A snappy Google search led me to a classic an example of self-reference: ‘As long as you are not reading me, the fourth word of this sentence has no referent’. I am talking to you, but are you listening? How do you interpret this?

Wolfgang Iser was a man about town. His ideas about the artistic, the aesthetic and the virtual space in between are phenomenal. To him, literature has an artistic and an aesthetic pole; the former is the writer’s written words, and the second is the reader’s re-conceptualization. Between the two is a virtual, rather than concrete, space and this is where the dynamism of communication occurs.

Readers interpret freely. And writers do not often realise this as they are shackled by the traditional ‘single meaning’ approach to interpretation. ‘The author’s message is…’; ‘the moral of the story is…’ Fiction writing is not about instructing, it is about seeking to suspend disbelief, and encourage interrogation and negotiation.

Many new writers forget that reading is an experience. So they bang out words and dump them. Why do they frequently not think about the faceless, anonymous, and unnamed reader? The hypothetical reader? Who do I think you are?

Interestingly, Iser’s Act of Reading was written in the late 1970s, well before WWW. But his ideas have novel and exciting potentialities in terms of blogging, virtual space, and interpretation. Do blogs open up an author/reader virtual interface? Are all bloggers writing for ideal readers? Are we raising consciousness by bombarding others with words?