It may be when he writes the author has a certain empirical audience in mind; this is how the founders of the modern novel wrote−Richardson, Fielding, Defoe−who were writing for merchants and their wives. But Joyce, too, is writing for an audience, imagining an ideal reader affected by an ideal insomnia. In both cases, whether the writer believes he is writing for a public standing there, money in hand, just outside the door, or whether he means to write for a reaser still to come, writing means constructing, through the text, one’s own model reader.
What does it mean, to imagine a reader able to overcome the penitential obstacle of the firsr hundred pages? It means, precisely, writing one hundred pages for the purpose of constructing a reader suitable for what comes afterward.
Is there a writer who writes only for posterity? No, not even if he says so himself, because, since he is not Nostradamus, he can conceive of posterity only on the model of what he knows of his contemporaries. Is there a writer who writes only for a handful of readers? Yes, if by this you mean that the model reader he imagines has slight chance of being made flesh in any number. But even this writer writes in the hope, not all that secret, that his book itself will create, and in great quantity, many new exemplars of this reader, desired and pursued with such craftsmanlike precision, and postulated, encouraged, by his text.
If there is a difference, it lies between the text that seeks to produce a new reader and the text that tries to fulfill the wishes of the readers already to be found in the street. In the latter case we have the book written, constructed, according to an effective, mass-production formula; the author carries out a kind of market analysis and adapts his work to its results. Even from a distance, it is clear that he is working by a formula; you have only to analyze the various novels he has written and you note that in all of them, after changing names, places, distinguishing features, he has told the same story−the one that the public was already asking of him.
But when a writer plans something new, and conceives a different kind of reader, he wants to be, not a market analyst, cataloguing expressed demands, but, rather, a philosopher, whos enses the patterns of the Zeitgeist. He wants to reveal to his public what it should want, even if it does not know it. He wants to reveal the reader to himself.