"Is There a Meaning in This Text?", Chapter 4

After exploring the undoing of the author and the book, Vanhoozer turns his exploration of contemporary hermeneutics to the reader: meaning is found neither in the text, nor behind the text, but in front of the text says this age (148). This is because the reader is no longer an observer, detached from the text, but a participant in its meaning.

While texts are written to elicit specific responses from ideal readers, this ideal reader does not exist. All readers are situated and, as a result, do not see texts as they are meant to be read. As a result, all meanings of texts have their readers' influence. Vanhoozer sums this up by saying, "Instead of reading conforming to the text, the text conforms to the reading" (152).

So, then, how should a reader act? A reader can participate with the text by reading it to form a coherent whole, governed by the text; she can create the text's whole; she can be formed by the world the text describes. (For example, a person can study a piece of Bach music; a person can study a Bach piece that is shaped by their own setting; or, a person can perform a Bach piece.) Taking this question further, Is there a morality involved in reading? Should readers read to describe texts? evaluate texts? use texts? By undoing the text, the reader is free from the power of the text and can interpret it to different ends. The end that Vanhoozer discerns in postmodernity is liberation: freedom from author and freedom from text. However, this liberation is strange because it allows a certain "violence" to be done to the text; it can be misused; the author is silenced. But even more importantly, if there is no meaning in the text, then texts should not have an impact on readers. Texts should not be able to form readers.

Perhaps the idea of freedom from texts is a bit confusing. Here we should note that for Derrida texts are not just pages with black ink printed on them. 'Texts' are those things we interpret. And, as Derrida says, 'nothing is outside the text.' All of life is interpretation. But applying this directly to written texts helps make the point of liberation: Why should Shakespeare be required reading? Why does the Bible have 66 books? [That's my own question that reflects my own theological commitments.] Those who read the texts establish the canon, the standard, are themselves historically and culturally situated. You now see why "different readings" become necessary: how does one read a text, like a biblical letter, from a feminist point of view when the letter is written in a patriarchal society? Is such a reading fair? Is such a reading necessary to bring a text down from its hierarchical thinking and apply it accurately?

Most of us don't read just on our own, though. We belong to literary communities: churches, companies, countries, etc. Stanley Fish is the main guy here. Communities shape how we read and how we construct a text's meaning. [Think about being in a church where you hear, say, an apocalyptic text preached as pure prophecy with strong reaction from the audience. It's quite possible that neither the audience nor the preacher would interpret the text in that way outside a church service and outside each other's company.] But what's good for the goose is good for the gander! Communities don't just create texts. Texts create communities. Whether or not that church just mentioned knows it (or reflects it!), the biblical text has shaped it and brought it together. In other words, texts kick back against readers!

Because of this dynamic relationship, the reader's relationship to the text is a live question. And the questions that Vanhoozer wants us to ask--what's the morality of reading?--become legitimate. How do you fight fair with texts? How do you undo their ideology? How do you get shaped by them, especially when one can no longer make dogmatic claims to purely objective knowledge? For the postmodernist, deconstruction is the answer to this how: deconstruct texts as they have been written; deconstruct the authors who wrote them; deconstruct the people who read them. This humble (?) pursuit takes the other with utmost seriousness. But is there really an "other" there at all? Isn't the author an other? Isn't the text an other? Aren't readers others? Does a hermeneutics of suspicion help us to live graciously? [My rhetoric may have gotten the best of me in the last few sentences.] Vanhoozer thinks not, and engages in a reconstructive proposal in part two that resurrects the dead author (chapter 5), redeems the unbound text (chapter 6), and reforms the meaning-making reader (chapter 7).