The Writer – Reader Relationship – Part 1

Maar ik zou niet willen dat deze laatste beweringen meteen tot een andere aanleiding geven, veel gehoord onder slechte schrijvers: dat je alleen voor jezelf schrijft. Wantrouw wie dat zegt, hij is een oneerlijke en leugenachtige narcist.

But I wouldn't want these last assumptions to lead to another conclusion, widely heard amongst lousy writers: that you only write for yourself. Distrust whoever says this, he is a dishonest and lying narcissist.

The above quote is from Umberto Eco in 'On Literature', in a section called 'The Writer and the Reader'. I thought it was funny, as I had a discussion with my cousin Gwen earlier this week on this exact topic. She, speaking more from a journalistic perspective, believes that the writer should always keep the reader in mind, and should therefore always write with the reader in mind. However, I write from a more therapeutic perspective, and I believe that a writer writes primarily for himself, and the reader is of secondary importance. So I couldn't suppress a smile while reading the above passage, even if the implication was that I am a dishonest narcissist.

Of course, the magic word in the quote is 'only'. I may believe that I write primarily for myself, but that does not mean that the reader is of no importance at all. After all, if the reader does not matter, I would have no legitimate reason to keep blogging. If I would write purely for myself, I would be content with leaving my writings in my notebook, or maybe even just in my head, where they can just lie peacefully. So yes, the reader does matter a lot, as writing is in essence another form of communication, so if there is no Reader, my writing would be devoid of any purpose. This realization in itself would, in my opinion, be sufficient to explain that I do not necessarily disagree with Eco, especially since the discussion I had with Gwen was more about the readability of a text (which ironically originated from Eco's 'On Literature', which we said was extremely hard to read and understand), and I believe that that is a completely discussion that what Eco had in mind.

Still, the Writer – Reader relationship is still very much an interesting topic, and strangely enough one that I failed to explore thoroughly in the past, even if only in my head. I need to think about it and hopefully write more about it later.