ТОП просматриваемых книг сайта:
Bodies and Books. Gillian Silverman
Читать онлайн.Название Bodies and Books
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780812206180
Автор произведения Gillian Silverman
Жанр Языкознание
Издательство Ingram
In the section of Walden (1854) entitled “Reading,” Thoreau begins by differentiating the exalted activity of scholarship from the more prosaic occupations of “accumulating property for ourselves or our posterity,” “founding a family or a state,” and “acquiring fame even.” The former, he insists, deals with “truth,” and, in taking this up, “we are immortal, and need fear no change nor accident.” Reading, then, is significant because of its removal from the quotidian world of contingency, a point reinforced in his next sentences:
The oldest Egyptian or Hindoo philosopher raised a corner of the veil from the statue of the divinity; and still the trembling robe remains raised, and I gaze upon as fresh a glory as he did, since it was I in him that was then so bold, and it is he in me that now reviews the vision. No dust has settled on that robe; no time has elapsed since that divinity was revealed. That time which we really improve, or which is improvable, is neither past, present, nor future.101
Here Thoreau suggests that reading belongs to an alternative chronometry divorced from linear or progressive time. The temporal lapse between when an author writes, or, in Thoreau’s language, “raises a corner of the veil,” and when a reader reads is imperceptible—“no time has elapsed.” The writer’s revelation, even if it happened centuries ago, is made simultaneous with the reader’s discovery: “I gaze upon as fresh a glory as he did.” Why is this? Because at the moment of reading, reader and writer are fused and inseparable: “It was I in him that was then so bold, and it is he in me that now reviews the vision.” In other words, it is the reader who ultimately enables and makes real the author’s initial discoveries, a variation of Maurice Blanchot’s radical reader response position—“What is a book that no one reads? Something that has not yet been written.”102 Likewise, in perusing the ancient book, the reader is inhabited by the subjectivity of the author who “reviews” his original discoveries through the reader’s own eyes. The result is a profound imbrication of the two beings, so that writer and reader exist in one another (“I in him,” “he in me”), and the time between them is suspended—“neither past, present, nor future.” That Thoreau describes this alternative temporality as “really improv[ing]” suggests his interest in aligning reading with a form of productivity not reducible to traditional notions of progress.
Thoreau’s account of the curious bodily fusion between reader and author recalls Austin’s description of her forays into Old Red Sandstone—“the feel of the author behind the book.” Both are examples of what Annamarie Jagose has called the “transformed relationalities” that are made possible and necessary by rethinking temporality.103 In other words, if reading brings with it new ways of understanding time and space, it also, in the process, suggests new relationships between readers and the players associated with a book’s narrative world (author, character, fellow reader, etc.). For Thoreau, the book thus creates an intimacy unlike that found in any other art form:
A written word is the choicest of relics. It is something at once more intimate with us and more universal than any other work of art. It is the work of art nearest to life itself. It may be translated into every language, and not only be read but actually breathed from all human lips;—not be represented on canvas or in marble only, but be carved out of the breath of life itself. The symbol of an ancient man’s thought becomes a modern man’s speech.104
What is significant about the “written word,” the book, as distinct from painting and sculpture, is its relationship to the material body of its reader. It is not, as is the case of the visual arts, viewed abstractly from afar, but rather “breathed from all human lips … carved out of the breath of life itself.” Thoreau is not unaware of the paradox of the book’s reception: On the one hand, it is easily reproduced and disseminated and thus “more universal than any other work of art.” On the other hand, its ability to be grasped and spoken aloud renders it an intimate part of the reader’s bodily experience. It is thus capable of both reaching the masses and physically engaging with the individual, a point that anticipates Walter Benjamin’s claims some eighty years later about the art form in the age of mechanical reproduction.105 In breathing the words of a book, we are, in effect, sharing the originating breath of the author, and it is this physical intimacy between reader and writer that serves to suspend or distort the chronological time between them. When Thoreau writes “The symbol of an ancient man’s thought becomes a modern man’s speech,” he describes a book’s trajectory not exactly through time but, asequentially, across it—the “becomes” signaling a transmutation from “thought” to “speech” that is less historical than spectral.
I have been arguing that reading in the nineteenth century could create new modes of perception, feeling, and identification. Thus, alongside the discourse of improvement that issued forth from conduct books and that was readily taken up by readers, there existed another narrative embraced by both cultural authorities and everyday subjects—an alternative to the emphasis on realized potential, measurable gains, and ineluctable progress. Anne-Lise François has described this latter rhetoric as an embrace of “uncounted experience,” “freeing desire from the demands of goal-oriented action.”106 For Susan Warner, M. Carey Thomas, Mary Austin, and Henry David Thoreau, reading involved satisfactions that were not always tied to the advancement of knowledge or the productive realization of the self. It was a practice that was not necessarily plot-driven, indeed, not even propelled by a desire for comprehension or understanding. It engaged the mind but also a wider conception of self that included both spirit and body. It was often voracious and yet could rest content with partiality and noncompletion. It was marked by a sense of recursivity, belatedness, dislocation, and convolution, all of which challenged its placement in normative temporal and spatial frames. Finally, in the case of Austin and Thoreau, it was characterized by a bodily intimacy with the book itself or with a figure associated with the book’s narrative world. It bears repeating that such a reading experience was not simply an effect of the novel—the genre most often associated with imaginative flight and the vitiation of normative experience. On the contrary, history, geology, and classical philosophy (in the case of Thoreau) were equally capable of producing this nonunitary sense of being in the world.
As I mentioned in the introduction to this study, it is tempting to align this kind of reading with a Romantic sensibility, for indeed the two have much in common. This is especially evident in the language of immediacy, personal transformation, and spiritual longing that accompanies the accounts of Thomas, Austin, and Thoreau, each of whom can easily be placed within an American Romantic tradition. All three align reading with a desire to exit the predictabilities of their everyday existence, to partake of “experience disengaged … exempt from the conditions that we usually know to attach to it”—the premier attribute that Henry James ascribed to the romance.107 In this way, the alternative time connected with reading is a version of the “transport” associated with the Romantic sublime. And yet, there are also important differences. The commitment to “totality” characteristic of many strains of Romantic writing—what one critic describes as the “possible-impossible expansion of the self to a seamless identification with the universe”108—seems more abstract and all-embracing than the specificity of connection to another that I have discussed in this chapter. Even with Austin, the desire for merger was directed at a particular landscape rather than at the universe in general. For many Romantic writers (especially in the American transcendentalist context), the interest is in the “currents of Universal Being”109 and the speaker’s place among these. Thus when this writing celebrates the oneness of the world, it is often with an eye toward how this makes possible a renewal or coalescence of the self.
The visions of reading articulated by Warner, Thomas, Austin, and Thoreau, on the other hand, do not speak to self-realization so much as they offer possibilities for removal and self-forgetting. To be sure, each of these thinkers associates reading with power, but it is hardly themselves who are emboldened by this activity.