Reader Habits of Synthesizing a World

What the text is experienced as saying about its world is always exceeded by the density and number of connections which passive synthesis seems to prepare for reflective discovery, the argument made in Chaps. 10 and 11 . As the reader encounters passive interconnections in reflective hindsight, they may become aware of the conformity of these connections, at least to some extent, with assumptions prevailing in their own culture about how any world works. The current chapter addresses such cultural dispositions for passively connecting certain text world features with certain others. These culturally privileged connections are likely to diverge between differently situated readers. Thus, what prompts readers to reflection, because it seems conspicuously (dis-)connected by the text, may also differ between readers. Additionally, the unity of the text world as such can become problematical to the reader. This experience is invited deliberately by some modernist literary art, and the chapter will use a work by Edmond Jabès as an illustration. Yet the level at which passive synthesis prompts the reader to reflect can adjust itself by habituation to ‘unrealistic’ world features, to features that are factual but new to the reader, and also to ‘weak’ world densities. The sensitivity with which acts of reflection respond to prompts from passive synthesis can undergo change, and the text itself can contribute to such changes.