The Dark Side of Literacy: Literature and Learning Not to Read 9780823292820

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TH E DA R K SI DE OF LIT E R AC Y

T h e Da r k Si de of L i t e r ac y Literature and Learning Not to Read

Benjamin Bennett

Fordham University Press New York

2008

Copyright © 2008 Fordham University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bennett, Benjamin, 1939– The dark side of literacy : literature and learning not to read / Benjamin Bennett.—1st ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8232-2916-1 (alk. paper) 1. European literature—History and criticism. 2. Literature, Modern—History and criticism. 3. Books and reading. I. Title. PN701.B46 2008 809—dc22 2008022285 Printed in the United States of America 10 09 08 5 4 3 2 1 First edition

In memory of M.S.B., who had her own ideas on these things, especially Milton and Keats

Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction

ix 1

Part I: Theory 1. Reading and the Theory of Reading

11

2. Poems, Myths, and the Advent of Modern Reading

44

Part II: History 3. Dante and the Invention of the Novel Reader

85

4. Boccaccio, Cervantes, and the Path to Solitary Reading

141

5. Magic and History: The Roots and Branches of Dr. Faustus

185

Part III: Response 6. Intransitive Parody and the Trap of Reading: What Reading Really Is

223

7. Kleist, Kaf ka, and the Refutation of Reading

264

The Parting of the Ways: A Concluding Note on the Novel and Literary Studies

309

Notes

317

Index

339

vii

Acknowledgments

This book would not have become what it is without the criticism of Marshall Brown and Stanley Corngold. Neither, of course, is responsible for its faults, but both have probably had a hand in any of its virtues. Other people to whom I am grateful for either deliberate or unwitting assistance are Paul Barolsky, Cristina della Coletta, Volker Kaiser, Chad Wellmon, Marco Borth, Joshua Davis, Michael Deal, Joshua Paddock, Amanda Sigler, students in practically all of my courses, and of course my wife. For technical and fi nancial help I am indebted to the University of Virginia. For help with research and with preparation of the manuscript and index, I am grateful (again) to Amanda Sigler. For further technical help and for organizational assistance I am indebted to Brenda Ayres, Melody Palmer, Gina Hutton, and the late Courtney Lindsay. And my thanks go fi nally to Fordham University Press, its editors and consultants, for the swift and efficient completion of this project. Chapter 6 is developed from an article, “Intransitive Parody and the Trap of Reading in Turn-of-the-Century German Prose,” in Steven Taubeneck, ed., Fictions of Culture: Essays in Honor of Walter H. Sokel (New York: Peter Lang, 1991), 135–67. I am indebted to Peter Lang Publishers for permission to use this material.

ix

Introduction

Everyone agrees that reading, in and of itself, is a good thing. The ability to read gives us power in the real world of society and business. Reading expands and exercises our mind. Reading makes accessible to us vast areas of experience and knowledge that must otherwise have remained strictly foreign. Reading conquers death itself by bringing us into direct contact with the best intellects of past ages. Reading thus creates, re-creates, and constantly revitalizes the traditions by which our historical existence is stabilized and protected against chaos; but reading also constantly makes available to us perspectives from which to criticize, hence to improve, to socialize, to humanize our traditions. And so forth. Everyone agrees on most of these points, although different people will emphasize different particulars. And on the main point, that being able to read (and exercising that ability) is in every conceivable case, and in every respect, better than not being able to read (or failing to read), everyone agrees absolutely. But when everyone agrees absolutely upon an inherently debatable proposition, it is—in my opinion—a fairly reliable sign that the proposition is false, at least in some of its applications. No inherently debatable proposition, when considered on its merits alone, can ever be universally accepted. When such acceptance occurs, it follows that the proposition is not being considered on its merits alone, and in the case of reading one has reason to wonder why. There is, after all, a long tradition of arguments against the absolute usefulness of reading, and these arguments have always turned out to be harmless. Why do we apparently fi nd it in our interest to suppress them? The principal argument that has been invoked against reading is not at all complicated. In Schopenhauer’s formulation: Reading is a mere surrogate for one’s own thinking. One permits one’s thoughts to be led around on someone else’s leash. . . . Reading means thinking with someone else’s brain, instead of one’s own. . . . When 1

2

Introduction we read, someone else is thinking for us; we merely repeat his mental process. It is the same as when a pupil, in learning to write, retraces with his pen the pencil strokes made by his teacher. In reading, that is, we are released from most of the work of thinking. Hence the palpable feeling of relief when we cease being occupied with our own thoughts and begin reading. But when we read, our brain is actually only a playground for alien thoughts. This is why people who read a great deal and spend most of the day at it, and pass the rest of their time in thoughtless recreation, gradually lose the ability to think for themselves—as people who always ride eventually forget how to walk.1

The basic points here are not very different from those of Plato’s argument against the art of writing in the Phaedrus (274Bff.). Reading is only a way of avoiding the labor of serious thought. Reading enables us to cultivate the appearance of wisdom without doing the actual intellectual work (or for Plato, the dialectical work) on which true wisdom is founded. In reading, we permit another person to use our mind for thinking his or her thoughts. Nothing has changed much in the two millennia or so between Plato and Schopenhauer. Roughly the same basic suspicions or worries about reading remain, but are never taken very seriously in the end, probably because the people who articulate them are always themselves extremely well-read individuals. But then why has an entirely unqualified insistence upon the benefits of reading become cultural and educational dogma among us—why have all signs of debate on this matter disappeared? Part of the reason is probably a deep-seated worry—not only on the part of cultural conservatives—about modern electronic communications and information management. But I think (without pretending to be able to prove it) that there is more going on here, that the traditional arguments against literacy have now, in our most recent history, become dangerous, because they bring to light some uncomfortable but undeniable facts about political life from the twentieth century on. The twentieth century marks the birth of totalitarianism. Forms of tyranny or despotism are certainly as old as humanity; but the peculiar solidarity, the sense of subjective engagement unsupported by any agreement on specifics of doctrine, that characterizes a population under totalitarian rule, is not even conceivable without certain twentieth-century technological developments, especially the illusion of limitless simultaneity created by broadcast radio.2 And as soon as totalitarianism becomes a

Introduction 3

possibility (not to mention an actuality), the question of literacy becomes embarrassing because training in literacy is a cultivation of the habit of permitting one’s mind to be occupied as fully as possible by the thoughts of another. Under certain circumstances this habit may well have social or ethical value; but it is also exactly the habit required most immediately of citizens in a totalitarian state. It is a habit, once formed, that spreads to all types of communication; and the trap of totalitarian propaganda (notably for the many intellectuals who participate enthusiastically) is that the habitual mental adjustment necessary to receive it as a reader—especially in an electronic atmosphere of boundless simultaneity that swamps the idea of one’s “own” time (say, for reflection)—already includes a move of assent or acceptance in relation to which one’s actual interpretive objections appear mere quibbles with the new status quo.3 The traditional arguments against literacy are now suppressed not only because they have a certain amount of validity, but even more because they are ineffectual, because the immediate practical advantages of literacy for every individual inevitably trump them, because the development and expansion of literacy are therefore irreversible, and because the irrevocability of literacy implies that totalitarianism is ineradicable in modern politics—no matter how many totalitarian regimes are destroyed. Especially in democratic politics, which means politics in the medium of discourse, and even more in “media driven” politics, there will always be a tendency in the direction of the totalitarian. This is the truth that cannot be let out of the bag for fear that it would weaken our commitment to democratic institutions. The Cold War was costumed as a contest between “systems,” implying that our “system” of government is itself, inherently, a defense against totalitarianism. But exactly the opposite is the case. Given a literate populace—especially a populace schooled in the reading of “high literature,” where allowing a writer’s thought to unfold in one’s own mind receives the greatest possible value—democratic politics as a system will always tend toward the totalitarian, and its survival will always depend (and I think has depended) on asystematic and unlegislatable factors. Is this recognition—which is a consequence of the traditional arguments against literacy—really dangerous enough to justify putting those arguments aside, either by simply forgetting them, or else by discrediting them, as Derrida discredits the argument of the Phaedrus by running it parallel to an apparent prejudice against writing in Rousseau?4 It will not escape notice that what I have said about the untrustworthiness of democracy (considered as system) in the preservation of its own

4

Introduction

democratic character could easily be imagined as justifying the sort of radical remaking of the state that is typically proclaimed in the course of precisely a totalitarian takeover or undermining of democratic institutions. The conceptual situation is very slippery; and the most reasonable course seems therefore simply to avoid opening the issue for discussion, which means we are inclined, again, to suppress the questioning of literacy. The story is told of Winston Churchill that, in response to a cynic, he once conceded that, yes, democracy is certainly the worst political system, except for all the others. And perhaps we should leave it at that. We could insist, it is true, that an understanding of the totalitarian penchant in the combined operation of modern democracy and modern literacy by no means implies that democracy is not the best political system. That the best available political system is still radically flawed, and requires constant repair and reorienting, does not imply that any other system is better. But these considerations are perhaps too subtle and treacherous for anybody’s good. I will not develop these thoughts any further here. If I did, they would soon become the introduction to a different and as yet nonexistent book. I offer them as an indication of what I think I am doing in the book I have actually written and in several earlier books, although this tendency may not be apparent to most readers of them. They are, after all, only books about literature. But their cumulative effect, or at least the effect of writing them on my own thinking, is the recognition that literature, “high” literature, is neither as innocent nor as helpless in the matter of totalitarianism as might ordinarily be supposed. Scraps of this idea will appear in the pages below, but only as a sign of my personal concerns, not as a proof of anything.

The Business at Hand The present book is a theoretical and historical and critical inquiry into the exact scope and meaning of our notion of “reading” (our notion, not our actual practice, whatever that might be) in relation to the body of textual material that since the eighteenth century has come to be known as “literature.” Its central point is that perhaps the single most influential theory of reading in the last century or two, as developed in detail by a line of thinkers from Henry James to Wolfgang Iser, is in reality nothing but theory and by the manner of its construction cannot accurately describe or reflect the experience of any actual person. This point brings with

Introduction 5

it several obvious questions. How can a theory gain and maintain currency if it lacks any plausible connection with the experience it purports to explain? What is the historical provenance of the theory in question, and of its failed relation with its supposed object? And to what extent is an understanding of the difficulties in our evolved idea of reading traceable in literature itself? The fi rst of these questions is the topic of Part I, “Theory.” In Chapter 1, “Reading and the Theory of Reading,” I point out that a Jamesian theory of reading, however great its refi nement and philosophical sophistication, cannot possibly be accurate because reading itself cannot reasonably be regarded as a form of “experience” in the sense that such a theory inevitably presupposes. And Chapter 2, “Poems, Myths, and the Advent of Modern Reading,” attempts to show whence, nevertheless, that theory derives its power and plausibility. “The advent of modern reading” refers not to a change in reading as such but to a change (and a perception of change) in ideas of reading; and similar changes can be found repeatedly in Europe from the sixteenth century on. The version of that change that Chapter 2 focuses on, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, happens to be important because of its association with the increasing stature of the novel as a poetic form, and as a form in relation to which precisely a theory of reading seems called for. But caution is required here because that association is not an essential one. The modern novel, when it arrives, becomes linked to an idea of reading that had long been developing on its own—linked so strongly that the form and its imagined reader seem but elements of a single entity. This semblance is illusory, and a wish to avoid confusing the issue is one reason that no actual novels are discussed at this point. The second question, that of “History,” the topic of Part II, has not been discussed in literary scholarship because it has not been recognized as a question to begin with. Surely (it is assumed) the provenance of ideas of reading is not an independent question but belongs to the question of how literary forms have developed; the novel, in particular, develops alongside certain social and political changes that produce its actual readers, who in turn serve as the model for our developing idea of the reader. My main point in Part I is that this is not the way things really work. Henry James’s theory of novel reading, and the whole basic idea of reading as a vehicle of immediate personal experience, which is at least three centuries old when James theorizes it, is not at any point in its development a record of real conditions. Therefore not only its spread and power but its very existence

6

Introduction

needs to be explained. It does not simply grow up with the novel. It must have, in the realm of texts and readers, a genealogy of its own. In Chapter 3, “Dante and the Invention of the Novel Reader,” I argue that the original instance of an idea of reading that recognizably prefigures the idea later associated with modern novels is created by Dante in the Commedia when he assembles, out of both poetic and theological considerations, a set of implied instructions for reading that will enable his work to operate as a founding act in the history of Christian poetry. There are striking parallels between what Dante requires of a reader and what seems to be required by modern novels. But there are also crucial differences, the most important of which is that Dante’s theoretical construct makes sense in relation to contemporary practice—to what could be expected of actual readers without presupposing any theoretical indoctrination. Dante’s readers are not enjoined to abstract themselves into anything like “the” reader of modern theory, but rather, on the contrary, are required to bring to bear upon their reading, in each case, the whole of their own narrow contingent individuality. You can—indeed you must—be yourself when reading Dante, rather than imagine yourself transported into what James calls “another life.” Can a direct historical connection be demonstrated between Dante’s invention and modern reading, a series of historical steps by which the latter arises out of the former? Strictly speaking, at least for the present, the answer to this question is no. I myself, at least, do not have either enough detailed knowledge or (probably) enough life expectancy to fi ll in all the blanks that my statement of the task suggests. But I think I can show enough in the way of large and relatively obvious connections to make the overall connection at least strongly plausible as a hypothesis, certainly plausible enough to support retrospectively the basic argument about reading and theory that requires it. In Chapter 4, “Boccaccio, Cervantes, and the Path to Solitary Reading,” I argue that the Decameron, considered as a gloss on Dante’s Commedia, completes and clarifies Dante’s hermeneutic design and packs it into an allegory, the brigata of ten storytellers, by which it is transmitted to Cervantes, among others. The distinction between a manuscript culture (like Boccaccio’s) and a print culture (like Cervantes’) plays an important part here, both in supporting the basic argument and in explaining how Dante’s invention could be transformed into an idea of “the” (solitary, anonymous) reader. These ideas need as much contextualizing as one can give them, and in Chapter 5, “Magic and History: The Roots and Branches of Dr. Faustus,”

Introduction 7

I attempt to show ways to meet this need. By discussing instances in which a relation to the history of ideas of reading is fairly clear (especially Faustus, who I argue is the “myth of the modern reader”) and instances in which such a relation is quite unexpected (the systems of Kant and Hegel) this chapter aims to give a sense for the breadth of the historical process in question and also, as a result of the instances treated, for its connection with modern totalitarian politics. With this point, for the time being, the historical journey is closed. But does my argument imply that the whole practice and study of literature is complicit in propagating an idea of reading that promotes—by being false, yet still somehow undeniable—a kind of constitutional hypocrisy in readers? Only to a limited degree. The title of Part III, “Response,” refers to what I think is an adversarial response to modern or Jamesian reading on the part of a great deal of nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature in Europe and its cultural dependencies. The field of inquiry is very broad here, and instead of trying to give a comprehensive view of it, which would lack critical focus, I conclude the book with two chapters that concentrate on a single narrative type in German literature, a type that is the subject of much theoretical reflection, the so-called “Novelle.” Using as examples texts of Goethe, Gerhart Hauptmann, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and Thomas Mann, and then groups of texts from the work of Heinrich von Kleist and Franz Kaf ka, I argue that this short narrative type tends to operate in direct opposition to the politically suspect idea of experiential reading that its authors expect will be prevalent in their audience. At the very end, fi nally, I append a short piece called “The Parting of the Ways: A Concluding Note on the Novel and Literary Studies,” which I think I should let speak for itself.

Part I

Theory

1.

Reading and the Theory of Reading

By “reading,” in How to Read and ABC of Reading, Ezra Pound means a discipline that one acquires only by being guided expertly in the study of exemplary texts. We do not ask people how they read; reading is something we tell people how to do. “I begin with poetry,” says Pound—immediately after suggesting his notorious false etymology “Dichten = condensare”— “because it is the most concentrated form of verbal expression.”1 But he also ends with poetry. And on the few occasions when, for example, he speaks of the novel, he is still talking about discipline—“what ‘writing a novel’ means” (61), “the art of novel construction” (76), “the underlying concept of FORM” (90)—never about anything like enjoyment, never about the obscure psychic processes by which a mind becomes engaged with a text. Pound would perhaps dismiss these processes, which are what we usually claim to mean by reading, as relevant only to “Books that are intended and that serve as REPOSE, dope, opiates, mental beds” (88). But then why does he speak of reading in the fi rst place, rather than, say, textual study or literary judgment or critical thinking? I think it is likely that he intends precisely to dislodge the common notion of reading as something any reasonably well-educated member of a modern society can do. And if this is his intent, then in a sense I agree with him. One of my main points is that our common notion of reading, or at least the version of it that is most often associated with the reading of novels, is logically, and perhaps even ethically, corrupt. I do not mean that the enjoyment of texts is corrupt. It is the theorizing of such enjoyment that becomes corrupt by imposing systematic constraints in an avowedly subjective domain where system as such tends to violate basic individual differentness. But precisely in relation to reading, theory tends to assume inordinate importance. For there is no such thing as the “actual” experience or activity of reading against which we might test theories. (At least I will make an argument to this effect.) Thus it 11

12

Theory

becomes possible for a persuasive or seductive theory of reading to worm its way into the mental place normally occupied by our recollections of “actual” experience. Thus, in particular, a political ideology can be made to seem a simple outgrowth of our “actual” subjective humanity—which is what I mean primarily by the “corrupt” tendency in reading theory.

What Do We Do When We Read? This question is obviously unanswerable. As far as we know, each of us does something completely different. Even if several of us (even if thousands) agree on a single formulation of what constitutes the reading process, nothing is gained. Precisely the seductive power of the formulation (assuming it attracts widespread agreement) must make us suspicious about whether it has not itself influenced, or simply supplanted, what we take to be our memory of the elusive actuality of reading. Indeed, the question remains unanswerable even if it is shifted from the plural to the singular. What do I know about my reading? To focus on the process of reading in my memory of it, I naturally make an effort to exclude all those elements of the remembered experience that I judge (or actually, prejudge) to be external to that process. And in doing so I certainly delude myself. How can I decide what to exclude? We recall T. S. Eliot’s remark, as silly as it is famous, about poetic sensibility. The latter [“the ordinary man”] falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes.2

But what else—even for “the ordinary man”—is reading if not a constant forming of “new wholes” in experience? And can we imagine that this synthetic or appropriative move somehow stops short at the boundary between the printed page and the rest of the world? Can I assert with confidence that reading, for me, is the same (essentially or basically the same) when I do it in the subway and when I do it on the beach? There are certain things we can say in general about reading: for example, that it is an experience or activity normally attended by a pleasure that appears to arise from the acquisition or discovery of new mental terrain. But we have not formed a theoretically developable notion of reading until we have associated the list of qualities it implies with a list of textual features to which they somehow respond. (On what other basis could we call

Reading and the Theory of Reading

13

the activity we are talking about “reading”?) Especially tempting is the apparent parallel between temporal or experiential linearity (presumably the medium of reading) and textual linearity. Probably most descriptions of reading assume, explicitly or not, that the sequence of words or images or chapters in a text is the order in which reading takes cognizance of them. Stanley Fish assumes this no less than Michael Riffaterre, for all his disagreement.3 And if such an entirely basic notion of reading, along with its twofold assumption of linearity, can be debunked as thoroughly as I think Goethe debunks it in Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre—where relations between the main narrative and the collections of aphorisms leave us no room to deny the entirely unpredictable skipping, and skipping around, by which reading shapes itself—then what notion of reading can possibly survive a rigorous critical questioning? Can any notion of reading fail to assume some type of resonance between an order of textual elements and an order in the reader’s experience? I think it is a sense of this problem that prompts many of us, in the end, to take Pound’s route and formulate our idea of reading not as a description but as a norm. The very idea of literature, we insist, requires that we train ourselves to read in a particular way. Jonathan Culler reasons: The time and effort devoted to literary education by generations of students and teachers creates a strong presumption that there is something to be learned, and teachers do not hesitate to judge their pupil’s progress towards a general literary competence.4

But precisely this reasoning, or the implied need to resort to it, raises doubt about whether there really is such a thing as “general literary competence” or a right way to read. Culler (122) also quotes Northrop Frye on the matter of “a coherent and comprehensive theory of literature . . . the main principles of which are as yet unknown to us.”5 And like Frye, who is more candid about it, he has really only demonstrated that there is a widespread need to believe that reading is more or less objectively discussible. We will come to the reasons for that need shortly. What do we do when we read? Even the word when in this question is problematic. Can we even identify the action or process of reading? Can we locate it in time, let alone describe it? Stanley Corngold suggests that “a particular aim of the novel” could be “to alert us explicitly and for the fi rst time to the truth of prereading,” to the truth, paradoxically, “that we never read for a fi rst time.”6 And anyone reasonably familiar with the complications of hermeneutics (the temporality of understanding

14

Theory

and its dependence on preunderstanding) or with those of the concept of intertextuality (the emergence of meaning only between texts) will recognize the justice of this remark. To read, at least with respect to literature, is never really anything but to have read—or to postpone reading—and reading “itself ” is always distributed indeterminably among versions of these possibilities, with no place of its own in which to exist. Curiously enough, the best evidence of this truth—to the extent that evidence is possible here—is often provided by people who would strongly oppose the conclusion. Stanley Fish, for example, in describing his “method,” his tracing of the supposed reading process from instant to instant in its making and unmaking of sense, says what the method does is slow down the reading experience so that “events” one does not notice in normal time, but which do occur, are brought before our analytical attentions. It is as if a slow motion camera with an automatic stop-action effect were recording our linguistic experiences and presenting them to us for viewing.7

It is true that Fish later repudiates this view, as theory, and I will say something below about the terms in which he does so. But for the time being, let us take his earlier thought as an exemplary version of the belief that reading can be held fast and described as a particular type of experience unfolding in time. The “events” Fish tries to demonstrate, on the basis of this belief, are typically instances of a change in the reader’s mind, as it proceeds through the text, about the sense of the text. One of his most interesting examples—although he only makes this argument after his own change of mind, to show how he would have argued earlier—is the following from Paradise Lost: Satan, now fi rst infl am’d with rage, came down, The Tempter ere th’ Accuser of man-kind, To wreck on innocent frail man his loss Of that fi rst Battle, and his fl ight to Hell. (4.9–12)

In “the course of negotiating these lines,” says Fish’s hypothetical argument, a reader will “assume that the referent of ‘his’ in line 11 is ‘innocent frail man,’ ” which appears to make Satan responsible for the Fall. By then correcting this assumption, in line 12, “Milton . . . makes the reader aware of his tendency, inherited from [Adam and Eve], to reach for interpretations that are, in the basic theological sense, self-serving.”8

Reading and the Theory of Reading

15

The only thing wrong with this analysis is the (hypothetical) suggestion that it unveils an event that does “occur” in the reader’s experience. On the contrary, by creating the impression that we change our mind about the referent of “his,” the passage raises the question of when we change our mind, which is not at all adequately answered by saying: at some point in our consideration of the words “fi rst Battle.” In one sense, in fact, we never change our mind. The reference to “innocent frail man” remains valid despite the eventual contextual resolution, since Satan is after all implicated in the Fall (3.130–32). And ethically speaking, it must remain valid in order to profi le precisely our change of mind, the act of taking responsibility; otherwise we would not remain aware of what that act overcomes, of our “tendency . . . to reach for interpretations that are . . . self-serving.” Thus our change of mind not only never, but also always (over and over) takes place; and so it turns out that the supposed “experience” of reading (represented by our change of mind about this passage’s reference) cannot be located at any particular point in our experience as a whole, which means in effect that it is not really an experience of ours in the fi rst place. This problem has a theological dimension. On one hand, Christian readers do constantly change their mind as they attempt to grasp the truth of their own responsibility for their fallen state. But, on the other hand, one cannot grasp that truth fully (just as we never have the experience of changing our mind about the text); one’s repentance, like that of Adam and Eve, is never in itself sufficient. If humans could ever truly accept responsibility for the Fall, God’s sacrifice in the person of Christ would not be necessary (3.203–212). If we are on the lookout for this type of “event” in Paradise Lost, we do not need to go beyond the poem’s opening lines: Of Man’s fi rst disobedience, and the Fruit Of that forbidden Tree, whose mortal taste Brought Death into the World, and all our woe, ... Sing, Heav’nly Muse. (1.1–6)

Surely, at the end of the fi rst line, we are disposed to read “Fruit” metaphorically, in the sense of “results,” meaning the results of Adam’s and Eve’s disobedience. (Can actual pieces of fruit be the poem’s main content?) And then we must change our mind, but without necessarily sacrificing our inclination to read metaphorically, since the “Fruit” in question, in a strong sense, is knowledge of good and evil. Again, therefore, we

16

Theory

move in the direction of accepting responsibility, since knowledge of good and evil, unlike Adam and Eve’s specific disobedience, is something in which we participate directly, and in fact participate as readers, assuming that the Muse will here sing of that knowledge. But, as above, the temporary meaning of “Fruit,” which we discard in line 2, must nevertheless remain in force—so that, again, we both never and always change our mind. For we do not take responsibility simply by exercising as readers our knowledge of good and evil; we must also constantly understand that such knowledge itself represents a specific moral situation, that it is the “Fruit” of a sinful disobedience. These complications are accentuated by the absence of the word of before “the Fruit,” which enables “Fruit” to be taken either as strictly parallel to “disobedience,” the object of an implied of, or as a direct object of “Sing.” That is, the poem’s singing can be taken to be of or about the knowledge of good and evil, or it can be taken simply to be (or be the vehicle of ) that knowledge, which produces another instance of what Fish suggests is “a general strategy by means of which the reader comes to know that his experience of the poem is part of its subject.”9 And similarly, “all our woe” can be parallel to either “Death” or “Fruit,” thus belonging, again, either to the poem’s subject matter or to its quality as singing. But one thing this argument does not do is “slow down” and present for inspection the “actual” experience of reading the opening of Paradise Lost. Rather, like Fish’s own argument about the other passage, it reduces to absurdity the very idea of reading as a single locatable experience. In the argument on the poem’s opening, this point is underscored by the consideration that all the personal–theological “events” of the first three lines depend on the reader’s already knowing the verb “Sing” in line 6. The experience of reading thus cannot be disentangled from the condition of having read, which is another way of stating Corngold’s thought. From the two foregoing arguments alone, it would be wrong to suggest that we have demonstrated a focus in Paradise Lost on the question of the experience of reading. The focus—assuming we could find enough instances to form a convincing pattern—would probably turn out to require a theological formulation. But I think we could still claim for Milton a place in the history of ideas of reading. Since reading, as such, lacks a defi nable location and character in our experience, our idea of reading is always of necessity borrowed, always the reinterpretation or refunctioning of text-related ideas from other domains. Fish’s argument on readerly “events” in Milton shows exactly this process in operation with respect to

Reading and the Theory of Reading

17

theology. Again, what we take to be the experience of reading is always at base a product of theory.10

Second Thoughts Suppose we agree that the distinction between experience and memory is intrinsically incomplete, that one does not have experience except in the medium of memory—hence that the problem of locating one’s reading in time casts doubt on its quality as experience to begin with. Does the whole question of the experience of reading even really matter? There is nothing mysterious about the paradox associated above with passages in Milton. What happens in reality is not a change of mind but simply a growing critical understanding of the passages. We read them over and over again, either with the page before us or in our mind, and a picture of the various possibilities of meaning gradually emerges. But my point—and I think Fish’s as well in the end—is not that a change of mind actually happens, but rather that a careful re-reading of those passages persuades us that a change of mind on our part must necessarily have happened before we can claim to have understood them on a level sufficiently deep to involve our moral being and our hope of salvation. It is thence that the paradox arises: we are persuaded that a particular thing must necessarily have occurred in our experience, but we cannot locate it in our memory. We are in the situation of the man born blind, who says ( John 9:25–26), “Whether he [ Jesus] be a sinner or no, I know not; one thing I know, that, whereas I was blind, now I see.” But that blind man cannot answer the question, “What did he to thee? how opened he thine eyes?” Is this whole line of thinking any more than an idle theological paradox? I think it is a great deal more. For one of the things we always mean when we speak of “reading”—not as a defi nition, but certainly as an essential component of the idea—is precisely a change of mind. We cannot claim to have read at all if we do not imagine a clear difference between our mental inventory or condition before reading and those same quantities after reading. But for reasons that are brought to light by the Milton passages treated above (or more generally, by the problem of the “hermeneutic circle”), we cannot fi nd by memory a point in our experience, or a reasonably compact stretch, where the transition from “before” to “after” takes place. It is as if we discovered a bleeding cut, but with no memory of how or when we had been injured. We are faced with something like Zeno’s paradox. We know perfectly well that reading happens; we do it

18

Theory

all the time. But when we interrogate the matter from a certain angle, we discover that reading cannot happen after all, at least not in the form of a simple experience that we can locate in memory. But, as with Zeno’s paradox, the paradox of reading arises only if we adopt a particular manner of interrogating the phenomenon. Why should we not simply dismiss that type of interrogation? The paradox of the impossibility of motion may be interesting philosophically—and may even turn out eventually to have a resolution on its own terms, in the theory of limits of infi nite series—but it says nothing whatever about the particular instance of Achilles and the tortoise. The trouble in the case of reading is that it is not so easy to separate the paradox from the instance, at least not if we mean a reading that can be described as literary, including the idea of coming to grips with a text and positioning ourselves to interpret it. Precisely Fish’s once-favored mode of argument presents us, as if inadvertently, with texts that appear deliberately contrived to involve us in the paradox of reading, by evoking “events” in our experience that we cannot locate in time. Fish’s own notion of “self-consuming artifacts” also involves this type of paradox.11 Precisely literature does not let us off the hook. The reason why this should be so is formulated nicely by Culler, who says that “poetics is essentially a theory of reading,” intending thereby “to stress literature’s dependence [for its defi nition, for its very existence as a specific field] on particular modes of reading.”12 There are no objectively ascertainable signs by which a text is marked once and for all as “literary.” The notion of the literary seems to name not much more than a general manner in which we take certain texts, which is why it is important to know exactly what that manner is. (Hence the need to believe that reading is objectively discussible.) But as soon as we suggest an answer to this question that might illuminate the notion of the literary, the requirement that that answer be not merely abstract but somehow manifest in our experience (how else shall we verify it?) entangles us yet again in the paradox of reading. For there is no such manifestation in experience except to the extent that it is supplied by theory. What is bound to happen in this situation is obvious. For historical reasons, which we will go into, certain theories of reading gain contour and prominence; and to avoid the paradox that arises when we apply the test of experience, we simply agree (on what grounds could anyone challenge our agreement?) that our experience confi rms those theories. In reality this process takes generations to be completed, but the result is still that

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our idea of our own experience is contaminated by theory; we are induced to accept, as a mark of professional or indeed cultural membership, an idea of our own “actual” experience that is more or less demonstrably untrue. I agree that the idea of pure experience, uncontaminated by any theoretical sense of what experience ought to be, is naive. But I am not philosophizing here about “experience” in general. I propose to show how a specific theoretical structure, at a particular historical juncture, has a measurable effect on our idea (or manufactured memory) of the experience of reading, an idea which is then (by petitio principii) used as evidence for the theory in question, or at least as confi rmation of it.

