will put the text to different uses than he or his contemporaries could have envisioned. But the take-home message for us today in his insight is that there is in a sense never a particular in writing, only the general; the replicability of the text is its defense against the ravages of time for that very reason. It is, in a sense, not there, not in a book, which is paper that degrades, nor on a disk, where the iron oxide may degrade, but in code, which we decode word by word, sentence by sentence, from whatever medium has been used as its substrate.

And more by sentence than by word. All this might be easier to grasp if we understand that there is a reason why most words in dictionaries have more than one definition². We cannot know, when we walk into a classroom and see the English word "fault" on a blackboard, whether the preceding class was on geology or ethics. But if the word has been used in an entire sentence, then perhaps we may guess (unless we read only Chinese).

Stanley Fish remarks in Is There a Text in This Class? that a work barely exists, or, to put it more strongly, never exists until there is a reader (3), and adds that the reader is a socially contexted phenomenon:

Categories like "the natural" and "the everyday" are not essential but conventional. They refer not to properties of the world but to properties of the world as it is given to us by our interpretive assumptions (271).

A text must have a context to be understood.³ The reader must have some grasp of the signs with which the text has been composed, and educated in the culture in which the text has been produced, and, further, training in the discipline(s) within which the text seeks to operate, in order to derive from the text something like that which the author has envisioned should be derived from it. "STOP," in white letters on a red metal signboard, placed near an intersection, has in some parts of the world a context in which the operation of motor vehicles and the rule of law are brought together; the  traffic engineer hopes for a normative outcome in a number of instances.

When we write for an "intended audience," we are hoping that a majority of our readers will be equipped to download, compile, and run our program in a satisfactory manner. Thus it may be appropriate to consider the reader as analogous to an operating system.

3. Reading: Download, Compile, Run

It appears to me that a (codex) book, as a phenomenal object occupying a place on the space-time continuum prior to its being seen by a reader, is no more than compressed vegetable fiber and a quantity of tacky black dye derived from vegetable matter either directly, or remotely (from coal tar). But once is presented to those with the education appropriate to a particular interpretation of the object, it becomes something more: a storage device, containing, in the placement of shaped dried droplets of dye, a coded program to be run. We open the book, we look at the page, our eyes travel, in cascading saccades, left to right or right to left, or perhaps top down, depending on the language from which the program is derived. Sentences are downloaded, absorbed in a temporal sequence into memory, in such a way that the thoughts, images, or clusters of thoughts and images which the program calls forth (uniquely in each reader) are compiled in a way analogous to, but not necessarily identical with, phenomenal experience of the sensory-derived "real world."⁴

The experience of "reading the book" creates the text almost as a standing wave of thought, to which we add bits of the whole as each sentence is acquired. What Hans Robert Jauss, Hans-Georg Gadamer, or Stanley Fish might refer to as "context" or "horizon"⁵ comes into play here -- but not as the active determinant of the passive reader's unique experience of the text. Rather the reader actively assimilates the program coded within the book into the ongoing experience of her or his own life, weaving meaning into the code and deriving meaning from the results, against a background of experience from which material is selected for the weaving. No two readings are identical, as no two readers, including the same reader twice, stand in the same place or breathe the same air. The program runs, and because the reader is a very fast neural-net processor, the program runs, practically anew with each sentence, deferring the final run to the reading of the final sentence.

All texts have been hypertexts since the day that two texts were available in the same code and the same reader read both. Works refer to one another by the mere fact of their existence in a common code; they refer to one another in citation and reference; they refer also to the external "world" and to other places within themselves, just as HTML documents do. Reference is the meat of every sentence in every text, for a work that refers to nothing is itself necessarily blank. So the reader reaches out, in reading, to touch in neural model⁶ all that has gone before, concurrently is, and might be, in an act of creating, within, something new, a realignment of posited conjectures and affirmations that would have been difficult or impossible to achieve had no one attempted the coding of the program.

I think that as we examine the act of reading, especially in a non-hierarchically networked world, reader-response theory will mature from that which it now is, too easily dismissed by its detractors as leaving no place for the author, into a model in which the reader creates the text but acknowledges a dynamic partnership with the author, whose programming of the text is real work, without which the text in the reader's mind could never have come to be.

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Notes:

1. That Sidney's insight has implications beyond text as here discussed is corroborated by remarks since made by others whose field of consideration is the sciences and not literature.

. . . metaphor has the same general properties as reality; reality is not thought or understood otherwise than by metaphor (Bachelard, 64).

