Vortex Theory on the Author-Text-Reader Trichotomy

Running Head: VORTEX THEORY ON THE AUTHOR-TEXT-READER TRICHOTOMY

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Vortex Theory on the Author-Text-Reader Trichotomy Alex Tamulis

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Vortex Theory on the Author-Text-Reader Trichotomy

Alex Tamulis 2015

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Abstract The purpose of this study is to explore the author-text-reader trichotomy, by analyzing previous theories on the subject, and to introduce the concept of continuum of authorship/readership. The continuum contemplates points of convergence among various accounts of the same text and encompasses similar and dissimilar interpretations. The reader has a central role in the “contract� that is established in the trichotomy cited above, and any interpretation that arises out of this interaction will be seen as a refracted account. The idea of the perception of the self is discussed in this paper, in terms of understanding how this view of self interacts with the implied subjects that are pictured by every reader upon reading any text, and how it refracts meaning.

Several literary theories and methodologies are cited throughout this study, in order to better understand the interaction between author, text and reader, thus covering all tiers of the trichotomy.

The study of meaning and how it affects the understanding of a text is also explored throughout this paper, with citations from previous works also highlighted when necessary.

The quest for meaning becomes a quest for literary convergence.

Mathematical concepts were used sparingly as a means of abstracting patterns to a more general view of the topic.

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Vortex Theory on the Author-Text-Reader Trichotomy

There are numerous examples of studies that aim to shed light on how readers create meaning when reading a text or how authors convey meaning when writing them. The role of authorship has been prominent in human history, especially during the Romantic period, which emphasized the self, through creativity and originality. Later developments in the 20th century saw the rise of New Criticism, which focused primarily on close reading and how a work of literature could be seen as a self-contained source. The role of author and text were at the core of such studies; it would only be reasonable that a third school of thought would rise and focus on a third actant in the process, that is, the reader. This has come to be known as reader-response theory1. In summary, the trichotomy author-text-reader has been long discussed in academia and beyond. My goal in this theoretical essay is to present the concept of a vortex-like model to authorship, texts and readership, and to present a new perspective on the idea of implied author and implied reader (Booth, 1961) and how every text is affected by “the observer effect”, that is, the observers (the author and the reader), and how they will always affect “reality” (the distortion of a text by mere observation).

1 See Beach, R. (1993) for more on reader-response theories.

2 Please see Darling (2007) for more info on wave-particle duality and the double-slit experiment.

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1. The Vortex First and foremost, what is a vortex? A vortex, in Physics, is seen as a flow of liquid, such as water or coffee, rotating around an imaginary axis line. There are numerous examples of vortices in nature: from tornadoes to whirlpools, to aircraft wings and dust devils, and many more.

The idea of an imaginary axis serves as an analogy for the idea of an abstraction of a text; when examining a whirlpool, the imaginary axis is visible due to the shape of its column of water, but the axis isn’t really there, the brain pictures it as a vertical structure, similar to a stick, keeping the whirlpool from falling apart. An analogy can be drawn between this imaginary axis and a text (not only written texts, but also verbal texts, such as the recording of a dialogue, or interview, that can be transcribed later on). The abstraction of the concept of a text is important to understand that an observer (the reader, or even the author, upon completion of the writing task) will never be able to have access to it.

An observer can endlessly stare at the Moon, but he wouldn’t know what the Moon looks like when no one is staring at it. In other words, the concept of moon, or the “mooness” of the Moon, is something that cannot be observed without some sort of influence, the observation itself, laden with preconceived ideas and thoughts. From this point on, this distortion will be classified as a “refraction” that takes place every single time a reader approaches a text.

The concept of a sphere in a two-dimensional sheet of paper is a mathematical model to represent spheres in the real world. It can be modeled in many ways and the mind associates it as a signifier + signified combo (to cite a Sausserean term on the subject) without the need of any physical representation; the mind can deal with abstraction, but the concept itself is unattainable and cannot be truly analyzed, due to the fact that the analysis itself distorts it; the very aspect of looking at something changes its outcome, and the perspective of the

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individual alters its reality, which will never be truly unveiled; concept analysis is always done through human brains and eyes, and that itself is a determining factor for the alteration of its path and its immanent reality.

