I’ve gone over this before, but in a post so tl;dr that I’m sure it could bear some repeating. It’ll probably be relevant to the Casshern Sins post I want to write for Super Fanicom, and if not, it’ll at least give me a good starting point. Besides, I mention “text-image” enough, and it’d be nice to have a compact reference post to link to when I do.

First, a graphic. Fun!

This is (ostensibly) the reading process, as I see it thanks to people like Poulet, Iser, and de Saussure. There exists a physical text, of course, but all meaning-building must necessarily take place in the minds of readers, as that’s how meaning-building works; in this sense, the text is not only empty, but unfillable. What we “fill” with meaning when we read is an effectively infinitely large (or, more accurately, sizeless) construct of signifiers I’ve been calling the authorial shell (in reference to Poulet’s authorial consciousness, though “authorial” may just be verbal baggage by now). This shell is assembled by the reader out of their personal store of knowledge and the text-image, the mental “version” of the text the reader forms in response to the text’s linguistic/visual/aural cues. The text-image would include information such as “Gandalf wears a gray robe,” while knowledge/experience would supply what a gray robe looks like in the first place, if it can, as well as symbolic knowledge of the color gray which would enable the filling of the authorial shell with signifieds. Thus, we contribute to a text’s total meaning and help determine its place in the body of literature by hanging our corresponding authorial shells from it alongside the shells of those who have read before.

Certain problems arise from the simplicity of the above illustration. It’s possible that the text-image and knowledge/experience combine inexorably, or that the text-image is itself composed of knowledge and experience, and thus we can’t consider them to be separate things at all, or must think of them not as complementary parts of the authorial shell, but steps in the process of the creation of the shell. I keep these possibilities in mind as I throw sharp objects at my model to test its durability in various cases — such as that of Casshern Sins, which I want to use to look at the phenomenology of subversion, as soon as I think of a place to start.

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