Text (Reader+Author)=Meaning

 

The image above is from Claudia Rankine's Don't Let Me Be Lonely (2004), a little free library find that may be my favorite read of the summer.  I finished it this morning, at one point standing in the living room because I couldn't bear to put it down as I went to close the window, and then was so transfixed by the words that I stood in the middle of a dark room, reading.  

Its structure is soooo rewarding: there is a narrative arc of sorts, but then surprises and reprises.  I read too fast, wanting the next bon bon of surprise and delight.  It's personal, academic, accessible, and political.  It reminds me that I want to change the image that represents me on social media to a water bottle filled with rice and baby formula.  The image above refers to a theme in the text about livers, but I like how the alimentary tract here terminates with an intestinal USA, a full one.  (I am not sure what to make of the placement of Hawaii.)

The passage above the image includes these lines about a dialogue between author and editor: 

"I understand that what she wants is an explanation of the mysterious connections that exist between an author and her text.  If I am present in the subject position what responsibility do I have to the content, to the truth value, of the words themselves?  Is 'I' even me or am 'I' a gear shift to get from one sentence to the next?  Should I say we?" (Rankine 54).

Rankine's musings hit on a couple of issues I am thinking about currently:

1) First person narration.  I am writing a thing that is fiction, but in a confessional first person ("Curses: My Year of Internet Dating").  It does concern me that readers will think the "I" is me when really I do want something more widely applicable.  I am trying to write a "we," an everyperson kind of scenario.  It is inevitable that folks will think this is about me (and worse, if they are someone I have gone on a date with, about them).  

2) "We" is about the narrative voice (the weaving together of author and subject and fiction and known truth, the embodied and the imaginary).  BUT "we" is also about how the text and its reader create meaning.

Yesterday I wrote this in my journal: 

"Good literary analysis teaches you about yourself, your world, and the people you know.  

It is 'creative' in that it is generative.  

The text is what it is (50% of meaning) and how its reader meets it (the other 50%)"

(My journal: August 7, 2025)

I think a lot about how reading is actually a compact between the text and its reader.  I think I disagree with the new critics that texts have a pure intrinsic meaning, one that is objective.  But I don't think I am exactly advocating Reader Response Criticism either.  I'm probably closer to RR but feel like something in that model isn't quite right.  It implies a lack of rigor maybe?  I'm not sure.  I need to unpick my biases and learn more about RR first.

Anyway: leaving other thinkers aside, I think texts have meaning because of how readers interact with them *and that readers should be allowed freedom in their interactions, and not be shoehorned into checklists demanding they identify certain codified and approved "important" textual elements.*

After reading Rankine though, and in spite of wanting the "I" in my own writing not to be collapsed with me, I think there is also some residue of the author that we have to contend with, like it or not.  

For years, I have believed Roland Barthes that the author is dead.

But now maybe I wish the author wasn't?  Maybe I wish that the text had certain intrinsic characteristics, but also that a murky web of connections reveals things about the author and their world, and that to arrive at any meaning at all in reading fiction in particular, a reader HAS TO bring their own murky webs, connections, experiences and insights, their memories  and imaginations, into play.

Trivia: memory and imagination happen in the same part of the brain.  The Hippocampus. 

No not this kind of hippocampus.

Perhaps it is all part of my freak out about AI and its effect on the Humanities, reading and writing in particular? 

Maybe it is just me being defensive?  

I insist on putting all the humans back into the equation.  For now, at any rate, when it feels like AI is the final precipice off which "English" or "Literary Studies" will fall, and conclusively perish?

But humans will still live, right?

And humans will still want to feel themselves seen and understood by other humans?  They will still want to connect, and share powerful emotions?

Because that is what makes life worth living as a human, right?

So, I end with math:  Text (Reader+Author)= Meaning 

and maybe "meaning" here really means connection.