Textual Strategies Using Dialectics

We often hear that poetry lends itself to multiple interpretations. But, what about prose, or

any form of communication for that matter? What determines our interpretation of a work of

fiction? Is there a true meaning that the author implies or are there multiple meanings, each

as “correct” as the other that the reader can derive based on his own cultural context? How

far does a text determine its own meaning and how far is the meaning determined by the

reader? Is there an ahistorical truth, a truth that is valid devoid of culture and history or does

the truth change with time? These are some of the questions that critics and philosophers

have tried to answer since centuries. A school of thought, called objectivism believes in a

permanent ahistorical framework from which the “true” meaning of the text can be derived

while relativists place the onus on the interpreter and the cultural context she is a part of. Ian

McLean, in this reading, summarises three major theories that attempt to answer these

questions and the views of the major critics that have contributed to these theories.

One of these critics, Wolfgang Iser talks about literary objects as interaction between text

and reader. It is in this respect that he talks about “repertoire” and “literary strategies”. The

literary strategies or textual strategies represent the underlying form of the text, while the

repertoire is the set of social, historical and cultural norms that the reader supplies as a

necessary adjunct to his reading but which the text in some sense contains. The function of

both repertoire and textual strategies is to de-familiarise the reader, and to communicate the

text to the reader without explicitly determining it. Hence, in essence, textual strategies carry

the invariable “primary code” which the reader deciphers in his own way to arrive at the

variable “secondary code”. In this sense Iser’s approach is a mediation between objectivism

and relativism because instead of