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

1.2 Types of meaning
Unit 1 Asking questions as a way into reading
Section 1 Basic techniques and problem-solving

Faced with variability within reading, many people maintain that they would prefer one single route that all textual investigation could follow: a search for ’meaning’ that would follow some pre-given sequence of procedures or tests. The points made above, however, suggest that meaning cannot be uniform or singular in this way. Looking for the meaning or meanings of a text involves exploring many different sorts of question - or alternatively blocking off those different sorts of question in order to settle on a possibly more comfortable but significantly reduced, single interpretation.

There is a more positive way of looking at variability of meaning, however, that doesn’t see it as merely loss of truth or clarity. Diversity within reading can be productive as a catalyst to reflection on how language works, what meaning is and how reading contributes to the creation of beliefs and social values.

Before moving on to consider specific local questions that can kick-start your reading of any given text, we list here the main alternative kinds of general meaning that compete for attention and interact as you read.

1.2.1 The intended meaning?

One of the commonest ways of looking for the meaning of a text is to wonder what the author meant by it. To speculate about authorial intention, such as Shakespeare’s intention in writing Hamlet, involves trying to extrapolate from what the text says, second-guessing a set of social circumstances very different from your own. In effect, you try to reconstruct the likely meanings or effects that any given sentence, image or reference might have had: these might be the ones the author intended. In doing this, you make a huge imaginative leap: you try to gauge an author’s beliefs, emotions, knowledge and attitudes, and to guess what the author ’had in mind’ at the time of writing.

There are obvious difficulties with deciding on a text’s meaning like this. A persona, or invented voice, might have been deliberately adopted, separating what the speaker or narrator of a text says from the writer’s own feelings. In plays, novels and narrative poems, characters speak as constructs created by the author, not necessarily as mouthpieces for the author’s own thoughts. Even the speaker of a first person lyric poem (the poetic ’I’) must be regarded as an invented speaker, not a clear window into the writer’s self.

Besides, there is no infallible way in which an intention can be verified. That is largely why the critics W.K. Wimsatt and M.C. Beardsley (1946) dismissed the quest to discover what the author ’had in mind’ as an intentional fallacy: an unwarranted shift from what the words of a text appear to mean to what we imagine the author meant by using them. In addition to difficulties presented by reading a text produced in a different place or period, language can occasionally escape the speaker’s intentions, producing meanings that were not anticipated. Sometimes slippages or failures of meaning may undermine any seemingly intended or coherent meaning completely (see Unit 14, Authorship and intention).

1.2.2 The text’s own meaning?

If you look for this kind of meaning (which some critics have called ’objective’ interpretation), then specific features of the text will be the key to your interpretation. How the text is organized (what words and structures it uses, how images and ideas are patterned) will direct you towards a specific meaning. What is important in this framework is to observe details of language and form. You examine choices of expression and the use of stylistic devices, such as parallel structures or figurative language, and contrast the ways the text is presented with other, alternative ways it might have been presented (which would have produced different meanings).

If pursued in isolation, however, this search for a meaning that should be predictable simply from the text’s own organization runs into difficulties. The fact that texts are interpreted differently in different historical periods, and by differing social groups or readerships, challenges the notion of an ’objective’ meaning determined by the text alone - unless only you are right and all those other readers were somehow simply mistaken. Interpretive variation suggests that the social circumstances in which a text is produced and interpreted, and the expectations readers bring to it, can significantly affect what it will be taken to mean.

1.2.3 An individual meaning?

Perhaps the meaning of a text is whatever your personal response to it is: what the text means to you. Texts are suggestive, and they connect with individual experiences, memories and personal associations for words and images. What you might value, therefore, is your own direct engagement with the text, reworking it into a form linked to your own life experiences.

Many critics, however, including Wimsatt and Beardsley (1949), have argued that this sort of reading involves an affective fallacy: an over-attention to personal response at the expense of what the words of the text actually say. Concern with personal resonances of a text can displace attention from the text’s own structures and rhetorical organization. It is also possible that many of the memories or associations triggered as you read may be either stock responses or idiosyncratic reactions that go off at purely personal tangents, having little to do with the text that prompted them.

1.2.4 General processes of making meaning?

Meanings are undoubtedly produced by creative acts of reading that you perform on a text. So, perhaps, instead of investigation of textual details that guide a particular interpretation, emphasis should be placed on the mechanisms or procedures by which texts come to have whatever meanings are attributed to them. If so, looking for meaning should involve exploring the interpretive conventions and social institutions of reading, such as identifying and contrasting themes or treating particular elements of a text as central symbols, rather than reporting local outcomes of particular acts of reading. Readings that are produced would be valuable to the extent that they offer illustration of general reading processes; and meanings you articulate would be finally only as interesting as the processes by means of which they were arrived at.

Reading texts in this way, however, could easily become highly repetitive. Almost any text would be equally useful or interesting; and, while reading clearly does involve general processes, readers bring different expectations and ideologies to bear, with the result that readings cannot be analysed exhaustively in terms of general codes. Nor is interest in reading texts normally reducible to how interpretation takes place in the mind. It is often prompted by concern with the experiences or topics being represented.

1.2.5 Meaning and a text’s reception?

People don’t all think as you do, and they certainly haven’t always thought the same as you in the past. So, perhaps, what a text means, since readers bring their own beliefs, attitudes and expectations into how they read, is all the various things it has meant to different readerships in the past, together with the different meanings it has for different communities of readers today.

Readings of texts are diverse, but they are not random; they fall into categories or groups, with the shared or overlapping meanings of these groups changing over time and differing between places in describable ways. Understanding the meaning of a text might therefore mean not only accounting for individual personal response, but also charting such responses within larger, social and historical patterns of reception.

In advertising and market research, readers (for instance, of newspapers or magazines) are classified on the basis of variables such as class, age, gender and income (as As, Bs, ABs, C1s, C2s, etc.). In literary criticism, readers have more often been distinguished on the basis of their imagined relative taste (as elite and mass audiences, or readers with highbrow or popular taste, for example). Readerships, however, might be identified on the basis of other considerations, including the function reading a given text serves (e.g. as a marker of social accomplishment, for study, as distraction from pain or work, or out of cultural curiosity). What potentially makes patterning within the responses of actual readers or audiences interesting is how different groups of readers appropriate core features of or statements in a discourse into their own preoccupations or ways of thinking and living.

1.2.6 Critical social meanings?

Critical social meanings are formed when a collision or contradiction occurs between one reader’s response and a meaning commonly accepted by a significant group of other people. As an individual reader, you are always a specific social subject, with an age, gender, ethnicity, class and educational background. Your responses and interpretations are to some extent guided by these aspects of your location. If you express a critical or polemical view of a given text’s significance and influence, you are reading in an actively socially engaged, rather than detached, disinterested or simply curious way. Support for critical readings, like that for established readings they challenge, lies in combined forms of analysis: analysis of a prevailing culture’s established imagery (how particular topics such as race, sexuality, work, religious belief, social conflict or money are conventionally represented); and analysis of how images of any of these topics relate to your own sense of how such topics should be represented.