It Begins On the Page: How Relationships Between Readers and Writers Are Made

Typically, when publishing professionals think of readers, they think they need to entice them to buy the book so they may have hours of pleasant or enriching cultural entertainment. The author’s name is repeated ad nauseam: on the cover, on the spine, on the frontispiece, on the credits page, sometimes at the top of pages, and occasionally even in the epigraph, as if to remind the reader that the book “has a sole owner.” The role of a more conventional epigraph, with a quote from another author’s work, is to present the author’s family tree; it shows readers where what they are about to read comes from, subtly pointing to the book’s ancestry, introducing the text’s forebearers. I have seen cases where an author takes an epigraph from their own work and doesn’t cite the source; in this manner, they don’t trace a line to their predecessors, but begin the book by navel-gazing.

A good or well-chosen epigraph speaks to the rest of the book, but when it’s merely an exercise in narcissism, all it does is add gloss to the writer’s biography, which is usually emblazoned across the inside flaps or on the back cover anyway. Signposting the role of the author with all these markings is, to some extent, fair. It extols their artistic work, but it is also part of a culture that establishes the absolute primacy of writers in relation to readers—the same thing happens in other arts, with the artist occupying cameras, stages, daises, and walls.

In this manner, readers and audiences aren’t considered part of the work; they are simply passive consumers. But it’s worth remembering that this wasn’t always the case. Fictional texts awaken entirely personal resources of the imagination at both the moment of writing and the moment of reading.

In this way, the book that remains etched in each reader’s mind is unique to them. The lines of a silent power struggle between writer and readers are drawn in the book itself. Symbolically, during and after reading, one might rightfully ask: Whose book is this?

I’ve always been keen to find studies that investigate what leads something to emerge from a writer’s memory and imagination and migrate to the pages of books, whether first written out by hand or composed on the blank page of a computer screen. I dream of making a more systematic investigation of the psychology and neuroscience of artistic creation, to help me understand the inner workings of memory and its relationship to literary creation. I may not have the time to properly explore the subject until I retire, which would be somewhat cruel: I’ll be better able to understand my trade once I’ve left it.

I will read about the past of the practice to which I have dedicated my life as if I were a first-year student of literature or publishing, as if I were returning to the early days of my internship at Brasiliense—where I began without knowing anything about books, except that I loved them and couldn’t live without This deep analytical knowledge will connect in my mind with so many memories of accompanying hundreds of authors in their creative process without ever daring to theorize about it. I don’t believe that any kind of original, theoretical study is possible for me, as an editor. This is a profession in which we know a little about a lot of things, but never delve deeply into such a complex subject.