How We Read and Interpret Text?
These days I feel great interest for more close to life questions of literary studies than just issues of poetics of a certain author. I find it really captivating to read about mechanisms of text interpretation, the reasons why people actually read books, the correlation between literature and reality and so on. Maybe you have noticed it in the posts I have written recently (Is Literature Supposed to Correspond to Reality, Changing Functions of Literature, How People Choose Which Book to Read etc.).
This time I got interested in the problem of text perception. What happens to a reader when he reads a text? What happens to a text when it is read? I will try to explain it briefly with the help of R. Ingarden’s* monography «The Cognition of the Literary Work of Art» and W. Iser’s* monography «The Act of Reading» (all italics mine).
*Roman Ingarden (1893–1970) was a Polish philosopher who specialized on aesthetics, ontology and phenomenology. He was also interested in literature and wrote some works at the intersection of literature and philosophy.
*Wolfgang Iser (1926–2007) was a German philologist mostly known for his investigations in literary reception and theory of reader’s response. This theory was greatly influenced by Ingarden’s works. It shifts the focus from the text to the reader’s role in creation of the text.
The nature of any work of art
It is crucial to explicate what forms the basis of the fiction text in order to understand the ways it can be perceived. Iser’s main idea was that the essence of art lies in its communicative nature. He considered the reading process to be «a dynamic interaction between text and reader» [Iser: 107].
The reader along with the author and the text itself is a full-fledged participant of a creative act. Before the reader’s reception a work of art can not be considered a work of art, it is just a set of signs.
It is the reader who fills the work of art with some content. If not having been read, the text remains «empty», because only the reader can fill the scheme, construction, which text represents with meaning. Reader’s consciousness is supposed to hesitate in choosing between different possible interpretations of the text: «He is drawn into the events and made to supply what is meant from what is not said» [Iser: 168].
The role of language in our perception of the literary works
Language of the literary work of art plays a huge role in the way we as readers perceive it. Ingarden says that «The form of the artistic language itself takes the reader out of the normal attitude of reading predicative sentences as judgments and forces him to assume another attitude» [Ingarden: 64–65].
In a nutshell, it means that the author chooses words whose sense, phrasing and composition differ them from scientific language and from the ordinary speech we use in our daily life. «The cadence of the sentences, which differs from the usual speech melody or sentence melody, and the peculiar rhythms which appear also alert the reader to the fact that the language is not being used for normal communication, nor does it aim at the common real world, but, instead, evidently exercises some other function» [Ingarden: 65].
Ingarden stipulates though that this phenomenon does not appear in all literary works of art. For instance, it is irrelevant for naturalistic dramas of the late XIX century (for example, Ibsen’s). If it does not appear though, then there are some other language means used which let the reader know that he is dealing with fiction text, but not with an everyday speech, and that the purpose of this text is not to transmit information.
But still, in most fiction texts the words are taken not in their literal, but in a metaphorical meaning.
«…they are obviously supposed to point intentionally to something other than they usually do in everyday language» [Ingarden: 67].
Due to this reason the special language in which the literary works of art are written creates «a particular emotional atmosphere» [Ingarden: 66]. The purpose of its use is to «elicit an emotion in the reader, to remove him from the usual attitude of a man involved in practical life, and to move him to a new mode of experience, a mode of experiencing not merely emotion but also an emotional way of seeing and grasping qualities which, to be sure, could also appear in daily life but which elude our attention there» [Ingarden: 66].
Difficulties which accompany text apprehension
Ingarden states that there are a lot of acts of apprehension which the reader is to perform simultaneously when getting acquainted with the literary work of art. And of course «the reader does not give the same active attention to all the acts he performs, nor does he perform all of them with the same requisite vividness or thoroughness. <…> Many details of the structure of the work may be omitted or incompletely constituted in concretization; or else they may be overconstituted, developed too prominently; or they may even be falsified». [Ingarden: 90].
«During reading, we are usually absorbed in apprehending the objectivities portrayed in the work, which then seem to occupy the foreground of the concretization. The details of the semantic stratum, such as the peculiar sentence formation and the way the meanings of the sentences are interrelated, will then hardly be grasped for themselves because, in reading, one generally only passes through them to reach the portrayed objects» [Ingarden: 91].
«It is as if the genuine literary work of art — considered now independently of its length and what kinds of demands it makes on the reader with regard to its apprehension in all its consecutive parts — is too rich to be apprehended immediately in its whole abundance, even by a very gifted reader» [Ingarden: 92].
The way the process of text perception is regulated
The complex process of reader’s perception of the text is controlled by the text itself, however strange that may sound. It means that an attentive and open-minded reader will not be able to impute foreign ideas upon the text, because there are some basic structures in the text itself which regulate the process of text perception.
