Styles of Reading

Abstract

One of the things readers do with stories is to talk about them. These stories have not said it all, and readers derive evident pleasure from completing them, commenting on them, making them their own in various ways. Christine Brooke-Rose has recently called attention to the strategic incompleteness of good stories spelling everything out treats the reader as stupid and has suggested a classification of stories according to the tasks they leave to readers, or in which they entangle readers (BrookeRose 1980:120-148). If we look at actual, published discussions of a story, however, we find no two of them answering the same set of questions, which suggests that we should look for questions (pre)inscribed in the reader as well as the text the text, it is a matter of fact, has not very narrowly constrained the set of questions the readers have posed. As soon as we raise the matter of the actual performance of readers, however, we encounter a plethora of variables, and it has become something of a fashion in discussions of reading to enumerate them, often, it seems, to frighten scholars back to the study of narrative competence and the ways texts constrain, or should constrain interpretations. Here, for example, is the list of Gerald Prince, a theorist who, though a strong believer in narrative competence, is a sceptic about the study of narrative performance: