Ways of Reading Third Edition - Martin Montgomery, Alan Durant, Nigel Fabb, Tom Furniss, Sara Mills 2007

1.1 Comprehension and interpretive variation
Unit 1 Asking questions as a way into reading
Section 1 Basic techniques and problem-solving

You open a book which begins:

PROLOGUE

The Storming of Seringapatam (1799)

Extracted from a Family Paper

I address these lines - written in India - to my relatives in England. My object is to explain the motive which has induced me to refuse the right hand of friendship to my cousin, John Herncastle. The reserve which I have hitherto maintained in this matter has been misinterpreted by members of my family whose good opinion I cannot consent to forfeit. I request them to suspend their decision until they have read my narrative. And I declare, on my word of honour, that what I am now about to write is, strictly and literally, the truth.

How does your reading proceed? Clearly you try to comprehend, in the sense of identifying meanings for individual words and working out relationships between them, drawing on your implicit knowledge of English grammar (see Unit 3, Analysing units of structure). If you are unfamiliar with words or idioms, you guess at their meaning, using clues presented in the context (as possibly with ’the right hand of friendship’). On the assumption that they will become relevant later, you make a mental note of discourse entities such as ’my relatives in England’ and ’John Herncastle’, as well as possible links between them. You begin to infer a context for the text, for instance by making decisions about what kind of speech event is involved: who is making the utterance, to whom, when and where? (In this case, an unnamed writer in India is addressing relatives in England - relatives who are therefore presumably also related to a certain John Herncastle - in order to correct an impression we are invited

to believe the writer feels they have formed of the writer’s ’reserve’ in a matter that has not, at this stage, been explained.) A world created by the text begins to build up, even though you are obliged to leave gaps: who is the writer who remains for the time being just ’I’? Who are the relatives? What has gone on before?

As you follow such interpretive strategies, which apply to all discourse (not just to literary works), you are likely to speculate about what kind of text this is: how it fits into whatever you take to be its discourse-type, or genre (see Unit 4, Recognizing genre). As it happens, the author’s Preface at the beginning of the particular book you have picked up opens with the words, ’In some of my former novels . . .’, so you may surmise that the text that follows is a novel, as its title also suggests: The Moonstone: A Romance, by Wilkie Collins, published in 1868. Your possible assumption that you are reading a slightly formal letter must now be embedded in a more complex model: that of a fictional letter within a narrative, functioning (so we are told by the subtitle) as the ’Prologue’ to a story that will include ’the Storming of Seringapatam’ - about which you expect at some stage to be informed. Because of the fictional context, you also have to adjust any straightforward reading you may have made of the assertion that what you will be told will be ’strictly and literally, the truth’; that assertion may apply within the fictional world but is unlikely to hold beyond it.

1.1 Comprehension and interpretive variation

The ways of reading indicated here are without doubt kinds of comprehension. But they show comprehension to consist not just of passive assimilation but of active engagement in inference and problem-solving. You infer information you feel the writer has invited you to grasp by presenting you with specific evidence and clues; and you make further inferences, for instance about how the text may be significant to you, or about its plausibility - inferences that form the basis of a personal response for which the author will inevitably be far less responsible.

Conceived in this way, comprehension will not follow exactly the same track for each reader. What is in question is not the retrieval of an absolute, fixed or ’true’ meaning that can be read off and checked for accuracy, or some timeless relation of the text to the world. Rather, we ascribe meanings to texts on the basis of interaction between what we might call textual and contextual material: between kinds of organization or patterning we perceive in a text’s formal structures (so especially its language structures) and various kinds of background, social knowledge, belief and attitude that we bring to the text.

Such background material inevitably reflects who we are. Factors such as the place and period in which we are reading, our gender, ethnicity, age and social class will encourage us towards certain interpretations but at the same

time obscure or even close off others. This doesn’t, however, make interpretation merely relative or even pointless. Precisely because readers from different historical periods, places and social experiences produce different but overlapping readings of the same words on the page - including for texts that engage with fundamental human concerns - debates about texts can play an important role in social discussion of beliefs and values.

How we read a given text also depends to some extent on our particular interest in reading it. Are we studying that text and trying to respond in a way that fulfils the requirement of a given course? Reading it simply for pleasure? Skimming it for information? Ways of reading on a train or in bed are likely to differ considerably from reading in a seminar room. Such dimensions of reading suggest - as others introduced later in the book will also do - that we bring an implicit (often unacknowledged) agenda to any act of reading. It doesn’t then necessarily follow that one kind of reading is fuller, more advanced or more worthwhile than another. Ideally, different kinds of reading inform each other, and act as useful reference points for and counterbalances to one another. Together, they make up the reading component of your overall literacy, or relationship to your surrounding textual environment.