READING THE WRITING AND WRITING THE READING - I LOVE BOTH !!- sudhanshu

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ONCE I WROTE an article during my teens for the Lucknow Daily newspaper – “The Pioneer” ?that had a small irregular “arts” section. They wanted something laudatory about the value or perhaps just the pleasure of reading. This last noun, “pleasure,” annoyed me because it is routinely associated with emotion: delight accompanied by suspense. Reading is fundamental—emphasis on the “fun.” At the least, of course, it is understood, in popular discourse, to be uplifting, instructive; at its best encouraging deep thought.

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Thoughts about the practice of reading engaged me early on as a writer/imaginer as well as an absorbent reader.

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I began reading when I was three years old, but it was always difficult for me. Not difficult as in hard to do, but difficult in the sense of having a hard time looking for meaning in and beyond the words. Mother encouraged me for reading. The first grade primer sentence “Run, Jip, run” led me to the question, Why is he running? Is that a command? If so, where to? Is the dog being chased? Or is it chasing someone? Later on when I tackled “Hansel and Gretel” more serious questions flooded. As they did with nursery rhymes and games: “ring around the rosie, pocket full of posies.” It was some time before I understood that the rhyme, the game was about death during the bubonic plague.

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So I chose for – THE ?PIONEER - ?an attempt to distinguish reading as a skill and reading as an art.

?This is some of what I wrote:

?“Mr. Sharma awakened to discover that the room was full of moonlight. He sat up and stared at the floor boards—the color of silver—and then at the ticking on his pillow, which might have been brocade, and after a second, he saw half of the moon five feet away in his shaving mirror, paused as if it were waiting for his permission to enter. It rolled forward and cast a dignifying light on everything. The straight chair against the wall looked stiff and attentive as if it were awaiting an order and Mr. Sharma’s trousers, hanging to the back of it, had an almost noble air, like the garment some great man had just flung to his servant.”

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In those opening sentences by me, I chose to direct ?readers to Mr. Sharma’s ?fantasy, his hopes. The ticking on a pillow, minus a pillow slip, is like brocade, rich, elaborate. Moonlight turns a wooden floor to silver and “casts a dignifying light” everywhere. His chair is “stiff and attentive” and seems to await an order from him. Even his trousers hanging on the chair’s back had “a noble air,” like the garment some great man has flung to his servant. So, Mr. Sharma has strong, perhaps unmanageable dreams of majesty, of controlling servants to do his bidding, of rightful authority. Even the moon in his shaving mirror pauses “as if it were waiting for his permission to enter.” We don’t really have to wait (a few sentences on) to see his alarm clock sitting on an overturned bucket or to wonder why his shaving mirror is five feet away from his bed, to know a great deal about him—his pretension, his insecurity, his pathetic yearnings—and to anticipate his behavior as the story unfolds.

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In my essay, I was trying to identify characteristics of flawless writing that made it possible to read fiction again and again, to step into its world confident that attentiveness will always yield wonder. How to make the work ?while it makes me do the same.

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I thought my illustration was fine as far as it went, but what I could not clearly articulate was the way in which a reader participates in the text—not how she interprets it, but how she helps to write it. (Very like singing: there are the lyrics, the score, and then the performance—which is the individual’s contribution to the piece.)

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Slowly I learned in reading – to read the invisible - what lies under, between, outside the lines, hidden until the right reader discovers it. By “right” reader, I am suggesting that certain books are obviously not for every reader. It’s possible to admire but not become emotionally or intellectually involved in Proust. Even a reader who loves the book may not be the best or right lover. The reader who is “made for” the book is the one attuned to the invisible reading.

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The usual dyad in literary criticism is the stable text versus the actualized reader. The reader and his readings can change, but the text does not. It is stable. As the text cannot change, it follows that a successful relationship between text and reader can only come about through changes in the reader’s projections. It seems to me that the question becomes whether those dormant projections are products of the reader or the writer. What I want to suggest is that may not always be so. While the responsibility of interpretation is understood to be transferred to the reader, the text is not always a quiet patient the reader brings to life. I want to introduce a third party into the equation—the author.

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Some writers of fiction design their texts to disturb—not merely with suspenseful plots, provocative themes, interesting characters, or even mayhem. They design their fiction to disturb, rattle, and engage the entire environment of the reading experience.

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Withdrawing metaphor and simile is just as important as choosing them. Leading sentences can be written to contain buried information that completes, invades, or manipulates the reading. The unwritten is as significant as the written. And the gaps that are deliberate, and deliberately seductive, when filled by the “right” reader, produce the text in its entirety and attest to its living life.

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Think of “Benito Cereno”( which I read long back ) ?in this regard, where the author chooses the narrator’s point of view to deliberately manipulate the reading experience.

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There are certain assumptions about categories that are regularly employed to arouse this disturbance. I would like to see a book written where the gender of the narrator is unspecified, unmentioned. Gender, like race, carries with it a panoply of certainties—all deployed by the writer to elicit certain responses and, perhaps, to defy others.

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I have written elsewhere about the metaphorical uses to which codes are put—sometimes to clarify, sometimes to solidify assumptions readers may hold. My read - authors Virginia Woolf with her gaps, Faulkner with his delays both control the reader and lead her to operate within the text. But is it true that the text does not formulate expectations or their modification. Or that such formulation is the province of the reader, enabling the text to be translated and transferred to his own mind?

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Writing the reading involves seduction—luring the reader into environments outside the pages. Disqualifying the notion of a stable text for one that is dependent on an active and activated reader who is writing the reading—in invisible reading.

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Let me close with some words from a book that I believe is a further example.

?-???????? “They rose up like men. We saw them. Like men they stood.”