Standing on a Rainbow
text
bookSection
Mackey
Margaret
aut
Readers are material beings, placed in time and space, history and geography, and the material conditions of each reader have an inevitable impact on the reading experience. In this chapter, I address questions of how our understanding of literature may shift when we consider the materiality of the audience as well as of the text and of those responsible for its production. To increase awareness of the specificity of that material audience—in contrast to the widely studied concept of the mass audience—I focus here on two singular readers of one particular book. I seek to balance what I can ascertain about the readers against what I have been able to learn about the author, and against my assessment of at least some aspects of the text under consideration, Stand on a Rainbow by Mary Quayle Innis. I then assess the conceptual implications of this tiny case study for how we may develop a principled literary map.
As readers, we each have some sense of our own position in time and space, often almost by default. As students and scholars, we are sometimes invited to consider the importance of an author’s position in time and space. As contemporary lay readers (rather than scholars), we may also be encouraged to pay heed to the author’s persona as developed in websites, Twitter accounts, reading tours, and the like. None of these readerly stances is particularly rare; yet it is unusual to develop an awareness of a reading experience that takes account of the placement of both author and readers. One reason for the scarcity of such an approach, of course, is that readers are multiple and largely unknowable in that very plurality. A book, simply by the fact of its existence, is designed on the broadcast model of one-to-many; to consider it in terms of one-to-one is to alter the exploration of its address in radical ways.
My aim here is to explore how we understand a reading experience if we balance an assessment of the text and a study of the author with an equivalent focus on readers. Already, my articles are betraying my argument. In my small case study, the text and the author can be designated through the definitive article the, but my specimen readers must more accurately be labelled in the singular as a reader—in this case two particular readers, one of whom influenced the other. The reader does not exist, except as a generic category almost too abstract to be useful at all—an audience member whose experience is represented in an aggregate description or even a set of statistics. Very often a reference to the reader camouflages a self-referential assumption that all readers behave just like the person making the reference. Unpacking this careless generalization is one of the challenges of this study of the readerly experience.
Here are the units of my study. In 1943, an author named Mary Quayle Innis published a book entitled Stand on a Rainbow. It tells the story of Leslie, a housewife and mother of three children, two sons and a daughter. In the 1950s, my own mother regularly borrowed this book from the public library and read it over and over again; she described it as her favourite novel. Curious about what it was that inspired her so greatly, I also read this book more than once—initially as a child of ten or eleven and later as an adult, purposefully looking back on my childhood reading experiences. At this later date, I came full circle in some ways by locating comments on Mary Quayle Innis by her own daughter. I also made a discovery that recontextualized the author for me and altered my own reading relationship with her text.
Conventional studies of literature place fiction in time and space (with associated cultural and ideological implications) and often do the same for an author. My project entails an equivalent placement effort of two readers. Obviously not every reader of a book can be located in such a singular way, but I hope at least to reveal a standard omission in the conventional scholarly account of literature and to show how that absence can lead to an imbalance in our literary understanding that is so normalized as to be almost invisible.
Cultural mapping and the digital sphere: place and space
book
Panofsky
Ruth
edt
Kellett
Kathleen
edt
First edition
Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
The University of Alberta Press
2015
monographic
978-1-77212-049-3
AZ105 .C84 2015
Copyright © 2015 The University of Alberta Press