…every text is a type of its own reading…
Northrop Frye, The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (1981, p. 226)
Every night as you watch the news, you can see story forming up. The repetitious gabble of the reporter on the spot is soon smoothed to a studio version. The unmediated account is edited into coherence. Cause and effect are demonstrated by the way we order our account. It gathers a subjective human dimension as it is analyzed, discussed. We shovel meaning into it. The raw event is now processed. It is adapted into history.
Hilary Mantel, “Adaptation” (Reith Lecture 5, July 11, 2017)
And that is why the actual text needs the subjectivity that makes it possible for a reader to create a world of his own.
Jerome Bruner, Actual Minds, Possible Worlds (1986, p. 37)
There are doubtless other means by which discourse keeps meaning open or ‘performable’ by the reader—metaphor among them. But the three mentioned [presupposition, subjectification, and multiple perspective] suffice for illustration. Together they succeed in subjunctivizing reality, which is my way of rendering what [Wolfgang] Iser means by a narrative speech act…To be in the subjunctive mode is, then, to be trafficking in human possibilities rather than in settled certainties…To mean in this way, by the use of such intended violations or ‘conversational implicatures,’ is to create gaps and to recruit presuppositions to fill them.
Jerome Bruner, Actual Minds, Possible Worlds (1986, p. 26)
Facts are strong, but they are not stable. Soon you find your sources are riddled with contradiction, and that even when the facts are agreed, their meaning often isn’t.
Hilary Mantel, “Can These Bones Live?” (Reith Lecture 4, July 4, 2017)
When we are puzzled about what we encounter, we renegotiate its meaning in a manner that is concordant with what those around us believe.
Jerome Bruner, Actual Minds, Possible Worlds (1986, p. 122)