Statements can be logically justified only by statements (Popper, 43).

What makes insensible things intelligibly describable is analogy, notably the special form of analogy known as extrapolation (Quine, Word and Object, 14).

. . . utterances about physical objects are not verifiable or refutable by direct comparison with experience. They purport to describe, not experience, but the external world. They can be compared with the world only through the medium of our experience of that world, but the connection between our experience and the world already  involves a step of hypothesis or inference which precludes any direct and conclusive confrontation of the utterance with its subject matter. There is many a slip betwixt objective cup and subjective lip. (Quine, Methods of Logic, xii).

2. I. A. Richards, writing in 1936, commented on this:

A chief cause of misunderstanding . . . is the Proper Meaning Superstition. That is, the common belief . . . that a word has a meaning of its own (ideally, only one) independent of and controlling its use and the purpose for which it should be uttered. This superstition is a recognition of a certain kind of stability in the meanings of certain words. It is only a superstition when it forgets (as it commonly does) that the stability of the meaning of a word comes from the constancy of the context that gives it its meaning (11).

3. Jeremy Campbell has a very handy anecdote for illustrating the necessity of context:

The cable had been sent from Paris . . . PLEASE SEND ME FIFTY DOLLARS AMERICAN EXPRESS NICE LETTER OF EXPLANATION FOLLOWS LOVE LOU. The message presented no problem to Mrs. Tribus, although the word "nice" was a little strange . . . to Tribus himself however, it looked wrong. He knew that there were three American Express offices in Paris and the cable should have specified which one . . . Then he realized that "nice" was not an adjective . . . but the name of a town on the French Riviera. . . because of his prior information, Nice was more probable than nice in the context of the whole message (65).

The context must include geographical knowledge of France greater than that Paris is in France, otherwise some of the information in the cable is simply not there.

4. Or perhaps it is the same after all. Biologists have begun remarking that this analogical nature of sensory interpretation is not limited to reading, but is the universal mode of animals and in a sense even plants in responding to the information obtained from their environments. Rupert Reidl comments:

Life is a hypothetical realist . . . there are many indications that support the reality of the world . . . but none of them is logically convincing. However, the solution that living creatures have found for the reality problem avoids deductive conclusions and depends on probabilities (19).

Roland Barthes compares life itself to language:

Today we recognize in the living organism the same structures as in the speaking subject: life itself is constructed as a language. (100)

But these are not new ideas. I. A. Richards remarked in 1936, almost as an aside, that "The theory of interpretation is obviously a branch of biology . . . "(12).

5. Jauss spoke of the "horizon of expectations" which the culturally contexted reader brings to the work: "The coherence of literature as an event is primarily mediated in the horizon of expectations of the literary experience of contemporary and later readers, critics, and authors" (166).

6. Or if you prefer, "mapping." Mary Catherine Bateson has written effectively on this:

Any kind of representation within a person of something outside depends on there being sufficient diversity within him to reflect the relationships in what he perceives.... One reason why poetry is important for finding out about the world is because in poetry a set of relationships get mapped onto a level of diversity that we don't ordinarily have access to (287-289).

Works cited:

Bachelard, Gaston. The Philosophy of No. Trans. G. C. Waterston. New York: The Orion Press, 1968.

Barthes, Roland. The Rustle of Language. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1986.

Bateson, Mary Catherine. Our Own Metaphor: A Personal Account of a Conference on the Effects of
Conscious Purpose on Human Adaptation. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972.

Fish, Stanley. Is There a Text in This Class? Cambridge, HUP 1980.

Campbell, Jeremy. Grammatical Man. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982.

Jauss, Hans Robert. "Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory." Trans. Timothy Bahti.  In Adams, Hazard, and Leroy Searle, Critical Theory Since 1965. Tallahassee: FSUP, 1986.

Popper, Karl. The Logic of Scientific Discovery.New York: Basic Books, 1959.

Quine, Willard Van Ormond. Methods of Logic. New York: Holt, 1950.

Quine, Willard Van Ormond. Word and Object.Cambridge, MA: MITP, 1960.

Reidl, Rupert, and Robert Kaspar. Biology of Knowledge: The Evolutionary Basis of Reason. Trans. from the third German edition by Paul Foulkes. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 1984.

Richards, I. A. The Philosophy of Rhetoric. London: OUP, 1936.

Sidney, Sir Philip. The Defence of Poesie. See Adams, Critical Theory Since Plato. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1971.