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Van Manen’s work on phenomenological writing has me returning to an image I brought up in an earlier post about the writer-reader relationship. Chardin’s Le Philosophe Lisant embodies this relationship in that the READER’S quill is emphasized in the foreground of the image. “It defines reading as action,” writes George Steiner in “The Uncommon Reader.” “To read well,” he continues, “is to enter into answerable reciprocity with the book being read; it is to embark on total exchange.” Perhaps, then, it is this call-and-response relationship between writer and reader that makes what Van Manen describes as the “lonely dimension of writing” at all bearable. The phenomenological writer is intensely aware of her reader, adds Van Manen: “For a phenomenological text to ‘lead’ the way to human understanding it must lead the reader to wonder. The text must induce a questioning wonder.”
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