Is there any legitimate way of reading a literary text? This is a familiar question over which the two directly conflicting camps, essentialist and relativist, have had a controversy again and again. Now it seems necessary to overcome such a barren dichotomy and find an alternative way of reading. In so doing we must first understand how much our own act of reading, whether essentialist or relativist, is defined and controlled by preconception, the frame of reference, and other cultural restraints. Then we can analyze the dynamism of reading which produces what we recognize as actual out of nothing real.