Our scene begins with a screen full of leather bound books, red and brown, resting on a well polished shelf as classical music plays softly from some unseen source. We move across the shelf, catching titles –Nietzsche, Shakespeare, a Star Wars comic book that doesn’t seem out of place, and we finally land on our reader, Andrew. He is resplendent in a plush robe sitting before a fire in a large buttoned, leather, winged back chair. Small comforts like tobacco and brandy surround him. We have interrupted his reading. But the interruption is not unwelcome, and he address us directly.
“Oh, hello gentle viewers. You caught me catching up on an old favorite.” Here he closes and lovingly pats another leather bound tome. Then he continues, “It is wonderful to get lost in a story, isn’t it? Adventure and heroics and discovery. Don’t they just take you away? Come with me now, if you will, gentle viewers. Join me on a new voyage of the mind –a little tale I like to call ‘Buffy: Slayer of the Vampyre.’”
At this point there is a loud knocking and the scene abruptly cuts. Andrew is not relaxing in a Holmesian library at all. He is sitting on a toilet and the knocking comes from his roommate who wishes to have access to the facilities.
This brief scene demonstrates the antithetical poles of the ideal reader and the reader as he/she really is.
At the start of the scene Andrew is the reader writers wish for. The learned tomes he surrounds himself with indicate he is well versed in the classics, while the newer titles show he is not opposed to all things modern. This is important because the ideal reader should be well read but not to the point of snobbery. The quality of his books are important as well. Everything is encased in leather (even his chair) and inlaid with gold letters. This is a reader who cares for his books, not the stories they contain. He has surrounded himself with small comforts –the fire, a favorite chair, food, drink, a smoke –as a result he won’t have to move for hours. He can, as he says when he address us, lose himself in a story. Then he defines reading for us (at least from one perspective). He is “catching up on an old favorite.” He is not the fickle consumer who reads books once and is then done with them forever. The ideas contained within Andrew’s books are not disposable. He has a relationship with his books and it is this relationship that defines the act of reading itself. He is “catching up” with them, as if they were old friends. There is an exchange of ideas between the reader and the text. Finally there is the interruption, but this too is idealized. We are the interrupter, we the gentle viewers. Part of Andrew’s reading experience is a journey of discovery –he gets lost but returns with something to share. Now we have come, so he may share what he has discovered thus completing the circle of reading, a circle which is not complete when Andrew closes his book.
This is juxtaposed, rather humorously, to reality. Andrew is on a toilet because it is the only place he can find enough quiet and privacy to read at all. We know this from other story elements that are not relevant here. His book is shabby, but no less loved. He is interrupted, not by a gentle viewer, but rather by a crass roommate who is not interested in Andrew’s discovery at all. And the roommate tells us Andrew has been in the bathroom for nearly half and hour. A long time to occupy the only bathroom in a house, but not nearly long enough to get truly lost in a story. In real life the Reader is distracted, busy, and frustrated in his attempts to read. As much as he wants to be left alone for hours on end, the pressures of life intrude.
What is consistent between both Library Andrew and Bathroom Andrew is the genuine desire to engage the text. Library Andrew is not an ideal forced on to Bathroom Andrew by some outside authority. It is his own ideal –it is his fantasy. Andrew is reading to escape his own life. He is reading to identify with a hero and do something great even if it is only vicarious greatness. He fantasizes about becoming the ideal reader so he can better participate in the acts of his heros, to better attend to their journey, and thus facilitate his own discovery. And it cannot be overlooked that it is only as the idealized reader he is allowed to share his discovery.