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

15.1 The implied reader
Unit 15 Positioning the reader or spectator
Section 3 Attributing meaning

The meaning of a text is produced in a complex negotiation between the reader and the text. It cannot be said that one contributes more than the other, and much recent theorizing suggests a finely balanced negotiation between the two in terms of who or what determines the interpretation or meaning that the reader arrives at. Nevertheless, although it is clear that readers bring a great deal of background information with them, which they use in order to construct a ’reading’ of a text, the focus of this unit is on the way that texts address or position their readers. Texts address readers in a variety of ways, either by directly addressing them, or by indirectly encouraging them to agree with certain statements.

15.1 The implied reader

It is important to distinguish between the actual reader of any text and its implied reader. The actual reader is any person who reads the text, but the implied reader is an ideal or optimum figure that the text anticipates or constructs. In this sense, the implied reader is rather like a role that the real reader is encouraged to adopt, providing a ’position’ from which the real reader can interpret the text. For example, in the following extract from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902), the main narrator (Marlow) makes the following statement:

It is queer how out of touch with truth women are. They live in a world of their own, and there has never been anything like it, and never can be. It is too beautiful altogether, and if they were to set it up it would go to pieces before the first sunset. Some confounded fact we men have been living contentedly with ever since the day of creation would start up and knock the whole thing over.

Marlow is the main protagonist and narrator of this novel, and in general his views are not overly challenged by other views. It seems as if he as narrator and character is given a position from which the ’truth’ of the situation is given (Rimmon-Kenan, 1983; Toolan, 2001). The role that the reader is called upon to adopt here - that of the implied reader - is in fact a masculine role: this is cued for the reader by the use of ’we men’, a reference that includes Marlow and a group of men that comprises his audience on board a boat, together with the novel’s male readers. It is also cued by the reference to ’women’ as ’they’, which signals to the reader that the narrator is referring to a group to which ’we’ do not belong. The reader here may also be drawn into agreeing with what is said about women, since the statements are not modified in any way by qualifying phrases such as ’I think’ or ’Maybe’, or by counter-statements from Marlow’s listeners. The narrator’s views about women come from a position in which it is ’common sense’, a ’matter of fact’, that ’women . . . are out of touch with truth’, that ’they live in a world of their own’ and so on. In this way, therefore, we can say that the (actual) reader of Heart of Darkness is drawn into a position (that of the implied reader) where the obviousness of these stereotypes about women may be taken for granted.¹ However, that is not to say that we as readers have to agree with these views and we may well distance ourselves as real readers while recognizing the position of the implied reader.