Page 73 - Critical and Cultural Theory

LANGUAGE AND INTERPRETATION
Regardless of a text's degree of openness, however, all narra-
tives engage the reader in a process of detection. All texts could be
conceived as variations on mystery and crime fiction. The reader is
not the only detective on the scene, since a text's characters are
likewise intent on working out their place in a pattern and on
interpreting the clues that will advance or stall the action. Thus,
characters are readers. Conversely, readers can be thought of
as characters. This is most obviously demonstrated by texts in
which characters act as interpreters. According to J. L. Borges
these scenarios are rather unsettling reminders of our own imagin-
ary status: 'Why does it disturb us that Don Quixote be a reader
of the Quixote and Hamlet a spectator of Hamlefl I believe I have
found the reason: these inversions suggest that if the characters of
a fictional work can be readers or spectators, we, its readers or
spectators, can be fictitious' (Borges 1970: 231).
Stanley Fish corroborates the idea of the reader as a textual
function (Fish 1980). Readers are readable. Fish emphasizes that
texts are produced by their interpreters but also argues that
readers themselves are produced by their cultural milieus - specifi-
cally, by the decoding procedures of the interpretive communities
to which they belong. Any community adopts certain reading stra-
tegies and instils them into its members so as to guide their inter-
pretations. The dividing-line between readers and texts collapses,
as readers become texts determined by their communities. Conco-
mitantly, texts become readers: they expect to be read in ways
sanctioned by the community and thus read us as we read them,
i.e. monitor our ability to employ the interpretive skills we are
supposed to have developed. Alberto Manguel endorses the notion
that human beings are 'books to be read' and underscores the
material dimension of the reading process. Reading 'serves as a
metaphor to help us understand our hesitant relationship with our
body, the encounter and the touch and the deciphering of signs in
another person' (Manguel 1997: 169). Hence, the idea of the
reader-as-book carries eminently physical connotations.
The closing part of this chapter looks at the relationship
between reading and the body. It focuses on two main ideas: (1)
the symbolic link between reading and sexual desire; (2) the text's
status as a material object. How can one explain the symbolic
connection between reading and sexuality? Could it be that it is
the eminently private character of the reading experience that

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