Nicola, when you talking about your "bloody learning experience,"
& Mike, when you talk about Butler's authorial unreliability,
you may be both talking about how arbitrary a reader's relationship
is to any fiction text. Readers often make mistakes of "fact"
(i.e., missing material in the text that makes explicit a certain
interpretation-- as in the case of Lauren's "hyperempathy"-- which
I did pick up on in my reading, as a very telling detail that
stuck in my mind-- or even changing the details in their memory,
to accord with their own preconceptions & on-going [rather than
after-the-fact] interpretation), & authors-- in an act of reading
their own work, not writing it, though obviously "reading" is
a necessary part of the total process of "writing"-- often insist
on a simplicity of a single level-- the one they consciously intended--
to their work, denying that anything could be in the text but
what they consciously intended. (Eudora Welty sticks in my mind
as an author who becomes enraged at readers seeing anything but
the surface of her stories.) I seriously wonder if anyone reads
the same piece of fiction in the same way anyone else does. I'd
be willing to bet any issue of _Locus_ you might pick up would
manifest such errors in its reviews. (I catch such errors there
constantly: & of course this holds true for other publications,
& not just _Locus_.) It's not necessarily carelessness (though
if the reviewer took the time to re-read the piece being reviewed,
at least some of the mistakes might be caught-- often in deep
puzzlement, that s/he could have been so grossly in error). It's
just that all sorts of things-- from previous reading experiences,
previous conceptions of the author's work, & all sorts of personal
experiences in the life of the reader-- kick in when we read,
sometimes even from the very first sentence. (Which is why I
don't think the author has the responsibility to hit the reader
over the head with a fact: showing, not telling, is always appropriate,
except in political tracts.) In my experience, even when three
people who are socially close and share the same political attitudes
read the same book, they discover when they talk to one another
about it that they've read three different books. [I don't say
"completely" different books, but *substantially* different books.
They almost never remember all of the same details. They weight
themes differently. They are disappointed or excited for different
reasons.] & then, in the process of discussion, the person who
has the most forceful & structured articulations of what s/he
read ends up shaping the other two readers' memories of what *they*
read.) I myself have been through this process-- with the same
two other people-- with many, many books.
It might not be totally off-the-wall to hypothesize that people
develop a consensus about what any given piece of fiction is about
strictly through public discussion (meant broadly). If so, public
discussion then becomes the lens through which a particular work
is read.
And "public discussion," of course, includes lists like this one.
Timmi Duchamp
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