Suppose it is the year 5055 and you are living in a primitive new world. You know nothing of the world of 2004. You come across on your food forages a cache of manuscripts from the 20th century. (For present purposes, we will assume you can read English). Among these manuscripts you find a book titled Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by an author named Philip K. Dick. Not knowing anything of the life of Mr. Dick or of his cultural background, you would be forced to bring your own limited knowledge to the story. You may recognize the text as a fictional story or you may choose to read it as historical fact. You would have no background from which to place the text in its proper context. You would be forced to bring your own meaning to the text by providing the text with a context.
We are speaking here not of words by themselves but of whole texts. While agreeing with Derrida that the words are repeatable and can be cited in many different contexts, our concentration here is on particular texts as a whole. The context of a single word can shape meaning and the meaning can be re-contetextualized. We understand that the word is not anchored and can be moved elsewhere into infinite contexts but does the same hold true for an entire text?
A text is produced to convey an idea. Finding the context of the text can narrow all of the meanings of that central idea down. The context of a text limits and shapes its meaning. However, it is not possible to find every context and therefore every meaning. In a sense, the context is going to interrupt the meaning. Meaning is always being ruptured by one form of context or another. Here we will explore three distinct forms of context: the historicity and cultural backgrounds of a text, the intention of the author and of the reader, and finally, the background noise surrounding a text.
Bronislaw Malinowski in his essay “The Role of Myth in Life” says that “The text, of course, is extremely important, but without the context it remains lifeless” (Malinowski 201). The contexts here are the cultural and sociological components that surround a text. This context, consisting of the understanding of the culture in which the text extends from, is essential to effective communication of the text. This is especially important when approaching a text in which the present day reader is not the reader that was the intended audience. This present day reader is far distanced from the text’s creation.
Literature Professor John Lye of Brock University offers this observation, “Reading is thus tied to the text and its historicity; every reading is only an interpretation, an engagement of the historicity of the reader with the historicity of the text. There is no stable reading, only historical reading…meaning as it emerges through the historical reader’s understanding of the historical text” (Lye).
If Lye’s statements are valid, then this statement shows the importance of understanding the historicity and culture of a text. Using the example set forth in the first paragraph of this essay, the historicity of the year 5055 reader and the historicity of the text he is reading are far removed from one another and therefore the validity of the text is vulnerable to misinterpretation because its context has vanished.
William Faulkner writes, “The artist is of no importance. Only what he creates is important…” (Faulkner Quotes). Faulkner speaks of the author as invisible, of the unimportance of who wrote the words, of the “death of the author”. But this is simply not the case. The historicity of the author very often is of utmost importance. The authors of the Bible are dead, are invisible but without searching out the historicity of the culture of these authors, the reader of the text will be falling through an abyss of endless meaning. Scholars and lay readers alike must delve deeply into the historicity of the Bible text in order to establish, at the very least, an approachable context for finding meaning.
Without this knowledge of historical context behind the writing it is not possible for the reader to understand the text validly. As stated in the above example using Philip Dick’s novel as a model, without knowing the historicity and cultural background of the period in which the novel was written can lead to error in interpreting the text itself. Without knowledge of the author and the author’s background can a reader begin to interpret the text in the manner that the author intended? The 5055 reader may very well take as historical fact the apocalyptic world that Dick has created. The reader may not even possess the background to understand what science fiction or satire is.