Reading for Thrills We need to know when and in what form the question of “reading” arises—since without a particular type of interrogation there is no problem, no paradox—and we will come to these points later. But for the time being, let us jump ahead to the fairly recent past and to a description of reading that is so eloquent and engaging that it takes some effort to keep from forgetting how fundamentally misleading it is. I refer to Georges Poulet’s essay, “Criticism and the Experience of Interiority.”13 Poulet begins by asking whether books may be regarded as simple physical objects. No, he answers: They wait. Are they aware that an act of man [someone’s reading them] might suddenly transform their existence? They appear to be lit up with that hope. Read me, they seem to say. I fi nd it hard to resist their appeal. No, books are not just objects among others. (56)

And “the extraordinary fact in the case of a book,” which makes books different from other objects, “is the falling away of the barriers between you and it. You are inside it; it is inside you; there is no longer either outside or inside” (57). Or to develop the matter in more detail: I am someone who happens to have as objects of his own thought, thoughts which are part of a book I am reading, and which are therefore the cogitations of another. They are thoughts of another, and yet it is I who am their subject. . . . I am thinking the thoughts of another. Of course, there would be no cause for astonishment if I were thinking it as the thought of another. But I think of it as my very own. Ordinarily there is the I which thinks, which recognizes itself (when it takes its

20

Theory bearings) in thoughts which may have come from elsewhere but which it takes upon itself as its own in the moment it thinks them. . . . Now, in the present case things are quite different. Because of the strange invasion of my person by the thoughts of another, I am a self who is granted the experience of thinking thoughts foreign to him. I am the subject of thoughts other than my own. My consciousness behaves as though it were the consciousness of another. (59)

It almost seems that the content of what one reads does not matter. The mere act of reading produces deep philosophical pleasure, in the form of a thrilling self-transcendence that seems to set me “free from my usual sense of incompatibility between my consciousness and its objects” (58). We are also bothered by why Poulet speaks repeatedly of reading “books,” when it seems obvious that he really means reading novels. (The actual word “novel” occurs only once in the essay, as if inadvertently, in the phrase “the hero of the novel” [60].) He comes close to conceding this point, but never takes the fi nal step: As soon as I replace my direct perception of reality by the words of a book, I deliver myself, bound hand and foot, to the omnipotence of fiction. I say farewell to what is, in order to feign belief in what is not. I surround myself with fictitious beings; I become the prey of language. (58)

Could this passage refer, say, to the reading of professional scholarship? Could it even refer to the way professional critics or scholars read novels? What excuse would we have for calling ourselves “critics”—despite Poulet’s attempt at a complete reunderstanding of this term (63)—if we actually only “delivered ourselves” to our books, “bound hand and foot”? In his own book from about the same period, La Conscience critique (1971), Poulet does attribute that unreserved self-delivery to criticism; but there, in his book, he is speaking of only a few critics who have special talent and a special affi nity for the authors they write about. Here, in the essay, he is talking about the way reading should be practiced in general: When I read as I ought—that is without mental reservation, without any desire to preserve my independence of judgment, and with the total commitment required of any reader—my comprehension becomes intuitive and any feeling proposed to me is immediately assumed by me. (60)

This is a prescriptive idea of reading, which is justified presumably by the liberating experience, the thrill, that we undergo when we accept it.

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And it is offered for acceptance to “any reader,” not only to the trained critic. Is this “any reader” not the ordinary reader of novels, ready to comprehend without criticizing and ready to feel with no personal occasion for feeling? The essay we are looking at was presented at a conference in Baltimore in 1966, and the discussion that followed, including remarks by some very high-powered thinkers, is printed along with the essay. But even in that discussion, no one points out that Poulet is really talking about novel reading. Only René Girard even mentions the word “novel” (83), and he does so, interestingly, only in the process of distancing himself from Poulet’s view. Poulet, he suggests, is evoking a particular type of text-induced “fascination”; and by rights, the reading of a novel should result in “a victory over this fascination,” by which “the situation of the work of art”— opened to “explication”—is recovered. But Girard is only disagreeing about how to read a novel and about the kind of thrill involved: victory, not self-transcendence. He does not question the tendency to confound novel reading with reading as such. I think this compound conceptual slippage—between novels and books in general, between critics and readers in general—can be explained by the question of whether Poulet’s argument is vulnerable to the critique of reading as “experience” that was developed above. If Poulet escapes that critique, then it is only because (1) by not getting pinned down on the question of novel reading, he avoids the difficulties that result from attempting to correlate the supposed experience of reading with particular types of textual structure; and (2) by being unclear about how much critical distance is included in the experience of reading, he avoids having to draw a line separating a reader’s imaginative realization of meaning that still belongs to the text from a reader’s mere use of the text as an occasion for daydreaming. The second of these problems, which we have yet to treat in detail, is the problem of regulation. Can we refer to an experience as reading if we cannot show that it is regulated by a text? And how can such a showing ever be made? Reading as critics practice it is certainly regulated by its text, but this regulation occurs in the domain of debate, not that of “experience.” What critics say or write, while not strictly determined, is always subject to regulation (with the aid of methodological conventions) by the text in question. And Poulet, by letting the distinction between critic and general reader get blurred, manages to give the impression that such regulation might as well operate at the level of experience, where the text inhabits us.

22

Theory

What I am suggesting is that precisely Poulet’s spirited and persuasive presentation, in the illegitimate tactics it cannot dispense with, inadvertently confirms the argument made above: that the “experience” of reading is a chimera, and consequently that reading for thrills, which means the desire for that experience—either in itself or as a vehicle for the vicarious experience of a book’s fiction—is always a fundamentally theoretical move, but a move whose lack of an object makes it unsustainable as theory and forces it into the mask of “experience” itself.

Reading for Art Does it follow that all theories of reading are deluded? Not at all. One especially cogent account, though it is not usually regarded as a theory of reading, may date from as early as the fi rst century AD. “Longinus” says: By its nature, truly great writing somehow stirs up the soul in us, which, possessed now of a kind of exultant loftiness, is fi lled with joy and with boastful pride, as if it were itself the creator of what it hears.14

There is no lack of enthusiasm here, but it is not the same enthusiasm that Poulet shows for his “books.” What excites a reader is not the content or the experience of reading, but the art of the writing. We identify not with the imagination, but with the technical mastery of the author, which we experience as if it were our own to boast of. We are readers for art. And we are expected, accordingly, not to hold fast the experience of reading as if undergoing it for the fi rst time, but rather to read or hear a passage “many times” (7.3) before making a judgment about it. Ezra Pound is thus obviously an exponent of reading for art. In fact, Longinus’ insistence on re-reading (ἀναθεώρησις [7.3]), and on the production of ripe or thickly grown ideas (τὸ περὶ τὰς νοήσεις ἁδρεπήβολον [8.1]), suggests something very like Pound’s “condensare.” We can probably ascribe reading for art, as a practice, to modern literary criticism in general, at least to all critical endeavors that involve the analysis of relatively small pieces of text. For whatever such criticism may assert or suggest about “the reader” (meaning the ordinary reader), it obviously finds its own principal literary vocation in detecting, thus in a sense creating anew, the else unremarked technical devices by which the poet operates; we read in the hope of positioning ourselves not in the auditorium but behind the scenes, “as if we ourselves were the creators of what we hear.” When the dalang or shadow-puppet-master brings his show into your house in Java,

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23

many of your guests will of course seat themselves before the backlighted screen, where only the shadows are visible; but others, without thinking it at all strange, will be seated behind the screen, where they watch the actual shadow-casting puppets and the hands that work them. The situation of the typical literary critic is similar. Part of her or him pretends merely to listen to the text, but another part is moved by the ambition to occupy, and to make available to yet further readers, the secret seat of creativity itself. Reading for art is a motivating factor even in such reader-centered criticism as that of Riffaterre and earlier Fish. The invocation of an imagined reader’s second-by-second experience seems to me primarily a device for concealing the authoritarian aspect of that motivation. Fish practically says as much in his account of how he changed his mind. This [new insight] would mean, for example, that the moment crucial to my analysis of Paradise Lost, IV, 9–12, the moment when the reader mistakenly thinks that it is the loss of Eden of which Adam and Eve are declared innocent, is not discovered by the analytical method but produced by it. (13) It followed then that what I had been doing . . . was not revealing what readers had always done but trying to persuade them to a set of community assumptions so that when they read they would do what I did. . . . I was assenting to a characterization of my position that I had always resisted: you’re not telling us how we’ve always read; you’re trying to persuade us to a new way of reading. (15)

But once he grasps the importance of “interpretive communities,” Fish fi nds that he no longer needs to deny his reading for art. Once I saw this [that “there is no single way of reading that is correct or natural, only ‘ways of reading’ that are extensions of community perspectives”], the judgment that I was trying to persuade people to a new way of reading was no longer heard as an accusation because what I was trying to persuade them from was not a fundamental or natural way but a way no less conventional than mine and one to which they had been similarly persuaded. (16)

The critic has now stepped into the shoes of the poet and taken up the task of creation—of effecting change in his readers. Interpretive communities are made up of those who share interpretive strategies not for reading but for writing texts, for constituting their

24

Theory perspective. In other words, these strategies exist prior to the act of reading and therefore determine the shape of what is read rather than, as is usually assumed, the other way around. (14)

That the distinction between poet and reader has become quite tenuous here can perhaps even be understood as a theoretical justification of reading for art. Two points need to be mentioned. First, reading for thrills and reading for art are not simply alternative views of reading. They are categorically different types of “view.” Reading for art is anchored in reality in the sense that it can always be developed into a method, whereas any such statement about reading for thrills would be obvious nonsense. But the second point, then, is a question: if reading for art is generally what modern critics do, where does the idea of reading for thrills get the enormous seductive power by which it lures even excellent critical minds into the type of selfdelusion that Fish accuses himself of?

Reading for Wisdom Reading for knowledge, if there is such a thing, will be subject to the same problems and paradoxes as reading for experience—or reading for thrills, as I have called it. For knowledge exists only by being contextualized; and in any given case, the needful contextualization will be dissociated from the supposedly present act of reading by being distributed over various separated times (including times forgotten and times yet to come) in the individual’s life. But reading for wisdom is perhaps a notion that makes sense independently. And its most eloquent advocate today is probably Harold Bloom. To read human sentiments in human language you must be able to read humanly, with all of you. You are more than an ideology, whatever your convictions, and Shakespeare speaks to as much of you as you can bring to him. That is to say: Shakespeare reads you more fully than you can read him, even after you have cleared your mind of cant.15

All good reading, in this sense, is a reading of oneself by way of texts in which one’s self happens to be illuminated, Shakespeare being the unique general case by which presumably no one can fail to be illuminated. What is important to Poulet is the amount by which, while reading, he is different from what he ordinarily is. And it is the latter (I take it), it is

Reading and the Theory of Reading

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what we simply are, about which Bloom’s Shakespeare informs us. Henry James wants us, as readers, to have the impression “that we have lived another life—that we have had a miraculous enlargement of experience.”16 But the scope of wisdom is then exactly what we and James, by living “another life”—by not being strictly and simply ourselves—would have left behind. But in the same book, indeed in the same paragraph, Bloom also shows the limitations of both reading for wisdom and wisdom itself. [Dr.] Johnson . . . urges us to allow Shakespeare to cure us of our “delirious ecstasies.” Let me extend Johnson by also urging us to recognize the phantoms that the deep reading of Shakespeare will exorcise. One such phantom is the Death of the Author; another is the assertion that the self is a fiction; yet another is the opinion that literary and dramatic characters are so many marks upon a page. A fourth phantom, and the most pernicious, is that language does the thinking for us.

As long as reading for wisdom concerns itself with developing wisdom from texts—the more numerous and diverse those texts, the better—it is unassailable. But as soon as it attempts to specify its own position in general terms, it succeeds only in proving that wisdom is not inconsistent with a kind of recklessness. Are those “phantoms” that irritate Bloom somehow not instances of “the human”? Would Shakespeare—who does not merely tolerate but actually inhabits Polonius and Pistol, and even Brutus—have lost patience utterly with Roland Barthes? It is Hamlet himself who says Was’t Hamlet wrong’d Laertes? Never Hamlet. If Hamlet from himself be ta’en away, And when he’s not himself does wrong Laertes, Then Hamlet does it not, Hamlet denies it. Who does it, then? His madness. If ’t be so, Hamlet is of the faction that is wrong’d; His madness is poor Hamlet’s enemy. (V.ii.244–50)

There are several levels of irony operating here. But it would be more than just reckless to deny that this speech invokes a philosophical questioning (like Montaigne’s)17 of whether the self that operates against itself can reasonably be viewed as more than a kind of fictional linking of opposites. The notion of reading for wisdom does not admit of being developed as theory, for it lacks a position. And the notion of reading for art, which does occupy a clear position—that verbal genius or sublimity is a product of art,

26

Theory

not nature (Longinus, ch. 2)—lacks a consequential reason for its activity. It is possible to regard the attenuation of the difference between poet and reader in some of Fish’s writing as a justification of reading for art; but it is a justification only after the fact. How shall membership in an “interpretive community” produce the boastful pride or vainglory (µεγαλαυχία) that Longinus speaks of? And where is the incentive toward reading for art without that surge of pride? On the other hand, there is plenty of boastfulness in Barthes when he declares we are now beginning to let ourselves be fooled no longer by the arrogant antiphrastical recriminations of good society in favour of the very thing [the reader] it sets aside, ignores, smothers, or destroys; we know that to give writing its future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.18

But it is boastfulness, paradoxically, on behalf of a reader who himself cannot possibly feel it, who “is without history, biography, psychology [and] is simply that someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written text is constituted”—a reader who is evidently not a reader for art but the reader for thrills. From now on I will call this reader, who does not really exist, simply The Reader (with initial capitals), for reasons that will appear shortly.

“Literature” and the Novel It is almost as if reading for thrills, for all its lack of substance, were a kind of default position among responses to the question of reading. What is the relation between this state of affairs and the tendency shown by Poulet and his Baltimore interlocutors to permit novel reading to stand for reading in general? In my opinion the relation is strictly accidental, at least with respect to form. If it were not—if there were a systematic connection between reading for thrills and the form of the novel—then it would be possible to locate “reading” exactly in our immediate experience by using its ties to specific textual features. And this, we have seen, cannot be done. The distinction between reading for thrills and, say, reading for art has nothing to do with any textual form. It is telling, for example, that Henry James, by insisting that his reader live “another life” while reading, shows himself an advocate of reading for thrills, and that Ezra Pound, a resolute reader for art, nevertheless greatly admires what he considers James’s mastery of form.19

Reading and the Theory of Reading

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The association of reading for thrills with the novel is an accident, but it is a significant accident. When the modern concept of “literature” is developed in the eighteenth century—as distinct from earlier “litteratura,” which meant more or less “humane letters”—when “literature” appears as an aesthetically colored concept, embracing especially belleslettres, its principal function is (or becomes) to provide a category that will include, as a single type of art, all the traditional genres of poetry plus some popular prose types, especially the novel. And, as the German Romantics understood particularly well, bringing the novel into contact with the established array of poetic genres undermines the very concept of genre, since the novel can incorporate any type of writing one might imagine, plus various types of nonwriting, including not only pictures and typographical devices, but also things like the entirely eccentric pages in Tristram Shandy. But a work’s genre, to the extent that we can identify it, is normally our source for guidance on how to read the work; and only when that guidance is lacking (as in the case of the novel) do general theories of reading become necessary or even possible. In the eighteenth century it was common enough for novels, with varying degrees of irony, to offer guidance in how to read themselves. And Friedrich Schlegel, in his “Brief über den Roman,” suggests that an adequate theory of the novel must itself become a novel.20 The novel, then, at the time it is incorporated into the newly understood category of “literature,” becomes a focus, an object, an instrument of the formal and informal theorizing that literature requires for its establishment as the more comprehensive institution that will henceforward represent the poetic as a whole, or art in the medium of language. It is true that the novel’s theoretical capacity had long been evident. Don Quixote includes in its wealth a highly complex study of readers and reading. But it is not until the arrival in European cultural history of The Reader—who is no particular person but rather, as Barthes says, just someone, anyone at all, who occupies the point where literary products are consumed—that the theoretical capacity of the novel becomes crucial for the definition and the very survival of what had for millennia been known as “poetry.” The Reader is no longer a reader for art whose training in the shape and history and operation of poetic genres makes him or her capable of occupying vicariously the seat of creation. The people who represent themselves to themselves as The Reader are primarily consumers, and if they are to read at all seriously—if they are to read in a manner that might preserve for “literature” the traditional dignity of the poetic (we recall Culler’s point

28

Theory

about “literature’s dependence on particular modes of reading”)—then the technique and benefits of reading must be explained to them. Hence the need for theory, for the question of reading. And precisely this need for theory, in turn, is part of what moves those new readers to think of themselves as The Reader, rather than a disorganized crowd. That these readers and the material they read, “literature,” arrive on the scene in Europe at pretty near the same time, is obviously not an accident. Exactly how it is not an accident is something I do not myself have a clear idea of. Does literature attract and educate its readers, or does readerly demand call forth literature? Or both, or neither, and in what proportions? The evolution of political and social structures and concomitant systems of education certainly plays a role here, as do the technology of printing, the growth of lending libraries and other book-circulating associations, the serialization of otherwise unwieldy and unaffordable books, and the gradual advent of indiscriminate mass bibliopoly, all of which produce a situation where in principle anyone, for a reasonable sum of money, can become a reader of anything. But however it happens, it happens. The poetic is preserved in modern middle-class European society by being included in the new category of “literature”; literature in turn is maintained by a certain (often nationalistic) seriousness in reading, which in turn is learned, or felt to be learned, from literature itself; and the whole process is associated vaguely but naturally enough with the most popular literary type: the novel in its newly achieved status as a genre of what used to be known as “poetry.” Under these circumstances, it is not hard to see how reading tends to be understood as novel reading—assuming that the question of reading has been raised. And the question of reading is raised repeatedly, not to say obsessively, in eighteenth-century Europe: in novels themselves of course, but also in endless debates about who should read and how, about what should be read, about the damage or benefit of novel reading (especially by young people and women) to public morals and to the economy. There is no need to treat this matter in detail. When Günther Blaicher, for instance, says that “from now on [with Addison’s discussions of reading psychology] the reader is a permanent social and psychological reference point in all thinking about literary problems,”21 practically no one will be inclined to disagree. Occasionally we come upon texts or utterances that have special historical significance. Ian Watt, in The Rise of the Novel, calls our attention to passages from Steele and Huet in which novel reading is contrasted with other sorts of reading as making fewer and lesser demands on the

Reading and the Theory of Reading

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memory, as a type of reading that is more fully contained in the moment of its happening, when our eyes are actually following a line of text.22 We think immediately of Poulet’s submergence in the experience of the book, of James’s idea of living “another life” in reading, of Riffaterre’s insistence on “following exactly the normal reading process,”23 of Fish’s analysis of reading into a series of present “events.” But the basic historical situation would be clear even without these moments of special clarity. The Reader—who becomes and is such solely by having the experience of reading, here and now, regardless of the personal, professional, intellectual, or social qualities he or she might otherwise possess—arises side by side with a new notion (“literature”) of reading material; and the point at which these two historical newcomers intersect, so to speak, is the form of the novel—which is not itself an historical newcomer, but does gain a new kind of life, a new “realistic” immediacy (to invoke Watt once more) in the new historical circumstances. I offer these points as an attempt to explain certain habits of thought in modern European criticism. But it cannot be concluded that The Reader (or reading for thrills) belongs integrally to the history of the novel, or vice versa. In principle, either of the two could have developed without the other. This point has two important consequences. First, no amount of analysis of any novel can demonstrate reading for thrills as its proper communicative medium. (Think of Pound reading James.) The study of novels is therefore of no special use for understanding The Reader. And second, the idea of The Reader, once posited, must be shown to have its own genesis in European intellectual history, apart from the history of any particular literary forms. This matter is taken up in Part II of the present book.24 (For the sake of conceptual clarity, fi nally, let me repeat one more point I have implied above: that when I speak of The Reader—when I say that This Reader arises or arrives—I am referring only indirectly to the activity of actual people. By The Reader I mean the inferred vessel of a supposed experience of reading, an experience which does not exist except as a theoretical response to the question of reading. Theory here takes the place of experience “itself ” in our idea of what we are doing. It is true that in the eighteenth century new groups of people became readers of new or unaccustomed types of text, and these real phenomena do play a role in the developing theoretical situation. But these new readers, or readers reading anew, are The Reader only to the extent that they are persuaded to understand or theorize themselves thus. The Reader, that is, arises only when the question of reading is asked with sufficient insistence to require

30

Theory

the positing of a vessel in which reading-as-such—reading as an object suitable for theorizing—takes place.)

Literature, Reading, and History There is a further sense in which the idea of reading assumes importance for the new discipline of literature. For literature (in the modern aesthetic meaning of the word) is no sooner born than it fi nds itself in need of a history, to justify its incorporation of the enormous number and variety of past poetic monuments that it claims to embrace in a single category. And it is probably Harold Bloom, again, who has understood most influentially the relation between the concepts of history and reading in the literary domain. In A Map of Misreading, Bloom summarizes his approach: Influence, as I conceive it, means that there are no texts, but only relationships between texts. These relationships depend upon a critical act, a misreading or misprision, that one poet performs upon another, and that does not differ in kind from the necessary critical acts performed by every strong reader upon every text he encounters. The influencerelation governs reading as it governs writing, and reading is therefore a miswriting just as writing is a misreading. As literary history lengthens, all poetry necessarily becomes verse-criticism, just as all criticism becomes prose-poetry.25

In strict logic it would be sufficient to assert that all reading is a form of writing, all writing a form of reading. These propositions, along with the (heuristic) assumption that literature in fact has a history—that it changes substantially over time while remaining the same basic entity— entail Bloom’s prefi x “mis-” as an inescapable consequence. The only questionable element in this logical structure is the term “literature.” Is it well enough defi ned in the fi rst place—is its existence well enough established—for us even to entertain the question of its history? Bloom himself skirts this problem by saying, as often as he can, “poetry,” not “literature.” But his own historical situation repeatedly betrays him, as in the last sentence above where he speaks of “literary history.” What other term could he have used without sounding silly? “Poetry” is also not easy to defi ne. But then poetry does not need a definition, or a history, in the same way that literature does. Millennia of theory and practice have accustomed us to the idea of poetry as a relatively loose collection of verbal possibilities or challenges—we usually call them

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“genres.” In fact, Bloom’s “revisionary ratios” (84, et passim) might reasonably be viewed as an attempt to understand genres as types of movement in the making of history. But however we look at it, Bloom’s thought depends logically on an idea of history, hence (since history as such is an empty concept) on a notion of the entity whose history is in question, and therefore is ultimately concerned with the discipline by which poetry is fi rst gathered together into a single historicizable entity, namely literature. (Bloom himself suggests that he is mainly interested in “postEnlightenment strong poetry” [4]; and in The Anxiety of Influence he speaks of “the Cartesian engulfment,” which had to happen before “the anxiety of influence became central to poetic consciousness.”) 26 But literature does not so much have a history as need one. It operates in the bind of needing a history in order to exist, and needing to exist in order to have a history. Some solid, indisputable fact is required, upon which to apply the leverage needed to escape this bind. And that fact—in the general eighteenth-century view, and again in Bloom—is taken to be “the reader” (not yet quite capitalized). It is, first, only inside a reader that those aesthetic movements can occur—“aesthetic” being yet another new concept in the eighteenth century—by which the new boundaries of “literature” are marked. And it is only in the mind of a reader that disparate pieces of (presumably remembered) text can come into direct contact with one another and interact in the relations that make a literary history. This second, historical reader is not far from what Bloom calls “a new mythic being . . . the Überleser” (5), who is in effect an allegorical summarizing of the apparently undeniable operation of reading in culture. Riffaterre, interestingly, also imagines a “superreader,”27 but as a summary of readers in the aesthetic, not the historical sense. But, to operate as a fact in this theoretical context, “the reader” must be amenable to theorization, which means that he or she has become The Reader, who cannot possibly have the character of a fact in the fi rst place. And even if The Reader were usable as a fact, that fact would still fail to solve the problem of literature. For upon analysis it would always turn out to be composed of two separate facts: (1) the aesthetic reader, the supposed actual individual who undergoes the experience of dealing with a text, the experience that must supply literature’s identity; and (2) the reader as a “mythic being,” representing the limitless array of nodal points, points where texts make contact with each other, which must supply literature’s history. And two separate facts cannot do the job because neither the identity nor the history of literature can be established independently; each,

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rather, requires the prior existence of the other. Literature arises as a concept only in the eighteenth century, and bears the mark of its recent origin precisely in its generalizing claim (the mark of the Enlightenment) to denote a continuous history stretching back at least as far as Homer. The figure of The Reader, in the end, serves only to profi le this problem, not to solve it.

The Two Faces of Reading The Reader, if we insist on regarding her or him as a fact in relation to literature, is not one fact, but two separate facts. Or one might say that there are two clearly distinguishable ways of asking the question of reading. Are we asking about a particular type of experience that individuals undergo when they confront themselves with texts? This is what I will call a microscopic formulation of the question. Or are we asking about the unavoidably inferred medium in which literary history unfolds, the medium in which it becomes possible for texts to come into contact, to communicate with one another? This I will call a macroscopic form of the question of reading. And while there is room for doubt about whether the communicative relations among texts add up to what we might reasonably call a history, it still seems indisputable that a communicative medium for texts—an intertextuality—must be postulated. We cannot even begin to say anything about any one text except in some form of intertextual framework. The macroscopic view of reading is thus as inescapable as the microscopic view. Indeed, it is hard to see how anyone could sustain a serious theoretical interest in the latter—in reading as experience—if not in the hope of discovering an approach to larger historical issues. But is there really any way of mediating between these two ways of thinking about reading? Is there any basis for the postulate of, say, a causal relation between the process of reading, as individuals experience it, and the shape or growth of literary history? Bloom seems to posit such a relation—hence a coincidence of the microscopic and macroscopic views in their object—but only for the case of what he calls “strong” reading; one might even defi ne Bloomian strong reading as any reading that makes history, any personal reading experience that is enshrined (if perhaps only temporarily) as a presupposition in some culture’s account of the relations among its texts. Or, to develop this defi nition further: “strong” reading, in its making history, is active reading—reading that occupies the site of creation—not passive reading or reading for thrills or

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reading as consumption; it is what I have called reading for art. Bloom’s doctrine thus implies the proposition that all true reading is reading for art, a proposition to which most significant modern literary criticism adheres in practice anyway. Bloom deals with the problem of how to ask about reading by appealing not to “the reader” in general, but to an elite group of “strong poets” (poets who are strong readers) who are selected precisely from the current inventory of literary history, and whose reading therefore cannot help but be continuous with that history’s unfolding. Needless to say, this approach begs practically every theoretical question one can think of. But are any other approaches preferable? Bloom places himself in the middle of what we can imagine as a scale of responses to the refractory duality of “reading.” At one end of the scale is the idea that literary history develops from a kind of average of all readings of all texts. Every member of the given culture reads in a way that he or she fi nds natural—having been influenced by current educational prejudices, which in turn are influenced by current ideas of literary history—and the experience of all these new readers, who live in an historical period that is different from the one in which the givens of their education were formed, is somehow absorbed into literary history and moves it in new directions. This view provokes some difficult questions. How does literary history ever take shape as history, how does it ever become more than a mere jumble of confl icting diagnoses of the inherently unknowable “mood” or “temper” of a large mass of individuals? If we wish to avoid invoking an idea like “strong readers” after all, the only obvious alternative is the idea of some preexisting shape in the collective historical being of the mass of readers, the idea, in particular, of a “nation” with its national literature. And, in fact, the concepts of “nation” and “national literature” do appear to be deeply involved in the large eighteenth-century conceptual shift that produces “literature” itself.28 At the other end of the scale, accordingly, is a strongly antinationalistic view that posits no connection whatever between the individual aesthetic reader and the inferred historical reader. How literary history happens, in this view, has nothing whatever to do—or at least nothing demonstrable, nothing knowable—with any individuals’ experience while reading. Later on we will discuss the development of such a view by Heinrich Heine. But for the time being, it is clear that there is no sound theoretical reason for preferring any particular point on that whole scale. At one end we are perhaps made uncomfortable by nationalistic implications, but at the other end we are made uncomfortable by the impossibility of any specific

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implications at all. And if a mid-positioned argument like Bloom’s appeals to us, we shall fi nd, upon reflection, that its appeal arises from the personality and intelligence of its advocate, who is its prototype “strong reader,” not from any empirical or logical advantage.

