On Wed, 9 Apr 1997, L. Timmel Duchamp wrote:
> 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
>
I suspect that you're correct, Timmi. You know, I've always been a bit
skeptical of reader-response theory, but what you're suggesting above
is a pretty good defense of its legitimacy.
Mike Levy
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