Shifting the Reader on Automatic Pilot into Active Mode Reader-Writer

(1) The writer, I, and the reader, you, are appropriately understood to be two separate material consciousnesses operating in a circuit under the guidance of a text. The ebb and flow of energy in the writer’s mind in the end pushes and pulls oceans of prior knowledge to shores of meaning in the reader’s mind.

(2) Writers do not need readers to complete the work of making a text for them, although you may have heard otherwise. An unread text is incomplete in a Bahktinian sense. Bracket that assumption for now. Instead, readers manifest potentials writers have stored in semantic batteries charged by living language. Readers don’t need writers to do the work of reading a text at all, just the batteries. Want proof?

(3) Dead writers can still be read. True, dead readers can’t read, but the point I’m making stands. In simplest terms a writer scribbles words, lives or dies, and a living reader decodes those words. So which would you rather be—a reader or a writer? Here you see a text on your screen as we speak. I wrote it. Where am I? You are reading it. Where are you? What does it matter to the doers?

(4) The only reality remaining, if there is to be a joining of writer and reader, exists in the spiritual realm. Like you, I understand that “reality” and “spiritual realm” are intended metaphorically in a you-know-what-I-mean kind of way, a slight shrug.

(5) Can you tell me what the next sentence on your screen will be? What more do you need? If you were AI, you could. AI, needless to say, is non-dead and never-lived. Its text has already been written by living writers now alive or dead. AI can neither write nor read.

*

Upon closer examination, he said haughtily, the picture is more complicated. The functions and roles of writers and readers in literacy events are entangled in a theoretically elusive sociocultural, historical, and cognitive mashup that can transcend a writer’s death. The body dies; history lives on—except in Florida.

Acts of literacy, whether reading or writing, are made material (or immaterial) in isolation, often when both parties are alive and well, sharing an understanding of norms extant. While writing and reading are solitary behaviors, neither partner fulfills a shared objective without the other. In some sense they are collaborating.

Climbing the abstraction ladder one rung means putting quote marks around words. Please comment here about my use of quote marks in paragraph 4 above. Ponder the implications for students if I were their teacher requiring you to comment. Include your thinking on both topics, the meaning of quote marks and the meaning of the quiz each worth 5 pts. Note well: If you skip this item without responding, tonight in your dreams you will face the academic grim reaper come to take back your highest degree.

*

Readers can and do get close to dead writers, and during in vivo acts of writing, writers know it unconsciously. Who doesn’t understand the meaning of a will? By studying a writer’s life history and context, readers can adjust how the energy flows through the circuit in the black box of the text to their mind.

That George Eliot wrote what I’ve heard critics call the only truly adult novel we have changes how one might read Middle March. Knowing the facts of authorial attribution changes every word in the text for me. During the Victorian era, the norm for female writers included a contradiction between creativity and femininity; as a woman Mary Ann Evans, nee George Eliot, was therefore biologically constrained from masculine creative strength.

Even Mary Ann Evans evaluated women’s writing to be sharply saccharine. She didn't want to write like a woman. Her place in time was, what, a century plus apart from, say, Sylvia Plath or Betty Friedan, who faced discursive cages hanging around to this day. Her protagonist Dorothea Brooke breached the boundaries of standards of feminine behavior, becoming a social reformer who advocated for tenant farmers, a woman who desired to acquire knowledge and intellectual depth just as Victorian men did.

Think about it, charitable reader. Readers at original reception of the book produced a defiant Dorothea in need of taming, a non-conformist trying to usurp masculine roles. Today her portrayal slips toward a heroine ahead of her times, courageous, a role model for self-actualization. Now factor in the deception, the pseudonym, the underlying dynamics. What do these external energy sources do to the circuit in the black box of the text?

*

Now all of this might be fun to think about, but you can’t use it to critically evaluate the book in certain graduate courses. What about critics who want you, fine reader, to demote the author, to escape the crime of invoking authorial intention. What counts is the sense and coherence, the craft of the writing, post-production only, the signifiers inside the text, nothing more nothing less. How can you trust a writer to know what they intended to say? The important part is what they say and how they say it.

Of course, historical context is fair game in discussions of interpretation just as the speeches made at the Constitutional Convention in 1787 are relevant to originalist Supreme Court Justices, but it is simply impossible to know what George Eliot intended. The true task of the critic in any case is to critique how the text works, its elegance, its aesthetic impact. It is a serious mistake to waste time on George Eliot, a front for the actual author.

*

There is a shape-shifting going on when we transform ourselves from reader to writer. I’ve shape-shifted so much it’s hard for me to decide where my writer stops and my reader begins. I’m reading a book right now, a profound non-fiction memoir that complicates the whole readwrite writeread mashup. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants was written by Robin Wall Kimmerer, a botanist with a PhD and a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. This book is in part about intersections between an indigenous epistemology of plants and mainstream scientific epistemology. It has me wondering if trees can read and write, too.