Reading as constructing meaning

Traditionally, the locus of meaning has been considered to reside within the text itself. A text is thought to possess a fi xed meaning, and the reader’s task is to retrieve its inherent meaning as accurately as possible by deciphering the text. However, skillful readers are undoubtedly aware that the act of reading requires much more than decoding sentences: it also demands that the readers actively construct a context of interpretation based on their exist- ing knowledge and experience of the world, as well as their purposes of reading. In other words, meaning can be considered something that is assigned

to the text by its readers. This conceptualization of reading is shrewdly

characterized by Rosenblatt (1966: 1000): the text is akin to a musical score to be performed by a player. In this view, textual meaning is no longer fi xed and static. A reader might understand a text in the same way on many separate occasions, or s/he might interpret the identical text differently each time by foregrounding different aspects.

Through meaning construction, or sense-making, derived from reading a text, readers modify their existing knowledge structures by integrating into

them the newly acquired information. To this end, they constantly hypothesize about the meaning of expressions on the basis of expectations created by their memory-stored knowledge or gained from the previous context (the

top-down process). This hypothesis is then tested against what follows in

the ST (the bottom-up process). Only if these two processes are compatible does adequate understanding take place. If they are not compatible, mis- understanding may result (Kussmaul 1995: 22). Therefore, understanding a text is always an ongoing and tentative process, which permits continuous reinterpretation of the text (van Dijk 1997: 18).

This perspective of reading is referred to as reader-response theory (see Iser 1974, 1980; Fish 1980). According to this theory, because all readers bring their own knowledge and experiences to the understanding of a text, each interpretation is inevitably subjective and unique. It also holds that reading is close to writing in that both demand creativity, although any interpretation of a text must be accounted for by referring back to the text itself. This point can be illustrated by the following example taken from the intermediate-level Japanese textbook written by Miura and McGloin (1994: 8):

日本人留学生青山弘の日記

今日の午後四時ごろ成田を出て、今日の午後四時ごろこの町に着い た。日本から十数時間かかったのに、日本とアメリカの間には日付 変更線というものがあるので、同じ日の同じ時間になってしまった のだ。空港には、Friends of International Studentsというグループの メンバーのルーカスさんという人が、迎えに来てくれていた。アパ ートが見つかるまで、ルーカスさんの家に泊めてもらうことになっ た。ルーカスさんは、自分をファースト・ネームで呼んでもらいた いと言うけれども、三十も年上の人なので、どうも「トム」とは呼 びにくい。

In order to apprehend this passage, the reader needs to be able to supply covert or presupposed information, as well as to be able to make feasible hypotheses, for example:

1. Hiroshi is a common fi rst name of a Japanese male.

2. This is a diary, so its episodes are most likely what the writer has experienced each day.

3. Therefore, the missing subject of the fi rst sentence must be the writer himself. 4. Narita is the name of an airport in Japan. Therefore, the writer has left

Japan by airplane.

5. Because the text explicitly states that the writer is a student studying abroad, this episode is probably about his trip to the country where he plans to study.

6. Kono machi is most likely in the United States because the text mentions the international date line between Japan and the United States. 7. It is the writer’s fl ight from Narita to this town that took more than ten

hours.

8. Friends of International Students is likely the name of a volunteer organization that hosts foreign students, and the writer had contacted this organization before he left Japan.

9. The writer had not met Mr. Lucas previously because he uses the phrase

X to iu hito ‘person called X’.

10. This diary was likely written at Mr. Lucas’s home.

Now that the text is thoroughly understood, it can be translated as:

“Diary of Hiroshi Aoyama, a foreign student from Japan”

Leaving Narita about 4 p.m. today, I arrived in this town about 4 p.m. today. It took more than ten hours, but because of the inter- national date line between Japan and the United States, I arrived here on the same day and at the same time as I had left. Mr. Lucas from

Friends of International Students was waiting for me at the airport. It

turned out that I’m staying at his house until I fi nd an apartment. He wants me to call him by his fi rst name, Tom, but because he’s 30 years older than me, I feel uncomfortable doing so.

Active participation in interpreting a text, however, does not allow readers to construe it in any way they want. Iser (1974) argues that arbitrary and irrelevant interpretations are ruled out by the constraining force exerted by linguistic features of the text. Fish (1980), on the other hand, considers the stability of interpretation to be achieved by interpretive strategies rather than by the text itself. He proposes the concept of interpretive communities that share reading strategies. Because the community’s culture fi lls the reader with assumptions and beliefs, people who belong to the same interpretive community tend to interpret the text in the way that is shaped by the expect- ations of their community and its acknowledged leaders.

Consider, for example, Exercise 1.5 in Chapter 1, where Tawara Machi’s

tanka was translated:

この時間君の不在を告げるベル

Late at night, alone in her apartment,1 _{the protagonist is listening to the}

unanswered ring at the other end. Her lover is not home yet. Almost all native speakers of Japanese recognize the bell in this poem to be the sound of a telephone ringing. She cannot stop wondering where and with whom he is drinking. By contrast, most non-native speakers in my translation course construe the bell sound with a doorbell, and some with a clock. In the case of the doorbell, the protagonist supposedly goes to his apartment and rings the doorbell in vain. This setting does not appeal artistically to Japanese sensibility. The clock-bell construal conveys the idea that they are living together, and she is waiting for him to come home. Then the clock bell chimes, making her aware that it is already late. This situation is more poetic than the one with a doorbell.

The different interpretations of this tanka between native and non-native speakers of Japanese are no doubt partly due to the fact that “telephone bell” is no longer a common collocation, so that native speakers of English do not naturally associate “bell” with “telephone.” However, this cannot be the sole reason for the difference because it fails to account for the reason Japanese speakers do not construe “bell” to be doorbell or clock chime, even though beru in Japanese can also refer to them. This phenomenon strongly suggests the existence of an interpretive community whose members share interpretations shaped by communal expectations. Understanding even the simplest message potentially involves all our accumulated experience – the knowledge, beliefs, suppositions, inferences, and expectations that are the stuff of personal, social, and cultural life (Hervey and Higgins 2002: 7).