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Copyright © Carmel Bird April 2001
All rights reserved.

Are you in the library, in the spa, on the train – in the sunshine, in the rain? Are you reading a book or a photocopy of some pages? Are you reading on a screen? What if you are listening to this on tape? What if someone is reading aloud to you?

Reading. Who needs it? There is so much print in the world that reading might be losing its point. Too much to read. Better not read anything. Image and sound, let’s have image and sound. The word ‘reading’ has broad meanings these days – we read the world, we make meaning – but in any case I’m mainly going to talk about reading stories in some kind of print, because I get the feeling that’s what you want to know about. I am making assumptions about you. Assumptions are all I’ve got here. I try to imagine I am you so that I can tell you things you would like to know. But they have to be things I want to tell. We are in this together. Human beings need to construct their world in stories, constantly, and need also to have those stories reflected in and nourished by the stories of other human beings. The old-fashioned way, but not the oldest way, of discovering the stories of others is through reading books.

Books are among my dearest treasures; reading them, is among my sweetest occupations. I am a reader. I have been a reader since I was a child, looking forward then to birthdays and Christmases partly because I expected to get new books. I used to read the books on the shelves at home, and now as I dig into my memory for some of these to show you, a strange little book moves forward into my consciousness. It is tiny, maybe one and a half inches square, half an inch thick. It is made from amber-coloured glass, with a piece of beaten silver on the front cover. Into the silver is impressed the image of the infant Jesus in crown and elaborate robes. He is the Infant of Prague, and the book contains a fine slender Rosary of golden horn beads. You could say it isn’t really a book and that there was no reading here. But if I start on the Infant we’ll be here all day; and if I get onto the Rosary we’ll need a week. Telling the beads is an ancient way of communicating. And that’s what reading and writing come down to, or come up from – communicating. I want to communicate with you. Since we are not in the same room, will you let me reach you; will you read my words?

Right now you are my reader. But things are not as simple as they seem. You are my second reader; I am my first. I have the pleasure of telling all this to myself, before it can get to you. I am working on a couple of levels – talking to myself but thinking about you – writing to you but thinking about myself.

The idea of a writer suggests the idea of a reader; a story suggests a teller and a listener. My mind flips to such reading matter as the information on the candy-bar: sunflower seeds, peanuts, sesame seeds, organic honey, glucose. This short history of the composition of the candy-bar has an implied reader. Do they expect us to read the postage stamps? I read on one that the Tasmanian Tiger is an endangered species. That word ‘endangered’ has a huge story to tell. Depends how you define it, how you read. The way I see it, the animal was made extinct, but is now being cloned from its DNA, and so may be rescued from extinction. It was thought to be beyond danger, but is now in danger of coming back. Endangered species.

The impulse to make stories seems to me twined from two indivisible parts – the listener or reader and the teller or writer are always, to some extent, one creature, a caduceus. In coming to this idea I have gone back to thoughts of myself as a very young child, listening to stories of all kinds, particularly the accounts of daily life and gossip which I heard around me. And I have remembered some sense of taking the stories in, of making them part of myself, of remaking them even as I was listening. I realise I don’t know, in human development, what can be said to come first, the listener or the teller. For when I tell stories to myself, I am both; when I listen, I am still both; when I tell, again, I am both.

So as I am speaking to you, writing to you, we are both the reader, and as you take in what I write, you become the writer, the teller, the maker of the tale, the maker of the meaning of the tale. But we come together first of all, in the simple black and white world of print, as: me writer – you reader. It is my first responsibility to get the words here; then it is your responsibility to get the meaning out of them, my meaning, and your meaning, both. And in the end I’m not sure which is which, but I would like you to get what I imagine to be my meaning. I don’t want this to be just an opportunity for you to make up your own mind about things and to ignore me. You are supposed to be listening to what I am saying. Writing to be read is an act of vanity. I want you to notice me, and to notice what I am saying. I do my job; you do yours.

The writer and the reader will always, I reckon, be fertilised or infected by each other. You can take the sex image or the disease image here. Reading, although people describe it as something we do for information or for pleasure or for a bit of both, has always had other and more powerful and truthful imagery in its saddlebags (I tried and tried to get rid of that wild west word, but it wouldn’t go away); it has those pictures of sex and disease. Parents tell children they will ruin their eyes (disease), and that may be true, but parents also fear that reading and wanking are, if not identical, at least close. They are anxious to the point of mania that the child should learn to read, but in cases where reading then takes over, the parents show their real colours, their true puritanism, revealing the fact that they really meant to gain control, not lose it. Time, you see, is to be used profitably, not wasted on reading books. Then there is the danger that comes with the text and its intent and its content. The information you get when you read can be disruptive, dangerous in various ways. You might learn how to make bombs or drugs or love, for example. You could be utterly corrupted. By reading. Imagine. Playing with fire here. In my childhood there was an epidemic of polio, and all the books in the public library had to be fumigated. Great word – fumigated. In France during the early seventeenth century, there were attempts to suppress tiny mystical books which unknown priests introduced into convents. Dangerous sexy stuff. Books have often been burned to stop the ideas from getting around.

And if reading can do all these things, what fun to be a writer. The dizzying power of it all. Pen mightier than sword. Think how you can wound with the words you speak; think how you can soothe and heal. And nourish. There, then, is the food image.

