აგიოგრაფიის მკითხველი

აბსტრაქტი

სტატიიდან აღებული ავტორის ინგლისურენოვანი რეზიუმე:

Key words: Communication, text, reader.

A text does not exist without a reader. The life of a text is conditioned by commu- nication with the reader. Communication starts before the encounter. Prior to encountering a text, the reader recognizes the authority of the text. If you do not recognize the dictatorship of the text, you fail to become a reader. Self-belief that you choose the text by yourself is wrong. The text chooses you. Hence, you do not choose, you are chosen. You are a means of reading the text, a tool to enliven the text. This means that the text imposes conditions on you. If you do not take into con- sideration these conditions or break the rules of communication, a literary work won’t let you come closer to it; it won’t open up, trust you.

The rules of communication include the recognition of the primacy of the text – its aesthetic, ethical and poetic principles; its destination, purpose, importance. Not as you understand, but as it should be. The reader unconditionally acknowledges the authority of a text which implies the influence, effect and dictate. The reader is not permitted to go beyond the limits of the law of genre but he is allowed to enter the narrative, to become a participant in narrative events, to put oneself in the place of a character. The reader should enter the text as a hotel room, where everything belongs to you, but not your property. While you are in the text, the nuances are all yours, exist for you, serve you, but you know that you don’t have to change anything, alter, remove or throw away.

The reader feels that his will and perception are secondary. The author’s will is not primary either. The primacy belongs to the law, the law of the genre. A good reader is the one who follows the author and knows what the law is. A literary work is not created just only by the author and the law. It is also created by the time, history and culture. In the reading process, both the author and the reader occupy a secondary position: the status of primacy belongs to the tradition, which is an actor, subject of a narration, main representant. Participation in the tradition, i.e. reading, perception and understanding is a cultural process. The “historization” of perception is the key element of communication.

The responsibility of a reader is not only reading, but “reading comprehension” of the text. The “reading comprehension” is an interpretation, awareness, bringing the content to the surface, objectification of an idea, i.e. what Hans-Georg Gadamer calls “revealing the hidden”: “The work of art that says something confronts us itself. That is, it expresses something in such a way that what is said is like a discovery, a disclosure of something previously concealed.” The reader may not fully reveal the hidden, but must see the purpose of the author. He must realize that he lives in such a field of values that cannot be spontaneously changed by him.

He cannot alter anything or bring his ideas into it, his extrapolations – anachronistic views. The text influences like music which is impossible to interpret fully. Feelings cannot be explained by reason, replaced with logic, analyzed. If you think you understand everything, then you do not understand anything. The purpose of the author is that the reader should find a camertone, an acoustic instrument, a rhythm on which the reading process is to be constructed. There exists a narrative rhythm – the dynamics of the transmission of the plot, the rhythm of perception – the intensity of the reception and assimilation of the forms of reasoning, the rhythm of reading – the technique of internal and external articulation, the rhythm of the syntax – the harmony of words combination, sometimes sluggish, low, slow, accelerating, sometimes fast, accelerated, expressive.

Reading in itself is not a creative process. Reading is an action that involves the correct understanding and rendering of the text. The text invites the reader to work together. The sound, syllable, word, syntax, rhythm, tone, pathos are the mechanisms of joint action. The text requires from the reader not obedience, but coincidence. Reading is effective as much as the reader obeys the rules, to what extent his perception of the text is constructive and adequate. The first step of “reading comprehension” is a question of communication, determination of the relationship with the text. The connection of two kinds is singled out: synchronic in relation to the text and diachronic in relation to the tradition (history).

Approximately, as in receptive aesthetics, the text should be read in the context of time perception. The perception, acceptance and reading should be realized against historical background. We accept hermeneutical study of the professor from Cambridge Quentin Skinner – when reading a literary work, the focus must be placed not only on the text but also the dominant traditions which determine the approach to the themes and problems put forward in the composition should be taken into account (Skinner). Perhaps the reader is unaware that he is selected beforehand. Such normative text as a hagiographical composition presupposes “its own” reader who will “understand”, acknowledge its law and recognizes its cultural sovereignty.

The text is seeking a real subject of perception. The purpose of this search, intention, teleological essence is that the composition realizes itself as “writing”, as the subject of tradition or transmission. The reader protects the aesthetic distance, takes into consideration the specifics of the genre and observes the rule of actualization, in what direction the attention is to be intensified. This is a kind of receptive control, the violation of which means not freedom, but the absence of control. Free interpretation means that we are on the wrong path, i.e. we have broken the law, got out of the reception control. If the character is “black”, he should not be made “white” and, on the contrary, if he is “white”, it is not necessary to look for black spots in it.

For example, if the author of the Life of St.Shio says that St. Shio became a “theatron for angels and men”, this means that the principle character really became a “theatron”, spectacle and in this case only this metaphor expresses what the author wants to say. The reliability factor works by itself. The author entrusts the text to the reader, the reader relies on the author. This “social contract” is in force until a certain level, and then begins another, internal, more natural stage of reading, which I would term a receptive caprice. What do I mean by this concept? First of all, it is impossible for the reader to perceive the text exactly as the author writes.

At the same time, the text cannot render with complete accuracy what the author intended to render. Based on this, two buffer spaces are created in the reading process: the first is a space between the reader and the author and the second space is between the text and the reader. Buffer zones are filled by themselves with artistic, aesthetic and psychological factors. What is given to us in the form of a text and how we specify or how we perceive it, whether you like it or not, depends on each individual reader’s experience.

გამოქვეყნებულია ჟურნალში „სჯანი“, ტ. 20/2 (2019), გვ. 7–13. ნაშრომის გახსნა