The Act of Reading? The simple summary conclusion to be drawn from all the foregoing arguments is that the idea of reading—especially if it is seen by way of The Reader as its vessel—is of no theoretical significance in understanding literature as a whole, and does not significantly advance the interpretive task with respect to individual works. Reading cannot be assumed to operate as a cumulative linear apprehension of textual signs. Reading cannot be understood as a particular type of experience, and cannot be located in an individual’s memory as a particular instance of experience. Reading understands itself (theoretically, when the question arises) as reading for thrills, but precisely this self-understanding is usually an instance of reading for art, except that it denies itself the incentive that might otherwise sustain and legitimize it as reading for art. And reading—if we ask after the theoretical need that creates it as a supposed experience—turns out to have two separate aspects which can be connected with one another only by a strictly arbitrary, hence untenable, theoretical move. But the matter does not end here. Precisely those properties of “reading” that disqualify it as a useful critical concept make it interesting as an object of critical and historical study. Where does the idea of “reading” come from, and whence does it derive its apparent power among us? We have already taken a cursory look at these questions, and we will take a more detailed look soon. But fi rst, given the inherent inconclusiveness of negative arguments, it will be useful to articulate the present discussion one step further by showing an example of how the hopelessness of a theory of reading is measured by the extremities to which its proponents are driven in supporting it. I have in mind the case of Wolfgang Iser. One of the difficulties in Iser’s thought is that he often resists being pinned down on specific questions. But it is certain, at least, that he regards reading as a unique and clearly distinguishable form of experience, and that it is the structure of this experience, more than the nature or content of what stimulates it, that makes up its importance in our lives. In this regard, Iser is not far from Poulet, despite his attempts to distance himself.29

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My purpose is not just to poke holes in Iser’s arguments. This has been done often and conclusively enough. 30 My purpose is to employ Iser’s own basic honesty as a touchstone for the whole inquiry he has embarked upon—an honesty and rigor that are apparent on every page of his work, in the enormous effort he devotes to describing psychologically and (as he implies) phenomenologically the specifi c and unique structure of the “reading process.” His starting point is shared by any number of other critics and theorists: The literary work has two poles, which we might call the artistic and the esthetic: the artistic refers to the text created by the author, and the esthetic to the realization accomplished by the reader. From this polarity it follows that the literary work cannot be completely identical with the text, or with the realization of the text, but in fact must lie halfway between the two.31

But most other critics do not recognize as thoroughly as he does that this idea of a “halfway” position presupposes that the text in some degree regulates the reading experience. (Where would the difference be between reading and daydreaming otherwise?) And such regulation cannot happen if we assume that everyone’s reading experience may be completely different from everyone else’s. Reading experiences can be different, but they cannot be completely different. There must be a level at which they all exhibit a single structure, the structure of the “reading process.” In other words, The Reader, at some level, must be everywhere The Same Reader. Otherwise there is no single “process” for the text to regulate. And it is this process, this structure, This Reader, that Iser strives to lay hold of with unmatched tenacity. Iser, then, is irreversibly committed to the position that “reading is the essential precondition for all processes of literary interpretation”32 and that “reading” names a unique and clearly identifiable human act with its own proper structure, a structure that persists and can be analyzed behind all the individual variations of that act. But in his sincere care to avoid a facile or obscure formulation of it, he is driven, I think, to conceptual extremes that in the end constitute a reductio ad absurdum of what they were meant to substantiate. He is not far from Poulet in his basic thinking, but whereas Poulet permits himself a certain amount of vagueness in formulae and arguments—which keeps his individual assertions plausible—Iser insists on following his logic wherever it leads. And even if, in consequence, his position shows itself to be untenable, still his arguments have in the

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process taken us further toward a reasonable (negative) grasp of the overall theoretical situation than all the arguments of his less ambitious and less rigorous predecessors and followers. The instance I have in mind involves what Iser repeatedly speaks of as “the subject–object division,” a concept he apparently means to be taken in as philosophically and psychologically profound a sense as possible. It is “the subject–object division essential for all perception” (140), and it is “the division between subject and object which always applies to the acquisition of knowledge” (9). In other words, it is the basic binary structure upon which, at least since Kant, the very possibility of experience is understood to depend. But Iser then asserts, in developing Poulet’s thought, that “Reading removes the subject–object division” (155). And he asserts that “image-building”—which means our principal activity as readers—“eliminates the subject–object division” (140). These assertions border on absurdity. If subject and object are understood in their full philosophical depth, then Iser is claiming that reading removes or eliminates the structural basis for experience as such, which means that reading itself cannot possibly be viewed as a type of experience. And if, on the other hand, subject and object really mean only the feeling or belief that certain elements of experience either do or do not belong to a world strictly outside ourselves, then we shall have no trouble fi nding cases other than reading where the division crumbles. But Iser maintains that reading is strictly unique in its effect on the subject–object structure: We always stand outside the given object, whereas we are situated inside the literary text. The relation between text and reader is therefore quite different from that between object and observer: instead of a subjectobject relationship, there is a moving viewpoint which travels along inside that which it has to apprehend. This mode of grasping an object is unique to literature. (109)

There is a conceptual slippage here, from object–observer to object–subject, as if these oppositions were the same. And the grasping of an object from a moving viewpoint inside it is certainly not “unique to literature,” but is also required by such objects as the state and society, not to mention the phenomena of quantum physics. Why does Iser insist on invoking the opposition of subject and object when it forces him into such precarious positions? Why, in the same line of thought, does he insist on “a basic difference”— by which he means an absolute difference—“between image-building in

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literature and image-building in everyday life” (140)? “In the latter case,” he explains, “our knowledge of the real object naturally preconditions our image of it, but in the former case, there is no empirical object with which to relate the image.” Try telling that to the author of the opening pages of Père Goriot. And how can a real but “absent” object (141) precondition our image-building if we happen never to have seen it? There are points where Iser seems to go out of his way to undermine his own concepts. In the midst of discussing the reading process, for example, he employs for elucidation a truncated passage from Jean Starobinski: “Strictly speaking, what we see arising here is a complex reality, in which the difference between subject and object disappears” (135). This is a good enough English rendering of the German version that Iser refers to,33 but it is not at all what Starobinski actually says, which is “En fait, l’on voit naître ici une réalité complexe, où s’abolit la distinction du subjectif et de l’objectif.”34 What Starobinski suggests is that the distinction (not the difference) between “the subjective” and “the objective,” or between subjective and objective effects, can disappear, which, in a different intellectual register, is no more than what Kant suggests in response to Cartesianism. But even if Iser is relying entirely on the inaccurate German version, still he must know that Starobinski is talking here about the Rorschach test!— which is not at all comparable to his own idea of reading the far more specific “signals” (135) of a literary text. The opposition of subject and object thus repeatedly strains Iser’s thought to the breaking point. But for the sake of simple honesty, he cannot avoid the idea that reading fundamentally alters that opposition. Otherwise, no matter how hard he argues, he can at best only show that reading belongs to a particular class of experiences, which would mean that the effects of reading could be achieved just as well by other activities, and his basic Jamesian vision of novel reading as a unique extension of experience, and ultimately a unique achievement of communication, would collapse. The very structure of experience must be altered in reading, which means that the subject–object relation as such (not only in its effects) must be undone or redone. But this argument, as Iser’s development of it shows in spite of him, leads to absurdity, and hence to the conclusion that reading is not after all a definite form of experience, that no valid theoretical generalizations can be made about the various things that people do with texts. The experience of reading, or “the act of reading,” is always an extraneously motivated theoretical construct. And the question of exactly what that extraneous motivation is, in the case of modern reading theory, must still worry us.

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Aura and Its Mechanical Reproducibility Iser’s argument, then, together with its premises, can be quite convincingly refuted. But one consequence of that refutation is the recognition that what we think of as our “actual” experience of reading is in truth always a theoretical construct conditioned by the evolution of theologically or scientifically or socially or politically or aesthetically grounded doctrines of reading. It follows that our refutation of Iser has no effect whatever upon the status of Iser’s theory as an historical fact, or upon the status of other theories (say, Poulet’s or Henry James’s) that are subsumed in Iser’s more rigorous argument. No mere refutation of the theory on a logical or conceptual plane can sever the connection (once it is made) by which that theory assumes the inherently irrefutable character of our “actual” experience. Something like an instance of this theorem can be found in the work of Walter Benjamin. Like most serious critics, Benjamin is concerned with articulating questions of as great a degree of difficulty as he can; and it is not often that we catch him avoiding a question of any importance. But in his essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” practically the only thing he has to say about the art of literature is: “The enormous changes which printing, the mechanical reproduction of writing, has brought about in literature are a familiar story.”35 I for one have never heard that familiar story. In fact, unless I am seriously mistaken, the remarkable truth is that the invention of printing had practically no effect at all upon literature as literature. It had of course a very great effect upon the volume and economics of the book trade, hence upon the availability of books and the development of educational and religious institutions, indeed upon commerce, government, and culture in general. But although it encouraged, in due time, a distinct lowering of the threshold of perceived quality at which books could be widely distributed, it neither prompted nor of itself was responsible for making possible the introduction of a single truly new literary genre. One can maintain, for example, that without printing, the picaresque novel could not have flourished in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But the long, adventure-fi lled prose narrative was not by any means a new form at that time, and the conditions of its flourishing then were in any case complex and varied, not reducible to the availability of printing as a medium. As far as I know, in fact, only one technological innovation has ever had a direct and demonstrable effect upon the literary as such: the invention of alphabetic writing, hence of “mechanical reproduction” (reproduction

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requiring no artistic talent) in the form of copying, without which the drama could not have arisen in ancient Attica.36 And this little piece of history has important implications for Benjamin’s main argument. For if, in the course of European literature, there has ever been anything like an “aura” associated with poetic works, it now follows that that aura had already survived, long ago, the introduction of a powerful technology of mechanical reproduction, which means there is no reason to suppose that it could not also survive the invention of printing. In fact, the introduction of printing will have tended, if anything, to increase the auratic quality of poetic texts, by making possible the idea of a fi nished or perfect or defi nitive version of the work. In the manuscript culture of Europe before printing—which will concern us in Chapter 4—the work is generally understood as a work in progress, subject to being glossed or even altered by the present reader or copier. Thus we are brought back to theorists like Poulet and Iser, whose project, in one aspect, is to pin down and describe what, in Benjamin’s terms, we should have to call the “aura” of a literary work. It is true that Benjamin’s initial defi nition of “aura” cannot be applied to literature: “Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be” (220). Literature as literature, as something somehow suspended between sheer language and sheer imagination, exhibits a condition about as far removed as is possible from that of “presence” at a particular time and place. But when Benjamin attempts to describe “aura” in more detail, the original defi nition is compromised: The concept of aura which was proposed above with reference to historical objects may usefully be illustrated with reference to the aura of natural ones. We defi ne the aura of the latter as the unique phenomenon of distance, however close it may be. If, while resting on a summer afternoon, you follow with your eyes a mountain range on the horizon or a branch which casts its shadow over you, you experience the aura of those mountains, of that branch. (222–23)

“Distance,” here, does not mean measurable physical distance. It means a kind of ontological distance, the radical separation of the observer from an object which, even while being fully exposed to our gaze, is also somehow fully wrapped up—fully cloaked—in its own being. And distance, in almost exactly this sense, is what characterizes the experience of reading for Poulet.

40

Theory In a certain sense I must recognize that no idea really belongs to me. Ideas belong to no one. . . . But whatever these ideas may be . . . so long as I entertain them I assert myself as [their] subject . . . I am the subjective principle for whom the ideas serve for the time being as the predications. . . . Now what happens when I read a book? Am I then the subject of a series of predications which are not my predications? . . . Whatever I think is a part of my mental world. And yet here I am thinking a thought which manifestly belongs to another mental world, which is being thought in me just as though I did not exist. Already the notion is inconceivable and seems even more so if I reflect that, since every thought must have a subject to think it, this thought which is alien to me and yet in me, must also have in me a subject which is alien to me.37

It is a question here not of the mysterious distance from an otherwise simply “present” physical object, but of the indeed “inconceivable” inner distance or alienness of a thought that is otherwise subjectively present to me in exactly the same way as my own thoughts are. Surely this qualifies as a description of the aura of a work of literature—especially if we consider how editorial tradition invests texts with “authority” (Benjamin, 221)—as does also, if perhaps with less poetic energy, Iser’s account of “the text as a living event,” constituted as such by “the reader’s continual oscillation between involvement and observation.”38 But if aura, or something powerfully analogous to aura, exists in relation to literature, then Benjamin’s historical argument is in trouble. For aura in this sense is not affected by any technique of mechanical reproduction, which means that aura as such—as a type of experience, as an unceasing seductive force—cannot be eradicated as long as literature continues to exist. And literature, as Iser and Poulet and Henry James understand it, is definitely a form of seduction. Books, says Poulet, “appear to be lit up” with the “hope” that I will read them. “Read me, they seem to say” (Poulet, 56). But if the seductive pleasure of aura, or an analogous pleasure, is thus still available to us in literature, how shall we resist the temptation to seek that same pleasure (or if need be, to fabricate for ourselves that same pleasure) even with regard to such arts as photography and cinema? And what has happened then to the socially progressive effects that Benjamin promises us in the age of mechanical reproduction? “If the seductive pleasure of aura is still available to us,” I said. But have I not myself argued that the theories of James, Poulet, and Iser do not reflect any “actual” experience of reading, hence that it is not likely that

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an experience comparable to that of aura is actually available to us when we read? The trouble is that I have argued one step beyond this point, to the recognition that there is no “actual” experience of reading against which theories might be measured, which means that theories themselves, when they gain some currency, are enabled to usurp the place of experience itself in our self-understanding as readers. “You have no right to experience reading as an auratic situation,” we might insist. And the Jamesian novel reader, who is probably still fairly typical nowadays, will just laugh in our face. Moreover, Benjamin’s argument in the “Work of Art” essay is peculiarly susceptible to the threat of being undermined even by a delusion. For it is not what we might call a “constative” argument (extending the range of J. L. Austin’s terminology), but rather a “performative” argument, for it is meant itself to contribute to the establishment of its content as historical truth. The substance of his essay, Benjamin explains, is not “theses about the art of the proletariat after its assumption of power or about the art of a classless society,” but rather “theses about the developmental tendencies of art under present conditions of production.” And with regard to the latter, he says: Their dialectic is no less noticeable in the superstructure than in the economy. It would therefore be wrong to underestimate the value of such theses as a weapon. They brush aside a number of outmoded concepts, such as creativity and genius, eternal value and mystery—concepts whose uncontrolled (and at present almost uncontrollable) application would lead to a processing of data in the Fascist sense. The concepts which are introduced into the theory of art in what follows differ from the more familiar terms in that they are completely useless for the purposes of Fascism. They are, on the other hand, useful for the formation of revolutionary demands in the politics of art. (218)

Concepts are not simply reflections of supposed facts or states of affairs but rather “weapons,” to be judged according to what they are “useful” for. The “processing of data” is never objective or innocent, but always has a preexisting “sense” or bias. This type of situation is always presupposed by serious revolutionary writing, writing aimed not at describing but at changing the world. But unfortunately it is also exactly the type of situation that arises necessarily in the history of reading, where theory itself is enabled in effect to shape the experience that it makes the gesture of describing. And when revolutionary politics and the theory of reading

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happen to collide in a single historical–conceptual space, as they do in the twentieth century, there is little doubt about which of the two will prevail. The theory of reading (as novel reading), after all, offers not an arduous task and the risk of the radically new, but simply a pleasure that is ours for the taking. It is clear, then, why Benjamin, himself primarily a literary scholar, is moved by his instinct to avoid the question of literature in the “Work of Art” essay. But his own formulations betray him from time to time anyway, in the description of “aura” that I have already quoted, for instance, and also in the discussion of reactionary and progressive responses to art. Mechanical reproduction of art changes the reaction of the masses toward art. The reactionary attitude toward a Picasso painting changes into the progressive reaction toward a Chaplin movie. The progressive reaction is characterized by the direct, intimate fusion of visual and emotional enjoyment with the orientation of the expert. Such fusion is of great social significance. The greater the decrease in social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion. With regard to the screen, the critical and the receptive attitudes of the public coincide. (234)

This passage provides an obvious opening for co-option on the part of an aesthetically exclusive literary establishment; and its terms are in fact coopted (not deliberately, but in effect) by Poulet. Poulet’s essay, we recall, is not about reading as such but about how reading must be practiced by the professional critic (the “expert”) as a model for readers in general. It thus sets up as a criterion for the most advanced and authoritative literary thought exactly the type of “fusion” (between being an expert and being “delivered” to the text as an enjoyer) that Benjamin wants to reserve for the nonprofessional mass audience of cinema; and by consequence, it presents the authority of the critic as a benevolent force, intimately in touch with the enjoyable literary experience of average readers. Authority is on your side, it reassures us in effect. Does this mean that Benjamin’s argument is refuted? Not at all. It is hard to see how the predicate “refuted” could be applied to a “weapon” in the fi rst place. But a weapon can be blunted, and I think Benjamin’s argument is quite thoroughly blunted by the question of literature that he seeks to avoid, especially by the development of that question in the reading theory typified by Poulet and Iser, even though that theory, curiously

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enough, is defi nitely refutable by the procedure of reductio ad absurdum. This is the situation that I hope to give my reader, in turn, a feel for: the situation of modern reading in which the innocence of theory, if it ever existed, has been utterly lost, and in which it is hard to see how we shall ever disentangle ourselves from the infi nitely self-complicating fabric of nonexistent experience corrupted by empirically empty theory—except perhaps by somehow unlearning altogether how to read.

2.

Poems, Myths, and the Advent of Modern Reading

Not many of us would be imprudent enough to suggest that major intellectual shifts simply “take place” in history at a particular point or within a relatively short span of time. The reading of any large Sunday newspaper is enough to remind us that there are many people, indeed many genuinely educated professional writers, who live out their twentieth- or twenty-fi rst-century lives in an entirely pre-Freudian or pre-Marxian or even pre-Galilean universe. And yet, on the other hand, it seems clear that large historical changes do happen on an intellectual plane. But how shall we measure or locate them? Reading as many books and documents as possible, to establish a kind of universal average awareness at some given time, is like trying to measure the height of the tide by climbing a mountain from which one can see as much of the ocean as possible. The only reasonable approach, by contrast, is to shove a stick in the sand and see how high the water climbs on it.

Reading Poems If we are going to fi nd texts in which the pressure exerted by the development of The Reader upon reading in general becomes apparent, these will probably not be the texts of novels, where the tendency of authorial and critical habit (the association of reading for thrills with novel reading) is precisely to minimize such evidence, to avoid the appearance of any such pressure. We shall be on the lookout, rather, for the effects of what is normally regarded as novel reading in texts that are as unlike novels as possible. As it happens, the short lyric poem with a “subjective” or personal focus turns out to be a very useful measuring device. What do we mean by “reading a poem”? In the case of a novel or a story, we ordinarily do our best to convince ourselves—however illusory the conviction may be—that we are reading the text as if for the first time, that its content is bursting in upon our consciousness like the content of 44

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experience itself. But in the case of a poem, I think, we do not claim to have “read” the text until we have gotten to know it, until we have looked at it from a number of points of view, experimentally, and so anchored it in our mind. It is no longer fashionable to have children memorize poems in school; but something very like memorizing is still what we actually do with poems. If, in a periodical or a collection, I read through a poem only once and then go on to the next, it is a sign that that poem has not caught my interest. There is another sense in which we commonly speak nowadays of “reading a poem.” We have formed the habit of expecting special pleasure, and special benefit, from hearing the poem read aloud, particularly if the person who recites it happens also to be its author. It is felt that we get more of the poem’s flavor, that the poem becomes more immediately or completely an experience for us, if we are permitted to witness its direct passage from the very mind that conceived it through the vocal apparatus with which nature herself equipped that mind to express itself. But despite the idea of experience here, there is a vast difference between listening to poets and reading novels. The person who listens to a poet desires to lay hold of the poem’s language itself as an experience, to follow its unfolding instant by instant in search of the creative principle behind it, whereas the reader of a novel desires presumably to realize as experience the content of the language in question. (This is more or less the difference between reading for art and reading for thrills.) When Robert Frost recited “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” his audience hoped to submerge themselves not in the scene, not in the poem’s “fiction,” but rather in its rhythms—audible, quasi-visible, psychological, grammatical, idiomatic— and in their nuances and interactivity. These considerations help explain why most of us would agree that reading poetry (silently, in a book) is an activity that requires training. One must fi rst be able to read the poem’s written text as if it were an act of speaking, here and now, as if all its latent rhythms were physically present; but then one must be able to understand that act of speaking as something categorically other than precisely the speech act it pretends to be. The words “For Godsake hold your tongue, and let me love” are obviously an imperative, but they do not reach me as an imperative, they do not tell me to do something. Nor would it be considered adequate criticism if I glossed that line by simply trying to identify the people at whom its command is directed. And in at least one well-known example, where the person “spoken to” is actually identified, “Hang it all, Robert Browning, / There can

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be but the one ‘Sordello,’ ” we find that we have not really come to grips with the statement until we have recognized, not in it so much as behind it, a rather complicated piece of literary criticism. In other words, one must be able to read the poem’s implied speech act against certain conventions that present the text as something categorically other than a speech act, hence not summarizable by an understanding of what, as quasi-utterance, it “says” or “performs” or “expresses.” Those conventions may, in turn, be reducible ultimately to traditions of quotation—complex genealogical tables of actual texts which, by some form of citation or variation or montage, make their presence felt in the text under consideration with or without the author’s knowledge. And if we are willing, like Pound, to restrict the whole idea of poetry to a relatively narrow range of conventions, we may think it sufficient to acquaint a prospective reader with “the facts”1—with a set of “exhibits” (95) from which a sense of convention might be expected to emerge more or less naturally. But this method does not work in practice. Even Pound fi nds it necessary to comment on his exhibits at length. Here the problem arises that Pound formulates by asking how a language can “stay poetic” (22). Poetic conventions operate only by being silent, by being of an order categorically different from that of the statement or speech act they operate upon. Otherwise the relation between the poem and the conventions that govern our method of dealing with it would itself be ultimately reducible to a speech act (however complex), whereupon the question “what is being said?” would become both answerable and defi nitive after all, and the need for training would disappear—training in how to deal with a poem as a poem, rather than merely respond to it in accordance with the system of speech-act types that makes up our habitual (and inescapable) social and linguistic situation. Hence the importance of the project of teaching by exhibits alone, which, if we could do it, would avoid the danger of destroying by explanation the strictly ironic (silent, nonformulable) situation implied by reading a text against conventions that remove it from the domain of linguistic action and response. It may be possible (perhaps it must be) to maintain the defining irony of poetry even in our prose elucidation of particular instances. But even if we manage thus to teach poetry with a maximum of respect for its integrity as a practice, teaching as such still has the inherent tendency to objectify its content, to transform practice into formulable knowledge. Whatever the case with Chinese, therefore (Pound 22), European languages cannot be expected to “stay poetic,” or at least cannot stay poetic in the same way. Old

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conventions constantly become useless (no longer silent) and are supplanted by new ones in a process that is revolutionary by nature, being driven by the irreconcilable opposition between silence and speech, and is much better grasped, say, by Bloom’s notion of misreading than by any model of literary history as a kind of intergenerational consensus on conditions of communication. But at certain points in this process the imperative of silence will be enforced by structures in which incompatible conventions are made to collide rather than simply succeed or supplant one another. One such historical collision is represented in the first text I want to discuss.

A New Type of Poem? Reading poems requires us to be deeply schooled in a set of arbitrary conventions—or in a number of such sets for different kinds of poetry. Therefore we might expect that poetry will be especially sensitive to the discursive or literary conventions of its time. Not that poetry will simply reflect contemporary discursive conditions—far from it. But if poetry operates in a universe made out of conventions which, while necessarily silent, are nevertheless presumably known and shared in some given community at some given time, then any significant change in that community’s broader discursive conventions (a change, for example, in what is understood by “reading”) is likely to have a measurable effect on the conventions that govern poetry. In particular, there is a poem of Goethe in which I think we can observe unmistakably the arrival upon the European scene of “reading” in the sense of reading for thrills. Auf dem See Und frische Nahrung, neues Blut Saug’ ich aus freier Welt; Wie ist Natur so hold und gut, Die mich am Busen hält! Die Welle wieget unsern Kahn Im Rudertakt hinauf, Und Berge, wolkig himmelan, Begegnen unserm Lauf. Aug’, mein Aug’, was sinkst du nieder? Goldne Träume, kommt ihr wieder? Weg, du Traum! so Gold du bist; Hier auch Lieb’ und Leben ist.

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Theory Auf der Welle blinken Tausend schwebende Sterne, Weiche Nebel trinken Rings die thürmende Ferne; Morgenwind umflügelt Die beschattete Bucht, Und im See bespiegelt Sich die reifende Frucht.2 [On the Lake: And fresh nourishment, new blood, I suck from the open world; how lovely and good is nature thus, who holds me to her bosom! The water rocks and balances our boat in time to the oars, and mountains, climbing cloudily toward heaven, meet our course. / Oh, my eyes, why do you droop? Golden dreams, have you come again? Away with you, dream, gold though you are; here too is love and life. / On the water glitter a thousand hovering stars; soft mists drink the surrounding towering distance; a morning breeze flutters about the shaded cove, and in the lake is mirrored the ripening fruit.]

In Dichtung und Wahrheit, Goethe reproduces the poem in its entirety and associates it with a boat trip on the Lake of Zürich in June 1775 (WA, 29:111). He introduces it with the words “Möge ein eingeschaltetes Gedicht von jenen glücklichen Momenten einige Ahnung herüberbringen [Perhaps an interpolated poem will communicate some sense of those happy moments],” suggesting the idea of a gulf of time that might be traversed by our feelings when we read. Perhaps the poem will enable us, in some degree, to share the actual experience that provoked it. The transmission of experience by language is already an issue at this point in Dichtung und Wahrheit, where Goethe has just excused himself for not describing the elderly Bodmer on the grounds “that Bodmer’s venerable person, described in words, might not make an immediately favorable impression” (WA, 29:109). There is, to be sure, some trickery here. The first four lines of the poem Goethe actually wrote in 1775 are completely different from those in the fi nal (quoted) version, although the rest is pretty much the same (WA, pt. 3, 1:2–3). The factual situation is this: The original poem of 1775 was revised by 1784 or 1785 and had received its fi nal changes by 1790 (WA, 1:387, 368); and Goethe’s plan to use it in Dichtung und Wahrheit was probably formed by 1821 (WA, 29:228). But nothing in this situation seriously affects the points I intend to make. There is no reason to assume that

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Goethe is either insincere or mistaken when he remembers the original poem as an attempt to capture experience in language, or that the revision of the poem was not carried out in the spirit of the original. But if the poem therefore narrates an event, not only in its external details, but also in such a way as to convey its inner or experienced aspect, then the present tense (in all versions) is disturbing. Klopstock is certainly fresh in Goethe’s mind at the time of the poem’s composition—he had visited Goethe in March 1775—and Goethe alludes directly to his wellknown ode “Der Zürchersee” (The Lake of Zürich)3 a bit later in the same year (WA, 37:323). Even without these facts, the echoes of Klopstock’s poem about the Lake of Zürich would be evident in Goethe’s. Klopstock begins with an address to “Mutter Natur,” sees clouds and mountains in a dynamic relation (“Jetzt entwölkte sich fern silberner Alpen Höh”), and prefigures Goethe’s “beschattete Bucht” when he poses himself “in den Umschattungen, / In den Lüften des Walds, und mit gesenktem Blick / Auf die silberne Welle.” But Klopstock maintains a strict distinction between the use of the present tense for invocation, apostrophe, reflection, and the use of the past tense for narrative. What is the effect of Goethe’s not following him in this matter? In Klopstock it is clear that the utterance originates in a moment of memory and reflection on the part of the speaker. In Goethe, if we read the poem as narrative, the present tense implies that the utterance must originate in the midst of the narrated experience itself. (At least this is true if a reader is inclined to pay attention to verb tenses here; and it seems to me that Goethe, by setting his poem side by side with Klopstock’s, turns us in that direction.) But the act of speaking the poem then becomes difficult to imagine because the narrative does not describe a situation in which something like a dramatic monologue, or even a silent meditation, might naturally arise. The speaker is not alone (he speaks of “our” boat); and when he fi nds himself descending into his own thoughts, perhaps into a lyrically meditative state (“Aug’, mein Aug’, was sinkst du nieder?”), he pulls himself up short and forcibly redirects his attention to the external world. In the last section, in fact, if we take the words Sterne and Frucht literally (bearing in mind that Frucht, in the singular, is not a collective concept in German, but suggests here a single piece of ripening fruit), the sense of a connected narrative is supplanted by what appears to be a mere collection of impressions from different times of day and different points of view. If you can see reflected stars, it must be night and you must be out on the water; if you can see a single piece of fruit, it must be light and

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you must be close to shore. Thus a retrospective reordering of experience is implied, which would seem to require a past tense. This type of present tense narrative is common in modern poetry. Examples from poets as different as Valéry and Whitman come to mind easily enough. But if we are sufficiently specific in our defi nition, I think we will be hard pressed to fi nd instances prior to Goethe’s time. We are talking about first-person, present-tense narrative: not merely meditation, but the narrative of concrete events, as if the poem’s utterance were emerging from the immediate unfolding experience of those events, but without any suggestion of how the speaker, in the midst of the experience, might be imagined as pronouncing, or even thinking, the poem’s actual words. Present-tense narratives like Ewald von Kleist’s Der Frühling, in which the speaker’s action consists entirely of his placing himself in a quiet setting from which to observe and meditate on nature—hence to think the poem’s words—do not qualify. But another instance fairly close to Goethe’s poem in time that does qualify is Coleridge’s “Lines: Composed While Climbing the Left Ascent of Brockley Coomb, Somersetshire, May 1795.”4 We are by now comfortable with this poem, even though we recognize that it is highly unlikely that Coleridge actually composed it “while” making his climb. Even if the basic idea of the poem, along with key phrases and images, was conceived in the course of the actual event, it is certainly not the case that line 4, “Far off the unvarying Cuckoo soothes my ear,” was composed (as the present tense might suggest) at exactly the moment of hearing the cuckoo, whereas lines 8–11 come into being only later, when the poet rests—and in effect writes “I rest”—in the shade of the Yew-tree. Here, as in Goethe’s poem, the language pretends to keep pace, step by step, with the speaker’s unfolding experience, but cannot be imagined as actually originating—actually being spoken or thought—in the same step-by-step correspondence. And this poetic procedure, I think, while perhaps not strictly new in the second half of the eighteenth century, is certainly unusual enough to attract our attention and ruffle the silent surface of poetic convention in its time.

Or Is It Really a Poem of That New Type? But are we obliged to read Goethe’s poem as a quasi-narrative? Or can we read it as a conventional poetic meditation whose present tense originates in the mind of an individual not otherwise occupied? The first four lines offer no special difficulty in this regard, even if we read “freie Welt” to

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refer unambiguously to the outdoors. The possible translation, “I have been drawing into myself—these days—and continue to draw into myself fresh nourishment and new blood from the open world,” which takes the present tense to include a present perfect meaning, does no violence at all to the possibilities of standard German, and in fact helps make sense of the text’s opening “And,” which now suggests the continuation of a state or process that precedes the poem’s speaking.5 The speaker has been, for some time, in a condition of restorative union with nature; and the word and marks a transition from the condition itself to the act (now, in the poem’s present) of enjoying it reflectively. Hence also the word so in line 3, which, in order not merely to repeat the intensifying gesture of the word “wie,” must mean “thus, in this way.” “How loving and good is nature in this way,” says the speaker—namely, in that I now feel my vitality restored in me. The speaker is thus looking meditatively into himself, not outward into “nature” considered as the landscape setting for a narrative. (This re-reading of the fi rst four lines as non-narrative is at least as easy in the poem’s fi rst version, where the speaker imagines himself sucking nourishment through his umbilical cord from a nature that surrounds him, and thus places himself as much in nature’s womb as “at her breast,” in a situation that practically begs for allegorical interpretation.) And once we have decided to regard the utterance as issuing from a poet’s conventional meditative solitude, we do not have much choice but to read line 5 as an allegorical generalization of the thought. “Our boat” means “our” (all humans’) life or bodily existence. If we attend to our situation in nature—as the speaker claims he has learned to do for himself—we find that the rhythm of our own civilized human activity (“Rudertakt”) operates in perfect harmony with the powerful rhythm by which the world moves us in turn, as if in a cradle (“Die Welle,” which can mean either simply “the water” or more specifically a “wave”). The boat, in being both moved against the water and buoyed up by the water, is an allegorical image of the intimate relation between our activity and nature’s. And there in the distance, in the direction in which our life (“unser Lauf,” “our course”) is aimed, are cloud-capped mountains that suggest not only aspiration (a vague, lofty vision of the future) but also opposition (“gegen,” in the verb “begegnen”), hence a terminus to our existence—all of which adds up to the idea of immortality, or the hope of continued existence after death. The speaker, in meditating on his renewed personal vitality as a sign of union with undying nature, arrives naturally enough at the dream of his own personal transcendence of death.