What I really hope I am doing here is nourishing you. Not soothing, of course – I don’t want to lull you at all; I want you alert and active, making meaning and then going out to make your own wars with words. Stir up some trouble. Perhaps you are writing a novel.

For the space of the reading of a novel, the writer wants the reader’s full attention. The responsibility of the writer, then, is to give the work the energy, the care that will ensure this attention. The reader is an imagined presence, an implied receptor all along. The now anonymous manufacturer of the little amber Rosary book had an imagined user in mind, a hope-image, a destined child – a child who is not very far or very different from some notion or memory of a child within the manufacturer of the little amber book. Readers live on and multiply; writers die. To some extent it must always, I believe, be the case, that the reader is an imagined presence in the transaction. I sometimes meet students who claim to be writing for themselves alone, to have no reader other than themselves in mind. I believe these students are sincere in their aims, but I also reflect that the reader in the writer, the first reader, is already very close to the second reader, the reader outside. The first reader is having pleasure (not unmixed with pain) writing. If this writing gets to a second reader, this second one may receive some of the pleasure (and perhaps the pain). It is an interesting exercise, to write with the pure motive of yourself as sole reader. I can’t really do it myself, but some writers apparently can. It’s worth trying.

*

EXERCISE ONE

With pen and paper, not with your keyboard, write two separate pieces of five hundred words each on the topic ‘Ghosts’. The first piece will be written for a second reader. The second piece will be written for yourself alone. Because of the nature of the second piece, you will be the sole judge of the differences between the two pieces. The second piece will have to be destroyed half an hour after you have written it. This ensures that it is never going to be read by anyone else. Now write five hundred words on the experience of writing for yourself alone. You must destroy the second piece of writing before you write this third one. You may use the keyboard for this piece of work. Use the first and third pieces of writing as a basis for discussion.

*

One of the secret and personal narratives every normal human being is meant to construct is the story of dreams. Are you the writer or the reader of your dreams, or both? Both I suppose. It is possible, to a certain extent, to control dreams, but usually they are beyond the dreamer’s control. This is probably pure narrative without a second reader. When people record their dreams in writing they are in a sense becoming the second reader of their own work. And if they never show the record to anyone, then the loop remains personal.

*

EXERCISE TWO

Again with pen and paper (because this is meant to be possibly secret and personal and destructible), keep a record of your dreams for a month. Try to do it for yourself alone as the reader. You can just try to follow the narratives as you recall them, or you can make comment as you go along. Then make a decision about whether you will let someone else read this. What would be the purpose of showing this work to someone else? How might your account differ if you were really planning to give it to a friend or a therapist to read?

*

When my writer-self and my reader-self are working well together as I write, the work is very pleasurable. Being two is more fun than being one, I suppose. The reader is constantly responding to the writer, and that is just what the writer wants. And there is pleasure going backwards and forwards. Nice. But remember that we (writer-reader) have you (second reader) in our sights. This is for you. And I promise that the aim is benign and straight-forward. I really am only trying to tell you something, and to engage with you on the subject of ‘The Reader’. For it is possible to write with different intent towards the reader – even with evil intent.

Once when I was the judge of a short story competition, one of the entries submitted was clearly and openly addressed to me as the judge in a personal and nasty way. This was fiction-writer in reader-stalker mode. I imagine the writer was entertained, and perhaps a different second reader would also have been interested and entertained, but I as the target and victim of the stuff was not. The aim could not have been to win the competition, only to get my attention. The poison pen narrative is alive, and still sick. And think of the effect the writers of computer viruses have. Such wide and involuntary readership. Such sport, such damage. Such power.

But I want to come back to the writers and readers of novels. Although there are not many rules about the writing (or the reading) of these things, I think there is one rule that for me always stands, for the writer: do not be boring. Yet what is boring to one reader is thrilling to another, so the rule doesn’t really get you far. But if your first reader (you) is bored, then there is probably little hope for the second reader. I suggest you discover an imagined second reader, an imagined readership. If you want children to read what you are writing, you will probably write differently from the way you write when you write for adults. Perhaps you want your reader to laugh, to weep, to sigh with relief, to gasp with wonder, to thrill with horror. You have the power to shape the work, and in a sense to shape the reader. A second rule of writing, now I come to think of it, is that the writer needs to have a certain control of the language. It is quite fashionable to ignore the meanings of words, to say that ‘slither’ and ‘sliver’ are interchangeable, but this fashion carries the seeds of its own destruction. One of the nicest functions on the computer, for getting you to think about words, is WinWord’s <shift F7>.

Writing this has been like sending a rather long e-mail. It carries secret viruses. Readers and writers can never exist in a germ-free bubble, after all. If you are writing for no-reader, I wonder how much you write. Well, I’ll never really know. It is possible that writers write secretly as a way of practising to write, but in that case there must always be an implied second reader hoped for at the end of the lengthy exercise.

Here is an old-fashioned postcard as well, to follow my long e-mail. I hope the snails in your letterbox don’t eat it. A postcard is a small gift; and what a writer writes is always a gift to a reader. Then the reader’s gift is the reading. A writer never really knows exactly where the writing is going, where that second reader is located. Out there.

Such a tired but sweet old message:

Thinking of you.

Wish you were here.

(signed)

Carmel Bird