What happens when a tree falls in a forest and no living beings are there to hear it? Does it make a sound (Berkeley, 1940)? These arguments regarding observation and reality can help us better understand the concepts this paper brings forth: what is the idea behind the notion of an implied author? Is it an exact mirror image of the real author? What about the idea of a hypothetical reader that the author had in mind when penning a text? Does this translate to the actual readers out there, or to the notion of an implied reader in every text?

These ideas are still hotly debated in academia.

2. The Continuum of Authorship According to Barthes (1967), “Linguistically, the author is never anything more than the man who writes, just as I is no more than the man who says I: language knows a “subject,” not a “person,” end this subject, void outside of the very utterance which defines it, suffices to make language “work,” that is, to exhaust it.” (p.3) The author ceases to be a “person” upon completion of his work; from that moment on, the text becomes an intrinsic part of reality and it silently awaits an observer to experience it.

Barthes sees the modern writer (scriptor) being born simultaneously with the text, but this idea of an author is in no way supplied with a being, which precedes or transcends his writing. This leads to a broader view of the authorship: the author becomes an abstraction.

2A. The implied author

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Wayne C. Booth has coined the terms “implied author” and “implied reader” in The Rhetoric of Fiction (1983). He believes that the reading process is enough to determine the implied author and reader, based on formal and rhetorical elements of the text.

The approach to conceptual figures requires an abstraction of those same figures; the implied author is a construct created by the mind of each reader, based on linguistic cues of the text; if that is so, then the very idea of an implied author is misleading, since this ideal author would be affected by the reader’s own perceptions. The reader cannot rely on extra textual elements to find more information about the “real” author; thus, the reader has to picture the image of an ideal author in his mind, according to his principles, context and social environment (similar to the Gadamerian concept of prejudice). These variables will come into play and affect the image that each reader has of this ideal author, even though it’s still a hypothetical construct living in the imagination of each and every one of them.

They will never be able to reach a consensus on who this ideal author really is; every time an account is brought forth, a slightly different figure of an ideal author will rise. The reader is constantly affecting the idea of an implied author, wielding this apparatus in order to be able to reach out to this concept in reality; this leads to a multitude of implied authors, sharing similarities among various accounts, or bringing dissent to the machinations of this very same being. The fact that a “true, unified author” cannot be truly defined leads to the idea of a “continuum of authorship”.

2B. Sets and subsets within the continuum The continuum can be seen as a mathematical set. Let set A contain a single element, which is the abstraction of the implied author. This set A becomes a subset of set B when we introduce the set of all possible implied authors that every reader has in mind when reading a

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text. We can add a subset C containing a single element, the physical author of the work, and have this subset C contained in a major set D that encompasses all sets previously mentioned, creating henceforth the notion of a continuum of authorship; in set D, there’s an ideal implied author (which can only be idealized as a hypothetical construct and never be observed, due to the observer effect, previously mentioned in this article) plus all the possible implied authors that each reader has in mind (the set of “refracted” authors, previously mentioned as set B) plus the original author of the text (set A). This continuum can be potentially infinite, since the interpretation of a new reader can be added ad infinitum to the set that is a reunion of all subsets previously mentioned.

The continuum definition approximates this idea to the mathematical concept of a number line, where there are infinite numbers between 1 and 2, for example; if you look at the real number line, you can imagine a smooth continuum going all the way from number 1 to number 2, and that works for every integer that follows them, or for all real numbers, in fact. You can imagine that every number that can be conceived is actually there; but upon observation of the line at a specific point, say 1.79, the observation requires this point to be called out, and the continuum is “interrupted” by the emergence of a locus.

We can think of every single interpretation of this hermeneutic circle (to use a term coined by Martin Heidegger (1927) and further developed by Gadamer (1975)) as a locus; the physical author, the abstraction of an implied author (a hypothetical construct) and the “refracted” implied authors seen by readers are all individual points, becoming specific loci.

Since this is a continuum, just like the real number line, whenever two interpretations of a text meet, that is, share similarities, points of convergence are outlined; this creates the idea of shared similarities between reader X and reader Y.