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This strictly meditative and allegorical reading of the poem thus easily accounts for the “dreams” of the second section, which now refer directly to the vision of immortality in the fi rst; and those dreams are spoken of as “golden,” which means not only “alluring,” but perhaps also “authentic”—a vision of the ultimate truth about us. Yet the speaker is not satisfied with his meditation in this form. For precisely by being a dream— however “golden,” however true, it may be—this vision of immortality abstracts its speaker reflectively from exactly the feeling of immediate oneness or intimacy with nature on which it depends. Therefore, by a second move of reflection—reflection being the image that both opens and closes the fi nal section—the poem’s original reflective impulse (the reflection upon nature that produces the dream of immortality) must be countered and limited. The mountains that signify personal immortality are now removed from our vision altogether by encircling mists, by some form of salutary forgetting. (In earlier versions, the mists are called “Liebe Nebel,” “dear mists.”) And the stars, representing a level of truth or ideality even higher than the mountains, are now found to be here with us, here in the natural bosom (“die Welle”) that we rest upon, and here in reflected form. (By reflecting upon our reflection, in other words, we distance ourselves from the delusive “dream” and so achieve the oneness with nature that produces the true ideal component of our being.) Then comes another image suggesting (as the image of rowing the boat had) that the large operation of nature and the particular movements of natural objects (including humans) are one and the same—in that the wings with which the morning wind flutters are also the foliage around which it flutters. And fi nally, the image of a ripening fruit reflected in the water suggests two things: our reimmersion in our own natural ripening toward death, now that a second act of reflection blocks the transcendental move (the dream of immortality) by which we had been tempted; and the act of reflection itself, which ripens or matures by reflecting upon itself and so maintains contact with the sense of union with nature that had produced it. Even our original sense of community with nature may now be regarded as, in truth, our own act of mature, self-limiting reflection— reflection being our nature, as humans, which must be attuned with nature as a whole.6 Thus the opening word, “And,” becomes a sign that the end of the poem leads back into its beginning, that the process allegorized in the poem always starts over again in an experiential and reflective cycle from which there is no escape (hence the suggestion of Tantalus’ punishment in the image of fruit hanging over water!) except perhaps by a transcending

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move of the sort that the speaker rejects. Perhaps we have no choice but to accept the fate of Tantalus, or of Goethe’s Prometheus, by resolutely declining to pursue our reflective nature in a direction that must end in unworthy servitude vis-à-vis some imagined higher (cloudy, mountaindwelling) powers. Thus we can carry out a complete reading of the poem as meditation and allegory, a reading which is not inconsistent with young Goethe’s thought elsewhere. We can perhaps go still further in this direction. Goethe, like many poets of his time, wrote a number of riddle poems,7 and “Auf dem See” can be read as one such: “I suck new blood from the open air, where nature thus clasps me to her bosom. Who am I?” And the solution that we must supply, in accordance with the allegory, is “man.” But even without being developed to this extent, the meditative and allegorical reading is unsatisfactory for several reasons. We are disturbed by the idea of the poem’s slipping in and out of the allegorical mode: lines 1–4 and 9–12 are relatively straightforward meditation; lines 5–8 and 13–20 are allegory that must be deciphered. Also, the rhyme and meter of the fi rst two sections suggest motion and physical effort (rowing, in view of the content) more than meditative calm. And later on, in Dichtung und Wahrheit, Goethe himself tells us to seek experience in the poem, not allegorical meaning. But above all, because even as early as 1775 the reading of all literary texts is colored by habits developed in reading novels, we are already predisposed to look for a story in the poem.

The Poem as a Sheer Object and an Historical Node And if we look, we fi nd: a story that accounts even for the apparently disconnected images of the last section. The poem tells of a boat trip that begins probably in the evening, when distant mountains are still visible, and continues into the following dawn. When the sun fi rst edges above the horizon, sparkles of reflected light appear on the rippling water, like floating stars. (In the allegorical mode, we can perhaps accept the idea of seeing actual stars reflected in the lake—it would be “in,” not “on”—but not if we look at the poem realistically, and certainly not if we think of the water as “Welle,” which does not suggest a perfectly flat and quiet surface.) Morning mists now rise from the lake, but are dispelled by the awakening breeze, and burned through by the now fully risen sun, which is reflected in the water like a huge yellow fruit. Earlier, perhaps just before dawn, the speaker had been overcome by the memory of a dream of happiness

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he had left behind. (A few paragraphs after the poem in Dichtung und Wahrheit, Goethe quotes a melancholy little quatrain to Lili Schönemann, which he says he had composed around the same time [WA, 29:112].) But now he puts that memory aside; and his reimmersion in present experience is reflected as the intertwining, in the language of the last section, of an outer and an inner aspect of the experience, to the point where these aspects become practically indistinguishable in a single smooth flow of utterance that belies its own unsignalled leaps between simple denotative description and extreme metaphoricity. Thus we are faced again with the problem of the present tense: that there is no plausible point of origin for the utterance either within the narrated experience (as the present tense appears to require) or outside it, at a temporal distance (which would require a preterite). But if the utterance is denied the possibility of situating itself in relation to the experience, then it seems to follow—considering, again, the implied absence of temporal separation—that somehow the utterance simply is the experience, including what we may now imagine as the subjectively conditioned compression of time in the last section. In this manner the poem sketches a complete philosophical theory of language and experience, which can be put into propositional form as follows: Experience is verbally conditioned to its core. Whatever is not captured in language was never really there, in experience, to begin with. To borrow the terminology of Herder’s “Treatise on the Origin of Language,” with which Goethe was thoroughly familiar: language is the move of taking thought (Besinnung) in which each human being is fi rst confronted with a human world, with the possibility of experience. The place that is felt to be lacking in the poem, the place “within” experience, from which to master it verbally, is lacking in all experience; language can never have a “place” vis-à-vis experience to begin with, since language and experience are strictly coextensive. Our relation, as readers, to the experience narrated in the poem is thus exactly the same as that of the speaker—if the concept of “speaker” still even makes sense—and is exactly the same as our relation to our “own” experience. Even if we rescue the speaker here, by speaking of his “reliving” his experience in a mental and verbal present, we fi nd that the question of how to distinguish such a reliving from its supposed original referent is unanswerable, that the originary experience—as Faust resolves not to address it (“Verweile doch! du bist so schön!”)—is never really there except in the form of a lingering or reliving anyway.

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This conclusion—that experience is constituted by the utterance that makes the gesture of referring to it—creates a resonance between the narrative reading of the poem and the meditative-allegorical reading because the latter culminates in the understanding that our union with nature is constituted by a complex, self-limiting reflection upon that union. The two readings now coincide in the denial or renunciation of a transcendental signified. The “golden dream” of an extralinguistic or extrareflective substance of experience, hence ultimately of a personified “nature” to whom we might attribute divine benevolence, must be put aside. Even here (“Hier auch”), even without help from above, we have our life and our loving. The “towering distance,” which we might otherwise have imagined as transcendentally given, is thus “drunk up,” absorbed into the immediate enveloping mists of an irreducible ignorance that characterizes, paradoxically, our contact with the constant stars of truth—which now represent ideality in a more Platonic than Christian form, in the sense that ideals are the true ultimate referent of language. Nature is loving and good “in this way,” in the process of our constant, cyclical, reflective, and verbal reacceptance of our (reflectively and verbally) limited condition.8 But what exactly do we mean, then, when we say we “read” the poem? We do not mean that the experience of reading keeps step more or less with the linear unfolding of the utterance in a kind of shadow of the experience narrated—which is at least one of the things we mean when we speak of reading a novel in the sense of reading for thrills. The meditative aspect of the poem, and its implied focus on a philosophical theorem, prevents this. But we also do not mean that we analyze the utterance for the sake of extracting and understanding the theorem. For without its quality as a miniature narrative, the utterance would be tied to no specific conditions of time, space, experience, identity, and so would become exactly the type of absolute transcendental reflection that its allegorical meaning rejects. Reading the poem, therefore, means nothing but coming to know it—not coming to know what it says, which is easy enough, but coming to know it, as if it were a material object, to be touched and tasted and smelled. For precisely by being a poem, by being made of language, hence infected in every molecule by verbality and reflection, it is or becomes, so to speak, more emphatically a material object than the actual physical things of our daily life, by which we customarily obscure for ourselves the inherent verbal quality of experience. Our coming to know the poem is therefore also exactly the cyclical experience it narrates, an experience that cannot avoid the transcendental move of understanding the utterance,

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yet also is what it is (a coming to know) only by repeatedly retracting that move—by refusing to let the eyes droop into dreaming. Like many other readings of this poem, the reading I have attempted recognizes a sharp duality or separation or inconsistency, not only in style or rhythm or meter, but in the very identity and activity of the presumed reader. And like those other readings, mine has progressed through that perception toward a more or less unified understanding of how the poem works.9 But in the present case, it must be kept in mind that the poem does not work if one imagines that the two kinds of reading it presupposes have somehow been combined or reconciled. The gulf between reading the poem as a meditation, culminating in a theorem, and reading it (or experiencing it) as a representation of experience, must remain open; for our grasp of the poem as a sheer object depends on a constant cyclical oscillation between those two approaches to reading. And this open gulf, in turn, is the sign of a specific situation in literary history. It signals the coming-to-prominence of reading in the sense of reading for thrills, the historical moment at which a particular idea of novel reading gains its ascendancy as a model of reading in general. For if reading for thrills were not available as a model, the poem could not be read as an instance of immediate experience. But if the ascendancy of reading for thrills were fully accomplished, not still open to challenge and doubt, the undecided collision with a radically different reading of the poem as meditation and allegory could not happen. I am not trying to locate the advent of reading for thrills in Switzerland in 1775. Phenomena of this sort are not localizable in this way. But a shift in the idea of reading does happen; and it does happen that in 1775 (and repeatedly thereafter, in the course of revising the poem) Goethe becomes aware of that shift and uses it to suggest in “Auf dem See” a general idea of language that was new and difficult and so still required irony for its adequate expression. And the content of that theory of language reflects an awareness of the form of the novel and its problems—which is plausible enough, considering that by 1775 Goethe had recently fi nished the fi rst version of his own fi rst novelistic experiment in Werther, and had a number of good reasons to be dissatisfied with it. For the coextensiveness of language and experience implies a fundamental philosophical justification for the form of the novel considered as a poetic genre—as a type of text whose nonliteral level of meaning is already established in our recognition of its generic identity. It implies, in particular, the later view of James and Poulet and Iser that the novel, even in its quality as text, may be regarded

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as the immediate development of a reader’s own personal experience. Goethe himself later turns strongly against this view; text for him takes on a more political character, as with the writing of Tasso and Eugenie. But in “Auf dem See” he sketches a symbolic correlative to the historical situation in which such a novelistic view more or less has to arise; and even in the 1820s he sees no reason to repudiate that historical perception.

The Paradoxes of the Greeks Goethe’s “Auf dem See” signals the intrusion into the poetic domain of modern reading in the sense of reading for thrills—reading with a view to realizing as one’s own immediate experience the fiction suggested by the text. But there is another important dimension of modern reading that has to do with the extent to which a reader can be said to be operating as the particular individual he or she actually is. The Reader, as defined previously, is to an important degree everywhere The Same Reader, an entity as abstract as he or she can be made—stripped, as far as possible, of all the personal qualities or abilities or tendencies that might predetermine (or contaminate) his or her role in the hermeneutic process. Can texts be found that signal at least the imagined advent of The Reader in the same way that Goethe’s poem signals the coming ascendancy of the novel and the new poetic and philosophical respectability of reading for thrills? I have not found a single text that works for this purpose; but I think we can plot the direction of history by looking at texts of two authors, Johann Joachim Winckelmann and Friedrich Schlegel, that have in common an ambition to reanimate the spirit of ancient mythology. In 1755 Winckelmann published the first of the major works for which he is mainly remembered, the Gedancken über die Nachahmung der Griechischen Wercke in der Mahlerey und Bildhauer-Kunst (Thoughts on the Imitation of Greek Art in Painting and Sculpture). By the time the second edition was printed in 1756, he had added a “Sendschreiben” (Epistle), in which he poses as a critic of the original work, plus an “Erläuterung” (Explanation) supposedly responding to that fictional critic and defending the original work. These convolutions perhaps challenge a reader, but not unduly, for the original text of 1755 contains a number of very difficult and daring ideas. Only six paragraphs in, we read: The only way for us to become truly great—or indeed to become inimitable, if that is possible—is the imitation of the ancients, and what

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Theory someone once said of Homer, that whoever learns to understand him properly also learns thereby to admire him, is also true of the art-works of the ancients, especially the Greeks. One must become familiar with them, as one is familiar with one’s friend, in order to fi nd the Laocoön statue every bit as inimitable as Homer. It is by way of such exact familiarity that one will then make judgments as Nicomachus did of the Helen of Zeuxis: “Take my eyes,” he said to an ignorant observer who sought to criticize the painting, “then she will seem to you a goddess.”10

The obvious paradox here has to do with the concept of imitation. How can we become “inimitable” by imitating? Surely it follows that the more perfectly we succeed in imitating, the more clearly we have shown that our model, and hence our own work, is imitable. This is not the only problem. What does Winckelmann mean by “familiarity,” and why does he compare our knowledge of works of art to the feeling of certainty we have about the personal qualities of a friend? Does familiarity with a work of art mean personal sympathy with the artist? Then why does Winckelmann speak of exact familiarity (“genaue Bekanntschaft”), which suggests an objective knowledge of details? And does he not simply beg these questions when he offers the anecdote about Nicomachus? Learn to see with “my” eyes, with Winckelmann’s eyes, it is suggested, then you will understand. If we do not understand him, it is our fault, not his. Perhaps we cannot resolve these difficulties in logic—they seem intended to be irresolvable anyway—but precisely this observation enables us to make, at least provisionally, an important general statement about Winckelmann’s text. It is set up to discourage or even repel certain readers. It positions itself to be accessible only to a restricted audience. It opens itself only to that reader who in a strong sense has already understood it, who already possesses the eyes that are needed to see what it is talking about. It is—depending on how one sees its exclusionary move—either an esoteric or a highly technical work, a text that is meant either for initiates or for experts, unless these two terms mean the same thing. And even the short passage quoted above is enough to show that the two terms are equivalent. How else could we explain the idea of an “exact familiarity”? The initiates whom Winckelmann writes for are what they are not only by knowing a secret knowledge but also by being technicians or practitioners. (Nicomachus is not merely a critic but a painter.) And the expert, we infer, has achieved not merely mastery

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of an art or science or profession—which would be exchangeable for another specialty in the same category—but also, somehow, a mastery of life as a whole, even down to the level at which the physical senses (here, the eyes) operate. It is this state of affairs that we must interrogate for an understanding of how imitating can make us inimitable, or of how an easy, friendly familiarity can be combined with technical or critical exactitude.11 But for the time being we can conclude at least that this little book of Winckelmann’s is not aimed at The Reader, The Modern Reader who can in principle be distilled from anyone at all. The fictional critic of the “Epistle” makes this point explicitly: “My fi rst objection is that you have written in a style that sacrifices clarity to brevity. . . . Where general instruction is the goal, one’s writing must be easily understandable by everyone” (65). The goal of this work, however, is not “general instruction.” And Winckelmann clarifies this matter in the “Explanation”: My essay is written only for connoisseurs of the arts, which is why it seemed to me unnecessary to give it that certain learned fl avor that is produced by copious citations. Artists understand what one is saying about art even if it is not all spelled out; and since most artists consider it “foolish” (and must consider it so) “to spend more time on reading than on working,” . . . one ought at least to indulge them by being brief, if one hasn’t anything new to teach them. (97)

Winckelmann’s audience is a restricted one, in which the distinction between “connoisseurs” and “artists”—between knowers and practitioners—collapses. And it is an audience who expect nothing fundamentally new from their author—an audience of initiates or experts.

Mind, Nature, and “Allegory” There is a further element of Winckelmann’s presentation that strongly attracts our attention. Not far from the beginning of the original Thoughts, he says, “Connoisseurs and imitators of Greek works find in those masterpieces not only the most beautiful nature, but something more than nature, I mean certain ideal beauties that arise . . . from images created entirely within the rational mind” (30). And this thought is picked up a few pages later, where we read that the many opportunities offered by Greek culture to observe beautiful nature, especially naked bodies, were valuable to artists but not sufficient, that they “prompted Greek artists to

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go further: those artists began to form for themselves certain general conceptions of individual parts of the body as well as of its overall proportions, conceptions that were meant to surpass nature itself, and whose original model was an intellectual nature generated entirely in the rational mind” (34). A letter of Raphael to Castiglione is quoted here, in which the artist says that since certain types of beauty are so rare among real women, he has had to make use, for his Galatea, “of a certain idea in [his] imagination” (35). These thoughts alone do not seem to take us very far. Winckelmann himself mentions the “rule of Polyclitus” (30), the canon of numerical proportions by which the ideal form of the human body was meant to be described. But the quotation from Raphael suggests something more complex: that in imitating the Greeks we must imitate not only the results of their ideal imagining but also their use of the rational or imagining mind—that we must imitate their originality by ourselves being original. That Winckelmann is by no means blind to the problems created by this line of thought emerges a bit further on when he quotes Michelangelo to the effect that “he who constantly follows others will never get out in front, and if he does not know how to produce excellence from himself, he will not be able to make good use of others’ work anyway” (38). To illustrate this idea, he goes back to the example of Raphael: This is what we must understand when des Piles claims to know a report that Raphael, around the time when he was overtaken by death, had striven to leave marble behind [that is, to leave behind the sculpturally founded canons of bodily proportion] and devote himself entirely to the study of nature. For the true good taste of antiquity would have accompanied him even in the midst of common nature, and all his observations in nature, by a kind of alchemical transformation, would have become the same stuff that composed his own nature, his soul. (38)

In the very act of turning away from antiquity and imitating nature directly, Raphael would thus still have remained a true follower of the ancients because his by now fully internalized knowledge of antiquity (the stuff of his soul) would have infused nature itself as he saw it. How are we to understand this? What kind of mysterious “transformation” does even the direct observation of nature undergo for one who is thoroughly schooled in the art of ancient Greece? We can see where this question is leading us if we jump ahead to Winckelmann’s discussion of “allegory.” Artists and critics, he says, have

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grown sick to death of nothing but the same standard scenes painted over and over again. An artist who possesses a soul that has learned to think leaves that soul without anything to do when he works on a Daphne, an Apollo, a rape of Proserpine, a Europa, and things of the sort. He really desires to show himself a kind of poet and to paint significances by way of pictures, to paint allegorically. Painting extends to subjects that are not sensory; these are its highest goal, and the Greeks strove to attain it, as ancient writings testify. Parrhasius, a painter who . . . depicted the soul, is said to have succeeded in painting the [self-contradictory] character of a whole people. . . . If this seems possible, then it is so only by way of allegory, by pictures that mean general concepts. The painter [of today] fi nds himself here in a wasteland. . . . If he thinks beyond the limits of his palette, then he requires a learned compilation from which to choose significant and directly sensible signs for things that are not accessible to the senses. No complete work of this sort yet exists. (55–56)

Does this mean that what Raphael could have achieved by genius and deep study—the ability to see more with the eyes than is actually visible—can be made available to all painters by a kind of dictionary of iconic symbols? After becoming accustomed to the subtlety of Winckelmann’s thought, we are disturbed (to say the least) by his apparent simple-mindedness here.12 But he means what he says: The artist needs a work that collects from all of mythology, from the best ancient and modern poets, from the secret philosophical lore of many peoples, from the glimpses of antiquity on stones, coins, and tools, all those figures and images by which general concepts have been formed poetically and offered to the senses. This abundant material could be divided comfortably into classifications and, by the citation and interpretation of particular possibilities for application, could be arranged for the instruction of artists. By this means a large area would also be opened for imitating the ancients and so endowing our works with the lofty taste of antiquity. (57)

Nor is this mere talk. In 1766 Winckelmann actually publishes his Versuch einer Allegorie, besonders für die Kunst (Attempt at an Allegory, Particularly

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for Art), which he admits is not complete but offers as a first step toward the comprehensive iconography he had envisaged. In any case, the idea of “allegory” is extremely important to Winckelmann. The very last words of the Thoughts on Imitation insist on it: [The artist] should leave us with more to think about than he has shown to our eyes, and he will achieve this when he has learned not to conceal but to clothe his thought in allegories. If he has a subject, whether chosen by himself or given to him, which is already poetic or can be made so, then his art will inspire him and waken in him the fi re that Prometheus stole from the gods. The connoisseur will then have much to ponder, and the mere art-lover will learn from it. (59)

A long section at the end of the “Epistle” raises objections to this idea of allegory (83–89). But then an even longer defense of allegory concludes the “Explanation” (118–44). We cannot understand where Winckelmann’s argument is leading us if we do not face the fact that he is absolutely serious about his “Allegory” project, and follow the implications of this fact. But I think we can best approach the matter by way of a comparison of Winckelmann’s “Allegory” with Friedrich Schlegel’s “New Mythology.”

Friedrich Schlegel’s New Mythology When we start reading the “Rede über die Mythologie” (Speech on Mythology) that is included in Friedrich Schlegel’s “Gespräch über die Poesie” (Conversation on Poetry) of 1800, we quickly come upon passages that call Winckelmann to mind. The speaker says to his small audience of friends: You, more than other people, must know what I mean. You have yourselves composed poetic works, and while composing you must have felt that you lacked a solid basis to warrant your work’s outward effectiveness, that you lacked a maternal earth, a heaven, a living atmosphere.13

Like the modern painter in Winckelmann, who “thinks beyond the limits of his palette,” who wants to become a kind of poet in painting, Schlegel’s “modern” poet—who has to “produce everything laboriously from within himself ” (2:201)—fi nds himself in what Winckelmann would call a “wasteland,” a world devoid of inherently poetic material. What is missing in this wasteland? For Schlegel the answer is clear: “All the essential

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points in which modern poetry lags behind ancient poetry can be summarized in the words: we have no mythology.” But how can we possibly repair this defect, as Schlegel claims we can? For the Greeks mythology was built into nature itself; it was “everywhere the fi rst blossom of youthful fantasy, attaching and adapting itself to the most immediate and vital elements of the material world” (Schlegel, 2:201). Schlegel’s answer is that the origin of the “new mythology” will be nothing at all like that of the old one. “It must be produced and shaped from the deepest depth of the mind; it must be the most artificial of works of art (das künstlichste aller Kunstwerke).” Exactly what does this mean? The difficulty we have with Winckelmann’s proposed allegorical compendium is that the idea of a classification of images and their supposed meanings, for easy reference by artists, seems much too artificial to be of use in the production of works to which we might respond aesthetically. But would Winckelmann’s plan have been too artificial for Schlegel, or is it perhaps close to exactly the kind of artificiality Schlegel has in mind? Like Winckelmann’s “Allegorie,” in any event, Schlegel’s new mythology will also be a kind of compendium, including not only Hellenic antiquity but also “other mythologies . . . according to the measure of their profundity, their beauty, and their clarity of contour” (2:204). Therefore, if we fi nd it hard to imagine how Winckelmann’s “Allegorie” would operate in practice, perhaps we can acquire a useful perspective by asking how Schlegel’s new mythology is meant to arise. For the latter question is fairly easy. Schlegel’s speaker Ludoviko says to his friends: I beg you, at least do not make any concessions to an outright unbelief in the possibility of a new mythology. . . . And now pay close attention to my conjectures! I cannot pretend, in the nature of the case, to offer you more than conjectures. But I hope that in and through you yourselves these conjectures will become truths. For they are—if you choose to make them so—in a way suggestions for experimentation. (2:202)

Everything depends here upon how the listeners or readers respond. If our response is unreservedly positive, untainted by “unbelief,” if we commit ourselves fully to the “experimentation” required, if, in all intellectual activity, we insist absolutely on the possibility of a new mythology, then that new mythology will arise. The speaker is certain about this mechanism of cause and effect because he is certain about “the great phenomenon of the present age, [philosophical] idealism!” The truths of idealistic philosophy are now widely

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accepted, and chief among them is the recognition that “it is the nature of the mind to determine itself.” The speaker then continues: Idealism . . . is after all only the acknowledgment of that self-lawgiving [of the mind], and is thus also the new vitality (redoubled by that acknowledgment) which in turn most gloriously reveals the secret power of idealism by an unlimited abundance of new invention, by universal communicability, and by an ability to operate in the immediacy of life. (2:202–3)

Philosophical idealism, that is, in understanding fully the law of selfdetermination, transforms itself from mere knowledge or understanding into a positively self-determining, thus world-changing, power. Surely a new mythology lies within the scope of that power. The crucial requirement is that others believe in the speaker’s vision. It is true that different individuals will believe differently; but the quality of idealism as an outwardly effective power guarantees eventually the consequence of an “equally boundless realism” (2:203), a single reality, suffused with intellect, that will be there for every individual in the same way and so will serve as the anchor, indeed as practically the full realization, of a true common mythology. We need only take it and use it thus. Schlegel even offers an instance of the transformative power of belief, in his discussion of Spinoza. After reading that the means for expressing idealism’s reconstituted realism will be found “only in poetry . . . for realism will never again be able to emerge in the form of philosophy, let alone as a philosophical system,” the last thing we expect to hear is the praise of Spinoza that begins in the very next paragraph—that same Spinoza whose Ethics is both rigidly systematic, imitating Euclid in method, and (in Schlegel’s defi nition) absolutely realist, including the assertion that freedom of will can be attributed not even to God (Pt. 1, Prop. 32, Cor. 1). But precisely this apparent contradiction dramatizes the power of our belief and enthusiasm, which decrees of Spinoza: “Let him strip off the martial adornment of his system and take up residence in the temple of our new poetry together with Homer and Dante as one of the lares and household friends of every divinely inspired poet” (2:203). And if even Spinoza’s forbidding systematicity can be reclaimed for a newly mythologized world by our joyful affi rmation, then surely Winckelmann’s merely pedantic undertaking, which also has the advantage of being aimed specifically at a reanimation of antiquity, need not be excluded. How, in any event, if not by something at least comparable to Winckelmann’s “allegory,” will that

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“deliberate physical shaping” of the “highest truth” be possible, without which, Schlegel tells us, “any free philosophical art of ideas will be an empty name” (2:204)?

Winckelmann’s Mythology Schlegel’s project, then, can accommodate Winckelmann’s. But do we have any grounds for supposing that Winckelmann’s might accommodate Schlegel’s—that Winckelmann, in suggesting the idea of an allegorical compendium, is reckoning with an enthusiastic response on the part of his readers, by which the compendium will be infused with vitality and so made into a vessel of inspiration, not merely a reference work? In the fi rst place, Winckelmann’s aim is not what we should ordinarily call an “imitation” of Greek culture so much as it is a re-creation of that culture, including an enactment on our part of the move of originality by which the Greeks surpassed a mere copying of nature. Even while knowing about the Greeks in great detail, that is, we must also in effect be Greeks, by a kind of sympathy comparable to that between friends.14 (This combination of knowing and being not only explains the phrase “exact familiarity” and the combination of initiate and expert, but also corresponds to the transformation in Schlegel of the knowledge of selfdetermination into an originary power.) And it is plain that the condition of thus being a Greek can be neither demonstrated nor enforced by Winckelmann’s text, but must be achieved freely by at least a small group of appropriately predisposed readers. In a manner similar to Raphael’s internalizing of antiquity, we too must internalize the proposed compendium, the else merely mechanical “allegory,” and make it the “stuff of our soul,” whereupon nature itself will be transformed and animated for us by something like a mythological infusion. In the second place, precisely the contrast between the subtlety of Winckelmann’s notion of “imitation” and the apparent simple-mindedness of his notion of “allegory” should alert us to the importance of the role of a reader. Either we simply convict Winckelmann of inconsistency or else we fi nd a way of recognizing in the notion of allegory the same sort of subtlety as in the notion of imitation. But we have already recognized the importance of the restrictedness of Winckelmann’s audience, its identification of initiate and expert. Who else but exactly that audience will be able to supply whatever subtilizing of “allegory” is required? Moreover, if Winckelmann is determined to exclude particular types of reader from

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his audience, then his seemingly excessive emphasis on a mechanically imagined iconography serves the purpose of dividing one group of readers from the other, dividing readers who see nothing but another reference work (and who therefore have no business here in the fi rst place) from readers who recognize in “allegory” an unlimited field for the unfolding of their Hellenically inspired imagination. The restricted audience presupposed by Winckelmann’s doctrine of imitation is composed of all the people who know that while we may not possess a mythology, we have not lost the art of mythical thinking, that there is nothing at all in our historical situation that positively prevents us from having exactly the same sort of mythology the Greeks had (not a “new mythology,” dependent on Kant and Fichte), that the “querelle des anciens et des modernes” has in truth never been more than a quibble about empty distinctions. Winckelmann is speaking only to those people, however few, who (like Winckelmann himself, according to Goethe)15 manage somehow to be ancient Greeks even in modern Europe. Hence the violently paradoxical doctrine of achieving the inimitable by imitation, and hence the suggestion that if we do not happen to have the right eyes in our head, we will never understand Thoughts on Imitation anyway. For there is no way to explain to someone who lacks the gift what it means to be an ancient Greek in modern Europe—although homoeroticism is certainly part of the equation. Therefore, in our present discussion of the history of reading, it is very useful to have something like Schlegel’s “Speech” as a source of conceptual leverage. But even without Schlegel, if one reads Winckelmann carefully, especially the later version of his thought in the Attempt at an Allegory itself, one can form a fairly good idea of what is going on, so to speak, behind the scenes. One fi nds, for instance, the assertion: “Nature herself was the teacher of allegory, and this language seems more proper to her than the signs we later invented for our thoughts.”16 Pictorial allegory, that is, precisely in its simple and direct connection of figure and meaning, is very like ideographic writing and therefore in a sense not artificial at all, but closer to nature than alphabetic writing. More significant, however, is the moral dimension of allegory, which establishes a direct link between classical antiquity and Winckelmann’s own eighteenth century. Since, in general, the ancients in their best period prized only heroic virtues—i.e., those that elevate human dignity—while other virtues, by

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whose practice our ideas sink and humble themselves, were neither taught nor welcomed, it follows that these latter were that much less likely to be depicted on public monuments. For the ancients’ education was very much the opposite of ours; if ours is good in the measure that it promotes purity in manners and morals, and watches over the fulfi lment of the external duties of religion, theirs by contrast was concerned to make heart and mind sensitive to true honor and to accustom young people to a manly and magnanimous virtue which despised all petty purposes, despised even life itself, when an undertaking fell out in a manner inconsistent with the greatness of their habits of thought. In our culture, the noble thirst for honor is choked and a stupid pride is encouraged. (13)

The artistic aspect of this point arises from the recognition that strictly technical considerations (without any miraculous transcending of our historical situation) incline art to serve as an instrument for education on the ancient model. Images of vices are never anywhere to be seen on surviving ancient monuments, because works of art are consecrated to virtue, not to vice, and especially because the highest degree of vice contradicts the very process of representation in those noble pictures at which art must always aim. (16)

Art, in other words, is always fundamentally positive, always affi rmative with respect to its subject matter. The “process of representation,” by its very nature, cannot but say yes to what it represents; and what is represented, in turn, must have the character of a yea-saying. But this theorem implies that art as such, properly understood, is opposed to Christianity, not merely opposed to those dogmas and stories that many eighteenth-century deists hope to dispense with, but opposed even to the basic Christian virtues. Winckelmann does not draw this conclusion explicitly, but it follows by an inescapable logic when he argues, for example: The concept of Christian humility was even less accessible [than that of patience] to classical antiquity, because it consists in self-negation, thus in a forced condition that confl icts with human nature. The great men of antiquity say what is good about themselves with as much confidence as they say the same of others, because they believed that a man must be aware of his own worth in order to preserve himself from villainy. The

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Christian virtues, or at least some of them, are fundamentally opposed to the practice of art because they are negative. And even if one cannot advocate publicly a radical opposition to Christianity in eighteenthcentury Europe, there is no reason to suppose that such opposition does not represent the true sentiments of a substantial number of artistically interested and capable Europeans, who would then make up the audience Winckelmann is writing for. Nor is it beyond the bounds of possibility that some of these initiateexperts in true art, or the truth of art, will have internalized so fully their artistically conditioned alienation from Christian morality that in effect they do live the lives of ancient Greeks in a kind of exile—one thinks of Goethe’s Iphigenie auf Tauris. And for these ancient Greeks among us, what must Winckelmann’s Allegory be if not the spark that ignites their sense of self, their sense of community with each other, and their hitherto only distantly remembered sense of inclusion in a mythically legible nature?