The thing is that the information which is verbally expressed in the text is never equal to the information the text actually contains.
The last necessarily includes that non-themed, not expressed verbally semantic potential, which is actualized in reader’s consciousness when he reads the text. It happens so, because it is impossible to talk about everything in one text. And those pieces of information which were not verbalized in the text are called, to quote Ingarden, «places of indeterminacy» [Ingarden: 50], or «blank spaces» (this is Iser’s term). Every text contains them on different levels and the reader is supposed to picture them in his imagination himself.
For example, Pushkin does not give us Tatyana’s portrait in «Eugene Onegin». We know how her sister Olga looks like (because there is a description) but not Tatyana. So we need to imagine her ourselves. And it is interesting that in most cases readers imagine Tatyana as a brunette — on the contrary to her sister. It is seen on the illustrations for the novel, because all of them portray the elder sister with dark hair (by the way, I have also always imagined Tatyana being a brunette, although I have never analyzed the reason for this).
It means that as readers we oppose these heroines in our imagination through the way they look. And it also means that «in our reading we go beyond the text in various points without being clearly aware of it» [Ingarden: 52].
Iser, in turn, states that it is these blank spaces, «the fundamental asymmetry between text and reader, that give rise to communication in the reading process» [Iser: 167].
It means that blank spaces in the text are constantly filled by the reader and the text regulates the way the filling of these spaces will be carried out.
Because reader’s projections of the blank spaces keep constantly changing as he advances through the story and receives new information and at the same time — new blank spaces.
«The interaction fails if <…> the reader’s projections superimpose themselves unimpeded upon the text. Failure, then, means filling the blank exclusively with one’s own projections. Now as the blank gives rise to the reader’s projections, but the text itself cannot change, it follows that a successful relationship between text and reader can only come about through changes in the reader’s projections» [Iser: 167]. Thus, the reader’s view keeps changing while he is reading «and in this process of continual correction there arises a frame of reference for the situation — a definite, though not a definitive, shape» [Iser: 167].
Why one text can be perceived in many diverse ways
Different people may have different opinions about the same text, even if all of the readers are «highly cultivated and sensitive critics» [Ingarden: 62] and it is obvious. But why that happens if they are reading the same text which, moreover, regulates the way they are supposed to perceive it?
Ingarden states that it happens, because various aspects of text are perceived by readers in very different ways and that, of course, influences the apprehension of the literary work in the whole. A place and a person described in a text might be actualized and concretized in readers’ consciousnesses in very different ways. Moreover, «readers are often one-sided: they actualize, for example, visual but not acoustical or tactual aspects» [Ingarden: 62].
Depending on how and which aspects are actualized by each reader, «the aesthetic apprehension of one and the same work can turn out very differently. The appearance of a particular metaphysical quality, facilitated in this way, forms the culmination of the work and plays a great role in the constitution of the aesthetic concretization of the work during reading» [Ingarden: 62].
Another thing which greatly affects our apprehension of the literary work and creates differences in perception is that while reading, «the reader also forms certain stereotypes, certain stabilized forms of aspects, which he uses to help him bring objects to appearance. Instead of imagining a portrayed person in different aspects according to circumstances, we often imagine him always in the same aspects, without paying attention to the attributes of this person which have changes in the meantime» [Ingarden: 63].
«This occurs, for example, when long periods in the life of the particular person are depicted in a novel, so that he ages visibly, or would have to age. But in spite of this, the reader imagines this person again and again in the same way, that is, in aspects which have become stereotyped. The same holds true for the aspects of the streets of a particular city, which are constantly imagined from the same standpoint, although they are portrayed from various points of view in the work. Therein lies a further cause of inadequate aesthetic apprehension of a literary work of art, a cause which in this case is purely subjectively conditioned but which exercises its influence on the disclosure or concealment of an aesthetically relevant quality appearing in the work itself» [Ingarden: 63].
Now let’s sum it all up.
● Reading is a process of interaction between the reader and the text, during which reader constantly fills so called blank spaces in the text and text controls the way reader is supposed to do it.
● As readers we can not apprehend the work of art in the whole at once.
● Our perception of the text can also differ greatly from the way others perceive it, because of certain stereotypes which are formed in our consciousness when we are reading and depending on the aspects which we pay more attention to.
Of course there is so much more to write on this problem and in this post I was able to describe it just briefly. But I hope to continue writing about perception and our understanding of fiction, because these issues fascinate me.
Will be glad to read your opinion about the problems of text perception in the comments!
P.
Literature:
- Iser W. The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response. Maryland, 1987. 244 p.
- Ingarden R. The Cognition of the Literary Work of Art. Evanston, 1973. 436 p.