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3. Points of Convergence

Fig 1. Vortex. Taken from www.freeimages.com/search/vortex

Figure 1 shows several black dots which can be seen as various loci, meaning that every reader has his own interpretation of a text and that is pictured and placed in a specific locus; the lines connecting the loci can be seen as points of convergence, which are similar accounts that readers share of the same text; the sum of all loci and points of convergence is equal to the continuum of authorship/readership.

The imaginary axis that spirals down the vortex is the hypothetical idea of a text, not the text itself; the hypothetical text provides the backbone for the actual text, just like the imaginary axis that is perceived by the mind when looking at a whirlpool provides the vorticity to the flow, which is the curl of the flow velocity. The hypothetical text is just like the tree in a forest mentioned above; once there’s an observer watching the tree fall, sound will be perceived by the ear and the tree will indeed make a sound. If no beings are there, it doesn’t make a sound. Or does it? This debate may stir up strife and dissent, but there’s no way to know since observation can’t be taken out of the equation.

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If someone is reading a text, it ceases to be a hypothetical model and becomes a “refracted” text, pictured by whoever is reading it, and thus affecting its “true” meaning, which again, is unattainable. In fact, no one can claim to know the trueness of any text, since the claiming itself affects reality. At atomic scales, reality doesn’t exist until it is measured2.

At textual scales, texts don’t exist until they are read.

This premise effaces the role of the author as central to understanding the text, thus arriving at similar conclusions such as Barthes (1967) and Foucault (1998); in order for wholeness of authorship or readership to be attained, it would be necessary to picture each and every point of the continuum, and that wouldn’t be feasible, just like it wouldn’t be possible to number every single real number in the universe. Even if someone claimed to have been able to collect every possible interpretation of a text, it would only be necessary to add one more to the sequence, proving that interpretations of a text will forever be potentially infinite.

Gadamer (1975) states that the art of the interpretation of a text, also known as hermeneutics, is about merging horizons (Horizontverschmelzung). He states “The horizon is the range of vision that includes everything that can be seen from a particular vantage point…

A person who has no horizon is a man who does not see far enough and hence overvalues what is nearest to him. On the other hand, “to have a horizon”, means not being limited to what is nearby, but to being able to see beyond it… working out the hermeneutical situation means the achievement of the right horizon of inquiry for the questions evoked by the encounter with tradition.”

2 Please see Darling (2007) for more info on wave-particle duality and the double-slit experiment.

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The merging of horizons can be seen as finding points of convergence in the vortex, but the difference lies in the fact that the points themselves are refracted views of an unattainable text; the merging act contributes to a final interpretation, which would be seen, in Gadamer’s terms, as a “closer to the real meaning” type of hermeneutics.

The vortex, rather, seeing each interpretation as a locus that pictures a refracted axis, contemplates the unique aspect of observation. Consciousness itself has an important role on how people read and interpret information; the involuntary refraction of meaning is a crucial byproduct of the process.

Every reader has a pre-judgment of any text, as Gamader puts it; this is part of the refraction process, it can be seen as a distortion of reality. But what is this reality? It would be reality as seen through non-human perspectives; what does the Moon look like when no humans are looking at it? Perception and reality can be deceiving, and so can texts and literary analyses.

3A. Subjectivity Humans will never be able to escape subjectivity, and that has to be taken into account when those same humans are to interpret any sort of information, whether it’s a text or natural phenomena. The real “trueness” of anything becomes far-fetched and even utopic; we have to bear in mind that this refraction process is inevitable, and that the whole trichotomy of author-text-reader is itself a process that is born during the reading experience, during this “apprehension”. That doesn’t mean the reader is the only one responsible for conveying meaning or deciphering information; the trichotomy will be altered, there will be a “dent” to its immanence, but the fact that this reader could potentially know about the life of the author, or have a preconceived notion of what he or she is going to read about will indeed

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change the way this “denting” takes place. But this reader, being aware of the continuum of authorship and readership, and the fact that the text itself is being refracted by their own perceptions, can and will embrace other horizons3 and bear in mind that there are numerous interpretations for the authorship of any text; this would contribute to a less author-oriented world where everyone is trying to understand the oeuvre from the author’s point of view; this can be done if need arises, but it would only be one point in the continuum of authorship, and not the central one, because there is actually no center to any text interpretation, every point can be imagined as being at the center when that point is being highlighted.

