The World-Real and the Reality of Reading

     In his article “Literature In the Reader: Affective Stylistics”, Stanley E. Fish suspiciously states that “no one would argue that the act of reading can take place in the absence of someone who reads.” His statement is leading me to the question of logic of utterance and what is known to be the rational mind that reaches an understanding through any sort of utterance. While discussing the so-called phenomenological method that Martin Heidegger saw necessary to adapt to be able to put the relationship between being and the world -the tools- into words, and later Wolfgang Iser attenuated for the inquiry of the affinity between text and reader, I do find it essential to examine the reader in the process of reading in his/her natural environment, as if all is a matter of time, to record what the details of a text do to the reader so that the construction of meaning in a liner existence is to be brought out into the open. No doubt that Heidegger’s phenomenological method ignores one thing: the existence might also be a construction, that is to say, a Grand Narrative, and phainomenon can only reveal what Lacan excludes from the Real where Heidegger’s Da-Sein is fully connected to nothingness.   
     What led me to a structure that I call the Reality of Reading was an experiment. The reality, as far as my term is concerned, is exactly the opposite of Lacan's notion of the Real that is "an uninterpretable dimension of existence; an existence without the filters and buffers of our signifying or meaning-making systems." In a nutshell,"the real is something we can know noting about" for Lacan. 

     I find Lacan’s suggestion of reality is similar to that of Buddhism in that both claim we can experience the world of truths and oneness (the Real) when we have a moment in which we realize that it is not a set of timeless truths but ideology that has made the world as we know it. Buddhism recommends meditation for reaching the unique truth, while Lacan is rather desperate as he believes we can never get beyond the trauma of the Real that reveals itself transiently in the moments of realization. Claiming that we have an anxious feeling from time to time that the unattainable Real is there, Lacan ascribes a status of inaccessibility to reality and its functions, excluding humans’ perception from it. Lacan pulls himself off the problem of reality by problematizing and carrying it to the unattainable terrain of human consideration. On the other hand, I suggest that we can know a real; a real that might be called the World-Real, considering that reality is a matter only when it is a cause, not only to us but also to itself. 
     The World-Real is what language speaks about. In another sense, the World-Real is what the human cognition is limited to apprehend, or rather, what the human cognition has chosen to survive through. Yet, at this point, it is important to note that reality shouldn’t be regarded as a matter of limitedness or accession. On the contrary, reality is a matter of interaction, a matter of the feeling of Sorge, as Heidegger puts it. The Reality of Reading is, then, an action that occurs within the boundaries of the World-Real; the confines of the way that the human existence has seen necessary to adapt in the act of actualizing the meaninglessness and nothingness of the universe.

     My experiment involves a subject as the reader and a text that I have formed combining several unrelated texts. The subject is a 24-year-old male, muslim-born agnostic, lives in Turkey, university graduate, and has a keenness in literature, mostly that of Europe, yet he has never read the Bible. The text I have constituted is included Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem “God’s Grandeur” and another stanza that contains some terms that Sigmund Freud coined. The text as a whole looks like this:

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

    It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

    It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil

Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

    And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

    And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil

Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;

    There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

And though the last lights off the black West went

    Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

    World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

                             Condensation

                                     Sin

                     The Meaning of Death

                                 Heaven…

     I presented the text as an abstract from the Bible, as a speech given by an apostle to observe how the pre-expectations of the reader shape his understanding of the text. The first two stanzas of the poem are presented in the form of either single or double lines. I interviewed with the subject after he read each part. After he read the first line “the world is charged with the grandeur of God”, he expected a prophet to take the stage in the next line because he associates the praises for God with the praises for Jesus Christ. However, his expectation let him down as the second line of the poem was still about the grandeur of God.  When he read the second line, “it will flame out, like shining from shook oil”, he couldn’t make sense out of it because clearly, an apostle must have been unaware of the practice of oozing oil. At this point, the subject said that the text drives him to uncertainty and disguise of truth.

