The Consciousness of the Reader
© Kathleen D. Anderson
(A collage of scattered images entitled "Impression" made for this essay)
Years ago an African-American student came up to me after class with tears in his eyes. In his hands he held one of the assigned readings, the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, the son of a black slave and a white man who at twenty-one escaped and settled with his wife to New Bedford, Massachusetts where he changed his name and began his formal education---teaching himself to read and write and eventually becoming a great lecturer in the late 1800’s. My student challenged me with his remark: “Why haven’t I read this author before?” And, then he softened: “Thank you, thank you, for introducing this author to me because I’ve read some of his work to my own children.”
Just as writing a text is a creative act, so is the reading of the text as it creates a response in the reader.
In another class we read Anne Bradstreet, an American poet and mother of eight children and one of the first important poets of the American colonies. Another student, a mother of three children, presented a critique and personal response to a work of Bradstreet’s that struck an emotional chord inside. The poem that touched this student was Bradstreet’s “Before the Birth of One of Her Children.” It seems that the student had lost a child during childbirth and the poem moved her in a way that no other writing had moved her in the past.
Another very quiet student, a Desert Storm veteran, walked up one day with Hemingway’s Short story about WWI, “A Soldier’s Home” in one hand, and in the other a map of the war route where Hemingway’s character fought: Belleau Wood, the Champagne, St. Mihel, and the Argonne. “Mrs. Anderson,” my student shuffled from foot to foot and then laid out the map on the desk, and looked at me in awe, “…these were the bloodiest battles of the war.”
In the reader’s consciousness, while the writing itself remains constant, the response to a reading is an evolving creation of reaction as the reader processes the character and the plot and all of the images that reach inside him or her.
Finally, another student reaction---a very studious reader and student who discovered Walt Whitman, and even read Whitman as she munched her peanut butter sandwich at lunch, came into my office one day and exclaimed, “Whitman does a really cool thing in his writing. He calls the United States a ‘great poem.’ She looked up at me quizzically, "He's right. It is like a poem.”
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