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Originally Posted by Fordim
And finally, still others seem to think that there is no reader, only the text.
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But the text must exist apart from the reader, as a thing in itself. If the text changes us in any way at all it must be because it introduces us to new ideas & feelings, to something previously unknown. If we learn anything from it it must have supplied us with new information which we didn't previously have. My point is simply that it is that 'new information' which is of primary importance, & which must be given weight over what we already knew. The text changes us, & we become a different person (to a greater or lesser degree) to what we had been. The more open we are to the text the more we will be affected (changed) by it. As Bob Stewart says of 'Innerworld beings' 'they are 'real' within their own dimension. If we treat them as figments of our own imagination they will behave as such & our experience of the inner world will become a meaningless dream.
Now, admittedly, he is speaking of other, psychic, 'realities', but I think this idea gels with Tolkien's theory of Faerie, or 'secondary worlds'. The more we approach the secondary world as 'nothing but' a self creation on the reader's part, a construction by the reader based mainly on the reader's own 'baggage', the more it will become simply a 'mirror' which reveals only the reader's own psyche. The more we approach it as 'unknown', as 'new',as something we don't know, the more powerfully will it affect us, because we will be open to being changed by it. Gandalf, Frodo, Shelob, et al, are 'real' within their own world, they are not our invention, nor are they our mirrors of our unconscious contents. If they were they couldn't change us & we couldn't learn from them.