     After completing the first stanza, the subject declared that he had totally understood the text; the main theme is the reproach of the situation of human condition. He said that this is a speech given by the apostle in order to convince people that Christianity is the only real religion and it is God’s demand to convert to it.

     When he read the first line of the second stanza, “and for all this, nature is never spent”,  he was completely confused. He reached the conclusion that the apostle is inviting humanity to a sort of penetration into the wild, benefiting from it and exploiting it for the sake of humanity. Therefore, the untouched nature is something bad for the apostle. The contradiction got even wider with the second line of the second stanza, “there lives the dearest freshness deep down things.” Basically, the subject concluded, if the dearest freshness is there deep inside the nature when humans stay away from it, then it must be something to be appreciated. However, the apostle seems unhappy about this situation. The rest of the second stanza celebrates this freshness and beauty in nature and at that point, the subject totally believed that the apostle, a man of God, is trying to make people exploit the nature so that the freshness in nature can be used for the advancement of humanity and the development of the relationship between human beings and the universe.  

     The third stanza that I made up and presented as a whole as the rest of the apostle’s speech did make no meaning for the subject in the beginning. He asked for some time to understand the stanza. At this point, I asked him “what do you need time for?” His answer was something that revealed the way people construct the reality rather than perceiving a reality. He said: “I need to find the connection -the unity- between the third stanza and the first two stanzas.” I didn’t answer. He tried really hard and after 15 minutes or so, he came up with a logical explanation that reveals the relationship between the third and other stanzas. He claimed that when the apostle gave this speech, there was no writing tradition and those words were carried to the next centuries with the oral tradition and then written down. Therefore, there are some punctuation marks missing. The subject understood the stanza as follows: “Condensation: sin.” That is to say, he claimed that the condensation (he claimed that this word means ‘people’s practice to force themselves to live in a particular area’) is a sin. The apostle wants people to explore the nature, to discover “the freshness” and the beauty in it. Therefore, these first two lines of the third stanza are totally related to the urge in the second stanza: The Apostle is not happy with the idea that humans live in a particular area and they do not bother themselves with the new discoveries, which is regarded as a sin by God. Likewise, the subject understood the third and fourth lines of the third stanza as follows: “The meaning of death: heaven”, which basically says that when you die, you will go to heaven. He claimed that the apostle utters these lines because he wants to make people afraid of God so that they can be directed to the life that the apostle wants them to live; exploring and exploiting the nature. In the end, the subject made a sense from the whole of the text presented to him and he constructed a theme for the text. I asked him if he had ever suspected that this poem might be formed by different pieces of writings, his answer was a strong ‘no.’ He never thought it as he was instructed to regard the text as a whole with a unity and fixed meaning, and therefore, he tried to reach that unity and meaning through it.

     What the subject did in this experiment is exactly what I call the interaction with the World-Real and how he did it is the Reality-of-Reading. Humans construct a reality and then they judge the conceptual rightfulness of actions in this reality. The fact that I presented the text as a whole taken from the Bible had an enormous effect on the way the reader approached and perceived the text. If I had changed a few words and presented the text as the lyrics of a punk rock song, the reader would have approached and perceived it in a greatly different way. Therefore, the reality is a constructed meta-narrative that we are forced to perceive in a particular way. The world is a huge fragmented unity and presented us as meaningless and out of joint. The task of uniting the fragments is left to us and as my experiment shows, we need a sort of logic when approaching these fragments of the world. There is no meaning, but a particular way to make what we call meaning. Moreover, as Jacques Derrida argues, the language stands in for reality and therefore, the world we experience is a text and there is nothing outside the text. In this sense, language is the foremost tool that we adapt to make meaning out of the fragmented and unique segments of the world. When we look at mountains, rivers and other natural beauties, the presentation and other associations are also coming with them as the text I formed and presented to the subject carried many associations with itself. Consequently, the way the reader responses to a text reveals the way human beings response to what is used to be called the reality.