Roshin T. Roy
Assistant Professor
Department of English
Mar Thoma College for Women, Perumbavoor
“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies . . . The man who never reads lives only one.”
George R. R. Martin
What is reading? Are we readers? The meaning of the term is often reduced to the process of decoding words printed in a sheet of paper, grabbing the hidden content and inserting it into one’s consciousness. Can reading be such a passive activity where the reader’s role is only to receive the already prepared information? Furthermore, what can be read? Is it only stories, essays or biographies that needs reading? Can the definition of reading include something more than that?
Anything can be a text
Imagine ourselves watching a stranger coming in through the door. Our first response would probably be to determine that person’s gender. The way the hair is done, whether ornaments are worn, what kind of dress is usedโฆ All these will be examined in a split second, and we reach our conclusions. If the dress worn includes a skirt and top, we perceive the person as a girl. Based on our understanding of the contemporary and traditional styles, the girl will be labelled modern/conventional. If the person wears sandal paste on the forehead, we’ll assume that we know his/her religion, and if there’s a huge bindi instead, it’s read in a completely different way. We assume that we have understood many factors regarding the person’s identity even without a single word uttered in between. We were, in other words, “reading” that person and imposing some meaning over his/her existence. The same is applicable to our understanding of spaces (for example, how we identify a room as “dining room” or “bed room” based on the arrangement of furniture in it). Based on the available signs, we assign a meaning to that which is observed. The arrangement of different elements in particular orders are read by the perceivers to produce meanings.
Our understanding of everything that surround us is based on our reading of it. If we come across a painting, we tend to look into the details imprinted on the canvas so that we can understand the idea that it imparts. After watching a movie, we would have developed our own reading of the events portrayed in it. People whom we meet, events that are reported in the news, the places we visit, everything is “read” and understood.
Reading as construction of meaning, not the passive receiving of it
Were the meanings that we decode from a text, be it a piece of writing or the nature of a person, already made available in the text? The idea that the reader is only trying to retrieve something that is waiting to be unlocked is flawed. Meaning is created only during the process of reading. It’s not already saved in the text to be unlocked by whoever come with the proper key. The same book will be read by different people in different ways. The same room might feel congested for one and comfortable to another. The same musical concert could be entertaining for one, while extremely irritating for the other. Reading is a process defined by a person’s subjective choices. In literary criticism, we learn from Barthes that the author is dead and the meaning of the text is realised only in the process of reading. Similarly, while reading every text that surrounds us, we are instilling meaning to it, rather than taking out an already prepared meaning. The reader’s knowledge of the world, his/her previous experiences, tastes, and social background can intervene in the process of reading. Meaning is “constructed” in the process, not retrieved. The colour black painted on a plain canvas can mean hopelessness and desolation for one viewer, but it can represent the infinite universe for another. The meaning does not reside within the text but in the onlooker’s perspective of it. It can be a creative exercise to try to look at the same text (book, movie, photograph, dressing style) from different perspectives and to see the varying meanings one can produce from it.
Realigning the boundaries
Readers construct the meaning of a text according to some predetermined sign system they have made part of their understanding. Following the earlier example, the reading of a person’s gender is decided by our own understanding of fashion. Once the text refuses to fit into the categories we had developed, there arises some confusion. If the person who wear a skirt and top turns out not to be a woman, or the room with a bed was used as the sitting room in a household, our own readings will be challenged. It is very important to realise that the categories of understanding that we nurture (man/woman, dining room/bedroom) are often very limited and need to be redesigned to include varying realities. While reading the world, this openness to new categories and an inclusive approach towards unfamiliar ways of human existence can be liberating. The borders of our understanding need to be constantly challenged to include newer patterns of reality. All that we are not yet aware of demands an infinite extension of the capacity of our minds to construct meaning. It’s as simple as learning the name of a new colour, once the labels already learnt are not enough to distinguish the colours provided before us. The labels red, blue and green are not useful anymore. We’ll have to update our knowledge to include Munsell, Crayola and Pantone, all different colours, only that we chose to call it all blue, because we were never equipped with such terms of classification! Sensitivity to varying realities and choosing not to believe in a limited version of reality are the essential requirements to be a reader with great potential.
The text in conversation
The text is not a finished entity, it’s always in the process of evolving. Talking of literary texts, Shakespeare’s works are read from postcolonial or ecological perspectives today, and the author himself would never have dreamt of it. All the texts that surround us are in constant conversation with the people who respond to it. The more engaging the conversations are, the more enriching will be the text’s being.
As human beings with a limited life span, occupying a tiny space in this universe, we can widen the possibilities of our own existence by engaging in such conversations. Reading the texts that surround us from multiple perspectives will ultimately help us read ourselves differently. As we involve in an intense and nuanced reading of our world, we will acquire new tools to look at ourselves.
The world is what we read it to be. Let’s do the reading with more care and awareness, looking deeper into the images, abandoning limited categories for more spacious ones, and ultimately acquiring a better understanding of ourselves.
SCM Kerala 