3B. Prejudice seen as synchronic refraction Professor Paul Fry, during his 2009 lectures at Yale University on Introduction to Theory of Literature4, gives an example of a poem called “The Pleasures of the Imagination”, by Mark Akenside. He reads the line “The great creator raised his plastic arm”. He states that “If we know something about the horizon within which Akenside was writing his poem, we are aware that in the eighteenth century the word “plastic” meant “sinuous”, “powerful”, “flexible”, and in that case of course, we immediately are able to recognize what Akenside meant, why it makes perfect sense.”

From a vorticial perspective, what Akenside meant by “plastic” would be seen as a locus within the continuum of authorship; that locus may or may not share a point of convergence with a contemporary lay reader’s interpretation of the same poem; they are both spinning around the axis of the vortex, but the “fore-analysis” that contemplates the author’s point of view and the context the poem was written has to be seen as a diachronic approach to the hermeneutics of the poem itself. This diachronic approach would amalgamate meanings of

3 See Gadamer (1975).

4 Open Yale Courses, retrieved from oyc.yale.edu

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the word “plastic”, such as the one used in the 18th century, and the one that is prominent in everyday language today. However, demanding such interpretations from lay readers seems authoritative and imposing, due to the fact that this process obliges the reader to be aware of something that is very familiar to etymologists, philologists or historical linguists, and not to a person who’s simply reading a poem for his or her own pleasure.

The idea of good or bad prejudice (fore-project5) is misleading, since it involves holding expectations of a certain type of interpretation that would consider the historical use of that word; this idea brings the author back to the equation, what he meant, what his thoughts were, what can be drawn from his account, etc. This “Lazarushian” behavior (trying to bring the author back from “the dead”) is not beneficial to the reader, it imposes a certain point of view from a certain period of time; readers are supposed to be aware that “plastic” meant “flexible” and not “prosthetic”, or anything else. That leads the reader onto researching on what “plastic” meant before the 18th century, and what “plastic” would possibly mean in the 22nd century, according to variation theory, and so on and so forth. It’s a process that resembles peeling layers of an onion. That would indeed make readers akin to sociolinguists, chasing patterns of linguistic variation. The idea of synchronic prejudice relieves the reader from the burden of strenuous research on some other person’s perspective and focuses on his own “refraction” of the text. What does he understand by “plastic” upon reading the poem?

His cognitive interpretation takes many factors into account: the context, his attitude, engagement and cultural setting; thus, these variables have to be born in mind if one’s to be set free from author-oriented accounts.

5 The circularity of reading, the reader’s own expectations in accordance with a certain projected meaning.

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Does that turn reading into an idiosyncratic skill? Is the vorticial perspective lenient to all possible accounts out there? All accounts which share points of convergence, or that are part of the continuum should be accepted as fair interpretations of any text. The awareness of several loci makes readers grasp a larger portion of the continuum, thus contributing to a broader experience, more thorough and perhaps even more rewarding.

The fact that Mathematics can model the real world and use abstraction to picture it can be very helpful to understand the concept of a collection of convergent interpretations versus divergent ones. The lack of points of convergence or the judgment that a certain account might fall under the absurdity category means that there’s a universe (a class that contains every single element that can be considered in a given situation) and this class would contain the complement set (things that are outside of the continuum (main set)) and therefore would contain the accounts that are not relevant to the continuum of authorship/readership.

Picturing different sizes for infinity can make things clearer; the set comprising all real numbers is bigger than the set comprising all natural numbers. Both sets are infinite, but Cantor6 showed that infinity comes in different sizes; he introduced the concept of cardinality to infinite sets, and that is beyond the purpose of this article, of course; but the idea of different sets and different sizes gives us a better understanding on why certain texts can have several interpretations and can even embrace the idea of “absurd�7 interpretations to it; provided the absurd accounts are contemplated within the complement set, thus still being part of the whole universe.

6 Georg Cantor, famous German mathematician who invented set theory.

7 Lacking points of convergence or being the complement set of the continuum.

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4. Funnel Clouds Is there a true meaning for any given poem, or any given text? A single and unique meaning is impossible (the unity, as viewed by Derrida), unless the hypothetical and ideal text is brought forth without any refraction, which would not be feasible; the role of the author has been previously discussed and we cannot count on his or her own interpretation to pinpoint the actual meaning of a given poem, or any other piece of work. The image of a funnel cloud could help us better picture the idea of “chasing meaning� for any given text.

