Creating a monster--Authoritative readings

Reading Pope’s Dunciad in its 1729 form, I was most forcefully struck by the anxieties surrounding the practice of reading and readership in general that the text plays with.   The pseudonymous editor Martin Scriblerus frequently (and disingenuously) invokes or calls to the “gentle reader’s” judgment, only to foreclose any textual space for the exercising of such judgment.  Of course, since Scriblerus functions as a parodic figure, these self-conscious gestures might seem like mockeries of the typical officiously patronizing editorial practices of the day.  The “editor” sends mixed messages (forcing interpretations while insisting that the reader knows best) and thereby undermines his textual persona.  Despite this self-aware playfulness, though, the text, or rather, the paratexts remain deeply invested in maintaining structures of proper readership (or at least it recapitulates them on a grand scale).  From the seemingly exhaustive, meticulously annotated (though perhaps still spurious?) “list of books in which [Pope] was abused,” both before and after publication of The Dunciad,  to the list of Pope’s genuine works, definitions of textual authority are continually coming into question.  There seems to be an internal tension in the appendices and other paratextual materials included in this publication—a parodic acknowledgment of the editorial anxiety surrounding the authority of the reader that can never fully relax from that anxiety. 

The proliferation of texts gave a newfound (or at least newly defined) authority to “readers” in general (whether of text or, as Pat Rogers argues, of topographic nomenclature and other narratives more broadly).  When Scriblerus ends his afterword to The Dunciad with the sentence, “Wipe away all these monsters [editorial errors], Reader, with thy quill,” the tension between its imperative syntax and the power it invests in the reader is pronounced.  I’m left, however, contemplating the “monsters” themselves, which the “Reader” can destroy but also presumably create.  The productive, albeit perhaps disturbing potential for interpretive creation implied by this final line seems a fitting conclusion to such a self-consciously fraught work.