LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

psychophysiological relation to the book in favor of more empirical evidence: library records, transcripts from book groups, and so forth. Relatedly, it tends to emphasize actual group bonds over imagined forms of association.

      The second approach, by contrast, does focus on internalized or symbolic forms of sociality, but it generally understands reading as creating expansive and impersonal “community” rather than more intimate relations. Benedict Anderson, for example, writes about the ability of reading to forge “imagined communities”—large anonymous group formations that cohere especially along national lines. Anderson gives the example of reading the newspaper—an everyday act that triggers a sense of national belonging: “each communicant is well aware that the ceremony he performs is being replicated simultaneously by thousands (or millions) of others of whose existence he is confident, yet of whose identity he has not the slightest notion.” Anderson concludes: “Community in anonymity … is the hallmark of modern nations.”⁵⁹ Michael Warner has argued similarly that reading in early republican America was “impersonal” because it involved “an awareness of the potentially limitless others who may also be reading. For that reason, it becomes possible to imagine oneself, in the act of reading, becoming part of an arena of the national people that cannot be realized except through such mediating imaginings.”⁶⁰ Even when not articulated in national terms, the “imagined communities” associated with reading tend to be understood as remote and impersonal. Stanley Fish’s concept of “interpretive communities,” for example, is predicated on the idea that groups of individuals, while personally unknown to one another, are informally aligned through shared interpretive strategies.⁶¹

      But as I have tried to indicate above, the creation of impersonal community was hardly the most significant aspect of nineteenth-century reading practices. The letters, diaries, and novels of nineteenth-century subjects attest that reading forged imagined bonds that were intense, intimate, and highly exclusive. The result was not “community in anonymity” but rather a heightened connection to a specific other (usually an author or a fellow reader) because of the experience of sharing a common text. Instead of seeing reading as resulting in attenuated forms of association—what Ronald Zboray describes as an “illusory, print-oriented connectedness that could pose as community”⁶²—I suggest that reading, in certain instances, could become more vital and personally fulfilling than actual face-to-face interaction. That is, for a segment of nineteenth-century readers, the book could supersede actual social relations as the primary locus of affective experience and the preferred medium of libidinal exchange.

      Focusing on the deep interpersonal bonds engendered by reading means rethinking the polarized discourse of freedom and constraint often associated with scholarship on reception. Much early criticism in this field was dedicated to heralding alternatively the role of the reader or that of the text in the creation of meaning. Thus Michael Riffaterre, Georges Poulet, and Wolfgang Iser emphasize the limits imposed on the activities of the reader by the text or by the dominant cultural traditions in which reading occurs. Stanley Fish, Norman Holland, and David Bleich, by contrast, all argue for the relative autonomy and creativity of the reader in relation to text and context.⁶³ Critics attempting to mediate between these positions have staked out a middle ground, arguing, as Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier do, that “texts are always communicated to their readers in forms … that constrain them but do not destroy their freedom.”⁶⁴ But as these lines illustrate, even in forging a compromise position, book historians tend to imagine relations between author and reader as fundamentally antagonistic. For H. J. Jackson, for example, the “experience of reading always involves an element of contest or struggle, and an oscillation between surrender and resistance.”⁶⁵ Chartier, writing elsewhere, argues against “the absolute efficacy of the text tyrannically to dictate the meaning of the work to the reader.” He asks: “How can we consider at one and the same time the irreducible freedom of readers and the constraints meant to curb this freedom?”⁶⁶ Although Chartier is correct to insist that a text’s origins (its author, the dimensions of its publication, etc.) limit while never fully determining a reader’s understanding, he errs, I think, in imagining readers as primarily invested in liberation from these limits.

      Indeed, such an understanding is very much a product of our present cultural moment, in which “resistant readings” herald the triumph of subversive politics and minority identities. To “poach” or “appropriate” meaning in this context is to wrest it away from the author or the established tradition of reception and, in so doing, invest the (otherwise dispossessed) reader with agency and significance. Much of the work we do as scholars and teachers is bound up in this understanding of reading; our creative contribution hinges on our ability to differentiate ourselves from the text and its prior receptions, to offer something bold and original that frees the book—and ourselves—from its problematic origins. But while this approach to reading is often deeply satisfying as an academic exercise, it seems removed from the kinds of symbiotic experiences of pleasure that nonacademic readers (even the most elite) often associate with the book. At fifteen years of age, Susan Sontag wrote of reading the journals of André Gide: “Gide and I have attained such perfect intellectual communion that I experience the appropriate labor pains for every thought he gives birth to! Thus I do not think: ‘How marvelously lucid this is!’—but: ‘Stop! I cannot think this fast! Or rather I cannot grow this fast!’”⁶⁷ Sontag’s rejection of judgment (“How marvelously lucid this is!”) in favor of the language of mutual experience (“I cannot grow this fast!”) suggests the limitations of critique and resistance as models for understanding the activity of reading. Because accounts of reading in the nineteenth century are largely free of this liberationist approach, they are a particularly rich archive to mine for an alternative account of reading as communion.⁶⁸

      To be clear, I am not suggesting that reading during this period always resulted in an adaptive psychophysiological sense of oneness. Certainly, merger with an author held the capacity to overwhelm the reader, leading to a sense of dissolution that could be more threatening than fortifying. At other moments, readers could be alienated from texts, especially those they perceived as confusing or fallacious. By their own accounts, critical judgment was crucial at these times to stave off the injurious influence of the author. But even when readers experienced cognitive dissonance with their books, they tended to articulate this through the rhetoric of loss rather than interpretive resistance and identity formation. Writing to her friend Lucy Osgood in 1847, Lydia Maria Child comments:

      Newman’s book on The Soul seemed to me a very admirable work. The Phases of Faith pleased me by the honesty of its confessions, and I read it with all the eagerness we all so naturally feel to arrive at the inmost spiritual secrets of another soul; but the conclusion left me very uncomfortable. It seemed as the collegian said in his theme, “to land me in the great ocean of eternity.” I had traveled so far, and so confidently, with him, to arrive—nowhere!⁶⁹

      Here, Child specifies that she initially approached Newman’s text with the dream of affinity—“with all the eagerness we all so naturally feel to arrive at the inmost spiritual secrets of another soul.” But in the end, identification with the authorial mind proved impossible—“the conclusion left me very uncomfortable.” This dissonance leads to a feeling of profound isolation, figured as emotional and physical displacement—a sense of being “nowhere.” Indeed, Child’s experience of having landed (and here she ironically quotes Newman’s oneness metaphor to register her disidentification) “in the great ocean of eternity” suggests that the failed author-reader connection is akin to a kind of death for each. Newman’s book becomes a radical instantiation of the nineteenth-century “dead letter,” a text which failing to reach its audience leaves both in a state of isolated oblivion.⁷⁰ It is hard to square such an account with the triumphalist narrative of reader resistance as articulated in the contemporary academy.

      I also do not mean to suggest that identity plays no role in reading, or that all nineteenth-century readers read in exactly the same way. On the contrary, many fine studies have demonstrated how reading both impacts and is shaped by the categories of gender, race, class, nation, sexual orientation, and ethnicity.⁷¹ And yet, this emphasis on “difference” obscures the extent to which reading can be motivated not by opposition and hierarchy, but

Скачать книгу