Text, Reader, Reading:
Remarks on the Ground of Literate Culture
Richard
Bear
1. Text:
Creating the Program
ITis
a commonplace, dating back to Plato, that 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 ontological
particularity and epistemological generality 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 a
constructed world, building a model which it is hoped is like the
world, and 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.
While you are reading you
are engaging with the text. Once you have done reading you have
read the work. It is necessary to separate "text" from "work" to
understand this. Once we have read through to the last line of
Paradise
Lost, we can now run the entire program (which requires those "natural
tears" for its full impact) as a practically extratemporal gestalt. The
poem is never actually on the page, only the code for setting up the poem
is there. The text contains no work, only the means for recreating the
work in the mind. The poem is different upon each downloading; it is a
unique patterning that moves almost invisibly from author to reader, by
means of but not fully in the text. It lives fully only in the life, individually
and collectively, of its readers -- of whom the author is but one. The
text is the nexus, the transition point.
Language
is inherently algorithmic. The form of an argument espousing an assertion
is "a = b; b = c; 
a = c." The form of an argument refuting an assertion is "a
= b; b 
c;
a
c."2 Writing is
a reduction of language, and carries some but not all of the import of
speech, just as speech is a reduction of interpersonal communication, so
much of which is body language and not portable, except partially through
such media as film and video. Despite the reductions, if it may be presumed
the author and the reader have approximately shared assumptions as to what
a, b, and c are, the argument, as written and as read, should be persuasive.
We tend to think of this method as deduction, and assume that it is done
in, of, and about the real world. Yet the central operator, "therefore,"
takes place only in the minds of the communicants.
We proceed strictly
by analogy. It is all done in order to create a metaphorical leap of
faith. Longer arguments, with the citing of alleged instances to support
them, are simply this same structure in the form of routine with subroutines.
Hence, programming. An author hopes to communicate something
like
the author's thought; the thought itself, as a phenomenological event,
is gone forever. This analogical structure is ubiquitous in communications,
whether explicit, as in science journal articles, or implicit, as in most
commercial advertising.You will find this structure, I believe, in all
fiction and in all purported nonfiction, and I believe this is Sidney's
argument.
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." In Sidney's
social context, there was thought to be 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 Sidney 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. Not there, because
in the physical world there are no generals, only particulars, whereas
in conceptualization, we have if not only generals, then in our individual
minds particular conceptualizations which we take for generals.
And more by sentence3
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 definition.4
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, say, 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 read.5The
reader must have some concept of the signs with which the text has been
composed and a conceptualization of the culture in which the text has been
produced, in order to derive from the text something like that which the
author has envisioned should be derived from it.
The word "STOP," in white
letters on an octagonal 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 it is presented to those with education appropriate to a
particular interpretation of the object, it becomes something more: a nexus,
a bridge where the act of reading flows the work, incrementally, to the
reader. It is a storage device, just as we think of it, but it does not
store the work, it stores the means of access to the work, 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."6
The experience
of "reading the book" creates the work 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"7 comes
into play here -- but not as the active determinant of the passive reader's
unique experience of engaging with 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 loops, is entirely recalculated
with each sentence, deferring the final run to the reading of the final
sentence. A programmer might see in this what is called brute-force programming;
our brains don't handle the processing very elegantly. But that they do
this at all is miracle enough.
We easily look upon a text, in book or file form, as a stable object (at
least until the author gets round to messing with it again), but it is
not. The continuum is comprised of both space and time. Not only do substrates
deteriorate (paper, film, disks, CDs), readers also change, even as they
are reading. Unlike other operating systems, readers are modified by all
programs (texts).
All texts have been hypertexts
since the day that two texts were available in the same code and the same
reader read both. Texts 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 text that refers to nothing is itself necessarily blank. So
the reader reaches out, in reading, to touch in neural model all that has
gone before, concurrently is, and might be. It is 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 model8
in which the reader creates the work but acknowledges a dynamic partnership
with the author, whose programming of the text is a real work, without
which the work in the reader's mind could never have come to be.9
Notes
1. Sidney's strength
is that he argues for "poesie" by arguing a reinterpretation of the epistemological
ground of knowledge. That his insight has implications beyond "poesie"
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. Readers familiar with Predicate
Calculus here may be thinking, "oh, but this should be a discussion of
modus
ponens and modus tollens; and he's being much too simplistic
here." If I were a brilliant person I would undertake an argument that
Predicate Calculus might indeed be a model for the next fruitful direction
in literary criticism, with a look at discourse as possible-worlds theory.
