I needed a sentence
to start, an opener. Thanks to the New York Public Library, @nypl I found one
that seems to echo something of what this blog is about:
There’s someone in my head, but it’s not me!
The idea that I am developing here is one that takes as its starting
point Fairclough and his notion of reading as dialogic exchange between writer,
actual and imagined readers: the imaginary reader.
The 'exchange' in the
case of written texts is played out between the writing and the reading of the
text, and there may therefore be considerable temporal and spatial gaps between
the initiating and responding moves. Moreover, a written text and especially a
mediated text (e.g. a book) will figure in a great many exchanges corresponding
to its many readings. Written texts often consist in themselves of nothing but
Statements, and responses to them may go on only in readers' heads, so it may
seem somewhat tenuous to insist on the concept of exchange in such cases.
Nevertheless, all texts imply and are oriented to dialogue in a broad sense,
even a diary I write for myself inevitably involves choices in what sort of
imaginary reader (be it an imaginary self) to address, and this generalization
of the concept of exchange is one way to capture this. 1
I want to extend to reshape this idea, the stance from which
it is written to suggest the ‘imagined reader’ as not the reader the writer had
in mind when drafting their text, the active audience. Not the ‘imagined reader’ that the actual reader
imagine (and does or does not identify with) when reading a text. It is the
readerly self I create in the process of reading.
I want to think about the ‘imagined reader’ as the readerly
self I create in the process of reading.
Hence the image of ‘Coffin’ Ed and Gravedigger ‘Jones’, two
fictional detectives created by Chester Himes, one of the many black writers I
have read and loved – obsessively.
The readerly self, the academic readerly self is on a quest
to find ‘the truth’. This is a truth that
may be pluralised: ‘to find truths’; it may also by qualified – ‘to find
plausible truths’ rather than find ‘the definitive truth’. To read, published texts or data to be able to
make statements about how the world is: plausibly rather than definitively. This is of course a risky undertaking.
The readerly self, the academic readerly self is sceptical.
The stance taken in relation to everything read, heard, suggested is one of
incredulous disbelief. A critical stance that demands, show me, prove it how do
you know that’s the case, but what if, who says and so on. The questioning is relentless.
Whatever ls left intact at the end of
the process, is temporary until old answered questions re-emerge alongside new unanswered
questions.
The readerly self, the academic readerly self relies on
informants. The reading process is an entirely dialogic one. The plausible
truths to emerge through text do not reveal themselves spontaneously – they are
actively sough be and through the engagement with the writer, through places
several writers alongside each other, through looking and text and the world
the text refers to – which may be a world other then the one he writer was
specifically referring to –my reasons for reading may not be same as the writers
reading for writing, or for wanting me to reads. None-the-less the detective self forages for
truth and draws on whatever is available to assemble plausibility.
This is one possible version of the readerly self – there are
many other possible: the diver, the
orchestral conductor, the explorer, the hair stylist. The more I read, the more and newer selves I discover. There is nothing I enjoy more than being lost in text, lost as an imaginary self in a unexplored world.
1 Norman Fairclough, Analysing
Discourse: Textual Analysis for Social Research (London: Routledge,
2003) 109, Questia, Web, 13 Jan. 2012.
