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Can Writers Read Readers?

1. As I’ve suggested, these two types of rules sometimes get “scrunched up,” as Miss Watson might put it, when we’re not paying attention. (Certainly, I’ve not always been sufficiently careful to distinguish them in my own work.) Thus, when Phelan gives the reader-oriented version of the Rule of Dominant Focus, he says, “Once audiences infer that narratives are committed to a certain set of interests . . . they will continue to interpret new information in light of that dominant focus until the textual phenomena provide sufficient recalcitrance to frustrate those efforts” (27). As stated, it’s a rule of signification, a rule about how we make sense of what we notice. But which kind of rule of signification? Is that really a claim about reader inertia (as it seems to be on the surface)—or is it a claim about what we ought to do if we want to remain in the authorial audience? Say I’ve inferred that the dominant focus of Peter Lovesey’s who-dun-it The Tooth Tattoo is to determine the connections among the dead bodies and to figure out who the murderer is. Does the rule mean that I will (automatically) read the passages about the changing personnel of the Staccati Quartet as clues to the solution (rather than, say, as a series of insights into the difficulties of keeping a string quartet going)? Or does the rule mean that I should read it in those terms if I don’t want to risk going off the rails interpretively? I suspect Phelan means the latter, although it’s framed as the former. 2. There are also, as Corinne Bancroft pointed out in her incisive commentary, cognitive desires—such as the desire to complete a pattern or to impose a narrative scheme on events. But that’s too large an issue to address here.