[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
fact? Is it I, or some part of me? "It isn't I as a truth, but I as uncertainty about myself, reading
these texts that lead to perdition. The more I read them, the less I understand them, and
everything is going from bad to worse.i23
((174))
This is a common experience, if one believes testimony that cannot be quantified or quoted,
and not only that of "learned" readers. This experience is shared by the readers of True
Romances, Farm Journal and The Butcher and Grocery Clerk's Journal, no matter how
popularized or technical the spaces traversed by the Amazon or Ulysses of everyday life.
Far from being writers founders of their own place, heirs of the peasants of earlier ages now
working on the soil of language, diggers of wells and builders of houses readers are
travellers; they move across lands belonging to someone else, like nomads poaching their way
across fields they did not write, despoiling the wealth of Egypt to enjoy it themselves. Writing
accumulates, stocks up, resists time by the establishment of a place and multiplies its
production through the expansion-ism of reproduction. Reading takes no measures against the
erosion of time (one forgets oneself and also forgets), it does not keep what it acquires, or it
does so poorly, and each of the places through which it passes is a repetition of the lost
paradise.
Indeed, reading has no place: Barthes reads Proust in Stendhal's text;24 the television viewer
reads the passing away of his childhood in the news reports. One viewer says about the
program she saw the previous evening: "It was stupid and yet I sat there all the same." What
place captivated her, which was and yet was not that of the image seen? It is the same with the
reader: his place is not here or there, one or the other, but neither the one nor the other,
simultaneously inside and outside, dis-solving both by mixing them together, associating texts
like funerary statues that he awakens and hosts, but never owns. In that way, he also escapes
from the law of each text in particular, and from that of the social milieu.
Spaces for games and tricks
In order to characterize this activity of reading, one can resort to several models. It can be
considered as a form of the bricolage Levi-Strauss analyzes as a feature of "the savage mind,"
that is, an arrangement made with "the materials at hand," a production "that has no
relationship to a project," and which readjusts "the residues of previous construction and
destruction."25 But unlike Levi-Strauss's "mythological universes," if this production also
arranges events, it does not compose a unified set: it is another kind of "mythology" dispersed
in time, a sequence of temporal
((175))
fragments not joined together but disseminated through repetitions and different modes of
enjoyment, in memories and successive knowledges.
Another model: the subtle art whose theory was elaborated by medieval poets and romancers
who insinuate innovation into the text itself, into the terms of a tradition. Highly refined
procedures allow countless differences to filter into the authorized writing that serves them as
a framework, but whose law does not determine their operation. These poetic ruses, which are
not linked to the creation of a proper (written) place of their own, are maintained over the
centuries right up to con-temporary reading, and the latter is just as agile in practicing
diversions and metaphorizations that sometimes are hardly even indicated by a "pooh!"
interjected by the reader.
The studies carried out in Bochum elaborating a Rezeptionsästhetik (an esthetics of reception)
and a Handlungstheorie (a theory of action) also provide different models based on the
relations between textual tactics and the "expectations" and successive hypotheses of the
receiver who considers a drama or a novel as a premeditated action.26 This play of textual
productions in relation to what the reader's expectations make him produce in the course of
his progress through the story is presented, to be sure, with a weighty conceptual apparatus;
but it introduces dances between readers and texts in a place where, on a depressing stage, an
orthodox doctrine had erected the statue of "the work" surrounded by consumers who were
either conformers or ignorant people.
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]