Figure 2. Funnel Cloud (2015). Retrieved from www.pixabay.com. Free for commercial use.

The image above shows an imaginary rotating column that can be seen as the hypothetical text, providing the backbone for all possible interpretations within the continuum. The top part (which could be pictured as the base of a cloud, for example) is seen as the continuum of authorship, containing all sets that were previously mentioned in this study; the funnel is an abstraction on how readers perceive the author-text-reader trichotomy;

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the larger top section represents all possible interpretations of a text, including the author’s.

The reader can selectively find other interpretations that share points of convergence with his own and work his way through the downward spiral into finding more and more intersections among interpretations until he comes down to a single point, which is his own account (seen as a singularity), which would be pictured as a single imaginary dot touching the ground.

(Technically speaking, if a funnel cloud touches the ground, it becomes a tornado8.)

Every account is as important as any other; each and every reader follows the same process, sharing thoughts and ideas with other readers until they see themselves in a position where their account is the only one that seems to be the most relevant of all. That may or may not be the case; it is common to find similarities among readers’ accounts, and that would simply mean that they would still be living in a funnel cloud and haven’t turned into a fullblown tornado up to that moment, which doesn’t have to be the case for that text. Readers can and will question themselves if presented with other outcomes for a story; this may hinder the process of funneling down the points of convergence to an ultimate interpretation, and leave the reader within the realm of convergent accounts.

Readers don’t have to rely on guessing what authors had in mind from this point on; they can simply enjoy the experience of unveiling the possibilities of a text, and confront those possibilities with the ones that have been firmly standardized within our culture, such as the view of the author and the true meaning of a text (which still sound vague when the concept of trueness arises).

8 Please see Grazulis (2003) for more info on the subject.

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5. The consciousness of the perceiver versus the perceived text As Georges Poulet puts it, “Because of the strange invasion of my person by the thoughts of another, I am a self who is granted the experience of thinking thoughts foreign to him. I am the subject of thoughts other than my own”9.

The reader seems to keep in mind that there’s “another reader” in the process. Who is this other reader? It is an amalgamation of an ideal implied author and what is known about the real, human author. The human author has an ideal reader in mind; the human reader has an ideal author in mind as well; this process keeps going back and forth and the reader can indeed access other layers of the text, and finally feel he’s closer to the “true” meaning of the text and what the author really aimed for. This process inevitably drives the reader toward a gap-filling situation, where he tries to shed light on situations that the author might have left obscured by semantic puzzles. Again, this is not the ideal situation when one is attacking a text; this is still seen as author-oriented and the psychological leash that keeps author and reader connected is still present.

In order for a singularity to occur, that is, for the reader to be able to come to terms with his own account of a text, he must be aware that the whole process of constructing meaning is in fact part of an initial deconstruction of the text that begins with the awareness that the idea of an implied author is already a refracted one; the reader distorts that piece of information, using each and every tool that was previously described (contexts, social situation, engagement, prejudice, hermeneutics, etc.).

The fact that the text itself limits meaning is also of paramount importance; the realm of cognitive possibilities permeates the conscious process of interpretation, actively engaging

9 Cited in Beach (1993).

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readers to employ strategies to grasp its meaning, leading them towards more and more points of convergence, and this mutual process paves the way for a thorough exploration of the work of art, setting aside divergent points as well; the reader brings to life what the text potentially hides away. That’s why refraction will always be part of the equation; the reader cannot simply let his thoughts and feelings out and keep an “outside looking in” perspective; there’s no such thing as inert observation. This interaction takes place and may annihilate other divergent accounts in the process, leading to an ultimate interpretation that can also be seen as a singularity.

Reading is a conscious process, but it requires unconscious, complex chemical reactions to be truly effective. The combination of sentience and reasoning is definitely a human endowment; it’s part of an intrinsic aspect that seems to be genetically and culturally embedded in our minds. The process itself is something that needs to be taught through social interaction, but the deconstruction, the wondering, every neurological process is affected by the idea of the self, and how this self relates to the overall social perception of any self in society; in other terms, what we see and how we think society sees us plays a role in changing and altering how one perceives reality. That has to be taken into account when one thinks how people interpret semiotic works of art such as texts.

