Reading is Reading Reading

Barthes, Jonathan Culler, and many others have expressed the idea that the aim of Structuralism is not to explicate a text, but to discover the conditions of its making sense. In other words, its main question is not what a text means, but how it means what it means. Structuralists (and, lately, cognitive literary theorists) often hold that one should not create new readings, but account for the diverse nature of the existing ones. This kind of approach, at first sight, appears to be quite removed from what happens during normal, non-analytic reading. But I shall argue that in reality, it is precisely the same.

Jonathan Culler, in his On Deconstruction, recapitulates theories which hold that there are numerous types of readers / audiences of, for example, a narration: one which focuses on and believes what is narrated, one which understands how the narrator intends the narration to be taken (ironically? seriously?), and one which senses the author behind it all. The experience of a reader, it is argued, is determined by the interplay between these reader-audiences, in other words, by the identification with one or the other; by the simultaneous emulation of all types of audiences while reading.

If a literary critic is to account for different possible readings, then what s/he will do is emulate different readers, and see how they react to the work in question. One might think such an activity requires special skills, but we have just seen that we, "ordinary" readers, already emulate various approaches to a text: we are entertaining opposite ideas, we take into account multiple points of view; in a word, we are fragmented into a myraid of readers reading, at the same time, the same text into an array of different texts. While there is only one author, there seems never to be just one reader.

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Let me add two things. The first one is that the list of audiences related above resembles my notion of multiple addressers and addressees in literary discourses modelled as series of embedded communicative schemes. See my essay titled The Purloined Reader.

The second thing is about the possibility (and the task of the critic) of emulating readers and readings. In my view, it can be achieved primarily by taking into account various amounts and types of extratextual information in the process of interpretation. An ideal "New Critic" would use none; while the ideal or universal reader, in theory, would have access to all relevant information. (In the strict sense, the first would not even be able to interpret the words on the page, while the second should know the answer to the ultimate questions of the universe.) The construction of various types of Authors appears to be based on the very same difference.