Teoria Şi Practica Lecturii În Lumina Decantărilor Bibliosofice Moderne Şi Contemporane

THE THEORY AND THE PRACTICE OF READING

ACCORDING WITH MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY

BIBLIOSOPHICAL DECANTATION

By Liliana Moldovan

INTRODUCTION

From the perspective of the four essential dimensions - philosophical, hermeneutical, communicational and instructive-educational - the reading phenomenon stays at the bases of some generous theoretical questions connected to the essence, the diversity and the finality of textual discourses. Considering the extreme diversity of reading sciences, I have structured my paper into several issues, connected to:

1. The philosophical theory of reading;
2. The practice of reading from the perspective of communication theory;
3. Hermeneutic interventions in the individual reading practice;
4. Reading as a performant instrument of instruction, communication and information, in the context of informational society context.

1. FOR A PHILOSOPHICAL THEORY OF READING

It is well known that the philosophical substration of reading sciences is based on the hermeneutical theories made by Hans Robert Jauss, Wolfgang Iser, Jean Paul Sartre, Jaques Derrida, Ernst Cassirer and Umberto Eco. From the perspective of philosophic interpretation, these reading theorists have tried to solve the problem considering the complexity of receiving textual communications, giving an essential role to the reading consumer. It must be mentioned that philosophical substrate of reading theory has its roots in the philosophy of language and also in the communication theories, the reader having an active role. Within the reading philosophy, there is a discussion considering the erudite reader, the reader who adopts a hermeneutical attitude towards the literary text. He seems to know everything about the textual reality, which he is interpreting from the perspective of a personal and continuously changing reading practice.

Having a relatively recent past, the reading philosophy is concentrated on the book role, as ideational, cultural and spiritual trainer. It acts both on individual and social level. Within the philosophical context of reading hermeneutics, the bibliosophy emphases the echoes made by the textual discourses at the level of the receiver consciousness. The reading philosophy insists on the extra-textual relations and makes an analysis over the hermeneutical, psychological, cultural and ideational book substrate. It places the art of reading under the philosophical reflection spectrum. If hermeneutics taught us how to posses the ideas that are promoted by books, bibliosophy works on a superior level and proposes a new vision, a daring one, over the relation between man and lecture, insisting on the evaluation and receiving techniques, both individualy and socialy, of the literary products. The philosophy of reading is telling us all we have to know about textual reality, it links us to the newest challenges of hermeneutics, makes us understand reading both as an initiation and cultural-scientific act.

By giving some explanations considering the textual receiving phenomenon, the reading philosophers are trying to explain the way reading influences the readers; or, it reveals the effects of the printed word over the readers. The theorists of reading are suggesting some methods of looking for the „real” sense of the books.

Thus, J. Hillis Miller[1] is explaining the phenomenon from the perspective of some latent, implacable rules, similar to the Kantian moral law. In Etica lecturii, he considers the relation author-book-reader as being governed by ethical influences. Professor at Irvine University of California, Miller considers that there is a moral law of reading, a law that acts priori and raises some obstacles in the reader’s reactions of interpreting the texts. The productive character of reading is reduced by these ethical interventions. The reading of a book is made under the influence of some moral obligations, which are both addresses to the author and to the receiver of the text. Consequently, from respect for the moral law of reading, the author has no right to leave the reader alone to loose himself in the game of interpretations and can not require him to wilt in his search of the senses and ideas of the text. On the contrary, the author must support the interpretative efforts of the reader and he also must use a language that contains comprehensive clues, interpretation codes. At his turn, the reader must be loyal to the stylistic structure of the text; he also has to evaluate and to interpret the text according the main idea transmitted by the author. Under the pressure of the moral law, the most performant reading act is when there is an amicable connection between the author and the reader, and they do not hamper each other. If the author includes some receiving clues in the text, the reader must take them into consideration and follow them. More than that, if the content of the text is confused, the reader feels the need to read it again and again, as long as necessary, to understand the real significances of the discourse. The reader and the author are assisting each other in their attempt of occultation and revelation of the real senses of the text.

By imaginative and creative actions, reading becomes a revealing process, when the author impregnates the text with symbolical suggestions and is transmitting it directly to the reader, by using a metaphorical language. „His language must start from himself, so as the music has arose from the quick movement of the fingers of a great musician, so as the words arose from the mouth of an indignated speaker, so as the letters are flying under the fingers of a skilled typographer, so as the syllable that comes from the little bell of a keyman and get a certain form in his ears.”[2] Just like the bell ringing, the words are becoming sentences to understand, phrases whose role is to transmit information, to convince and to give birth to multiple reactions and feelings. Sometimes, the communicational relation between the author and the reader is far from being best-functioning. For example, when the author emphasise the metaphorical aspect of the text and uses an encrypted language, the act of reading reveals too many meanings and significations.