The Difference Schlegel and Winckelmann have basically the same goal: something akin to ancient mythology, for the sake of awakening heroic or poetic greatness in a Europe grown cold, prosaic, doctrinaire Christian, rational, and systematic. But the form in which they desire this awakening is different: for Schlegel it is a new mythology engendered by the discoveries of German idealist philosophy, for Winckelmann it is an old mythology that is not dead but merely slumbers, for the most part unrecognized, in relics of ancient art. And in method the two are even more different. Schlegel gives explicit instructions for how and where his readers must direct their philosophical enthusiasm. Winckelmann provides his readers with practically no instruction at all, except in matters of detailed iconographic interpretation, and instead configures his argument so that none but a very special type of individual can even begin to understand it and respond appropriately. But this difference is nothing but the difference between writing after, and writing before, the advent of modern reading. Schlegel—despite all the advantages that something like Winckelmann’s esoteric procedure would

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entail for him—simply cannot bring himself to write for anyone except The Reader. In the very process of expressing his ideas via a fictional conversation among friends—thus indicating that a small audience with shared preconceptions might serve his purposes best—he cannot resist the need to ground his thinking in the supposed suprapersonal epochality of Fichtean philosophy, in a system that is in principle accessible to every human individual in the same way—all you need to do is understand it. (He of course denies that Fichte’s thought is a system, but his treatment of Spinoza’s system as a “martial adnornment” that needs to be stripped away betrays him on this point.) Indeed, precisely his showing the usefulness of shared preconceptions—rather than simply assuming or even concealing (from the uninitiated) that aspect of his thought, as Winckelmann does—is itself already a reaching out beyond any intimate group into the limitless host that is represented by The Reader. This difference is in every sense crucial. It affects both form and content; it affects what is said, how it is said, and how it is received. Both Winckelmann and Schlegel make explicit statements on mythology (or “allegory”) in the present historical age. Schlegel’s fictional spokesman says, “Wir haben keine Mythologie [We have no mythology]” (2:201), which implies (dogmatically): I am in the same condition (of having no mythology) as you, The Reader, which means anyone who might be reading. Winckelmann, by contrast, having said that we cannot successfully repair with our own inventions the gaps in our knowledge of ancient “allegory,” continues: Denn unsere Zeiten sind nicht mehr allegorisch wie das Alterthum, wo die Allegorie auf die Religion gebauet und mit derselben verknüpft, folglich allgemein angenommen und bekannt war. (Allegorie 22) [For our times are no longer allegorical in the same way as antiquity, where allegory was built upon religion and tied to it, hence universally accepted and recognized.]

One can of course read this statement to mean simply that we lack allegory, as Schlegel’s philosopher-poets lack mythology. But the logic of the utterance also leaves open the possibility that our times are allegorical, although not “in the same way” as antiquity, or indeed that even if “our times” are strictly nonallegorical, still, at least for some of us, our being allegorical (being Greek, as it were), or our experiencing the world allegorically despite our time, is not necessarily excluded. Thus the manner

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in which the statement is read affects directly its truth with respect to the particular reader. If you read it to mean simply that there is no allegory, then for you there is no allegory; if you read it more subtly, then you are perhaps one of the people for whom allegory is possible after all. The Reader, therefore, is a meaningless concept in relation to Winckelmann’s texts, whereas That same Universalized Reader, who can be anyone at all, is the very touchstone by which Schlegel’s thought means to prove itself: I (like you, The Reader) am without a mythology, but I can see speculatively the way by which I might acquire one, which means that you (if you simply open yourself to the text, if you be nothing but The Reader) can see it too and will be inclined to contribute toward realizing it. It is not too much to say that the ascendancy of modern reading, the obligation to confront The Reader, determines the content of Schlegel’s argument—that what really disturbs Schlegel in his historical situation is not simply the lack of a mythology but his recognition (however indirect) that the condition of modern writing and reading, the obligation to write for no-matter-whom, has closed all those intellectual side streets, all those secluded gatherings of the eccentric (which he recalls nostalgically in the form of his “Conversation”), all those typical eighteenth-century secret societies, in which some vestige of a mythical mode of existence might otherwise have survived among us. This is why he feels called upon later (in 1804) to write a continuation of Lessing’s Freemason dialogues, in which he suggests that the true modern form of Freemasonry, after the French Revolution, is German idealist philosophy—whose character as “system” he again denies (3:76). But he gets Lessing wrong. In reading the latter’s “Ernst und Falk: Gespräche für Freimäurer” (Conversations for Freemasons), he focuses on the many occasions where Falk stresses the inexpressibility of Masonic truth or teaching. When Ernst fi rst asks him what Freemasonry is, Falk responds, “something that even those who know it cannot say.”17 A bit later he suggests that Ernst is already himself a bit of a Freemason: Falk: Because you recognize truths that are better kept silent. Ernst: But still could be spoken. Falk: The wise man cannot say what is better kept silent. (459)

And later still, he summarizes: “The secret of Freemasonry, as I’ve told you, is that which the Freemason cannot let escape his lips, even if it were possible that he wished to” (476).

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Schlegel, in claiming to represent what Lessing would have thought if he had lived to see the French Revolution, develops this idea as follows: Even when philosophy [which has inherently the same indefi niteness as conversation] is made public and exposed in works, the form and style of these works must be mysterious in order to appear appropriate. Even when dialectical works maintain the greatest clarity in detail, at least the connectedness of the whole must lead toward something insoluble if we are to recognize in it a representation of philosophizing, or of endless meditating. (3:79)

For Schlegel, in other words, the truth of philosophy is inexpressible because it is endless. But the truths that Lessing associates with Freemasonry are inexpressible because they are contradictory. The very notion of civil society—Falk suggests—implies “things” (structures, institutions, practices) that strongly oppose the only “purpose” that can reasonably be ascribed to the whole of civil society, which is the happiness of every human individual (458–64). Civil society is thus built on a set of contradictions, and so is constantly in danger of being disrupted from within and failing even in those steps toward its purpose that are actually possible. Ernst and Falk agree that to resist this danger, civil society requires Männer . . . die über die Vorurteile der Völkerschaft hinweg wären, und genau wüßten, wo Patriotismus, Tugend zu sein auf höret . . . Männer . . . die dem Vorurteile ihrer angebornen Religion nicht unterlägen; nicht glaubten, daß alles notwendig gut und wahr sein müsse, was sie für gut und wahr erkennen. (465) [Men (Lessing uses the unambiguous masculine) who would be beyond the prejudices of their nation and would know exactly where patriotism stops being a virtue, men who would not be subject to the prejudice of their native religion, and would not believe that everything is necessarily true and good that they recognize as true and good.]

The verb “recognize” here is unambiguous. Lessing is not talking about people who are open-minded on matters of opinion, but about people who are capable of knowing something to be true while still accepting the likelihood (given the fundamental contradictoriness of human life in society) of its not being so, people capable of living a strict contradiction, which is the contradiction between living unreservedly in a particular

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society (where “knowledge” of the good and the true can arise) while also living in recognition of the unrealizability of civil society as such—if one can even speak of “recognition” where there is no culturally grounded identity to do the recognizing, where the quality of being “a person of that kind” (462) is absent. It follows now that these people who live the inherent contradictoriness of civil society, these true Freemasons (who, Falk insists, need not be actual Freemasons [468]) whose unique perspective is their unique value in society, are automatically a secret minority joined together by an esoteric mode of communication. If they could ever form the whole of any particular society—or even a substantial, visibly effective portion—then that society would have lost thereby precisely its defi ning particularity (its one-sidedness, its certainty about what is true or good) and so would have ceased to exist (468).18 And this is the point at which Schlegel must misread “Ernst und Falk.” Indeed, he does so at least half-knowingly, using the French Revolution as an excuse. For he cannot accept the possibility of a truth that is not eventually available to The Reader. Therefore, in justifying the inexpressible, he substitutes for the idea of a contradictory truth that of an endless truth in relation to which the differences among individuals (as readers) are ultimately quantitative—how far along are you on the endless path?—not qualitative, as in Lessing (or Winckelmann), and pitilessly exclusive. Neither this argument nor any other can locate the advent of modern reading within a defi nite span of time. In fact the question of The Reader is contested for practically all of the eighteenth century and some of the nineteenth—even in the genre of the novel. Richardson’s use of epistolary form, for example, beginning with Pamela in 1740, clearly addresses The New Reader, in that someone who reads other people’s letters is positioned by contrast as one who lacks a specific involved situation and identity. And yet, twenty years later, in Tristram Shandy, Sterne does everything he can to obstruct our sense of being The Reader. It is a measure of the complexity of this situation that Iser’s formulation of the problem that will inevitably defeat him, his placing of the literary work “halfway” between the author’s activity and The Reader’s, is borrowed from Sterne, who uses it, however (I would argue), precisely because it defeats any possibility of locating The Reader.19 But what is interesting about Friedrich Schlegel, in his relation to both Winckelmann and Lessing, is the depth to which he truly desires the intimacy and exclusivity of esoteric writing, which can be seen from the

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conversational form in which he embeds his theory of mythology and from his fastening upon just “Ernst und Falk” for adaptation. (He has good reasons for this desire, for there are definite problems in the Fichtean model he follows. Exactly how far down, for instance, on a scale from the human race as a whole to the single empirical individual, can the doctrine of selfdetermination be applied literally? This is a problem that could be far less misleadingly dealt with in secret than in public.) That he nevertheless simply cannot take the step of cutting himself loose from The Reader, the new universal (imaginary) reading public, is therefore a very clear indication of how powerfully modern reading has established itself for him.

Nationalism Schlegel, like Goethe in the poem “Auf dem See,” is what we might call a borderline theorist of modern reading. Like the meaning of that poem, he is pulled in two different directions—toward esoteric communication in the manner of Winckelmann and toward a new kind of text that is meant to be available to The Reader. Borderline theory is interesting for our purposes because it is here that we are likely to find evidence of the extraneous motivation that must be postulated to explain the theoretical move (or widespread pattern of parallel theoretical moves) by which the nonexistent experience of The Modern Reader is foisted on us. In Goethe’s case, it is fairly clear that the motivating force is a concern with problems created by the new concept of “literature,” problems arising from the installation of such (middle-class?) categories as spirit, feeling, “experience,” in a judgment seat that had earlier been occupied by expertise in matters of poetic genre. Schlegel’s case is more complicated. I will come back to it in Chapter 5 in connection with the historical situation of systematic German philosophy. But one crucial issue is suggested by the relation with Lessing, an issue that takes on ever greater importance as the history of modern reading develops. I refer to a feature of Schlegel’s thought that is very clearly marked: his nationalism. Especially in his ostensible attempt to recapture the spirit of Lessing’s meditations on Freemasonry, which is nothing if not an international movement, it is quite shocking to hear Schlegel describe the fi rst easy steps on the endless path of idealist philosophy: It is possible and proper to say aloud that the purpose of the new philosophy is to destroy utterly the dominant mentality of the age, and to

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Theory found and construct an entirely new literature and an entirely new edifice of higher art and science. It is possible and proper to say that a defi nite purpose is to restore Christian religion and at last to profess aloud the truth that has so long been trampled underfoot. It is possible and proper to say that the express purpose of the new philosophy is to bring forth once more the ancient German constitution, i.e., the empire of honor, of freedom, and of staunch morality, in that the cast of mind shall be formed upon which a true free monarchy is based, and which must necessarily lead an improved mankind back to this original and uniquely moral and hallowed form of national life. (3:80)

There are any number of personal and historical reasons for Schlegel’s growing nationalism at this time. But what relation does it bear to his sense of obligation vis-à-vis The newly theorized Universal and Anonymous Reader? Is nationality one of those personal qualities that must be put aside by The Reader to avoid contaminating the hermeneutic process? Or if nationality is equivalent to the speaking of a particular language—which is how nations (originally collections of tribes) are distinguished in the narrow geographical confi nes of Europe—then perhaps it is not a contaminant at all, but literacy pure and simple, as the ability to read this or that text in the language in which it happens to be written. One can see, at any rate, how the difference between thinking of The Reader and thinking of The English or French or German Reader may tend to get obscured— all the more so when we recall that The Reader never really exists but is an abstract entity denoting the theorizability of the reading process; for if reading is subject to being predictively theorized (if we can say in advance what “reading” is), then surely the most important predictive factors will include basic linguistic conventions and habits. If one adds to these points the argument, in Chapter 1, on “The Two Faces of Reading,” which shows how the question of nationalism arises logically in relation to that of reading, plus the consideration that in political Europe, in the two or three decades on either side of 1800, the need of the newborn discipline of “literature” for a history of itself is most conveniently and convincingly satisfied by the manufacture of national literatures, one has no difficulty understanding how Schlegel’s nationalism comports with (and very likely motivates) his sense of The Reader. In this connection, fi nally, the issue of the “mother tongue” arises, the idea that every individual has a uniquely profound relation to his or her

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native language and is shaped as a character by that relation. For it now appears that the requirement of theoretical predictability for The Reader will tend strongly to include the assumption of This Reader’s mother tongue, and will therefore attach itself (as a condition or as a consequence) to all sorts of national and educational issues. And this point puts into historical perspective the quality of lacking a mother tongue. Winckelmann’s ancient Greek living in exile in modern Europe is a clear instance of this quality, as is, interestingly, the situation of the German Yiddish-speaker, which serves both Goethe and Lessing as a model for the true cultural condition of all Germans in an age of irony.20 The mother tongue, these instances suggest, is perhaps not after all the simple fact of human nature we normally take it for, but rather, along with modern nationalism, a construct of the new age of reading.

Keats and the “Querelle” One more text, I think, will be enough to round out a general profi le of the advent of modern reading. The text I have in mind is Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” where the opening of the second strophe suggests that here, in poetic form, we have a work on the theory of ancient and modern poetry. “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard / Are sweeter.” By being the written or printed text of a poem—which means a piece of language whose division into temporally measured units (lines of verse) testifies to a strong original affi liation with music—the text before us is exactly the type of “unheard” melody it is talking about. Thus an opposition is established between poetry in classical antiquity, where music and poetry were practically a single art, and poetry in the modern age, whose music ordinarily arises only in the mind of someone who infers it from the silent page. There are complications here. The urn, which was made in classical antiquity, suggests unheard melodies of its own by bearing the pictures of people playing “pipes and timbrels,” making music that not even the original observers could hear. And it is probably these melodies that prompt, in the fi rst instance, the comparative “sweeter.” The music depicted on the urn, like the springtime and the lover’s moment of desire, can never be over and done with, and is the “sweeter” for thus being eternal. But the issue of the opposition of classical and modern has been opened nonetheless. Actually, the issue is already there in the poem’s first lines. For “quietness” is not the same thing as “silence.” It is, rather, the condition of

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having been quieted—even in etymology, where “quiet” is derived from a passive participle, “silent” from an active. That the urn is a “still unravish’d bride of quietness” therefore means that it is betrothed to be quieted, somehow on the brink, but not yet fully quieted. And “quieted,” in this context, must mean having nothing to say to us any more. As the time of its origin becomes ever more remote, the urn is constantly that much more in danger of being received with utter incomprehension by generations of late-comers. But the time of its complete quieting, in this sense, has not yet come, because its natural parents (the age of its making) had handed it over to foster parents, “silence and slow time,” who have in turn endowed it with a new and more durable expressiveness. “Slow time” has erased from memory the presumed original reference to a specific “legend” and so opened the images to our free imagination, while the “silence” of those painted or sculpted images positively invites us to restore imaginatively their sound and motion. The word “thus” in the following line refers to this process (among other things, perhaps) and leads us toward another enigmatic comparative of the concept “sweet”: “Sylvan historian, who canst thus express / A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme.” Our rhyme (not “my rhyme”) means modern poetry in general. But why should the imagining of a tale from ancient images be sweeter than the simple telling of a tale in our own language and conventions? The answer to this question is indicated in the second strophe, and then, in the third, is hammered home with an insistence that suggests exactly the opposite of what the words seem to say: “Ah, happy, happy boughs! . . . happy melodist . . . More happy love! more happy, happy love!” When imagining a “tale” for the ancient images on the urn, since we lack knowledge of what would have been the correct “legend,” we are thrown back upon our own immediate experience of those images, especially upon the quality that threatens to stymie our narrative efforts, their unmoving silence, which we now interpret (in a move that is reinforced by their permanence, their survival since antiquity) as a perfectly “happy” transcendence of time, of change, of mortality. And from here it is but a short step to the idea that ancient Greek civilization as a whole was uniquely happy—especially in view of the suggestion, in the fi nal strophe, that modern generations are characterized principally by their “woe.” At this point, however, our reasoning is brought up short by the recognition that the happiness depicted on the urn is placed there by a falsification, by the introduction into the tale of an external condition of the tale’s telling—as if the projection booth could appear in the movie, as it does

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in Hellzapoppin’—which suggests in turn that our admiration of Hellenic antiquity in general might possibly be based on a falsification of the same type. (Falsification is of course also suggested by the clash between the ideas of “happy” and “a struggle to escape,” which latter is repeated in “that heifer lowing at the skies.”) And our reading of the poem is brought up short, correspondingly, by the following lines: All breathing human passion far above, That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy’d, A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.

The inversion in the fi rst line (for “far above all . . .”) makes it easier than it would be otherwise to read the relative pronoun “That” as referring (also) to the “happy, happy love” on the urn, a possibility which is reinforced by the natural association of “cloy’d” with the repeated idea, earlier, of the urn-world’s superior sweetness. And this consideration— together with the last line above, which marks a descent into (the poet’s?) immediate physical experience, an actual forehead and tongue, perhaps now even a “sensual ear”—suggests that the supposed difference in emotional temper between our world and the urn-world (or the real world of antiquity) is completely artificial, created by our way of looking at it, and so at the very least unverifiable. Perhaps that suspiciously insistent repetition of “happy” and “for ever” only masks for a moment our knowledge of the illusion it is based on—for a moment only, and then exposes the urnfigures and their whole civilization once more to an inescapable world of time and “woe.” Perhaps the situation “in midst of other woe / Than ours” (namely, the “woe” of classical antiquity itself ) had characterized the urn even from the time of its making. Or yet further, the “little town” of the fourth strophe happens to be an instance of exactly how the remains of classical antiquity appear to us today, as dwelling- and working- and worshipping-places rendered “desolate” by being “emptied” of the “folk” for whom they had been built. Thus, while on one hand our insertion of the conditions of representation into the thing represented endow classical antiquity with a “happy” exemption from time that we can hardly conceive of, on the other hand the same falsifying technique also creates even within classical antiquity an image of its subjection to the ravages of time, an image of ancient ruins. Our situation vis-à-vis the urn, and vis-à-vis classical antiquity, is therefore thoroughly ambivalent. When we attempt to develop this situation as a narrative, we always fi nd ourselves telling two radically different

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stories at the same time, one of perfect and timeless happiness and one of suffering, transience, and irrecoverable loss. But, in a sense, or rather in two senses, the two stories are the same. We cannot receive ancient civilization as an object of mourning if there is not something valuable to mourn for, namely the story of happiness. But the story of loss contains the implication that that happiness, “for ever panting,” is itself originally (the word “panting” says it) an instance of “breathing human passion” subject to time and satiety, so that our mourning only repeats the mourning—the remembrance of past passion—that produced the urn in the first place, whereupon the difference between antiquity and modernity (the reason for our mourning) evaporates, and the narrative of timelessness, as changelessness, is rejustified. It is surely by way of the dialectical relation of these two inferred narratives—a form of the dialectic of memory itself, which makes present what is lost and has always already lost what is present to it—that the urn does “tease us out of thought.” With regard to the question of the querelle, therefore, we have here the same basic state of affairs as with Winckelmann. The Greeks are lost, “our times are no longer allegorical” (says Winckelmann); but this condition of loss also harbors the possibility of a new Hellenic presence or revival among us. In Winckelmann, however, the realization of this possibility is entrusted to a small group of specially gifted readers whom his texts address esoterically; and there is no basis that I can see for making the same assumption about Keats’s ode. The urn, in being at least hypothetically visible, figures the continuing presence of classical antiquity among us. What does this figure refer to in practical terms?

How to Read Poems and Why “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard / Are sweeter.” The address here to a reader of the printed text, who is presented with the idea of music but not the audible reality, suggests that that reader’s task is to deal with the poem as the poem’s speaker deals with the urn, which offers him a similar type of inaudible music. This point alone is sufficient to identify Keats’s reader as The Reader, The Modern Reader who can be anyone at all. If the poem’s readership were imagined as a fi nite group of chosen individuals, communication in writing could not be understood as necessary (a fi nite group can be gathered within earshot, or can at least be imagined thus) and the idea of “unheard” melodies would lose its force. It is true that writing and the instruments of writing operate as self-reflexive

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metaphors in poetry long before Keats, even in classical antiquity. But Keats goes further. Without the parallel between the urn’s silence and the poem’s—which depends on the poem’s written form—the meaning of the poem cannot even begin to unfold. What we have here is not a metaphor, but a simple and absolute precondition for communication. The poem, then, is not only a response to the querelle, but also a piece of instruction for The Modern Reader—perhaps especially for The novel or romance Reader who expects a story, a “flowery tale,” but receives no connected fictional narrative either in the poem or on the urn—instruction of which the first element is that The Reader has no choice but to find a positive communicative function for the conditions of what must otherwise be regarded as a fundamentally defective communication. If poetry is in its essence affi liated with music, hence dependent on direct contact between singer and listener, then the printed poem is a mere empty husk, a ruin like the “little town”—perhaps even a “trodden weed,” the discarded and despised outer garment of a once living (audible) person—and reading it is a waste of time. The basic move that is therefore required, the projection of the conditions of communication into the communicated content, is suggested very strongly by the representation of the poem’s silence in the urn’s silence. But this move is a falsification—and not only in the sense that the idea of perfect happiness falsifies experience. It is also, so to speak, an absolute or intransitive falsification. For a communication whose content is essentially nothing but the conditions of communication is by defi nition perfect; it delivers its content whole and without distortion. (This is why “unheard” melodies are “sweeter,” at least for a reader who adopts the approach suggested by the speaker’s approach to the urn.) But precisely this perfection obscures or falsifies the original defectiveness of communicative conditions that had justified our seeking it. (The perfect is too perfect; we are “cloy’d” by it.) And perhaps, in its turn, this falsification has thus become a new form of communicative defect from which the cycle starts all over again. Moreover, if we now understand the inevitable defectiveness of communication or representation as “truth,” and the correspondingly irresistible ideal of perfect communication or representation as “beauty,” the dictum “Beauty is truth, truth beauty” becomes transparent as a description of the reading situation. The very idea of poetry suggests perfect and complete communication, with singer and listener in direct contact. By contrast, the form of the printed book is decidedly defective, while also offering

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the possibility of a new type of communicative perfection (involving as a kind of promise the book’s greater permanence, like the urn’s). But this new perfection violates its own conditions of existence and so operates as a defect, thus driving the cycle (by which we are teased out of thought) forward. Defect and perfection are so entangled as to become practically indistinguishable—as they are in Shakespeare’s Cleopatra 21—and so the identity of truth and beauty is enacted in the reading process. We can even make out the sense in which this identity is “all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” For the ability to detect beauty or ideality even in the universal defectiveness of experience—“in midst of . . . woe”—while yet still accepting and affi rming experience for what it is, adds up to something like a universal competence for living human life. And it is also the key, if there is one, to an authentic revival of classical antiquity, which will fi nd its completeness not in a relic from the past, not in a “Cold Pastoral,” but in its own enactment of the identity of beauty and truth. Indeed, the identity of truth (the realm of the knower) and beauty (the realm of the maker), if we reorient the categories a bit, translates easily enough into the identity, for Winckelmann, of initiate and expert. But, as with Friedrich Schlegel, the difference from Winckelmann places Keats fi rmly on this side of the advent of modern reading, except that whereas Schlegel adjusts the very substance of his thought to fit the new historical situation, Keats attempts to carry out for The Modern Reader, or at least to make available to That Reader, a project that almost exactly echoes what Winckelmann had attempted in an esoteric mode. And for Keats it is specifically the discipline of reading poetry—as sketched in the “Ode on a Grecian Urn”—that is now required by this project. For only the affi liation of poetry with music both (1) suggests the idea of perfect communicative immediacy and (2) exposes the radically defective communicative situation encountered by a modern reader—by The Reader who can be anyone and therefore has only the silent page to work with, The Reader who lacks the supplemental dimension of meaning that esoteric writing offers the initiate or expert. In a sense, then, Keats is trying to hold back the clock, to offer the discipline of poetry as an alternative to the enjoyable self-delusion of The typical novel Reader, or to that absolute submission to the state of being nothing-but-Reader from which Schlegel hopes to derive the possibility of a new mythology. Like Goethe (at least Goethe as the author of “Auf dem See”) and like Schlegel, therefore, Keats is a kind of borderline theorist, but not quite the same kind. Goethe balances on a knife edge between

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pre- and post- with respect to the advent of modern reading, and concocts a single coherent text that cannot be understood without being read in both modes. Schlegel positions himself more completely within the coming age, but not without exhibiting the compensatory need to discredit Winckelmann (by implication) and Lessing (in the act of pretending to follow him). But Keats is perhaps best understood as an instance for the proposition that all reading theory is borderline theorizing—that the borderline can never be left behind because the theoretical move can never be completed. We have already discussed one other instance in Wolfgang Iser, whose theorizing, precisely in its rigor and honesty, reduces to an absurdity the whole project of reading theory. But Keats, in defiance of chronology, is perhaps already one logical and critical step beyond Iser, already involved in the movement against modern reading that I call “Response” in Part III, where we will also encounter Goethe once again.

Part II History

3.

Dante and the Invention of the Novel Reader

If we agree that modern reading, as practiced supposedly by The Reader in each of us, makes a clearly marked entrance upon the western scene in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and that This Reader (imagined principally as a novel reader), despite being strictly a theoretical construct, soon comes to occupy a place in our thinking that might otherwise belong to our sense of intimate personal experience—because reading “itself ” so strongly resists the quality of experience—then we are faced with a considerable historical problem: how does The Reader arise, This Reader for whom reading is supposed to become equivalent to immediate experience, if not indeed a kind of super experience in which such normal constraints as the subject–object relation are somehow overridden? Is it possible that The Reader is generated out of nothing by social and political and educational conditions in the eighteenth century? The mechanism of such generation would have to be people’s actual experience; and actual experience is a domain in which precisely The Reader cannot be found. By the late seventeenth century, The Modern Reader therefore had to be there already in some form as an available idea of the human, waiting to be selected as a model for imagining (however deludedly) the way people are when reading. My suggestion is that the first step toward this needful human type had been invented (or built out of theological materials)— and in fact invented as a reader—by Dante in the Commedia.

Problems and Solutions Two basic qualities make up the figure of The Reader. First, I become The Reader only by participating directly in the realization of the book’s content, a realization that takes place in the very process of reading, which is transformed into something that feels (to me, to The Supposed Reader in me) very much like immediate experience, but experience in the form of Henry James’s “another life”—not simply experience as I am accustomed 85

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to it. Second, The Reader must be at some level The Same Reader in everyone, or at least in everyone who reads (says Poulet) as he or she “ought.” Otherwise every reader, in reading creatively, would produce his or her own separate version of the book—a version who knows how similar to someone else’s?—and the book would have no content of its own; one would not be able to speak of the book to begin with. To put it in more or less practical terms, I am required as The Reader to divest myself as far as possible of all the preconceptions that determine my personal mode of experiencing, so as to open myself to the other life that is offered by the fiction. (Iser indicates this second requirement by calling his approach “phenomenological,” thus suggesting that by something like Husserl’s reduction he has separated the phenomenon of reading as such from the conditions that shape each specific instance of it.) My main point about Dante is that in the Commedia, he invents a reader who meets the fi rst of these two requirements, but not yet the second. I think I can show that the problem that immediately arises here—how, in the case of the Commedia, can we then speak of the poem, with a single, relatively cohesive content?—is solvable by a fairly straightforward theological-hermeneutic argument. But more important and more difficult are the two problems that I suggest are solved by my main point. The fi rst is a problem that concerns the whole of the present project. How can the idea of The Reader ever arise in the fi rst place if it is not connected, somewhere in its history, with an instance of actual reading practice? On what other basis would it ever occur to us to call that theoretically constructed human being a “reader”? In Dante, however, not the whole of The Reader is invented, but only one half, only the participatory or creative reader; and that half, it turns out, represents a perfectly reasonable possibility for actual reading in Dante’s time and in relation to Dante’s text. What Dante invents is not a theoretical phantasm at all, but rather, in each specific case (for each one of us), an actual reader. If this point holds, then I will only need to show how the second requirement (that The Reader be everywhere The Same Reader) gets added to the fi rst, in order to have produced a plausible account of the genesis of The strictly Theoretical Reader as a whole. The second problem that my main point addresses is a problem internal to the Commedia. (Its relation to this problem is the basis for any claim of interpretive validity that might be made for my argument.) The problem is quite complex in its ramifications, but its basic outline can be seen in the relation between Dante and one of his main predecessors as an explorer of

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heaven, St. Paul. Paul’s roundabout mention of his rapture in Second Corinthians (12:2–4) is very much a factor in understanding the opening canto of the Paradiso. It is alluded to directly in verses that Dante addresses to God: S’i’ era sol di me quel che creasti novellamente, amor che ’l ciel governi, tu ’l sai, che col tuo lume mi levasti. (Par. 1.73–75)1 [If I was only that part of me which you created brand new, o love that governs heaven, you know it, who lifted me up with your light.]

