4.2 The Readers Reponses
(a) I ntroduction
Reading came before writing. Although we think of the word ‘reading’ to
mean the scanning of text, reading is, however, a broader, more complex human
function. We read the environment, expressions on faces, the movements of a
ballet dancer. We read at both a conscious and subliminal level, often
simultaneously, thus, it is both an archaic and complex function, and in that sense
we are all readers. Readers, in the sense of book readers, often experience
literature that leads to personal revelations and find themselves unexpectedly
aroused and emotionally affected, sometimes even transformed by a particular
work, sometimes to the very core of their being. C. S. Lewis helps us to understand
this in his suggestion that reading literature:
... enlarges our being by admitting us to experiences not our own.
They may be beautiful, terrible, awe-inspiring, exhilarating,
pathetic, comic or merely piquant. Literature gives the I to
them all. Those of us who have been true readers all our life,
seldom fully realize the enormous extension of our being which we
owe to authors. We realize it best when we talk with an unliterary
friend ... he inhabits a tiny world. I n it, we should be suffocated.
The man who is contented to be only himself, and therefore less a
self, is in prison. My own eyes are not enough for me. Even the
eyes of all humanity are not enough. I regret that the brutes
cannot write books. Very gladly would I learn what face things
present to a mouse or a bee; more gladly still would I perceive the
olfactory world charged with all the information it carries for a dog
... I n reading good literature, I become a thousand men, and yet
remain myself. Like the night sky in a Greek poem, I see with a
thousand eyes, but it is still I who see. Here as in worship, in
love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am
never more myself than when I do (Lewis, 1992:137,139,140-
141).
The writer John Fowles suggested that from a reader’s perspective ... all
literature is an attempt to escape, an effort to transcend iron-reality (Fowles,
1998:119). However, not all reading is a response to escape and David Malouf
offers another viewpoint of the act of reading and of a special state of
consciousness that ensues, one that takes us very close to the suggestion of MLC,
when he opines that it is not:
... an act of reading that is merely passive: of readers who are
happy to have books speak for them – though that is certainly
