| Chapter 1: | What Happens? What Is to Be Done? A Paean to Bricolage |
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Or, this same text might appear to a third reader looking over the shoulder of the first as a series of associations which draw him along the sentence line and keep him close to the surface of the text, inviting little or no speculation about ‘depths’. (If this is happening, the third, ‘associational’, approach I will describe is likely to be most helpful.) In all such readings—in all readings whatsoever—the ‘same’ text can clearly no longer be considered the same according to the meaning we usually allow the word. Any text becomes an entirely different text type depending upon the interpretative direction taken by the reader who labours to make sense of it.
The Three Approaches Immediately Re-Visited and Defined
A surface-to-depths reading is one which tends to picture the text’s important features as ‘outcrops’ connected as islands are joined invisibly beneath the sea. The sense of this is that things are connected at a deeper level to other things which are not immediately evident.
A discontinuities reading tends to receive the text as composed of features interrupted by ‘blanks’ or ‘gaps’ which have to be ‘filled in’ by the reader. In this way of patterning a text, which takes place largely at surface level and remains there, the connecting elements are implicitly present in the text as given, but want a kind of topographical realisation by the reader to complete them. In contrast to the ‘surface-to-depths’ model, attention tends to rest in the text as it appears. The sense that this reading gives is of things provided which are separated from other things also provided, requiring connection for their completion.
An associational pattern of reading is one where items in the sentence tend to bring to mind others which are syntagmatically proximate in the text as given. These ‘items’ may be concepts, images, figures of speech, or associated words or phrases. The sense of this type of reading is of things suggesting other things which are contiguous to them in the syntactic string. In contrast to a ‘surface-todepths’ response, such associations are horizontally entailed and keep attention at sentence level. The weight of meaning of the utterance as a whole remains with the metonymic chain. There is little or no sense of a plunging into paradigmatic depths of the sort that may be encountered in a ‘surfaces-to-depths’ response.