So what’s a lay-reader? This came up earlier today in a somewhat speedy but nonetheless useful review of the key theoretical work allying Literature and Science led by Martin Willis. We went through Beer and Levine and then came on to discussing Gowan Dawson and Sharon Ruston’s work in the area, and at some point, tangentially, this question came up. All our discussions about readership practice so far have assumed the existence of (and, I suggest, have implied a majority of) lay-readers. Have you ever met one? How are we defining them? Would they be happy with that? What is at stake in this process of definition?
I think it’s important to complicate this slightly condescending idea we have of the general reading public. A reading public who don’t know or care about science at all aren’t going to be at the heart of the readership even of popular science, let alone scientific treatise. Meanwhile, even popular literature is far from universal, and when it is consumed, it’s consumed by an extremely disparate group.
We need to get back in touch with the fact that a lot of opinions of texts are shaped from outside, without any direct interaction. My feelings about The X-Factor, which are pretty strong, by the way, are based on about one and a half minutes of direct viewing, but an enormous amount of reading, discussion with its fans and detractors, and all those other means of cultural osmosis to which we Young Things seem especially susceptable. Likewise, I have a friend whose opinions on Dickens were pretty fixed after he dipped a toe into a couple of pages at school, and he has found no need to revisit the subject. And of all the people I know who have opinions on the LHC, very few seem to have even an abstract understanding of what it does.
This is why I’m perhaps a bit surprised that discussions so far have avoided the question of the Media – the ‘lay-reader’ is constructed in the tenor and address of the dailies, surely, and exists much more by their implication than (s)he does in real life. Likewise, the damaging tropes of science (empirical, cold, uncaring, statistical, objective) and literature (prosey, wordy, irrelevant, self-absorbed) are daily reinforced by the stereotypes offered in the news. Interface with texts on either side is part of the story, but I think it’s very far from all, or even most of it – here I’m reminded of a discussion I had with someone here (I forget who – sorry!) about the BBC’s Have Your Say website and all of its contingent problems (nicely mapped on this blog).
What is a lay-reader? Well, I’m a lay-reader when I pick up Michio Kaku’s Physics of the Impossible. That’s why I pick up Physics of the Impossible rather than Kaku’s doctoral thesis, and that’s why Physics of the Impossible was written. But I’m probably an ‘advanced’ or ‘expert’ reader, or whatever you want to call it, if you fling an H. G. Wells my way. Clearly, everything here is a bit more complicated than it at first seems. Gillian Beer offers us the idea that scientists are not just scientists when they read genre fiction. They can also be sci-fi fans (as Kaku is), husbands, wives, scottish, tired, eating, on fire, and so forth. Presuming upon the existence of the dear average reader on behalf of whom a lot of people here are fighting quite nobly may well be simply to reinforce this media-generated world of black and white, of barriers between disciplines and, most crucially, of conflict.
Will Tattersdill