The quest for meaning should be replaced by a quest for literary convergence; what elements of a text can be drawn out as points of a continuum? Is it possible to come up with an account that represents most accounts as a whole, or would that still be seen as authoritative manipulation? The more one looks to a holistic attempt to deciphering a text, the more one sees intuition and imagination are conscious process that affect literary analyses, even though Russian formalists like Roman Jakobson opposed the traditional study of literature and focused mostly on its components, the ones that were not bound by

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author/reader or any other extrinsic systems; the main issue regarding this approach is that they don’t take the reader into account, the fact that Russian formalists themselves were also readers and were by and large refracting literariness10; an infinite loop arises, and if the author-text-reader trichotomy is not perceived as a cognitive, pragmatic, social, historical, cultural and individual task, there is no way to reach any consensus on what the role of literature really is.

In summary, when dealing with the trichotomy, if author/reader refraction is contemplated, and if the text is seen as a piece that can never be truly explored, for the exploration itself will refract it somehow, then points of convergence and divergence can be drawn and a broader picture can be painted, considering other possibilities and not pinpointing a single one based on privilege or preference due to purported beauty or aesthetic admiration.

6. The mythical refraction In “The Structural Study of Myth”, Claude Lévi-Strauss states that “A myth always refers to events alleged to have taken place in time: before the world was created, or during its first stages – anyway, long ago. But what gives the myth an operative value is that the specific pattern described is everlasting; it explains the present and the past as well as the future.”(p.430).11 The fact that myths are powerful narratives, whether they are verbally passed on to other members of a society, or written with aesthetic and normative concerns in mind, shows that atemporal affirmations seem to behave like afterimages in the human brain; it provides a model for humans and it seems to be universal, conducive to blind beliefs. A literary text can

10 Please see Baldick (2008) for more on literariness.

11 Please see Lévi-Strauss (1955) for more info on the subject.

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be seen as a myth, that is, the reader tries to inadvertently believe that his interpretation (his locus) has to be the exact same to the one that seems to be ideally fitting to the text (such as the implied author, seen through the eyes of the reader); his concerns regarding what the author had in mind, and the reasons for the linguistic choices and outcomes have to be real, it has to be a truism, and therefore the reader needs to find the key to unlock this mystery since its true meaning is laid out for him to unveil; seeing a text as a powerful source of true information leads readers to a “mythical refraction”, where they try to adjust their perspectives to the ones they think are in most accordance and agreement with that given piece of work. It seems there’s an implied contract between text and reader and they both have to come to terms and reach a final agreement. This type of behavior shows that certain human aspects (culture, society, values, morals, beliefs) cannot and will never be isolated from how any reader attacks a text. This shows that refracting a text is intrinsic to the action of reading it.

That is not to say that texts are myths, of course; it simple means that our minds see universal truths and atemporal affirmations in it. If it’s written, it must be true; it it’s lectured, it must also be true. This gives the text an advantageous position in the trichotomy; it’s part of the past, it has been spoken or written before, it may be part of an ultimate theory that the reader is not yet aware of. The most important thing the reader has to be aware of, though, is the fact that his refraction is the one that has to be taken into account when approaching a text; that any pre-conceived accounts (implied through linguistic cues) will have points of convergence with his own, or might diverge completely from it. Whatever the case may be, the process starts with the reading act, since a text is not born until that very moment; even if the author is still alive, even if the author is popular and famous, he’s not there at the moment of “conception”, that is, at the exact moment the reader starts exploring the text and giving it

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an atmosphere, a skeleton, a surface, albeit a refracted one. Even if the author were physically there, even if he wanted to impose his own version to it, it would still be as valid and as important as the text seen through the eyes of the reader, given the fact that they’re all within the continuum (they could even be in the complement set, and yet still be within the universe, as previously described).

