They buried the cat last Friday. Myrtle thought it was best, all things considered. Given the hot spell.
That’s the start of my latest short story. I’ve not written much else, because I don’t write short stories. But I enjoyed writing it. It gave me that feeling I’d parachuted you directly into something. All the best short stories start like that, leaving you running to catch up, to get yourself on top of things, to overtake the words. That must be what schoolteachers meant when they kept telling me to keep up (mind you, I can’t resist the aside that story-telling really ought not to demand a kind of lexical archaeology - James Joyce has a lot to answer for).
What I want to explore today is the contract between writer and reader. Only when we’ve thought about that can we go back and find out what was wrong with that delicious new writing system we invented last time. (To be fair, it had already been invented at least a dozen times, most famously by a seventeenth-century Bishop. Fear not, we shall return to it.)
I know what was in my mind when I wrote those two sentences up there. Can I conclude that when you read them, I also put whatever it was into your mind? If so, how did that come about? Does writing really give me a licence to put things into other people’s minds?
Let me make a few guesses about what you might have understood when you read those imperishable words up there. You probably decided that this Myrtle person has some kind of relationship with somebody else. The word they did that. You also probably decided it was this couple’s pet cat that had died and Myrtle accepted the sad event slightly better than the other person. You can’t pinpoint a word that brings this about – it has something to do with the whole of the second sentence: She’s putting a brave face on things, coping with the inevitable. You believe you are being told all this sometime in the week following the burial (that is, the story is located in time: on a particular day between Sunday and Thursday of last week). That follows from the reference to last Friday. One final thing – albeit a guess - you may have intuited that these feline obsequies took place in the USA. Somewhere down South, in verandas and mint jelep territory.
Now, it was just seventeen words and only four of them were the names of anything - where the hell did all that stuff come from? A big question, dear reader, and not one I intend to shirk. Indeed it will take us weeks and weeks. Today we shall just make a start.
Consider the fourth word – the word cat. Imagine that’s as far as you’ve read. Try to recall what you thought about at that exact second. Did you think about a cat when your eyes alighted on it? Did catness enter your mind? Did you imagine a cat? Its colour? Its size? Since it was being buried, did you imagine other, disagreeable, things? Did you really think about all those things?
My guess is the honest answer is “no”. Frankly, you hardly had time. I claim you didn’t really imagine anything very particular. It was enough for your mind to be reassured that you knew what a cat was. What I mean is, you already knew what a cat was – there’s no way that sentence told you anything at all about cats.
My claim is that inside your mind (I’ve cast you in the role of reader, remember) all sorts of things are packaged concerning cats. When I penned those words, in the role of writer, I could not possibly know about all that stuff – we’ve not even met. You may be the world’s greatest authority on cats; you may be completely uninterested in them – how am I to know? All I can do is assume a certain common ground between us, regarding cathood.
Imagine I had asked you to read, They buried the djn. That particular three-letter word would have had you reaching for the dictionary. Assuming there was not one at hand my assumption is that vaguely Arabic thoughts stirred concerning a certain something capable of being buried (fruitlessly, as it happens, because I made the word up).
As you rushed past those first four words (it will have taken you about a second) all that entered your mind was what you might call “default catness” - a momentary awareness (or even less than that) of a lying-down- four-legged-no-longer-animate-furry-thing.
But wait a minute. Can I really say no longer animate? You may well reply: “Of course it’s no longer animate – it’s dead.” But you’ve already realised that’s not necessarily so. Those four words merely state it was buried, not that it was dead. I made you think it was dead because in the world most of us inhabit you don’t bury live things. We share that belief to such an extent (by virtue of never watching the wrong sort of movie) that I don’t even need to be explicit. Indeed, They buried the dead cat last Friday starts a story of an altogether different kind – in particular, one in which Myrtle has more than one cat.
There appear to be what you might call default states for words. In the case of nouns like cat, the default is a constellation of elements that may not get us very far along the wonderful branching tree of the sub-species felis silvestris catus – but far enough. In the case of verbs, something similar obtains. To bury a thing that is normally living usually requires that it be dead. To repeat – usually.
A rather alarming conclusion flows from this. The contract between writer and reader cannot operate at a very specific level at all. The belief that writing is about conveying ideas from one mind to another is false - the ideas were already there. Worse, each reader possesses a completely different set.
I posed the question: Where the hell did all that stuff come from? And the emerging answer is it didn’t come from anywhere – it was already there. At some point we’ll have to examine how it got there, but that’s for later. For the time being, we have to accept that you the reader knew it, and I the writer assumed you knew it and (since you had embarked on my story) you assumed that I knew that you knew it. That is why we’re talking about a contract.
Now I am well aware this is a deeply subversive idea - particularly unwelcome to those (and they are many) who see reading as a question of decoding - who think all readers have to do is crack the code, as it were, to secure instant access to the writer's thoughts. But the brutal truth to set against this is that readers only have access to their own thoughts. And the more you think about this apparently innocent observation the more dangerous it becomes, carrying with it many implications - psychological, sociological and political.