Author, Reader, or Text? (aka Canonicity Slapdown 2005)

[Mister Underhill]

Originally Posted by Bêthberry

On the contrary, there is no collaboration per se between author and reader, unless it is carried on solely within the reader's mind, some sort of necromancy in calling forth an absent human being.

Should have replied to this a while ago, but better late than never. I wanted to get a comment in before the thread gallops off down the usual well-trodden road.

Look:

Two women, one elderly, the other of indeterminate age, sat in a small alcove with full glass doors that gave out onto the back of the White Horse Inn. Through them could be seen a row of young apple trees, maybe ten feet high. If one were close to them, one could see tiny buds appearing on the branches, but from the Inn they still appeared like dark skeletons against the sky, branches leafless and budless.

The women's eyes turned back towards the Inn, watching the patrons congregate.

"More people from distant lands appear these days, " observed the older woman, her grey hair plaited in thin rounds about her head, her shoulders stooped from toil, but her eyes still bright with shrewd life and wit.

Now, I submit to you, Bb, that when I read these words of yours, the final act of creation is a collaboration between you and me. You haven't described either woman in any great detail, but I have a clear picture in my mind of both of them; likewise the place where they're at. Together we've created something that neither of us alone could have made. You don't have to be here with me, or even alive for that matter, for us to collaborate. Your words on my screen are as fresh as they were the day you typed them on your keyboard for the first time, just as Tolkien's are as fresh when I crack LotR today as they were the day they flowed from his pen. We're having a meeting of the minds, and both of us are bringing something to the party. Later, you may refine or even drastically alter the images in my mind and the way I think about the characters. The collaboration continues as I read. The creative act is ongoing.

Now these few paragraphs have established little or no meaning and not much emotion either. But together over the course of a whole story an author and a reader may collaborate to build whole worlds of image, thought, meaning, and emotion. And it is indeed a collaboration in the truest sense of the word: "to labor together".

Fordim's "analysis of the text" option which he has offered to cover this collaboration is far too dry for me. It implies an intellectual distance and doesn't compass, for me, the creativity and emotion of reading.

As SPM has implied, a book itself is only a sort of potential energy; unread, gathering dust on a shelf, it is meaningless to anyone except the one who wrote it. When another mind engages it, the possibilities that the two may create together are boundless. But it takes both author and reader together to make it happen.