Essay About Textual Strategies And Ahistorical Truth

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