7. The Center of a Text According to Haydee Dabritz, “Deconstruction is a genre of literary criticism that investigates hidden or paradoxical meanings within literary texts. It seeks to intertwine two hermeneutical approaches: uncovering the “stable” truths of a work, and then looking for ways in which these truths can be subverted. Its principal advocate, Jacques Derrida, claims that fixed interpretations of texts are unattainable, and all texts are composed of unstable elements.” (p.1) A text cannot hold meaning, as deconstructions points out; the slipping away meets the grasping on the cusp of understanding. This fickleness is what drives people towards it; meaning is thus unattainable. If you look too closely at any given text, meaning simply doesn’t hold up.

The idea of a hypothetical text previously mentioned in this article is similar to understanding the role of the center in Jacques Derrida’s work. Even though there’s always a physical text and a physical author/reader for the whole experience to take place, the physical text itself is always mirrored by an ideal version of it; it’s like keeping the unattainable version in Elysian Fields, while the refracted copy of it would be promoted throughout Ancient Greece.

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Let us pretend that this original version kept in Elysian Fields is the one that truly contains meaning; therefore it is securely holding the key to the trueness of the text. Derrida believes that a paradox takes place in this situation; the center for this meaningful structure can only hold meaning as long as it is not visible, it must remain outside the structure itself.

He admits that if the center exists, it must also be hidden; he sees the text as a piece of architecture that’s been long abandoned, reduced to its skeleton. In “Force and Signification” he states that “The relief and design of structures appears more clearly when content, which is the living energy of meaning, is neutralized. Somewhat like the architecture of an uninhabited or deserted city, reduced to its skeleton by some catastrophe of nature or art. A city no longer inhabited, not simply left behind, but haunted by meaning and culture. This state of being haunted, which keeps the city from returning to nature, is perhaps the general mode of the presence or absence of the thing itself in pure language. The pure language that would be housed in pure literature, the object of pure literary criticism.”(p. 4)12 His idea of a center is similar to the idea that the Universe has no center; according to the Big Bang theory, the Universe is expanding equally at all places, if it has no center, every spot could be potentially considered the center, thus becoming an arbitrary decision; meaning is, alas, beyond reach.

Deconstruction identifies tensions within the text and how these tensions are not really in opposition, tearing apart the idea of unity in the process; when a vortex is pictured and points of convergence and divergent accounts are spinning along its axis, these accounts, whether included in the set of similar or the complement set of dissimilar interpretations, become all part of the same universe; the continuum works as a metaphor for a structure with no center.

12 Please see Derrida (1978) for more details.

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Every point could potentially be placed at its center, leaving the decision to sheer arbitrariness; every point is and is not in the center; this paradoxically shows that true meaning could only be conceived as a combination of all items. This leads to a contradiction.

Another fact that has to be born in mind is language itself. Language is imperfect, and ambiguous; words have multiple meanings, and as Chomsky puts it, “it is poorly designed for communication�. But language actually becomes more efficient with ambiguity; more can be said using fewer resources, time and effort can be saved up; associations can be easily drawn out of context, and ambiguity, all of a sudden, allows for more and more combinations of expressions and metaphors. Language has been used and developed since the dawn of Homo Sapiens, and the fact that you can convey varied information using the same group of words while changing the context, letting the listener infer meaning from that very same context, is awe-inspiring and magnificent.

8. Meaning seen as the limit of a function A text can be seen as an irrational number; we cannot write down any irrational number to a T due to the fact it has an infinite decimal expansion. This means that by adding digits after the decimal point gets you closer to the number itself, but you’re always approaching this number, and never really getting there. No matter how many digits you add, you’re getting closer and closer to that number, say đ?œ‹, or đ?œ‘, but it’s only an approximation. The same thing happens to the mathematical concept of limit.

The purpose here is not to define mathematical truths or to show theorems to scientifically prove a corollary, but this will serve as an analogy to understanding how unattainable meaning is.

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Let’s say the meaning of a text is exactly 2. We cannot represent that number using decimal point, as previously discussed; but we can get arbitrarily close to it. How close? As !!

close as you like; but you’ll never get there. The approximation !" (approximately 1.41429) is frequently used and it differs from the correct value by less than 1 10, 000 . 13 It unfortunately is very far from the “actual” result, though. This approximation goes on forever.

Considering a single and unified meaning for a text, let us say we would like to approach this meaning by analyzing accounts that seem to get closer and closer to it; the more we get closer, the more blurred this meaning will get, since we could go on infinitely many more times towards the final outcome.

