Friday, May 14, 2010

Reading and Responding


Evidently, I have become the source of a blog posting and my concern was and still remains one of trying to understand how we read. We all approach texts, I'd argue, with a certain series of expectations, prejudices, experiences, readings, etc., and these will necessarily influence how we read. This was my point and continues to be a point of interest (incidentally one I brought up when I asked for a Proustian reading of Freud instead of a Freudian reading of Proust -- I was inverting).

At any rate, I'm currently reading Proust and Emotion: The Importance of Affect in À la recherche du temps perdu (2003) by Inge Crosman Wimmers. In this book, she puts forward the notion of "motivated reader" which I think is yet another interesting "reader" or "reading position" to consider:

The motivated reader I have in mind is open to new ways of being in the world (Proust, Ricoeur) and is not confined to a set of an 'interpretive community' (Fish), to the conventions of the 'competent reader' (Culler), or to psychological determinism (Holland). It is a reader who is sensitive to textual and intertextual strategies, to response-inviting aspects of the fictional world, and to structures of exchange between the world of the text and the world of the reader, all of which the Proustian narrator encourages by initiating readers through the various kinds of metaphoric narration I discuss and through models of how to read literature, art, and music. (14-15)

And to continue, and perhaps of particular importance for Natalie's reading praxis, Wimmers writes:

In an essay entitled 'Journées de lecture,' Proust first presents some of the most important ideas on reading that will be incorporated in À la recherche du temps perdu, as, for instance, the following observation that reading gives us insight into the deepest recesses of our soul: "[L]a lecture est pour nous l'incitatrice dont les clefs magnifiques nous ouvrent au fond de nous-même la porte des demeures où nous n'aurions pas su pénétrer" (180). Reading thus inspires us to probe deeper because, so the argument goes, "par une loi singulière et d'ailleurs providentielle de l'optique des esprits (loi que signifie peut-être que nous ne pouvons recevoir la vérité de personne, et que nous devons la créer nous-mêmes), ce qui es le terme de leur sagesse ne nous apparaît que comme le commencement de la nôtre" (177). It is quite evident from these and similar observations that a motivated reader is at the very centre of Proust's aesthetics. He encourages us not only to descend into ourselves and to be introspective, but to reach out and discover new worlds. (15)

Indeed, to return to Natalie's question of "did we ever think of reading [In Search of Lost Time]?" my response is something of a diversion: did we ever think of reading Proust's own theory of reading when we approach his texts? Of course, we are ultimately asking -- and necessarily so -- about whether the authority of the text resides in the text or in the author while still trying to negotiate the sovereignty of the reader. I don't know if the solution to reading Proust is to read only the novel precisely because the complexity of Proust demands what Jonathan Culler refers to as a 'competent reader' and in many ways we also have to be open to 'new ways of being in the world' as Ricoeur would have it, but to Wimmer's notion of the 'motivated reader,' we might, also, want to incorporate the 'joyous reader' and the 'pleasure of the text.' To close, I think Natalie's question is an important one and our discussion about it was interesting precisely because it revealed how different similar approaches can be and how two readers reading the same text will almost always depart from differing starting points.

J.A.

1 comment:

  1. A colleague writes the following to me:

    "We all approach texts, I'd argue, with a certain series of expectations, prejudices, experiences, readings, etc., and these will necessarily influence how we read."

    I concur with this sentiment, including the gist of the argument that reading is in many ways a "praxis," which suggests that reading is a scientific pursuit. I recall reading in Barthes's "From Work to Text" that the shift from a book to a text is Einsteinian; it marked a revolutionary shift in how we read, much like Einstein's theories changed the way scientists did science. The position of the reader partly determines what will be seen -- "seen" is a loaded term, meaning, to reader-response theorists like Louise Rosenblatt, understanding and appropriation: "An intense response to a work will have its roots in capacities and experiences already present in the personality and mind of the reader" (Literature as Exploration 41). What one "sees" is relative to one's position -- a viewpoint that inevitably includes a reader's history and values, the "raw materials" out of which we shape meaning (25). The reader "awakens" some potential meaning that is latent in the text and that the text makes possible; again, to quote Rosenblatt, the "reader and the text are essential to the transactional process of making meaning" (27). Texts come to life, in other words, when a reader (his history, experiences etc) becomes involved in them. Iser speaks to the issue of how readers see different things in a given text, employing a metaphor from astronomy -- each "stargazer" will see different images in the same constellation. This "shift" in reading is necessarily modernist, because the role of the observer (much like the scientist) presides over meaning.

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