The Author, the Reader, and the Text

The Author, the Reader, and the Text

By

John E. Shaffett

            Many people assume that reading is a static, not a dynamic process. They assume that the author begins with certain ideas in his head that he puts on paper. The reader, through reading, receives the author’s ideas into his own head. A compatible assumption with this idea is that the text contains only one meaning or interpretation. Another idea is that the author determines the meaning of the text. There are problems with these assumptions. First, Marxist criticism argues that in the writing of literature, writers have “responded to the social and economic conditions of cultural life” (Wilhout, 91). This indicates that both the reader and writer are situated in particular historical conditions which determine the reading and the writing of a text. Second, Lynch shows how the analogical imagination incorporates a four-fold level of biblical exegesis. The implication is that there are multiple meanings in a literary work. Third, Freudian criticism argues that there are particular problems with the romantic imagination. This criticism suggests that reading is a dynamic process.

In regards to Freudian criticism, Jacobs asserts, “But Freud attacks the imagination at the one place it cannot defend: within the mind itself. The imagination does not act with autonomy, but rather is motivated--as all human behavior is motivated--by the need to resolve internal tension and conflict” (Jacobs, 105). Freud’s critique is in response to the romantic view of the imagination espoused by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. He viewed “inspiration” as an “energy inherent in the poet’s own mind” (Jacobs, 99). This idea argues against external influence on the imagination. Freud concluded that the “writer of fiction projects his own conflicts into story, objectifies them by casting them into the character and event” (Jacobs, 101). Freud’s conclusion shows the idea that an author in the writing process simply his communicating conscious ideas he has in his head.

Marxist critics have used Freud’s “theories of internal struggle to explain how we bourgeois readers suppress our class allegiances and thereby enable ourselves to pretend  that our canons, our ways of reading, our interpretations possess a ‘natural’ or inherent authority” (Jacobs, 95). This is an important insight. Reading is just a natural process that the reader is not aware of the complexities of the reading act. The text is not a static thing that the reader just sees what is there. The reader, like the author, brings their own internal struggles to the literary work. Just like the author, they are projecting themselves into the work. The reader is bringing her own thoughts to the work which influences how she interprets the work.

Lynch asserts, “For I am convinced that according to its terms [four-fold level of biblical exegesis] it is undoubtedly true that there are four levels of insight, the literal, the moral, allegorical, and analogical, but that, even more importantly, there is also only one, and that the literal, which has been brought to complete illumination by the minds marching through all its possibilities, by marching through a finite, according to the whole thesis of this book” (Lynch, 207). Lynch argues in his book argues that the analogical imagination brings together the one and the many. This is illustrated in a drama when the plot of the drama is “deepened by the insights proceeding from other and deeper levels of action” (Lynch, 207). Jacobs and Lynch provides insights on how reading is a dynamic action.