Figure 3. The limit of a function. Retrieved from www.wyzant.com/resources/lessons/math/calculus/limits.

Let us use the aid of abstraction and Mathematics to help us visualize why attempting to pinpoint universal truths and meaning to texts is futile; on the graph above, the c value on the X-axis can be seen as the author of the text; f(c) on the Y-axis expresses the reader. The coordinate (c, f(c)) represents the “true” meaning of a text, and the curve itself represents accounts that share points of convergence and get closer and closer to the real meaning of this text; the closer you get to the value of the function at c, no matter if you’re approaching from

13 Please see the Princeton Companion to Mathematics (2008) for more info.

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the left or right sides, the closer you get to the actual value f(c), but this value is forever undefined; you get arbitrarily close to c, but if you decide to test the function at exactly c, the functions comes out as undefined. No one knows what happens at (c, f(c)); not even Mathematics can get you there.

This is obviously an exercise to picture the unattainability of a unified meaning; it doesn’t mean that structuralist views are being brought forth in this study, for the sake of scientific proof. These models can help us better picture how pointless this chase for meaning can be; language is ambiguous and imperfect. Meaning constantly escapes you, even though it seems to be close at hand.

Conclusion A vortex keeps all accounts flowing around its axis; the ones that are not within its continuum are part of its complement set; but in the end, both convergence and divergence can be seen as oppositions that find balance, that flow smoothly within the continuity of the infinitesimal, within the universe (explained cf. p. 12).

In summary, the text is seen as a piece that can never be truly explored, for the exploration itself will refract it somehow; points of convergence and divergence can be called out and a broader picture can be painted. This leads to widening the scope for other possibilities and not pinpointing a single, universal one, based on sole privilege or biased preference due to purported beauty or aesthetic admiration.

The ambiguity of language is seen as an asset that churns morphological items into a hodge-podge of signification. Utterances exist beyond and within the text itself. The idea of the self becomes an illusion (Hood, 2013) when language is the medium that permeates all individuals; no living soul can escape language, yet language doesn’t exist without human intervention. Language cannot speak for itself; humans are its spokespeople, and refraction is

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an inevitable corollary of this interaction. A collection of refractions leads to the possibility of communal acceptance; yet, it would be seen as communal refraction, contemplated within the continuum as an irrational number that’s still being approximated to its ultimate, unattainable value.

Not being able to pinpoint the true meaning behind a text can be disappointing to some, yet it opens an array of possibilities for the continuum of authorship/readership; exchanging points of convergence, finding divergent topics, guessing what the implied author wanted to say, everything becomes an exercise toward a broader view of the text; it’s a sudden burst of inspiration, the act of allegedly weaving its fabric, its essence, but not by singularities themselves, but by collectiveness, universal sets, and overall pictures, contemplated as a final continuum. Persistence on the ineffable, strenuous pondering, that constant struggle to finding the right way to think about matters… attacking the subject, when the subject is not even there; it eventually becomes futile. The caveman cocooned in a room, staring at a Pollock painting.

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Barthes, R. (1967). The death of the author. Ubuweb Papers.

Beach, R. (1993). Reader-response criticism. National Council of Teachers of English.

Berkeley, G. (1940). A treatise on principles of human knowledge. Dover Publications.

Booth, W. C. (1983). Rhetoric of fiction. The University of Chicago Press.

Chomsky, N. (1975). Reflections on language. New York: Pantheon Dabritz, H. A. (2002). Deconstructing Rabindranath Tagore. Retrieved from www.uwlax.edu/urc/JUR-online/PDF/2002/H_Dabritz.pdf Derrida, Jacques. (1976). Of Grammatology. Ed. Trans. Gayatri Sprivak Chakravorty.

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Derrida, J. (1978) Structure, sign and play in the discourse of the human sciences. In Writing and Difference. Éditions du Seuil.

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Hood, B. (2013). The Self illusion: how the brain creates identity. Oxford University Press.

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Searle, Leroy F. (2005). New criticism. In The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory & Criticism, second edition. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins.

Wimsatt, W. K. (1954). The verbal icon. University Press of Kentucky.