The part of a person that is created brand new in the moment that person fi rst becomes his or her self, the “spirito novo” (new spirit; Purg. 25.72) that is breathed into the body at that moment, is what then becomes the soul, so that Dante is here saying exactly what Paul had said: he does not know whether he had visited heaven in or out of the body, only God knows. And this connection to Paul is confi rmed by Dante himself in the letter to Can Grande, sections 77–79.2 But Dante’s reading of Paul in that letter—at least his ostensible reading—is a very curious one. He quotes only one sentence directly, and makes a mistake in doing so: “Scio hominem, sive in corpore sive extra corpus nescio, Deus scit, raptum usque ad tertium celum, et vidit arcana Dei, que non licet homini loqui [I know a man who—whether in the body or out of it, I don’t know, God knows—was carried up into the third heaven and saw secret things of God, which a man may not utter]” (Opere 445).3 And then he comments on that sentence by saying, “see, when the intellect in ascending had gone beyond human reason, it did not remember what had occurred outside itself.” But Paul has not said anything about failing to remember, unless one interprets “non licet [mihi] loqui” in this sense, which would be quite a stretch. Still, Dante presses on and now, without any justification, interprets the gesture of falling on one’s face (Matt. 17:6; Ezek. 1:28 [Vulgate 2:1]) as a representation of forgetting; and then he tells us, if we still resist his opinion, to read certain texts of Richard of St. Victor, Bernard of Clairvaux, and Augustine, but without saying what we should look for in those texts.4 We can perhaps make at least some sense of what Dante is doing in the letter if we turn back to the Commedia and read the very beginning of the Paradiso: La gloria di colui che tutto move per l’universo penetra, e risplende

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History in una parte più e meno altrove. Nel ciel che più de la sua luce prende fu’ io, e vidi cose che ridire né sa né può chi di là sù discende; perché appressando sé al suo disire, nostro intelletto si profonda tanto, che dietro la memoria non può ire. Veramente quant’ io del regno santo ne la mia mente potei far tesoro, sarà ora materia del mio canto. (Par. 1.1–12) [The glory of him who moves all things penetrates the universe and shines in one place more and less in another. I have been in the heaven that receives the most of his light, and I have seen things that no one descending from up there has either the knowledge or the power to tell of, because our intellect, when approaching the goal of its desire, becomes so deeply engrossed that memory cannot keep close behind it. Still, as much of the holy realm as I have been able to treasure up in my mind will now be the material of my song.]

By his insistence on fi nding a failure of memory in Paul, Dante, it seems, is trying (in vain) to establish a consonance between Paul’s text and his own (ll. 7–9). And this move, like the seeming confusions in the letter, only calls attention to deeper problems in the relation with Paul. For if Paul does not say “I have been in heaven” (which Dante does say straight out), and if Paul does not describe his experience in detail (which Dante of course does, despite his supposed inability to remember), it is not because he cannot say these things—surely he knows that the “man” he speaks of was himself—but because he chooses not to; “parco” (2 Cor. 12:6), “I hold back, I restrain myself,” he says. And clearly, in the context of 12:1–9, he makes this choice to avoid boasting (gloriari). But then, how shall Dante be defended against the charge of boasting? And although he acknowledges limits in his ability to describe what he has seen and heard in heaven, Dante promises to offer his reader as much as he possibly can, whereas Paul implies that there are things he could speak of if he wished, but that it would be wrong of him to do so—wrong in the sense of boastful, hence sinfully proud, or indeed simply unlawful, “non licet.” How, at least at this point in his account, can Dante be justified in ignoring the ethical or moral or perhaps theological constraints by which Paul is bound?

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Moreover, if we consider the fi rst canto in each of the poem’s other two cantiche, Inferno 2 and Purgatorio 1—assuming that Inferno 1 is the extra, thirty-fourth canto and serves as an introduction before the Inferno proper—then a significant pattern emerges, having to do with the question of whether and how Dante is worthy of being chosen to view the eternal realms before death. In asking just this question of Vergil in Inferno 2, Dante alludes again to the text of Paul we have looked at. After mentioning Aeneas’ descent into the underworld, he goes on: Andovvi poi lo Vas d’elezïone, per recarne conforto a quella fede ch’è principio a la via di salvazione. Ma io, perché venirvi? o chi ’l concede? Io non Enëa, io non Paulo sono; me degno a ciò né io né altri ’l crede. Per che, se del venire io m’abbandono, temo che la venuta non sia folle. Se’ savio; intendi me’ ch’i’ non ragiono. (Inf. 2.28–36) [Then the Vessel of Election (that is, Paul, Acts 9:15) also went there to bring confi rmation for that faith which is the beginning of the way to salvation. But I? why should I go? or who permits it? I am not Aeneas, I am not Paul; neither I nor others will believe me worthy of this. Therefore, if I give in and go, I fear lest my going be foolish. You are wise, and understand better than I can speak.]

Paul’s veiled boast to the Corinthians is evoked here specifically by the question of being worthy of God’s choice and by the wish to avoid foolishness (2 Cor. 12:6)—although Dante presses forward (“Or va”; Inf. 2.139) where Paul holds back (“parco”)! 5 And in Purgatorio 1, correspondingly, Dante must be made worthy to ascend the mountain by being cleansed with the dew and girt with the rush of humility (Purg. 1.121–36). Thus a pattern is established and is then called to mind again by the definite presence of Paul in Paradiso 1, except that now the question of Dante’s worthiness seems to have disappeared altogether and been replaced by simple certainty. Again, we must ask how such a thing can happen, how Dante can be exempt from, or immune to, the objective prohibitions and personal self-confl icts that prevent Paul from describing his experience in heaven. The question of worthiness, it happens, is also taken up rather abruptly in sections 81–82 of the letter to Can Grande (immediately after

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the passages discussed above), where Dante argues that God can choose even terrible sinners for a preview of heaven. And again our attention is called (deliberately?) to the questions that are being avoided. For while Dante may be a sinner, he does not show himself entering heaven (with the P’s on his brow erased) as a sinner. The question of worthiness is really the question of how Dante gets away with showing as much as he does, how he gets around Paul’s “non licet homini” (it is not lawful for a man). The Commedia is full of riddles that test our ingenuity and wit. And it seems to me that this large question, toward which we are nudged repeatedly, is given as a kind of super riddle: how is Dante justified in expressing himself as copiously and directly and assertively as he does? As far as I can see, only one answer to this question is possible. The sense in which Dante’s account is true must be different from the sense in which it is true that Paul visited heaven. The interpretive issue thus raised could hardly be more central. If we may assume that Paul’s trip to heaven is true in the sense of being a simple historical fact, then in exactly how different a sense is Dante’s account true? Shall we dismiss it as an instance of what he himself calls, in the Convivio, allegory in “the manner of the poets,” which means basically fables invented to clothe—to show by concealing—preconceived meanings that are the author’s real message? 6 Charles S. Singleton, more than half a century ago, made an impassioned argument against this view, an argument which I think is generally accepted by now.7 Singleton’s main point is that in the Commedia (by contrast with the Convivio) Dante employs the “allegory of theologians” rather than that of poets, an allegory in which the literal or superficial level of the account is not simply subordinate to the truth it cloaks, but rather possesses its own historical validity apart from deeper meanings. In the Convivio, Ovid’s account of how Orpheus tamed beasts, trees, and stones with his music is given as an example of allegory of the poets, a tale invented, says Dante, to signify how a wise man’s voice can tame and humble cruel hearts. But the example used by Dante when elucidating the Paradiso to Can Grande is the Exodus of the children of Israel from Egypt, which is taken to signify allegorically “our redemption by Christ” (Opere 438). And Singleton argues that this case is defi nitely allegory of the theologians because “the fi rst or literal sense [the text being Scripture] cannot be fictive but must be true and, in this instance, historical. The effects of Orpheus’ music on beasts and stones may be a poet’s invention, setting forth under a veil of fiction some hidden truth, but the Exodus is no poet’s invention” (88).

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But if the Commedia is truly characterized by allegory of the theologians in this sense, then the distance between Dante and Paul is reduced considerably, and the question of the difference between how their visits to heaven must be understood becomes very difficult.8 Singleton, taking his cue from Thomas Aquinas (see Singleton 88), gives a sense for just how difficult: When the other [allegorical] sense is there in Scripture, it is there simply because intended there by God. Hence . . . only God could write in this mode of allegory, wherein the event signified by the words in its turn signifies the “other” meaning, and only God could use events as words, causing them to point beyond themselves, only He could make the Exodus there (the real event) signify our journey here. . . . A poet has not God’s power and may not presume to write as He can. But he may imitate God’s way of writing. He may construct a literal historical sense, a journey beyond (it too happens to be an Exodus!) to be, in the make-believe of his poem, as God’s literal sense is in His book (and with God’s help he will have the power to make it real). And he will make his allegorical or mystic, his other sense, even as God’s. (15–16)

But even with God’s help, in what sense exactly can the poet make his “make-believe” real? Surely not in exactly the sense in which Paul’s experience had been real. I think the answer to this question, as Singleton intimates, has to do with the nature of poetry. Implied in the Commedia, I suggest, is Dante’s claim to have produced a founding or defi nitive instance of Christian poetry. (Other poets had been Christians, but their poetry, as poetry, had not been Christian in as complete a sense as Dante’s.) It is on this basis that Dante imagines himself admitted to the great poets’ club in Inferno 4, whose other members had all produced, in their pre-Christian hexameters, the defi nitive instances of specific poetic types: heroic epic (Homer), national epic (Vergil), satire (Horace), comedy (Ovid), and tragedy (Lucan).9 And it is as a founding Christian poet that Dante can perhaps after all be said to have “made real,” as Singleton wants him to, his journey through the eternal realms, even without being able to claim the same type of reality as Paul’s rapture. At least I will attempt to make this argument; and I will base the idea of a new-founded Christian poetry on the question of what we are doing, and what we are supposed to be doing, when we read the Commedia.

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Hermeneutic Issues One important aspect of the Commedia is its quality as an object of hermeneutic scrutiny. When reading the Commedia we must understand the verbal material not only with regard to thought or truth in the abstract, but also with regard to the subjectivity of its author, the person who speaks the word io in it; our reading must include an effort of divination with regard to that person’s exact subjective condition. I use the word subjective provisionally here; there are certainly elements of what it means today that we will not expect to fi nd in Dante’s thinking. But Dante is nothing if not attentive to his own inner states; in the Paradiso he challenges us repeatedly with feelings and experiences that cannot be communicated;10 and in the Inferno, in a passage we will examine (34.22–27), he offers us his internal condition in the form of a riddle. We can give logical shape to the subjective aspect of the Commedia by looking at Dante’s discussion of the use of “vulgar” language (Italian, as opposed to Latin) in De Vulgari Eloquentia. The vulgar language is “more noble” than Latin or Greek, says Dante, “because it is natural to us” (Opere 319), in the sense that our intention in using it is always “nostre mentis enucleare aliis conceptum, to expose in detail to others what is conceived in our own mind” (320). And for this purpose, it is only among humans that the medium of language is required. For angels possess a form of “intellectus” through which each of them is always (by way of reflection in God) fully known to all the others; and in the case of the lower animals, all members of the same species have exactly the same “actions and passions,” so that one individual knows everything about another simply by knowing itself. But humans do not have the angelic power of perfect communication, while on the other hand, human reason manifests itself so variously among us that “fere quilibet sua propria specie videatur gaudere [practically everyone would seem to revel in being his or her own unique species]” (321), which means that animal communication is denied us. Therefore, if we are to communicate at all, it must be by way of language, which is characterized by its combination of the rational (since reason provides the content of human communication) with the sensory (since humans engage each other directly only in the domain of the senses). But communication thus understood is problematic. For when Dante speaks of “reason” (ratio) in this context, he means not an absolute or abstract power but a particular quality of individual minds that varies widely from person to person, “vel circa discretionem vel circa iudicium vel

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circa electionem, with respect either to its discernment or to its judgment or to its own choice” (321). That is, my “reason” can be different from yours either in its native ability (discernment) or in its rational and ethical training (judgment) or simply in the decisions you and I make about using it (choice). It follows that when I clothe an element of my reason (say, a thought) in a sensible sign (a word, a sentence), there is no guarantee whatever that that sign will awaken the same thought in your reason. Perhaps my thought is not even possible in a reason constituted as yours is. This is one form of the hermeneutic problem in Dante: our intent in using “natural” language (as in the Commedia) is always to make our thought perfectly available to others (enucleare, “to take the nut out of its shell”), but because of the nature of human reason, this intent can never verifiably be achieved. It follows now that no single interpretation of a text can claim absolute correctness, hence that different or even contradictory interpretations of the same text (for all we know) can be equally valid under different circumstances, hence that we must reckon with the possibility that each particular reading of a text plays a role in constituting the text’s meaning. These ideas, when developed in practice, tend to get very complicated very quickly. But Dante provides, early in the Commedia, a simple and striking instance by which we are alerted to the type of problem that awaits us. The inscription over the gate of hell ends famously with the words, “Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate [abandon all hope, ye who enter here]” (Inf. 3.9). And Dante says immediately to Vergil, “Maestro, il senso lor m’è duro [master, the sense of those words is hard for me]” (3.12), where “hard” means “hard to accept, hard to deal with,” rather than “hard to understand.” The inscribed imperative, after all, is completely unambiguous. But still, Dante has asked about the “sense” of what he has read, and therefore, when Vergil’s answer echoes the logical shape and two key words of the inscription itself, it is fairly clear that he is offering a reading of it: he says “Qui si convien lasciare ogne sospetto [here it is necessary to abandon all fear or misgiving]” (3.14). The gate says “abandon all hope,” and Vergil suggests that the “sense” of this command is “abandon all fear.” The difference is one of circumstances. If you are one of the damned, then what the gate says to you is simply “abandon all hope.” If you happen to be still alive, and to have received from an apparently reliable source the assurance that your passage through hell is protected by Heaven itself, then the words on the gate are obviously a test of your courage and resolve, so you are entirely correct if you read them to mean “abandon all fear.” There is an extra wrinkle

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here: Vergil, who actually suggests the second interpretation, is one of those people for whom the gate’s literal meaning is valid, one of those people who are denied hope, as he himself admits in the next canto (4.42). Circumstances—it thus appears—are what creates the possibility of multiple or contradictory meanings, but our circumstances do not necessarily interfere with our ability to understand that multiplicity; they do not limit our understanding to the meanings that govern us in practice. Exactly this point is developed later at another gate, the entrance to the city of Dis (in Dante’s Italian, “Dite”), where Vergil refers back to the gate of hell: Questa lor tracotanza non è nova; ché già l’usaro a men segreta porta, la qual sanza serrame ancor si trova. Sovr’ essa vedestù la scritta morta: e già di qua da lei discende l’erta, passando per li cerchi sanza scorta, tal che per lui ne fia la terra aperta. (Inf. 8.124–30) [This intransigence of theirs (of the hostile spirits who guard the city gates) is not new, for they practiced it once already at a less secret gate (when Christ had entered hell) which is still found unlocked. Above that gate you saw the dead writing; and already on this side, someone is descending the steep slope by whom the city will be opened to us.]

By applying to the inscription over the gate of hell the adjective “dead,” Vergil seems in the fi rst instance to be stressing its ineffectiveness, since the context invokes three instances—Christ, the approaching angel, and Dante—in which the inscription has failed to destroy hope in those passing it. But it is also fairly clear that the inscription is “dead” in the sense of deadly—its function is to pronounce a fi nal verdict, “abandon all hope,” on those who enter by it. And this deadly effect of the inscription, we recall, had been prevented earlier by Vergil’s offer of a reading that had broadened Dante’s perspective and distracted him from a morbid attentiveness to the “hard” literal sense of the words. The same idea, that there are certain things upon which it is deadly to focus one’s attention, is repeated in the very next canto, where Vergil must prevent Dante from looking at Medusa (9.52–60); and at this point we are explicitly directed to read the text allegorically:

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O voi ch’avete li ’ntelletti sani, mirate la dottrina che s’asconde sotto ’l velame de li versi strani. (61–63) [O you who have healthy intellects, look upon the doctrine that conceals itself beneath the veil of these strange verses.]

At least one aspect of this secret “doctrine” is made clear by the hermeneutic context: that writing is “dead,” or deadly, only to the extent that we focus our attention exclusively upon a single meaning. All writing, even on the gate of hell, is at least potentially “polysemous”—as Dante says specifically of the Commedia (Opere 438)—whence we may infer that writing is alive (scritta viva?) exactly to the extent that our minds as readers, whatever our circumstances, are healthy (intelletti sani) in the sense of being open always to a broad multiplicity and variability of meaning, always inclined to read our texts imaginatively. We can now say something provisionally about how a reader’s role in the Commedia is envisioned. On one hand, each reader must attempt the ultimately impossible task of divining the exact subjective condition of the text’s author. On the other hand, a reader with a “healthy intellect” must know that the text’s meaning is in some measure constituted by his or her own imaginative activity in reading. Which adds up to the proposition that in reading the poem correctly, we must position ourselves so as not only to divine, but in some sense to be, or to become, its author. The word io in the poem must in some sense operate as our fi rst-person singular—in a manner that calls to mind Poulet’s discussion of the reading “I.”

Analogy and the Process of Reading The process of reading is therefore a matter of interest to Dante, and to us in reading him, which is why I speak of his invention as a “novel reader.” That invention, it is true, does not yet include the idea of The Same Reader; the process of reading, for all we know, could be completely different in each individual. But this consideration does not prevent Dante from making at least one general statement on the matter, in a famous passage from the letter to Can Grande: Finis totius et partis esse posset et multiplex, scilicet propinquus et remotus; sed, omissa subtili investigatione, dicendum est breviter quod

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History fi nis totius et partis est removere viventes in hac vita de statu miserie et perducere ad statum felicitatis. (Opere 440) [The object of the whole (Commedia) and of the part (Paradiso) could well have several different components, immediate and remote; but without going into the matter in detail, it can be said briefly that the object of the whole and of the part is to remove living people, in this life, from the state of misery and to bring them to the state of felicity.]

There may be extraneous and thoroughly practical reasons for Dante’s caginess here,11 but the immediate effect is to surround with an atmosphere of mystery the relatively simple formulation he settles upon, to call attention to that formulation as a kind of riddle. We must—it is thus suggested—read this passage very carefully. It seems reasonable to assume, fi rst, that the “living people” who are to be brought “to the state of felicity” are the poem’s readers, and that it is their reading of the poem by which this aim will be carried out. But exactly what does this mean? Felicitas can refer either to happiness in an earthly sense or to the happiness of souls in heaven, although beatitudo is more frequent, and perhaps more proper, in the latter meaning. (In the letter to Can Grande itself, we hear of animae beatae in heaven [440].) But the stipulation “in hac vita,” (in this life) appears to settle the issue in favor of earthly happiness and hence to create an opposition with the “conversio anime de luctu et miseria peccati ad statum gratie [conversion of the soul from the sorrow and misery of sin to a state of grace]” (438), that had earlier been spoken of. But in the cryptic, riddling atmosphere Dante has created, there is still room for doubt. Does the gratuitous redundancy of “viventes in hac vita” not suggest perversely that felicitas may have something to do with eternal happiness after all? And once we have come this far—in view of the poem’s subject matter, which is literally a journey from eternal misery to eternal bliss—it must occur to us (and one hopes to Can Grande) that the ultimate aim of the Commedia ( finis totius) is to transform that journey into an immediate experience, here and now (in hac vita), for us as readers, which is exactly the kind of thing that Henry James and his like will later say of the novel. We read not for the sake of some profit to be realized at the end, but for the sake of the journey, the process itself. But still, in what sense can readers possibly be expected to experience the supernal happiness that is described—or that is indicated by the gesture of being unable to describe—in the poem’s final cantos? And how can it possibly have occurred to Dante to imagine the reader’s role in this

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way? Both these questions are answered by the common philosophical and theological notion of analogy. Can we achieve direct understanding of the Holy Trinity? No. But Augustine, for example, argues that there is a triple structure analogous to the Trinity built into our immediate experience of ourselves, “Nam et sumus et nos esse novimus et id esse ac nosse diligimus [for we are and we know we are and we delight in that being and knowing].”12 And Thomas Aquinas, who also suggests the usefulness of our sense of our own intellectual experience for approaching an understanding of the Trinity,13 argues specifically that predicates applied to God by analogy with creatures, although not “univocal” (not applicable to God in the same way), are also not necessarily “equivocal” (not absolutely devoid of any relation to God), since the latter position would imply that “ex creaturis nihil posset cognosci de Deo, nec demonstrari [nothing could be known or demonstrated about God from creatures],” an implication he claims is contrary to both philosophy (Aristotle) and Scripture (Rom. 1:20). Therefore we have to accept the usefulness of analogical predication, where we neither pretend that our terms apply in exactly the same way to creatures and to God nor despair altogether of their having any relation to God, but recognize that a term can be used in a multiple sense (“multipliciter”) to signify different proportions relative to one object. Dante himself invokes the concept of analogy in this sense in the letter to Can Grande (Opere 437) to explain his idea of the mutuality of his “friendship” with the Veronese ruler—a friendship, incidentally, which he compares by implication (436) to the relation between man and God. Hence the hint of ambiguity that he attaches to the idea of felicitas. Heavenly beatitude itself is entirely beyond our powers of conception or imagination, however earnestly Dante may assert that he has experienced directly at least its intellectual aspect (for example, Par. 33.55–57). But if the activity of reading—with the reader’s own assistance—can be shaped into something recognizable as a passage from miseria to felicitas, then this internal situation (like our self-knowledge for Augustine, or our inward production of thoughts for Thomas) is available as an analogy by which some higher level of truth may be approached, in this case the transition from sin to grace. I will argue below that, in Dante’s intention, that transition, that passage, is one that the reader, by being a reader, makes over and over again in a manner that is represented at the end of the Purgatorio by the allegory of the two rivers in Eden. If such an argument can be sustained, I think I will have shown that Dante invented, essentially, a novel reader, but without needing to insist

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that it be everywhere The Same Reader; for in the interpretation of the letter to Can Grande that I am proposing, the specific experiences of different readers of the Commedia can be as radically different as one pleases, as long as each admits of some analogical relation to the eternal verity around which the text revolves. But my point is that Dante is the inventor of reading in this sense, which means that he must use this work itself to teach its reader how to read it.14 And at the beginning of Paradiso 2, he seems to recognize that this circumstance might drastically limit the number of actual “readers” his work will fi nd, readers whom he now addresses as “Voialtri pochi” (2.10). But still we and he have to assume that such readers exist, and our task finishes where theirs begins—with extracting from the text the author’s directions for reading it.

A Reader’s Freedom: Its Limits and Its Perils One thing Dante expects from us is our imaginative activity in reading, an activity that will realize the text’s allegorical possibilities and so bring the text to life. And since a text’s meaning is therefore in part constituted by the reader’s circumstances, which neither the text nor its author can control, it follows that a reader’s legitimate activity includes an element of freedom or arbitrariness with respect to what we might infer (however unverifiably) as the text’s original meaning. The text can thus be read legitimately to mean something “now” that it perhaps did not mean “then”—assuming one were in a position to understand the precise difference in circumstances. Exactly this point is made, and developed in great detail, by Susan Noakes in the Dante chapter of her book Timely Reading, which treats mainly the figures of Paolo and Francesca and the Geryon episode. Francesca blatantly misreads the prose Lancelot, says Noakes, which means she fails to read it literally enough; but her reading is also excessively literal in the sense that it attempts to stabilize the text’s meaning: To try to give the moment of reading a duration its [elusive, mutable, polysemous] nature does not permit by imitating an episode in a book is to try to falsify time: clearly, a form of rebellion against the workings of the divine [which postpones all stability of meaning until the last judgment]. Yet Paolo and Francesca’s form of rebellion against the temporal nature of human reading is not only familiar but necessary. Fundamentally, the root of their fall, constituting the state of readerly “original sin”

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from which there are no exemptions, lies not exclusively in themselves any more than in the book or the author. It is instead inherent in the nature of the temporal relationship among these three.15

In Paradiso 13 Thomas makes clear to Dante that “all interpretation is provisional—that is, subject to change at a later time” (Noakes 41); but it is also true that interpreters are nonetheless obliged to act as if it is not provisional if they are indeed to interpret. Francesca’s story thus becomes Dante’s way to demonstrate how it is that readers can read with an awareness of constant change only if they stop trying to get meaning from the words of a text: only, that is, if they stop reading.

Hence what Noakes calls the “original sin” of reading. Interpretive latitude is not only made available to us. We are under an absolute injunction to make use of it, to go beyond mere “listening” and stretch upward for the “bread of the angels” (Par. 2.1–12), to experience directly the text’s own upward mutability, which will culminate eventually in divine truth. But on one hand, we can never stretch far enough, never be open enough to God’s ways, while on the other hand, by stretching, we always open ourselves to the possibility of a simple misreading that might haunt us eternally, even with respect to a secular text. I would go one step further than Noakes at this point, and argue that the unavoidable fault in our reading is not only similar to Francesca’s but practically identical, in that we cannot read without imitating, without seeking stability of meaning by attempting to rethink the thought of the writer—this being the idea of communication in De Vulgari Eloquentia. Without this interpretive step, I would find it hard to account for Dante’s swoon after hearing Francesca. After discussing the lovers’ “appalling blindness” to their own “misreading [of ] a work meant to edify them,” Noakes continues: The pilgrim’s fainting “like a corpse” is an understandable response to such evidence of readerly blindness. Such blindness suggests that even works like those of Dante himself, if read by those determined to turn away from the temporality of reading, will lead their readers to damnation. (46–47)

There is defi nitely truth in these remarks, and I will discuss later the possibility that the Commedia might operate toward temptation rather than

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toward salvation or edification for its reader. But I do not think Noakes has explained Dante’s swoon. Dante (the pilgrim) swoons a number of times in the course of the poem, and it seems to me that the reason is always the same: he “loses consciousness” whenever, in the poem’s logical or more broadly discursive development, a point is reached where nothing can be said, where language simply fails. The case at the end of Inferno 5 is especially clear. Dante describes his swoon as follows: Mentre che l’uno spirto questo disse, l’altro piangëa; sì che di pietade io venni men così com’ io morisse. E caddi come corpo morto cade. (139–42) [While the one spirit said this, the other wept, so that with pity I fainted as if I were dying, and I fell the way a dead body falls.]

The locution “venire meno” means not only “to faint,” but also, more generally, “to fail,” and with the idea of “pity” Dante has in fact already begun to fail verbally, to miss the point, to succumb to the impossibility of saying what he wants to. For Paolo and Francesca’s imitation of their misread Lancelot is an image of imitation in the general sense of rethinking a writer’s thought. And if Dante wishes now to warn his reader against the danger of imitating single-mindedly in this sense, he fi nds himself on the horns of an insoluble dilemma: he must insist that his reader understand clearly the danger of understanding him too clearly. So the poem simply shuts off for a moment. An error message flashes on its screen, so to speak, and it is time to reboot. Dante of course does re-begin, as does Noakes by turning to Geryon, where she coordinates, in a single interpretation, an extraordinary number and variety of textual features, including the name, which, as Greek γηρύων, can mean “speaking” (Noakes 58); the monster’s “swimming,” for which Dante uses the term “notando” (Inf. 16.131, 17.115), which, unlike nuotando, suggests “writing” (Noakes 63–65); and the metonymic association between Dante and the “corda . . . aggroppata e ravvolta” (Inf. 16.106–111), “cord with knots and tangles,” by which Vergil summons the monster, which association, together with the monster’s own metaphorical identification with the same cord—he is painted “di nodi e di rotelle [with knots and round figures],” (17.15) and his arrival out of the abyss is associated with the idea of “returning” (16.133)—makes his connection to

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Dante himself, or at least to Dante’s work as a poet (speaking, writing), entirely unmistakable (Noakes 58–62). On this basis, and in mind of Geryon’s position at the entrance to the circles where fraud is punished, Noakes concludes: The intimate and paradoxical relation of Dante and Geryon suggests a notion that develops directly out of the Paolo and Francesca episode: an author with good intentions may see his work metamorphosed into a fraud, a deceiver, a Galeotto; the transformation of what an author “casts forth” [like the cord thrown into the abyss] into something entirely different is indeed present not as a mere possibility but as a necessity. The pilgrim must climb on Geryon’s back if he is to continue his journey . . . his poem can continue only through the use of fraudulent language. Geryon not only represents the kind of morally repulsive language on which Dante must depend; he is indeed fabricated from it. (62–63)

By a “fraudulent” and “morally repulsive” language, I assume Noakes is referring to what she has called a language infected with “original sin,” a language that must always practice a kind of deception when measured against its own true ultimate meaning in God. But Noakes hedges her point a bit in the course of a very fi ne reading of the passage in which we first actually encounter Geryon: Sempre a quel ver c’ha faccia di menzogna de’ l’uom chiuder le labbra fi n ch’el puote, però che sanza colpa fa vergogna; ma qui tacer nol posso; e per le note di questa comedìa, lettor, ti giuro, s’elle non sien di lunga grazia vòte, ch’i’ vidi per quell’ aere grosso e scuro venir notando una figura in suso, maravigliosa ad ogne cor sicuro. (Inf. 16.124–32) [A man ought to close his lips, as far as possible, to any truth that has the appearance of falsehood, because it will bring him unmerited dishonor; but here I cannot be silent, and by the “notes” of this comedy, reader, if they be not empty of “long grace,” I swear to you that I saw come swimming (notando) upward, through that heavy and dark air, a figure that would amaze even the most intrepid heart.]