Poetry - for example - is some kind of a holiday of artistic communication. It is the expression of the total freedom of creation; its reference frame is not the colloquial language, but the metaphor that projects the ideas from the artistic consciousness to the fairy-like domain, the domain of the amazing linguistic effervescence, grouped around the human’s existential issues. Despite some malicious remarks, according to which „some poets can not see the poetry because of the words,” the creators do not fail before „the words initiative” and keep control over the „lucidity” of the syntactical structures. Using the words of Blaga, we may say that the poets have a dionysian vision of human existence, and from the communicational meanings perspective, they manifest a clear predilection for visual language.

Poetry enriches the universe of stylistic expression, contributes to the broadening of the individual forms of thinking. Poetic reflection is no longer a simple reflection of intelligence; it becomes a state of grace of the heart, an attribute of feelings. The receiving of the poetry requires the reader swing relentless between the concreteness of the ideas revealed in verses and the semantic mobility of the word-symbol, which is hiding unexpected meanings and show metaphorical mobility. Because of the occultation processes of the significations that can be seen in the text, the poetical discourse receives a specific charm, which raises the artistic value and the power of expression.

As representative of the American deconstructivism in the domain of literary theory, J. Hillis Miller destroys the myth of concrete perception of the literary text and states that reading a text becomes as a series of lectures and re-lectures by which meanings come off one by one and are revealing themselves step by step. Thus, the discussions concerning the act of reading becomes more widen, the reading philosophers become more interested by the effects produced by the text over its receiver. The philosophy of textual perception attaches equal importance both to the context of artistic conception of literary creation and to the receiving context; it insists over the anthropological values of textual communication and deals with real interest the reader as interpreter position of readable books. Being a reading philosopher means to initiate the crack structure of discourse and to rebuild the road from the text to the reader. By the light of the terms of perception, reading appears as an interactive process. It is defined as a textual action, that implies subtle processes that influence the relation between the reader and the author and, why not, the relation of the reader to the external world and with self. The deconstructivist hermeneutics opens the text, looks at it as being a huge puzzle; it studies it as a reservoir of symbols. The deconstructivist interpretation is concentrated over the details and communicational individual elements, ignores the all and put on a secondary level the message of the literary work. The text appears as a conglomerate, consisting on multiple layers of meanings and significations. They are captured by the reader as it deepens the process of reading. There is no perfect methodology to learn how to read. We only know[3] that reading is stratified. The receiving of the message implies some stages of reading, which can be structured as follows:

- superficial reading - at the level of the first contact with the book;

- deep reading, that refers to the original start of work;

- historical or bibliographical reading, that implies a comparison between the work that we have read and the other works of the same author and also the discovery of the writer personal style, based on the bibliographical list of his works.

Giving the reader the interpretative skills the reading philosophy gives birth to some paradigmatic situations, which are based on the dialectical relation: author-text-reader. In the context of the new theoretical order, within the sciences of reception and interpretation, the accent is no longer on the relation between the author and the text, but on that between the text and the receiver. If so, both the action of composing and transmitting a text and the process of receiving the written message are under the sign of the respect that dominates the author-reader relationship. The author-reader interaction becomes more efficient when the reader understands or, at least, believes to understand, the significances of the text.

Within the reading philosophy, we may speak about polysemie and many efforts are made to define the mechanisms that trigger the need for interpretation. Shortly, interpretation means what the reader understands after reading a text. There is always an intuitive process close connected to the meaning. More over, we may say that every masterpiece fate depends on the way the text is received. The intuition of the meaning arises while we identify the details, the words and games of words that reveal the meaning.

Generally, the deciphering of the meanings that may be identified in a written communication has only one direction: to discover the original idea which was the basis for the written work. The satisfaction of understanding is not always predictable. Sometimes, to understand the meaning of a text, we have to follow some hidden clues; or it may happen to find all new significances, which are totally different from the original ideas. There is no doubt that the identification of the meaning is able to transform a dense text into a friendly and accessible one. A text that reveals its own meaning has a new appearance in the readers mind. More precisely, it receives a new content that does no longer frighten the reader, but communicates with him in a useful and relaxing manner.

