| Chapter 1: | Introduction |
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even though they make possible that function. Rather, texts interact with the world, and the world responds in kind.
Victorian readers’ constant movements of signification between exteriority and interiority framed the relationship between fictional and empirical reality and made true meaning reducible to the impermanence of signs always placed under erasure. Victorian readers were left to supplement texts and the world around them with their own productions of meaning, which also must be supplemented by an emergent technical language. However, “the supplement,” Jacques Derrida explains, “occupies the middle point between total absence and total presence” (Of Grammatology 202). The supplementation of linguistic meaning by nonlinguistic forms merely fills an absence devoid of meaning, but the supplement does not achieve full plenitude of meaning without additional signs and supplements. As Derrida explicates,
Readers participate in a process whereby signs and signifiers are always being recontextualized and reinscribed. Although texts do reach conclusions, those conclusions might be revisited and contested through further examinations. Therefore, texts do