There is a danger that this might be regarded exercise in solipsism or self-regard. But something struck me as reviews and emails from friends and colleagues have come in commenting on my book The Secret Life of War.That is the gap between what is intended by the writer - what the writer indeed 'owns' in his or her understanding of what they were attempting to achieve - and what the reader takes ownership of in the process of reading. It is a tension I have noticed before in my journalism. How readers through hostility or desire for you to share a common view with them, appropriate meanings that had, perhaps, never even crossed your mind.
What I had not considered properly before - was how there is so much more at work than the simple imposition of readers' own interpretive model - whether that is political, cultural or psychological - on what they read. Hans-Georg Gadamer, a German philosopher who studied under Heidegger, was hugely influential in establishing modern ideas about the relationship between the reader and the read, as a function of how we understand ideas like truth and meaning. If I understand Gadamer correctly, the idea that an objective truth could be excavated from a text by a reader was deeply problematic to him.
For Gadamer the reader inevitably was shaped by his own culture, background, experience and history. Whatever he observed in the reading process was necessarily strongly coloured. Filtered if you like. Gadamer rejected the idea that you could describe the author's true intention, instead suggesting that all encounters between reader and writer are essentially a fusion of experiences. Others have developed on Gadamer's work to suggest that between the business of reading and writing there exists "play" - a constant backwards and forwards.
Precisely why this interests me is because I became obsessed during the writing of The Secret Life of War with a related issue - how as a writer we can effectively interpret events that we see. In particular I became obsessed with attempting to relay as much as I could remember the precise details of situations as they took place, rebuilding the visual detail with the benefit of photographs with the notes of what people said and did, and emotional reflections.
Which left a question: was I writing about what I 'felt' had happened and whose meaning I had interpreted to my satisfaction, or had I managed to express something more true than a sketch of the provisional and foggy.
It is important because the more I think about attempting to be a witness, to observe and describe events, the less easy it becomes the more that I attempt to do it. Confronted by people's multiple viewpoints and interpretations. Which is what this blog will be about - not simply reporting or my reflections on events - but also an attempt to understand how we write about what we see.
The Secret Life of War by Peter Beaumont is published by Harvill Secker
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