There is a question that we may ask ourselves: could the reader affect the meaning, the informative or artistic identity of the text? As we are all expecting, the act of receiving is only visible on the exterior side of the interpreter. He gave back to the author an intact work, which has not been affected by subjective reception. The reader cannot change the content of the text he is reading, cannot modify its significances, but he can bring the text within its subjective space. The author is the only creator of the text, but it needs the reader collaboration in order to be known and to became a part of the communicational circuit. Nobody is writing a book for art’s sake; literary texts, scientific or philosophical ones, are not the result of some free acts; they are waiting to be read, to become a part of the communicational network.

By textual history of humanity, we understand all the performing and creative experiences of readers of yesterday and today. Reading philosophy offers some explanations of the textual perception phenomena; it shows how the texts are influencing the readers, it shows the effects the written text has over its receivers. In the name of reading philosophy, there were some attempts for understanding the reading process, the most adequate ways of looking for the real meaning of the books. Thus, reading philosophy as a domain is circumscribed around the theory considering “the semiotic ambivalence of the text.” Bibliosophy removes the text from the laws of morphological and syntactic incidence, to put the spotlight on the concept of speech, which is totally capable to transmit information in a meaningful semiologic way. For large philosophical or literary projects, the act of reading can be identified to the strategy of text understanding. There are meaningful books that can only be received after a long interpretative process.

Acting as independent elements, the textual discourses are especially highlighted by communicability, if they are coherent and created in order to transmit a certain message. Gheorghe Iova, the poet, used to say in his essay Acţiunea textuală: bunul simţ vizionar,[4] that “the text is not an independent institution. A text is multi-institutional.” No book has a certain value only by itself; they have to be caught in the global circuit of communication and to attract the reader’s attention. Interpretative strategies end with digging sense. To understand the real sense, reader must be so careful and interested in the text he is reading, in order to start a dialogue with the book; a dialogue that will allow him to talk with authors of different times; thus, he becomes some kind of universal interlocutor, which is contemporary to the whole world.

2. THE PRACTICE OF READING FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF COMMUNICATION THEORY

According to the language philosophy rules, there are two key points specific to any process of communication, the transmitter and the receiver of the message. From communication philosophy perspective, the author of the written communication is the transmitter, while the reader is the receiver. Thus, the author is encoding and transmitting a message, and the reader receives and decodes the message. The deciphering of the reading mechanisms is based on a simple idea, suggesting that written documents are having an essential role within national and universal network communication. From this perspective, the text is no longer seen in an exclusive linguistic manner, in order to be analysed in the philosophical context of reading hermeneutics; the accent is now directed towards the extra-textual relations, towards the echoes textual discourse has caused inside the receivers consciousness.

The term discourse, which has been borrowed from rhetorics, has been used for the first time by the structuralist philosophers; by this term, they meant a verbal or written communication, consisting and formed from a variety of signs and meanings. “Discourse” does not mean “text” because of its “communicative dimension”; the main difference consists on the comprehensive nature of the written word. A discourse is communicating something and it is addressing to the reader; this one thus became an active interlocutor and takes part to the dialogue through interpretative exercises. From the perspective of discourse theory, reading a text means to become a part of some decoding process, which will allow us to understand its significances.

The written text is always communicating new information to readers; it causes new experiences and brings them into a parallel reality. While reading I remain myself, I am a part of this world, but I am also part of the fictional reality; I live among fictional characters, I can walk along the logical thread of some theory, of some stories about past or present times. The author’s imagination is giving birth to some imaginative experiences, every time the book is opened? It is not the author who experiences all these, but the reader. He feels something when he openes a book and that is because of the reading eficiency, the intensive relation that has been established between the reader and the author.

From the communication sciences perspective, the most important function of a theoretical discourse - literary or philosophical discourse - is communicability. The reading theory main purpose is based on the necessity of showing that the way a message is assimilated is close connected to the eficiency of the receiving phenomenon. Hans Robert Jauss has laid the bases of the receiving theory by using some theoretical investigations; he thus consideres that from the very beginning, when a book has been opened, the author became more detached; he becomes more detached as the reader is taking its place and tries to understand the text by his own eyes. As a transmitter, the author chooses to detache himself from his own text and accepts to share his ideeas with the mass of virtual readers. According to Hans Robert Jauss, literary or scientific works are all defined by dynamism, which is the result of communication through reading. Because of the dynamism of communicational acts, reading is never pure; there is a personal style for every reader, a personal way to interpret the fragments, to rewrite them, to enrich or to poor them semanticaly, according to his intellectual capacity and power of abstraction. The effort of understanding and receiving will be more efficient if it contributes to the development of meanings, to the issue of new meanings.