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Noakes’s explanation of Dante’s oath to his reader here is wonderfully ingenious: The poet’s swearing “per le note / di questa comedìa” means that the veracity of his witness is to be proved by the very physical existence of the components of his poem. The monster Geryon is as real as the sounds or letters [two possibilities for reading “note”]16 of the words that call him forth, a reality that is indisputable for anyone reading them. (64)

Geryon, whose swimming is “writing” (“notando”), is nothing but an allegorical representation of what is going on in our reading (reading as a reenactment of the writing) of the artifact before us, so his existence is proved by (as it were, by an oath upon) just that artifact. But then Noakes hedges: “It is just at the point at which Dante names his poem [‘comedìa’] and swears by the tools of his craft [‘note’], then, that he asserts that poetry is a kind of fraud in reverse and pairs the terms note and notando in a singularly appropriate instance of paronomasia . . . [for] paronomasia is the trope that best exemplifies the kind of inversely fraudulent poetic language with which Dante wishes to identify himself by establishing an inverse relation between pilgrim and beast” (64–65). What is “fraud in reverse” or “inversely fraudulent language,” and how is the relation between Dante and Geryon an “inverse relation”? Because of the word “faccia”? Dante says that his story, though true, will have the “appearance” (faccia) of a lie, whereas Geryon has the “face” ( faccia) of an honest man (17.10), which is belied by his body and poisonous tail. But to use this reversal in Dante’s defense, one must begin by assuming that Dante’s own anticipatory self-defense against the imputation of mendacity is not itself fraudulent—an assumption which precisely the metonymic– metaphorical chain of associations between his writing and Geryon’s swimming calls into question. Or is Dante’s an “inverse” fraud because he opens his words to the mutability of meaning purely in “the hope that Logos may [eventually] fi ll his note” (Noakes 66) as the Virgin Mary had been fi lled with “grace” (di grazia piena—not vuota)? That would be fi ne. But if Dante himself reserves judgment on this matter, how am I, the present reader—who am after all addressed directly in the relevant passage—supposed to arrive at a fi rm decision about the sincerity and purity, the nonfraudulence, of the poet’s ultimate motives? Noakes, understandably, does her best to protect Dante from the imputation of fraud. But Dante himself—as Noakes’s argument actually shows—refuses such protection. In fact, to conclude once and for all

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that Dante is honest and sincere would be to carry out exactly the type of attempted stabilizing of meaning against which we are warned in the episode of Paolo and Francesca and later by Thomas Aquinas, exactly that reduction of textual mutability that Dante himself—if he is sincere in hoping that his “note” will grow toward God—cannot possibly desire. Precisely the integrity of Dante’s thought, in other words, requires that he remain open to the imputation of fraud, that fraud remain a legitimate interpretive possibility with respect to his poem. (It has to remain possible, in particular, that he is not justified in declining to observe Paul’s reticence.) And if we ask now where the adjudication of interpretive possibilities is to be carried out—where the decision will be made between honesty and fraud as a verdict on the Commedia—there are two answers. Ultimately the decision rests with God; but it is equally important to recognize that here and now it rests with the reader. “By the ‘notes’ of this comedy, reader, if they be not empty of ‘long grace,’ I swear to you . . . ,” says Dante. And Noakes points out that “grazia” suggests the “grace” with which Mary is in several senses “fi lled” (66). But “lunga grazia” also suggests simply “long acceptance by the reading public,” which in effect transfers to us, to readers, the responsibility for making the poem either true or false. We can understand this responsibility by way of the opening of Paradiso 2, where Dante begins by addressing readers who (in the “tiny boat” of their narrow existence) merely want to “listen” to him: “O voi . . . in piccioletta barca, / desiderosi d’ascoltar” (1–2); these readers, he says, would do better to abandon their journey with him and go home (4). But there is another group of readers: Voialtri pochi che drizzaste il collo per tempo al pan de li angeli, del quale vivesi qui ma non sen vien satollo. (9–12) [You few others, who in good time have straightened your neck upward for the bread of the angels, by which one lives here (on earth) but from which no one comes away sated.]

If we merely “listen” to the Geryon episode, this passage suggests, then we are defrauded (in the sense, at best, of being beguiled) by a fanciful story that strains credibility. Only if we stretch out for “the bread of angels” in our reading does it become possible for that episode to achieve truth; as a story, on its face (“faccia”), that story is a lie (“menzogna”), and only our

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own stretching fi nds the truth (“quel ver”) within it. Dante, then, is pure and honest only in the mirror of our own purity and honesty as readers. He himself fails if we fail him, if we fail to satisfy the conditions that I will argue are allegorized in the purification at Lethe and Eunoë. This is the sense in which authorship is a mortal risk—a casting of oneself into the abyss, a throw of the dice, as much “un coup de dés” for Dante as for Mallarmé: that the meaning of the text, indeed the very difference between signifi cance and oblivion, is at the mercy of its reader, of every reader. Hence the “perils” of reading. Even a text like the Commedia can be as much a seduction for us as the Lancelot is for Paolo and Francesca; and there is nothing whatever in the text itself, no fi rm, stabilized meaning, that can guide us out of that danger. Thus, by way of a hermeneutic speculation grounded in theology— the theorem that a text’s meaning is never fi nal (in our world) but always radically open to interpretation—Dante arrives at an idea of a reader’s function that is later resurrected when, with the advent of “literature” and its engulfment of the poetic, it becomes necessary to ascribe serious philosophical significance to the novel. Now, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it is ever more widely postulated that we do not merely “listen” to the novel’s story, that in fact we fi nd ourselves creating the world or reality in which that story takes place, and that in that creative activity, in that stretching of our imaginative power, we discover important preterfactual truths (a kind of “bread of angels”) about ourselves, about reality, about (Goethe suggests) language. Iser insists, it is true, that this readerly activity is somehow regulated by the text, just as Noakes insists that Dante is not a fraud. But these positions cannot be maintained. Once you cede power to a reader, you cannot take it back again. Each reader must now assume the responsibility, and the danger, of being able to do with the text exactly as he or she pleases.

The Contingency of Meaning and Understanding Of course there is a level at which the meaning of the Commedia is regulated. (If there were not, it is hard to see how we could recognize the text as an example of writing in the first place.) But unlike Iser, Dante does not attempt to include the reader’s mind or fantasy within the scope of that regulation. For Dante, the meaning of his text is regulated only at the level of truth, a level that is entirely separated from the actual feeling or experience of either poet or reader and is represented in the poem principally, I

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think, by the overarching arithmetical structure (the “terza rima,” the division into three cantiche and a hundred cantos, numerical structurings in the fiction) as well as by a number of strictly impenetrable elements of content, from the Holy Trinity itself down to the details of the “Greyhound” prophecy, which form (according to Beatrice) an “enigma” that is entirely beyond the reach of our thinking and will be solved only by the “facts” when they fi nally appear (Purg. 33.49–51).17 (Take note, I say that the level of truth is “represented”—I could have said “gestured at”—by these features of the text, not that it is “explained” or “articulated.”) This distinction between two fundamentally separate levels of textual operation is suggested at the very outset of the enterprise, where Dante says, referring to the difficulty of his task and to the depth of fear with which it is attended even now in the writing: Tant’ è amara che poco è più morte; ma per trattar del ben ch’i’ vi trovai, dirò de l’altre cose ch’i’ v’ho scorte. (Inf. 1.7–9) [So bitter is it that death is hardly more so; but in order to treat of the good that I found there, I shall tell of the other things that I perceived there.]

In at least one meaning of this passage, I take “the good” to mean the absolutely good, that which proceeds directly from God—what Cacciaguida calls “necessity” as opposed to “contingency” (Par. 17.37–42). Exactly this opposition produces the contrasting verbs trattare and dire—the absolutely good being an obviously suitable object for the former, as contingent “things” are for the latter18 —and may also lie behind Dante’s otherwise insufficiently motivated insistence to Can Grande (Opere 439) on the traditional separation of “forma tractatus” (mainly arithmetical structure) from “forma tractandi” (the working of logic and rhetoric from sentence to sentence). In more or less common parlance, the distinction is that between truth and accuracy. Statements by Beatrice, Statius, Thomas, and Bernard, for instance, not to mention Vergil, about the eternal realms, and about science, philosophy, and theology, are probably meant to be regarded as accurate. But they are not true in the sense that, for instance, the “arcana verba” Paul heard (but does not transmit) must be true. To belong to the level of truth—one could say the level of the absolute—by which the meaning of the Commedia is regulated, an element or feature of the text must utterly

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surpass the possibility of understanding. It must either (1), like the arithmetical conundrums, simply not have the form of an idea with which our understanding might come to grips, or else (2) be an idea that is either known (like the Trinity) or supposed (like the “Greyhound” prophecy) to lie entirely beyond the reach of human understanding. For anything that can conceivably be understood—which includes all of the presumably accurate statements I have alluded to—can also, by the same token, be misunderstood, and therefore belongs to the domain of hermeneutic indeterminacy, among those contingent meanings that are ultimately at the reader’s mercy. To the extent that this point is not recognized as following directly from the text’s overall hermeneutics, Dante calls it to our attention from another angle by showing a slippage between understanding and nonunderstanding in doctrinal passages. The Purgatorio—in which a questioning of the value of thought, knowledge, understanding is central—opens on the note of Vergil’s insistence that humans should be “content with the quia” (3.37), content to know that things are so without worrying about exactly how or why, and ends on the note of Beatrice’s rather scornful instruction to Dante, whom she considers incapable of understanding her: voglio anco, e se non scritto, almen dipinto, che ’l te ne porti dentro a te per quello che si reca il bordon di palma cinto. (33.76–78) [My will is that you carry it (what I have said) away with you, even if not written but at least depicted (meaning: even if you merely copy the words, without the understanding implied by “writing”), for the same reason that a pilgrim’s staff is brought back wound with palm.]

Behind these words lurks the recognition that no matter how authentic a statement of doctrine may appear in this poem, we never have any way of deciding whether, for us, it is truly “written” (with understanding) or merely “painted” or “traced,” whether our grasp of it constitutes anything more than mere mindless repetition. And then, in the Paradiso, even though Dante insists repeatedly that his powers of understanding and direct intuition had been greatly increased in Heaven,19 and even though he claims early on to have understood “clearly” how all Heaven is equally paradise despite gradations in the apportionment of “highest good” (Par. 3.88–90), and even though he seems entirely satisfied by Thomas’s rather complicated explanation of how Solomon can

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be considered peerless in wisdom (Par. 13.46–108): still, after receiving a similarly complicated (and in fact similarly structured) explanation of why God’s judgment on the virtuous heathen should not be questioned (Par. 19.40–90), he is told by the eagle of Jupiter: Quali son le mie note a te, che non le ’ntendi, tal è il guidicio etterno a voi mortali. (97–99) [As my “notes” (considered as song, but also as speech) are to you, who do not understand them, so is eternal judgment to all you mortals.]

Dante is thus informed that he can understand the “notes” of theological doctrine (recall the “note” of the Commedia itself in the Geryon episode) only by way of a prior and continuing failure to understand. Where does this leave us, and our understanding of the doctrine we receive as readers? There is, fi nally, a passage in the Purgatorio where the contingency of all understanding appears with unsurpassed clarity. After the earthquake in Canto 20 (127–29), Dante is tormented by a greater thirst for knowledge, concerning the origin of the quake, than he can recall ever having experienced (145–48). But after he has had this thirst satisfied by Statius in the next canto, he says: Così ne disse; e però ch’el si gode tanto del ber quant’ è grande la sete, non saprei dir quant’ el mi fece prode. (21.73–75) [Thus he spoke of it; and because one’s enjoyment in drinking is proportional to how thirsty one had been, I would not be able to say how much actual profit I received from his words.]

Understanding, as Dante emphasizes in this canto, unquestionably gives us pleasure. But if you think you understand something, then precisely the pleasure that this thought gives you makes you an interested party, thus clouds your judgment, and so calls your actual understanding into question. We have, in other words, in any particular case, absolutely no way of judging whether we in fact understand what we think we do— even when the object is as apparently simple as the cause of the earthquakes in Purgatory. Thus, incidentally, Dante’s position with respect to Iser’s or Henry James’s idea of novel-reading is clarified. For in Iser’s theory, where the

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needful regulation of meaning must occur somehow at the level of The Reader’s imagining mind, it follows that pleasure and understanding, for The Reader, far from being opposed, are each a guarantee of the other. We understand the text (that theory implies) exactly to the extent that we recognize pleasurably what is touted as a significant extension of our experiential range, James’s “miraculous enlargement of experience.”20 Dante, sensibly enough, would fail to see how pleasure—especially the inward, self-derived pleasure of Iser or Poulet or James—can ever be considered a regulating force, and accordingly reserves the regulation of meaning for God alone. Therefore Dante’s reader, or the reader Dante wants us to be, is not a “reader for thrills” but a “reader for art,” whose ambition, in the thoroughly contingent setting in which he or she operates, must be to participate not in the experience but in the creation of meaning, a creation which at the level of our activity in reading is free and unregulated. Does this imply that Dante is not, after all, the inventor of a novel reader—that his reader and Iser’s are simply two different constructs? Not at all. In the fi rst place, if Dante’s reader were similar to Iser’s reader in being a reader for thrills, then, as I argue in Chapter 1, he or she would have to be regarded as a strictly theoretical construct—since the presupposed quality of reading as experience cannot be found in reality—whereas the reality of the reader for art, either in Dante’s time or in ours, poses no such problem. And where shall the idea of constructing a reader theoretically have come from, if not, at some point, from the observation of real readers? How else would we orient our theoretical endeavor? At some point in its genesis, The Modern Reader has to have been extrapolated theoretically, as reader for thrills, from a real instance of reading, an instance such as the reader for art, who is as real—I speak here to fellow practitioners of literary criticism—as you and I are. And in the second place, it is easy to understand the historical transition by which Dante’s reader becomes (is not simply replaced by) Iser’s Reader. Noakes in fact credits Iser himself with this understanding. “Dante’s solution [to the question of reading],” she says, “would not suit later writers” (67). And in a footnote to this sentence, she adds, “Relevant here is the gradual crumbling of the certitudo salutis, which, Wolfgang Iser shows, has considerable impact on literature.” I am not sure that I give Iser as much credit here as Noakes does; 21 but it is true that divine truth or certainty is less available as a guarantee of meaning in the age of modern literature than it was for Dante.

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The Contingent Individual In Cantos 15, 16, and 17 of the Paradiso, Dante converses with the spirit of his great-great-grandfather Cacciaguida, who is his source for the allimportant distinction between contingency and necessity (Par. 17.37–42) without which there would be no room for free will to operate. The occasion for this philosophical question, however, is Dante’s need to know more about the hard fate that has been prophesied for him (17.13–27)—a fate which, being mere “contingency,” cannot be expected to interest those blessed spirits who are not personally connected with it, as Cacciaguida is by blood. Cacciaguida does expand on the earlier prophecies and concludes by advising Dante to make public his song regardless of who might be offended by it: Ché se la voce tua sarà molesta nel primo gusto, vital nodrimento lascerà poi, quando sarà digesta. Questo tuo grido farà come vento, che le più alte cime più percuote; e ciò non fa d’onor poco argomento. Però ti son mostrate in queste rote, nel monte e ne la valle dolorosa pur l’anime che son di fama note, che l’animo di quel ch’ode, non posa né ferma fede per essempro ch’aia la sua radice incognita e ascosa, né per altro argomento che non paia. (17.130–42) [For if your voice is bitter at fi rst tasting, still it shall afterward bring vital nourishment when it is digested. This cry of yours shall do as the wind does, which strikes hardest at the highest summits, and this makes no small argument in its honor. Therefore in these wheels and on the mountain and in the doleful valley, only souls noted by fame have been shown to you, for the soul of the listener will neither be settled nor fi x its faith by examples that have unknown or obscure roots or by other arguments that make no impression.]

Obviously this is a passage of great importance, for it justifies Dante’s whole project as a historical initiative. Which makes the false statement of fact at its climax all the more striking. In fact, not all the people shown to (or by) Dante in the poem are

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“noted by fame,” and one example of the showing of relatively obscure people is Cacciaguida himself! 22 Two questions arise. What does Dante mean to say by including a manifestly false statement about his poem at a key point in the poem itself? And why does he resort to this obscure method of saying it? The fi rst question is not difficult. By having Cacciaguida make that false statement, Dante raises for us the question of what is, in reality, the principle according to which departed spirits are chosen to be exhibited in the poem. And once this question is raised, its answer is fairly trivial. Every person in the poem is a person who happens to be known to the poem’s writer. This group of course includes many people who are known universally, thus famous; but it also includes people like the poet’s great-greatgrandfather and the sister of one of the poet’s best friends, people who could not possibly be there if the poet were not the particular individual he happens to be—contingently. “The personnel of the Commedia,” that is, precisely by not being structured in a manner that might be reduced to system or necessity, precisely by thus reflecting in content nothing but the particularity of the poet as a contingent individual, are a single huge image of the contingent aspect of the poem’s meaning, of that area of meaning which is exposed to the arbitrary judgment and manipulation of the contingent individual who happens to be reading. I think we must part company here with Curtius, who says Dante scholarship would be performing a useful task if it would re-examine this summary classification of Dante’s personnel [according to areas of historical, geographical, and mythical origin] and work it out in detail. This preliminary work once done, artistic and technical analysis could begin, and give us answers to the questions: How did Dante control and classify this extensive personnel? Can various stylistic phases be distinguished in this respect? 23

The main effect of Cacciaguida’s misstatement of fact is to establish precisely that Dante did not—and as a contingent individual, could not— “control and classify” how the world, even (or especially) the eternal world, disclosed itself to him personally. But then why does Dante not simply say that the identities of the people he encounters on his journey are conditioned by who he happens to be and what he happens to know? The trouble with such a statement is that, in making it, Dante would be taking his own personal contingency as the instance of a general theorem about contingency (the theorem that

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my knowledge of particular things can never escape contamination by my particular situation). Thus he would be pretending to exercise control (theoretical mastery) over the contingent aspect of his being after all; he would be speaking, as it were, with a voice that by rights he cannot claim as his own. Another point in the poem where Dante places himself in a similarly complicated position is where Beatrice calls him by name (Purg. 30.55). Our attention would probably be caught here anyway, but it is caught all the more because Dante not only mentions his name, but then also excuses himself for having done so: “quando mi volsi al suon del nome mio, / che di necessità qui si registra [when I turned at the sound of my name, which of necessity is recorded here]” (30.62–63). And as with Cacciaguida’s misstatement, this passage is more important for the questions it raises than for what it actually says. First, why does Dante feel it is necessary to excuse the mention of his name? And second, if he needs to excuse it, why did he do it in the first place? He could just as easily have said “Beatrice called me by name.” Or he could simply have let Beatrice say something else. This is after all, and is known to be, a work of fiction. In answer to the fi rst question, commentators never fail to cite chapter 2 of book 1 of the Convivio, where Dante says that rhetorical authorities prohibit one’s talking about oneself without “necessary reason,” because one cannot speak of someone without either praising or blaming, and both praise and blame “make an unsophisticated impression in someone’s mouth when talking about himself ” (Opere 149). But this is not the half of it. In the same chapter, Dante goes on to argue logically that selfpraise and self-blame are not only unsophisticated but always necessarily dishonest (since one cannot mean exactly what one is saying) and in fact false (since one cannot truly know oneself ) (149–150). And this reasoning is of considerable importance for the Commedia because Dante, after all, has been talking about himself throughout the poem. The passage where his name is stated is only the place where this fact is most clearly acknowledged.24 Unlike Paul, Dante comes out and says: it is I, Dante, who am being talked about here. Thus, if the reasoning of the Convivio holds, he is acknowledging that we readers have perfectly good grounds, if we choose, to dismiss his whole project as dishonest and false—a point that recalls the discussion of Geryon above. Not only the fi rst, therefore, but also the second of our questions is answered, except that we still have to understand fully why Dante insists so strongly upon exposing himself to the charge of fraud.

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But there is also a terminological joke in his excuse for naming himself. He says he does it “di necessità,” (of necessity), meaning that since Beatrice pronounced the word, he had no choice but to record it. (Never mind that there is plenty of speech in the poem that Dante does not record—for example, Inf. 4.103–5; 21.1–3; Purg. 22.127–29; 24.1–3; Par. 9.1–6—and one point in the Purgatorio [8.7–9] where he simply stops listening to Sordello.) But the word necessity calls to mind the opposition between necessity and contingency and so profi les the fact that in the very process of invoking necessity, Dante has actually abandoned the strictly formal and as such necessary position of his book’s “immediate cause”—its agens, in the terminology of the letter to Can Grande (Opere 438, 440)—and has put himself forward as a strictly real and as such contingent (non-necessary) individual. Why he should want to do this, moreover, can be understood in part from what has already been said about hermeneutics. If Dante’s contingency remained hidden within the formal operation of authorship (of the agens), then a fundamental difference in category between himself and his reader would be suggested. By becoming himself a wholly contingent individual—or by setting the seal, with his name, on his becoming such—Dante places himself on a level with the contingent individual who happens to be reading and so validates that reader’s position as a legitimate participant in the production of the poem’s meaning. That this is in fact Dante’s aim is also apparent from the relation between what we might call the poem’s two “why me?” cantos. The first is Inferno 2, where Dante asks Vergil (31–33) why precisely he, Dante, who lacks the obvious qualifications of Aeneas and Paul, should undertake to visit the abodes of the dead while still living. Vergil does not give him a real answer; instead he gives him, to put it perhaps uncharitably, a runaround. The canto is composed of practically nothing but acts of quotation, which means avoidances of responsibility. First Dante quotes himself, in an attitude of laudable modesty. Then he quotes Vergil (43), who answers him by quoting first Beatrice (58), then his own answer to her (76), and then Beatrice again (85), who now for her part, apparently on the authority of Lucia (who is thus quoted by implication), quotes the Virgin Mary (98) and then quotes Lucia’s ensuing message (103), which had occasioned her seeking out Vergil. Vergil now finishes his presentation (115), and Dante concludes the canto by quoting himself once again (133), now in an attitude of laudable resolve. The question of Dante’s specific qualifications for his journey, the question “why Dante?” gets lost in the shuffle.

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Then, later, an exactly similar question is not answered in Paradiso 21, where Dante twice asks Peter Damiani (55–57, 71–78) why precisely he, Peter, and not one of the other blessed spirits in his cohort, had been singled out for the present conversation. And although this question seems simple enough—it is the question Curtius wants “Dante scholarship” to ask, and we would have no trouble answering parallel questions about, say, Vergil, Beatrice, Forese, Thomas Aquinas, Cacciaguida—for Peter it turns out not to be simple at all. After explaining how supernally clear his own vision is, he continues: Ma quell’ alma nel ciel che più si schiara, quel serafi n che ’n Dio più l’occhio ha fisso, a la dimanda tua non satisfara, però che sì s’innoltra ne lo abisso de l’etterno statuto quel che chiedi, che da ogne creata vista è scisso. (Par. 21.91–96) [But that soul in heaven who is most illuminated (meaning the Virgin Mary?),25 that Seraph who has his eye most fi xed on God, would not be able to answer your question because what you ask is so deep inside the abyss of eternal law that it is cut off from all created vision.]

Needless to say, the lofty solemnity of this response seems out of all proportion to any philosophical or theological significance the specific question might possess. What is being stressed here, I think—as in Inferno 2—is the strict imponderability of the undoubtedly existing relation (Par. 17.37–39) between necessity and contingency. If that relation were not strictly imponderable, then contingency simply could not happen, because its necessity (its logical, hence necessary relation to the necessary) could always be established. But if the question of why precisely Dante should have been chosen for the poem’s vision is so obviously important that it has to be dealt with, or at least brushed aside, right at the beginning, what is there about Peter Damiani that makes his appearance such a mystery? The question in this form, of course, is precisely the question that Peter insists not even the Virgin Mary could answer. But what we can understand are the implications of the relation between Peter’s contingency and Dante’s own. Inferno 2 shows the impossibility of understanding why just Dante is the poem’s author. Paradiso 21 shows the impossibility of understanding why one particular individual should happen to encounter Dante at

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one particular point. And this last question could also be asked by every reader about his or her own encounter with the text. The question of why precisely I should be reading, here and now, is as deeply buried in the “abyss” of the divine as the question of why precisely Dante should have written. The text is thus presented to us not as an authority—auctoritas being a quality it lacks in the medieval view anyway—but as a kind of stage for the radically accidental interaction (and perhaps cooperation) between me, as a contingent individual, and the specific contingent individual Dante. As Dante’s reader, I am thus again denied the possibility of thinking of myself as The Reader. But this move on Dante’s part by no means disconnects him from the history of novel reading; in fact it is a subversive move that is later repeated in any number of actual novels—in Tristram Shandy, for instance, where the (we are told) interpretively significant marbled page, which is different in every copy, casts doubt even upon the notion of “the” book.

Pilgrim, Poet, Reader, Re-reader Dante’s reader is never freed (as Poulet wishes to be) from the condition of being the particular contingent individual he or she had been before reading. Yet there is still a specific structure in that reader’s activity. Francis Fergusson, in his study of the Purgatorio, says Dante writes the poem as the record of a journey which he once took and now remembers. He writes in the fi rst person; and yet the distinction between Dante speaking as the author, and Dante the Pilgrim, is fundamental to the whole structure. The author, when he reminds us of his existence, is outside the fictive world of the poem; the Pilgrim is the protagonist of the drama, the center of each scene. . . . The two perspectives together produce a sort of stereoptical effect, that of an objective and partially mysterious reality. . . . The Pilgrim’s awareness is always moving toward the author’s.26

The basic perception here—that in the Commedia the author’s presence is felt more strongly in his fiction than a storyteller’s normally is, and that it creates a pattern of “shifting tensions” with the supposedly past self that is involved in the action—is very fi ne, and lacks only the recognition that such tensions could not possibly arise if the identity of the remembering with the remembered self were not from the outset more strongly

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operative than is customary in fi rst-person narrative—if the distance of storytelling were not constantly in danger of disappearing. This quality of the poem is insisted upon very early, in the second tercet. Ahi quanto a dir qual era è cosa dura esta selva selvaggia e aspra e forte che nel pensier rinova la paura! (Inf. 1.4–6) [Oh how difficult a thing it is to say what a desolate, tangled, impenetrable wood this was, so much so that my fear is renewed in thinking of it.]

Past fear is repeated in present fear, past difficulty (escaping the wood) in present difficulty (describing it); and the adjective (selvaggia) that follows and is attached to the noun (selva), as the writing of the poem presumably follows and is attached to the pilgrim’s experience, turns out to be the noun all over again in etymology. We are barely six lines into our reading, and the obvious distinction between the writing of the poem and what that writing describes—between agens and subiectum (Opere 438)—has been called fundamentally into question. Of course the poem is in the fi rst person grammatically, so the identity of author and subject is assumed. But Dante goes far beyond this assumable identity and suggests a time-transcending identity of the “then” with the “now,” of the remembered self with the present writing self, which suggests in turn that the poem, in the final analysis, is about its own writing, by way of the mask of the fictional pilgrim. This possibility is underscored in the fi rst line of the above tercet, where Dante arranges the syntax so the sequence “era è” (was is) occurs, which pictures a kind of equivalence of the past and present tenses of the verb “to be.” Or let us consider the opening of the second canto: Lo giorno se n’andava, e l’aere bruno toglieva li animai che sono in terra da le fatiche loro; e io sol uno m’apparecchiava a sostener la guerra sì del cammino e sì de la pietate, che ritrarrà la mente che non erra. (Inf. 2.1–6) [The day was departing, and the brown air was liberating the animals that live on earth from their labors; and I, one person alone, was getting ready to support the war of both journey and pity that memory, which does not err, will reproduce.]

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The difference between pilgrim and poet is the difference between past tense and present. When the fi rst-person narrator speaks in the present tense (except in quotations), he is speaking as the poet; when he uses the past, he is speaking of the pilgrim. Therefore we infer that the above lines (except line 6) refer to what the pilgrim is doing. But at this point in the poem, the pilgrim is not alone, not “sol uno.” The whole of the preceding canto had positioned him as following Vergil: “Allor si mosse, e io li tenni dietro [then he moved off, and I followed behind him]” (Inf. 1.136). Therefore it must occur to us that the poet here is not speaking about the pilgrim after all, but is recalling the moments of dark solitude when he (as his real self ) had fi rst got ready to undertake his huge poetic task. Thus we have a case that confuses the situation completely by showing a past-tense reference to the poet. Yet precisely in this canto, where Dante questions his own qualifications for being the poet of his journey, the image of the solitary poet at his desk, as night falls, steeling himself for the task, is perfectly natural. The mask of the pilgrim, at this point, is especially transparent. To put it bluntly, it ought to be evident to a reader, by the time he or she has read the second canto, that in this poem Dante is not recollecting a vision he had experienced at some point in the past, but rather describing a vision that takes its substance from the act of his writing it; it should be evident that the unfolding of the fiction is a mask for the unfolding of the poem’s language. Or at least it should be understood that this possibility lurks constantly behind the ostensible story. These considerations support Fergusson’s comment that the pilgrim’s “awareness” and the author’s tend to merge as the poem goes on. For once we understand that the story is not dismissible as a past vision, it seems we have to assume that the writing— which many of the story’s characters refer to as a future event—is located in the very same world as the story, which means we should be able to imagine how Dante returns to his normal existence after the trip through the eternal realms. And exactly such a return becomes steadily harder to imagine as the poem progresses. Dante may not yet actually have served all his time in Purgatory, but the P’s are still wiped from his forehead and he still drinks of Lethe and Eunoë at the end, the actual effects of Lethe being noted by Beatrice (Purg. 33.94–96). Can someone to whom this has happened return to everyday reality, or someone who has “changed” as Dante has even at the entrance to Purgatory (Purg. 9.67)—not to mention his constant self-overleapings in Paradise, beginning with his Ovidian transformation under the influence of Beatrice’s image (Par. 1.67–72)? And

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the harder it gets to imagine the writing as being done after the events it relates, the more clearly it is intimated, again, that the story and its writing are one and the same. It now follows—taking into account the hermeneutic situation in which each reader becomes a legitimate coproducer of meaning—that since reader and poet are thus joined at the level of the poem’s writing, and since the level of writing is now recognized as not distinct from the level of described experience, each reader is now understood to be as much involved in that experience as Dante himself. We recall Paradiso 2, where those readers who have learned to reach for the bread of angels are told metter potete ben per l’alto sale vostro navigio, servando mio solco dinanzi a l’acqua che ritorna equale. (13–15) [You may certainly commit your ship to the great salt sea, following my track ahead of the displaced water that is returning to its level.]