But I will leave this to the philosophy professors. I'm interested in shaking
a few readers from the superstition of textual essentialism, but don't
claim to have a coherent theory of my own. If you will read Godel, Escher,
Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid I believe you will, yourself, think more
useful thoughts than any you find in this essay. But even that author makes
no claim beyond the tentative.
3. Here I gloss over an important
point for the sake of brevity. The argument of Jeremy Campbell in note
5 below is that meaning resides in context; words can only be regarded
as unambiguous when they reside in sentences, whether actually present
or implied. Castiglione comes tantalizingly close to arguing this view
in the Courtier:
I would know then, quoth the Count, whether this stile and measure which
you speake of, arise of the sentences or of the wordes?
Of the wordes, answered Sir Frederick.
Do you not think then, quoth the Count, that the wordes of Silius and Cornelius
Tacitus are the very same that Virgil and Cicero use? and taken in the
same signification?
Sir Fridericke aunswered: They are the very same in dede, but some yl applyed
and dyverslye taken.
The Count aunswered: In case a manne should pyke out of a booke of Cornelius
and of Silius, al the woordes placed in other signification then is in
Virgil and Cicero, (whiche should bee verye fewe) woulde you not then saye
that Cornelius in the tounge were equall with Cicero, and Silius with Virgil?
Then the L. Emilia: Me thinke (quoth shee) thys youre dysputation hathe
lasted to longe, and hathe been verye tedyouse, therefore it shall bee
best to deferre it untill an other tyme.
4. 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)
5. 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.
6. 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) I recently,
while standing in line prior to a university convocation, quoted Richards
to a noted English professor, who said, a bit patronizingly, that, "Well,
no, but language is a branch of biology." I was flabbergasted. Language
is a thing studied, biology is a study. "Theory of interpretation," or
literary criticism, is a study. Throughout the humanities, this confusion
of apples and oranges exists in a profusion with which, say, biologists
or computer scientists are relatively unencumbered.
7. 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).
8. 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)
9. The
implication of all this for textual studies is that while the work of editors
and critics in elucidating the texts that have come down to us has been
real work for which we can be grateful, we should never, metaphorically
speaking, place more weight on our theory of copy-text and the rule of
authorial intentions than it can bear. Jerome McGann rightly criticizes
the direction such studies have taken: "In asking us to analyze textual
problems -- indeed, to decide the most basic textual issues -- within a
sharply restricted analytic field, these approaches have tended to suffocate
textual studies as well as the larger enterprise of which they are a part."
(119). He argues, I believe persuasively, for a look into social context
when editing, and for withholding judgment as to authoritative text --
that final intention, for example, is not always the best or only useful
form of a text, assuming we have in hand anything we have the right to
call "final intention." He cites Auden's "September 1, 1939" as a famous
instance:
The instruments
agree that this is one of Auden's most important works, so that a collected
edition without it -- particularly a posthumous edition -- seems an anomaly.
Agreement is also general that the removal of the eighth stanza weakens
the poem. In all respects, then, the case illustrates the relative nature
of authority in matters dealing with cultural products like poems .
. . . this final Auden example graphically reveals the ambiguity
in a concept like the authority of the text. The work we know as "September
1, 1939" exists in print in several different versions, and one of these
is an absent text (as it were), a suppressed poem. (88-89)
But notice also McGann's almost
offhand inclusion of "the larger enterprise." Like Sidney, for whom literature
was but one aspect of the single enterprise of constructing a general understanding
of the world, McGann points toward an epistemological unity. As the sciences
and the humanities, like mutually unknown continents, drift inevitably
together, our cultural cartographers must begin to work toward a world
map.
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.
Castiglione, Baldessar. The
Booke of the Courtier. Tr. Thomas Hoby. Found online 5/21/02 at Renascence
Editions: <http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~rbear/courtier/courtier1.html>.
Fish, Stanley. Is There a
Text in This Class? Cambridge, HUP 1980.
Campbell, Jeremy. Grammatical
Man. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982.
Hofstader, Douglas R. Godel,
Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. A Metaphorical Fugue on Minds and
Machines in the Spirit of Lewis Carroll. New York: Random House. 1980.
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.
McGann, Jerome J. A Critique
of Modern Textual Criticism. Chicago: UCP, 1983.
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 <http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~rbear/defence.html>.
See Adams, Critical Theory Since Plato. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1971.
See also Richard's
Commonplace Book <http://epud.net/~bears/common.html>.
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Text,
Reader, Reading