It is a question not of following Dante at a distance but of being right up there with him, inside his fast disappearing bow-wave, so to speak. Thus we are a step closer to understanding two crucial points: the manner in which a reader is meant to imagine his or her identification with Dante (as both poet and pilgrim) and the basic kinship between Dante’s procedure and that of the modern novelist who entices a reader into responding to the fiction as if it were his or her own experience. Does this mean that Dante’s reader is a reader for thrills after all? Only if that reader fails by merely “listening” to the story, and does not grasp, as part of identifying with Dante, Dante’s own identification of poet with pilgrim, which removes the separation between experience “itself ” (as the reader for thrills wants to isolate and enjoy it) and the act of mastering experience in art. A reader’s identification with Dante necessarily includes identification with Dante’s own duality—with the duality of poet and pilgrim. Thus a corresponding dual structure must be posited for that reader, and I call this structure the duality of reader and re-reader: the reader being that hypothetical person who is somehow totally immersed in the text, at its mercy (as the pilgrim is confi ned inside the fiction), whereas the re-reader is that same person in the act of coming to grips with the text reflectively (as the poet does with the fiction). As with that of pilgrim and poet, however, this second duality only masks an underlying identity—is anyone ever really

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at the mercy of a text?—and if the identity of reader and re-reader can be established for Dante’s reader, along with the cognate identity of reading and re-reading, then we shall have uncovered a rather surprising consonance between Dante and the remarks of Stanley Corngold on the novel that were discussed two chapters ago. In fact, Dante himself gives us the identity of reading and re-reading, as he gives us much of his thought, in the form of a riddle. After the pilgrim (who is here even more obviously than elsewhere one with the poet) has been accepted as a “sixth” among the poets in Limbo, we read: Così andammo infi no a la lumera, parlando cose che ’l tacere è bello, sì com’ era ’l parlar colà dov’ era. (Inf. 4.103–5) [Thus we went on toward the light, speaking things of which it is as beautiful to be silent now as it was to speak them in the place where I was.]

What “things” were the poets speaking? This is a riddle, and it can be solved. First, since the six men have in common only that they are poets, they must be talking shop. Second, since Dante says it is not a good idea to let a reader in on the discussion, the “things” discussed must in some way concern precisely a reader. Therefore what the poets are talking about is the manner in which poetry influences or manipulates its reader. They are talking about poetry as rhetoric, as an art of persuasion; and if a reader were let in on their devices, that reader would of course no longer be persuaded by them. The reader, with respect to this view of poetry, is simply the reader as a manipulable object, not the re-reader. But Dante’s riddle is therefore solvable; and once we solve it, we are in the position of knowing ourselves to be objects of manipulation, which is the position of a reader who reflects on reading, or a re-reader, who is no longer a mere object. Thus the whole passage stresses the identity or indistinguishability of reading and re-reading. We are obviously meant to solve the riddle, which means that in doing so we are being manipulated, or being readers, hence that we become re-readers (puzzle solvers, knowers of the secret) in the very act of being readers. In any case, there is a similar instance later, with Vergil and Statius, where Dante declines to give the details of a discourse on poetry (Purg. 22.127–29). One could argue, in fact, that it is the nature of the riddle as a form to leap the boundary between reader and re-reader because it requires us (as obedient readers) to reflect upon it more or less creatively (as re-readers).

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Distance and Involvement One must not jump to the conclusion, however, that re-reading implies an increased distance of objectivity from the text. The distinction in Paradiso 2 between “ascoltar” and stretching for the “pan de li angeli” suggests exactly the opposite. Listening can be done from a distance, but the bread of angels is meant to be eaten—to be incorporated here and now into ourselves, metaphorically into our bodies. And in the large structure of the poem, the same suggestion is developed mainly in the Purgatorio, which repeatedly emphasizes involvement or participation as opposed to the distance of objective knowledge. Dante is now girt with a rush (“giunco” [1.102], in place of the “corda” that had spawned Geryon), which he describes as a “humble plant” (1.135); and Vergil interprets humility here as a willingness to accept the quia (3.37) rather than insist on knowledge as intellectual mastery. This theme is repeated in Vergil’s admonition against thinking too much (5.16–18) and in the injunction against looking back (9.131–32) once one has entered Purgatory proper. And then it is established very strongly in the episode of Statius’s mistranslation of Vergil. In Purgatorio 22, there are any number of things that disturb us when we try to consider them objectively—not the least of which, constantly in the background, is the question of where Dante can possibly have found the least shred of evidence that Statius had been a “secret Christian” (90). Then there is the question of Statius’s sin, prodigality, for which he had done penance among the avaricious (31–36). In itself this makes a certain amount of sense. But when Statius then generalizes (49–51) and says that every fault (colpa) that is diametrically opposed to a particular sin (peccato) must be expiated along with that sin, we immediately ask ourselves: are the diametrical opposites of carnality, gluttony, sloth, anger, envy, and pride really “faults”? But most outrageously wrong is Statius’s construction of a passage from Vergil: “quid non mortalia pectora cogis, / auri sacra fames! [to what extremes do you drive mortal hearts, o cursed hunger for gold!]” (Aeneid 3.56–57). Statius claims to have been rescued from his prodigality by reading these lines to mean “Perché non reggi tu, o sacra fame / de l’oro, l’appetito de’ mortali? [O sacred (in the sense of moderate?) hunger for gold, why do you not regulate the appetite of mortals?]” (40–41). His translation turns on the ambiguity of Latin sacer, which can mean either “sacred” or “cursed,” and upon a barely conceivable reading of cogere, “to compel.” But objectively speaking, given the context in Vergil, he is simply wrong.

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Or is he wrong? If Statius’s misreading has saved his soul, how can we possibly consider it wrong? Clearly we must put aside objectivity or distance here in favor of a form of committed involvement in the work of salvation. And this point is underscored later in the canto, where Statius says he had been directed specifically toward Christianity by reading, in Vergil’s so-called “Messianic eclogue”: “magnus ab integro saeclorum nascitur ordo. / iam redit et Virgo, redeunt Saturnia regna; / iam nova progenies caelo demittitur alto [the great line of centuries begins anew; now Justice returns and the realms of Saturn; now a new generation is sent forth from the height of heaven]” (Ecl. 4.5–7). Statius translates these lines more or less exactly (70–72), and interprets them (66–69) as an unwitting prophecy of Christ, an interpretation which, by Dante’s time, had become known and was accepted by practically everyone.27 But the parallel with the other passage that Statius has translated reminds us gently that there are no truly objective grounds for reading Vergil’s text as a prophecy of Christianity, hence that in this case we already have put aside objective knowledge in favor of the work of salvation, and that this putting aside, moreover, is a reflective act—an act on the part of the re-reader in us. That re-reading, or reflective reading, when practiced correctly, is a move of involvement or participation, not a movement of distancing, is also the burden of one of Dante’s riddles. At his last sunset before being taken into Purgatory proper, just before the angels come to protect the gathering of newly devout rulers from the serpent, Dante addresses his reader: Aguzza qui, lettor, ben li occhi al vero, ché ’l velo è ora ben tanto sottile, certo che ’l trapassar dentro è leggero. (Purg. 8.19–21) [Sharpen your eyes well here, reader, to the truth, for the veil is now so thin that to cross through it to the inside is certainly easy.]

These lines are usually taken to refer to the allegorical aspect of the angels; but it seems to me that especially the idea of crossing through the veil from the outside to the inside suggests a broader reference. In the preceding canto, Sordello had suggested to Dante that they remain at a distance on an elevated outcropping from which they might more easily survey and recognize the famous souls gathered below (Purg. 7.85–90). He then begins to enumerate those souls until Dante, at one point, simply stops listening, his attention having been caught by the devotion of one (unnamed!) soul in the crowd (8.7–12). What had been

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of primary importance in hell—learning who is there and maintaining one’s higher position—has it seems now become simply tedious in Purgatory. These are a new class of souls, and Dante is drawn toward them in a movement that is of course accelerated by Sordello’s mention of the serpent (8.39); and now Sordello too wishes to join the protected crowd (there is a nice irony here) of “grandi ombre” (great shades; 8.44). This, then, is the truth to which the “reader” must “pass inward” through the veil of allegory: that the maintenance of objective distance as a reader (the elevated perspective) only exposes one to temptation (the serpent), and that to fi nd truth in reading, one must instead “pass inward,” in the sense of uniting oneself—as an individual subject to contingency but nonetheless committed to the work of salvation—with the substance of what would otherwise have been an empty, merely objectively informative text. But what exactly are we meant to understand by re-reading as involvement with the text? There are of course limits on how “exact” our understanding can be if objectivity is out of the question. But still, an answer to the question is suggested by one of the most complicated moments in the Purgatorio, in a passage where reading is the central issue, the allegorical vision that Dante shares with Ezekiel and St. John the Divine. After already having begun to describe the four “animali” (Purg. 29.92), Dante suddenly appears to become impatient and says: A descriver lor forme più non spargo rime, lettor; ch’altra spesa mi strigne, tanto ch’a questa non posso esser largo; ma leggi Ezechïel, che li dipigne come li vide de la fredda parte venir con vento e con nube e con igne; e quali i troverai ne le sue carte, tali eran quivi, salvo ch’a le penne Giovanni è meco e da lui si diparte. (29.97–105) [To describe their forms I will spend no more rhymes, reader, for I am so constrained by other expenses that I cannot be liberal in this case; but read Ezekiel, who depicts them as he saw them coming from the cold region with wind and with cloud and with fi re. As you will fi nd them in his writing, so they were where I saw them, except that in the number of wings John is with me and departs from him.]

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It seems as if Dante were prepared to drop the fictional mask altogether and admit that what he has been passing off as personal experience (at least the experience of a vision) is really only the fruits of extensive reading. He does not actually make such an admission. But why does he insist on treading so close to the precipice? First, the idea of identification between ourselves and Dante is very strong here. Dante is comparing texts (Ezekiel and Revelation) and we for our part are invited to compare texts (Dante’s with the others). But if we make this comparison objectively, then the terms of our identification with Dante—our readerly imitation of the writer’s meaning—impute a comparable objectivity to Dante himself, which would unmask his pretended vision as a mere literate posture. The real trouble with this train of thought, however, is that once we have come this far, it is hard not to go the one obvious step further and ask whether perhaps John’s supposed vision on Patmos is not in truth a mere tinkered-with imitation of Ezekiel—especially since Dante speaks of the manner in which John “departs from” the Old Testament model. (The mechanism here would be analogy, A is to B as C is to D, which we have seen is important in Dante’s thinking.) And this suggestion is unacceptable, since it would cast doubt on the veracity of Scripture. Therefore we must go back to the beginning of the train of thought that led here and undo that beginning, which was our acceptance of the task of objectively comparing texts. But the only conceivable way for us to accomplish this undoing (since we are asked specifically to read Ezekiel and, by implication, Revelation) is to reject objectivity altogether, in all that reading, and simply accept the vision as a true vision. Or, to be more precise, we must simply have the vision. This idea of re-reading—as simply plunging into the text and living what it says—is itself far from exact. We are told nothing about how to “have the vision”—how to eat the book, as both Ezekiel (3:1–3) and John (Rev. 10:9–10) do, how to incorporate as immediate experience the text we are engaged with. But a failure to have the vision—thus a failure to authenticate, by hermeneutic identification, Dante’s vision—would be disastrous, for it would endanger perhaps not the veracity of Scripture itself, but certainly at least our relation to that veracity.

Dante and the Modern Novel If this idea of “having the vision” seems too questionable or difficult or tenuous to be critically or historically useful, it should be recalled that the

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widely accepted theory of reading that was discussed in earlier chapters posits an exactly similar realization of text as “experience” (Henry James’s word), except that in this modern version of the theory no act of reflection (no re-reading) is needed to achieve it. The engendering of something closely akin to personal experience, we are told, happens automatically, mysteriously, almost as soon as we open the book. (If Iser, for example, were pressed, he would probably concede that this happening of quasi-experience presupposes in the reader a certain amount of basic cultural conditioning; but he would certainly not concede that a specific reflective act on the reader’s part is required each time.) Poulet, when he speaks of “reading as I should,” is perhaps closer to Dante’s view. But still, I think he is talking about something one can train oneself (or be trained) to do habitually, not something one needs to think about anew in each instance. And as difficult as the idea of deliberately “having the vision” may be, it still seems to me a good deal more plausible than, say, Iser’s theory of reading, for two main reasons beyond the critique of reading theory I offered in Chapter 1. First, there is an inherent flaw in the idea that our quasiexperiential appropriation of textual material is governed by automatic or subliminal processes. What happens if the telephone rings while I am reading? When I fi nally get back to my novel, I must—to fi nd my place, as it were—repeat as conscious memories the subliminal operations by which my sense of the fiction had been in the process of shaping itself. And must those conscious memories, belonging as they do to a different category of inner experience, not also necessarily distort what they seek to repeat? As Dante’s reader, by contrast, I can live in reality, where interruptions happen. Even after, say, a violent argument with an unreasonably skeptical colleague, there is nothing to keep me from repeating exactly the reflective act I had been intending beforehand. In fact, as the example of Ezekiel and John the Divine shows, that act may even be part of my basic religious training, my understanding of the content and status of Scripture. The second point is one I have already touched on: Dante’s idea of a competent reader does not require that the necessary regulation of textual data, by which meaning arises, take place on the level of that reader’s thought or imagination or response. “Having the vision,” or having the experience, for Dante’s purposes, does not mean having the right experience or the same experience, which is what it does inevitably mean, at some level of analysis, for a Jamesian theory of novel reading. (Otherwise the text of the novel would cease to have any function; we might as well daydream.) For Dante, as he has Thomas Aquinas teach us, the regulation

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that constitutes meaning belongs only to God; and the production of text, which can never fully escape the charge of being fraudulent, is at its best an act of pious submission, our placing of ourselves, as writers and indeed as readers, in God’s hands. The experience or vision that one “has,” in this case, is subject to no specific constraints whatever, except perhaps theological ones—which explains in part why it is important to Dante that a reader, like a writer, be understood to retain undiminished his or her contingent individuality, hence unpredictability, in the process of communication. Whatever form of the vision works for you is the form you shall have—you will in a strong sense be its creator, as a reader for art—and is fully satisfactory as long as, in having it, you carry out the movement from “my” to “our” (see Purg. 14.86–87, 15.55–57; also Par. 19.10–12), from objective distance to committed participation, by which the lesson of Purgatory is learned, the lesson that is allegorized at the end of Purgatory in the passage through Lethe (loss of self as possessor) and Eunoë (regaining of self as participant). Dante’s notion of reading is still difficult and does not come with a user’s manual. But it is a great deal easier to understand the origin of that notion—to understand how it could be built out of religious ideas and related to the practice of actual readers, readers for art—than it is to understand the origin of the Jamesian or Iserian idea of novel reading. Unless of course the origin of the latter is explained precisely by the continuing influence of the former. Unless Dante, by suggesting that reading could and should become a realization of text as the immediate experience of its content, unwittingly invented the novel reader—even though The Novel Reader, when he and she finally arrive, takes a form (as reader for thrills) that Dante could have neither comprehended nor condoned. It is true that the mere showing of similarities or resonances is not enough to prove this claim; and it is also true that to exhibit in detail the process by which Dante’s idea of reading survives and evolves into the eighteenth century would fi ll up a good deal more than just the present book. But in subsequent chapters I will try to show a couple of cases that make the larger historical claim at least plausible.

The Two Rivers For the time being, let us go back to the allegory of Lethe and Eunoë. For James or Poulet or Iser, I think, Lethe would be enough. The Reader’s task is, as far as possible, to put aside (in a kind of forgetfulness) the details of

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his or her own individuality and become the empty vessel in which a new subjectivity and a widened horizon of experience might be concocted. The operation of Lethe alone, to the extent that one can separate it, is not all that different in the Commedia. Practically the whole space between Dante’s drinking of Lethe (Purg. 31.102) and his drinking of Eunoë at the very end of the Purgatorio is taken up by an enormously elaborate and obscure allegory of the history of the Church and of the relation between Church and state, an allegory for which Dante functions mainly as the passive vessel, being ordered several times by Beatrice simply to write down what he sees, whether he understands it or not (32.103–5; 33.55–57, 73–78). In fact, except for his rigid attentiveness to Beatrice, Dante often seems confused and distracted. To see the allegory at all, he has to be jolted out of his staring at Beatrice by the words “Troppo fi so!” (too fi xedly; 32.9). He hears a hymn that he does not understand and of which the melody bewilders him so completely that he falls into a sleep (32.61–69) from which he awakens thoroughly disoriented, “tutto in dubbio” (32.85), until he can fi x his eyes on Beatrice again. A while later, Beatrice reproaches him for talking like “one who is dreaming” (33.33); and he for his part admits that his mind cannot keep pace with her speaking (33.82–84). Some of what he does not understand, it is true, has to do with Lethe’s erasing the memory of sin (33.91–96). But Matelda points out (33.121–23) that this does not explain his confusing Lethe and Eunoë with Euphrates and Tigris (33.112–17). Dante thus appears entirely passive and at the mercy of circumstances here. (The only actual part he plays in the allegorical action is almost a comical one, when the Great Whore of Revelation 17:5 apparently gets ideas about him [32.154–55].) And this, I think, ought to disturb us significantly when we recall Vergil’s benediction at the end of Purgatorio 27: Non aspettar mio dir più né mio cenno; libero, dritto e sano è tuo arbitrio, e fallo fora non fare a suo senno: per ch’io te sovra te corono e mitrio. (139–42) [Do not expect my speech or my sign any longer. Your will (arbitrio) is free, upright and healthy, and it would now be an error not to act as that will sees fit, for which reason I now crown and miter you over yourself.]

Precisely this “arbitrio”—which names the human faculty of selfgovernment, a faculty compounded of what we would probably call today

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will and judgment (see Purg. 16.71, 18.61–75)—is what we fi nd very strongly lacking in Dante after he drinks of Lethe but before he drinks of Eunoë. It is as if the poet were mocking, in anticipation, the condition of The Novel Reader. We will have occasion, in subsequent chapters, to note that exactly this critique of the reader for thrills—that such a reader suppresses, or allows to be suppressed, the qualities of will and judgment—recurs very clearly at later stages in the prehistory of modern novel reading. But to return to Dante, we must now understand that Matelda’s explanation of Lethe and Eunoë is misleading (Purg. 28.127–29).28 (It is another example of how no doctrinal statement in the Commedia, no matter who speaks it, can be regarded as strictly true in some particular sense.) Lethe apparently does erase the memory of sin, but Eunoë in some manner restores the whole person, not only the memory of good deeds. This is emphasized in the sphere of Venus, where fi rst Cunizza (Par. 9.34–36) and then Folco (9.103–5) recall perfectly well their sexual adventures, yet recall them not as sin but as an occasion for joy and veneration of the divine valore. The case of Folco is especially interesting because he is a poet as well as a bishop, and because his words suggest very clearly the two-step process of reading. Of his station in heaven he says, “e questo cielo / di me s’imprenta, com’ io fe’ di lui [and this heaven is now stamped by me, as I was stamped by it]” (9.95–96). We think immediately of “ascoltar” and reaching for the “pan de li angeli,” or of reading and re-reading. One is fi rst marked or stamped by the text in that one listens to it; but the process of reading is not complete until one has oneself in turn stamped the text with one’s own free arbitrio—with the positive reflective act that I have called “having the vision.” (Folco is stamped by the sphere of Venus because he is driven to be a lover; but he then gathers up his loving nature into a positive act of will and now himself stamps that sphere in turn.) And these two steps—which are in truth only one step, the single act that is both reading and re-reading, just as pilgrim and poet are one person—are represented and, for the sake of conceptual clarity, separated in the allegory of Lethe and Eunoë, which do not really work, Matelda says, until both have been tasted (Purg. 28.131–32). Lethe is the forgetfulness of self in the sense that self impedes that perfect love that increases by being shared (Purg. 15.64–75). Eunoë is the self-reconstituting act of a reconstituted arbitrio, a direct incorporation of the bread of angels into one’s very self; it is, for a reader, the affirmative reassertion of the self in an act of participation—the eating of the book, the process of “having the vision.”

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But where in the Commedia do we observe the effects of Eunoë upon Dante? Exactly where we would expect to: in the opening lines of the Paradiso, except that we observe those effects not in the pilgrim but in the poet. How, in any case, could the effects of a newly reconstituted arbitrio be shown in the pilgrim? Statements in the past tense—“I (Dante as pilgrim) was,” “I did,” “I felt”—would fail because arbitrio is a radically present faculty. In the Inferno it is spoken of as “the good of the intellect” (3.18)—of which “Eunoë,” incidentally, is not a bad Greek translation—and the sign of its loss, as Farinata tells us, is that the damned souls have knowledge of all time except the present (Inf. 10.100–105). But poet and pilgrim are one—as we have known at least since the naming of “Dante”—and therefore we recognize the effect of Eunoë when we hear the poet assert, as not even Paul had dared before him: “Nel ciel che più de la sua luce prende / fu’ io [In the heaven that receives most of God’s light was I]” (Par. 1.4–5); and when he says that he will pass on to his readers whatever he possibly can, “quant’ io del regno santo / ne la mia mente potei far tesoro” (1.10–11), without Paul’s worry about whether such repetition is “lawful.” It is the effect of Eunoë that we hear in Dante’s invocation of Apollo: Entra nel petto mio, e spira tue sì come quando Marsïa traesti de la vagina de le membra sue. (Par. 1.19–21) [Enter my breast and breathe yourself forth as when you pulled Marsyas out of the sheath of his limbs.]

The language is a bit obscure here, with good reason. For by comparing himself to Marsyas, Dante affi rms that his poetic self-assertion is so unqualified as to be open to the charge of arrogance, and suggests that even the punishment for such arrogance (if it came) would serve his purpose by being the god’s own self-expression through him. It is the effect of Eunoë, fi nally, when, after expressing the desire to crown himself with the laurel (Par. 1.25–27)—we recall Vergil’s “crowning” him earlier—Dante goes on to address (apparently) Apollo as “father” (1.28) and suggests that his mere desire for the laurel, in these degenerate times, must be a source of joy to the god. Then he concludes Poca favilla gran fiamma seconda: forse di retro a me con miglior voci si pregherà perché Cirra risponda. (1.34–36)

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[A small spark produces a great fl ame: perhaps, after me, people will pray with better voices, so that Cirrha (a place sacred to Apollo) 29 responds.]

Dante can hardly be suggesting that in future, following his example, people will pray better to Apollo. The concept of prayer here has to refer to Christian prayer; and this draws our attention back to the epithet “father,” which is not typical for Apollo, who is generally depicted as beardless, but is of course what the God of the Christians is called. The passage is thus made to hover between pagan and Christian meaning, where it implies: after me (in my wake, to recall the ship image) Christians may learn to pray in poetic form (with “better voices”), so that my work may be considered the original invention of a poetic (Apollonian) art suitable for Christianity, thus the achievement of Christianity’s full equality with pagan antiquity, an achievement not yet even imagined by such earlier Christian pioneers as Paul. Or if the word “father” is taken to refer to Apollo after all, then the allusion almost has to be to book 2 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, where Phaethon begs his father, the sun god, to acknowledge him (Ovid, 2.19–39), and where Ovid identifies the sun god with “Phoebus” (2.24, 36) who is Apollo. Thus Dante identifies himself with Phaethon, another example, like Marsyas, of outrageous arrogance. And as with Dante-Marsyas, Phaethon’s punishment in a sense constitutes the acknowledgment he had begged for. In any case, this is no longer the passive Dante of the last moments in Purgatory, but a resolutely, not to say recklessly assertive, Dante, prepared to take the greatest conceivable risk for the sake of his mission as he sees it. That mission is the foundation of a truly Christian poetry by way—I think we have come far enough to conclude—of a system of parallels involving the process of the poem’s unfolding, the process represented in its content, and the process of reading.

Judgment on Dante At least two questions remain. First, exactly what is the risk, in practical terms, that Dante imagines himself taking as the writer of his poem? And second, how does Dante contrive to position his reader so that that indispensable quality of reading as process is foregrounded for him or her? We, for our part, have long been accustomed to reading novels and to being told what it means to read a novel; it is easy for us to understand how our reading of the Commedia is focused upon its own quality as process

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rather than upon what we supposedly receive by way of that process. The allegory of Lethe and Eunoë, or the idea of “having the vision,” describes what must happen in every moment of our reading, so that the overall content of the poem—the movement, as it were, from miseria to felicitas, from a condition of acquisitive self hood (the listener’s attitude) to a condition of unreserved participation (having the vision, eating the bread of angels)—constantly reflects back at us the process of reading in which we are engaged (as the identity of pilgrim and poet reflects that of reader and re-reader) and focuses our attention on that process. But how is this selfreflecting movement initiated for Dante’s reader, for a reader not already predisposed to it by the habit of reading novels? I think these two questions share a single answer, which has to do with judgments that we are invited to make about Dante and his poetic project. If we are honest in our reading, then on the basis of the evidence available to us in the poem as a poem, not in the contrived world of the fiction, have we any choice but to pronounce the work fundamentally fraudulent, perhaps heretical, possibly even blasphemous? We saw that Dante’s hermeneutics requires that his poem actually (not just hypothetically) be open to the imputation of fraud or dishonesty. The poet’s enactment of the effects of Eunoë, which ought to be a model for how a reader must take the last step of incorporating the vision, not only exposes him to the charge of arrogance, but also suggests an invidious comparison with Paul which could be construed as challenging the authority of Scripture. And what of the movement from “my” to “our”—the lesson of Purgatory? How is it consistent with Dante’s use of the first-person singular, his insistence that all the factual material in the poem is known to him from immediate experience and is therefore unchallengeable? The poem begins, many commentators remind us, in the middle of the journey of “our” life (Inf. 1.1). But in the last hundred lines (Par. 33.46–145) of the poem, the firstperson plural is absent and there are close to fi fty instances (depending on how one counts) of the grammatical first-person singular, which is no mean feat considering how many of the tercets are taken up completely with extended similes in which the first person is not a possibility. Is this not a reverse movement, from “our” to “my”? Our attention is repeatedly drawn to bases for a negative judgment. The curiously ceremonious opening of Inferno 20, by interrupting the narrative flow, invites us to pause and reflect upon the poem’s situation and ours. Dante has just delivered to Pope Nicholas III an anti-simonist rebuke (19.90–117) so militantly righteous that he himself thinks he may have

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been a bit foolish, “troppo folle” (19.88), in speaking it; but Vergil is so pleased with him that he lifts him bodily and carries him to the “colmo de l’arco [the high point of the arch]” (19.128) over the next chasm, which is the fourth of Malebolge. In book 4, chapter 23 of the Convivio, however, Dante repeatedly refers to the course of human life as an “arco” (Opere 297–98), “bridge, arch, arc, bow.”30 And it is here that he insists that age thirty-five is the arch’s high point, adducing as evidence a somewhat shaky demonstration that the “colmo” or climax of Jesus’ life—his passion— came in his thirty-fi fth year (298). Therefore, when he uses in the Commedia the same term “colmo” to designate the middle of the fourth arch (suggesting the middle of the fourth decade of life), we recognize that he is placing the pilgrim symbolically at the starting point of his vision, “Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita” (Inf. 1.1). And what does Dante, fortified with Vergil’s approval of his righteousness, see from that fourth arch? He sees the diviners, the soothsayers, the people who claim to receive knowledge through channels beyond nature. He sees, that is, an image of his own claim to have seen what is hidden from other mortals, an image of his own damnably arrogant project. Vergil unwittingly puts his finger on this point when, in chiding him for weeping at the diviners’ grotesque punishment, he says “Ancor se’ tu de li altri sciocchi? [are you too part of that crowd of fools?]” (20.27). And then, a few cantos later, when he and Vergil are forced to take refuge in the bolgia of the hypocrites (23.37–51), do we hesitate to infer that his project is tainted by hypocrisy as well, especially when we consider what effort it costs him to escape that ditch (24.31–36)? But the clearest suggestion of a parallel between Dante and the damned is probably the one involving Ulysses. At the beginning of Inferno 26, Dante almost seems worried by this parallel in advance. After dropping a cryptic hint concerning the identity of poet and pilgrim—in the climb out of the seventh ditch, “lo piè sanza la man non si spedia [the foot could not make it without the hand]” (26.18), which suggests, beyond the obvious meaning, that the pilgrim (on foot) cannot move without the poet (who travels by his writing hand)—he resolves now to “restrain his genius more than usual” (26.21), as if he thought he had cause to regret the preter-Ovidian extravagance of his descriptions in the two preceding cantos about thieves, as if he were comparing that extravagance in advance to the adventurousness of Ulysses, whose reward is that he is damned as an evil counselor, as one whose eloquence leads others (like us, the readers?) astray. And as with the diviners, the connection here is reinforced by

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a conspicuous word, esperïenza, which Ulysses uses to name the goal of his fi nal voyage (26.116) and which Vergil later uses to describe the object of Dante’s journey through hell (Inf. 28.48).31 Nor is it only in the Inferno that a negative judgment of Dante’s project is encouraged. In the Purgatorio, it is mainly the sin of pride that troubles Dante and us. When he first sees those repenting of pride, Dante compares them to distorted human figures in architecture that cause a real (sympathetic) discomfort in the viewer (Purg. 10.130–34); and he himself assumes the bent position when conversing with Omberto and Oderisi (11.73–78). But despite this implied self-accusation on the pilgrim’s part, the poet’s continuing pride is manifest only a few lines later when he suggests that he himself (Dante) shall drive both Guido Guinizelli and Guido Cavalcanti from the “nest” of top poet (11.97–99).32 Are poet and pilgrim sufficiently separate to permit pride in one and humility in the other? If so, should it not be the earlier Dante (the pilgrim) who is proud and the later Dante (the present poet) who has learned humility? There is another example of the poet’s pride—fitting Vergil’s definition, which involves the abasement of one’s rivals (Purg. 17.115–17)—when Bonagiunta is made to explain why Dante is so much better a poet than he himself and a couple of others had been (Purg. 24.55–62). Here, in fact, Dante’s pride is set off by contrast with an example of poetic humility, so that a bit further on, when Guido Guinizelli himself finally appears, the pilgrim’s and the poet’s expressions of veneration and self-abasement (Purg. 26.94–99) put some strain on our credulity. And what of the separation of poet and pilgrim, which appears to excuse Dante’s pride some of the time? At the end of Purgatorio 16 (the end of the poem’s fi ftieth canto, the exact midpoint of the whole), the pilgrim asks Marco Lombardo which “good Gherardo” he had been talking about (16.124, 133–35); and such ignorance on the pilgrim’s part would certainly mark a separation from the poet, since the poet obviously cannot be ignorant on this point. But Marco responds “O tuo parlar m’inganna, o el mi tenta” (16.136), words that we, as readers, could easily direct against the poet. In suggesting a separation of poet from pilgrim, Dante’s “talk” is evidently false and must be construed as “either deceiving us or testing us,” as putting to the test our grasp of the actual absence of separation. This is the exact midpoint of the poem, so it is also significant that the next canto opens with a fantasy on the pilgrim’s part, the type of experience that requires no differentiation from that of the imagining poet (17.13–39). Even in the Paradiso, the pressure upon us to form a negative judgment of the poem is not relaxed. A number of doctrinal matters are treated in

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detail in this third cantica, but one particular point is driven home strongly on two separate occasions and so is evidently meant to make an especially strong impression. Thomas Aquinas concludes his main address to Dante with a long sermon against any human attempt to anticipate divine judgment (13.112–42); and the eagle of Jupiter, with reference to the miraculous accounts of how the emperor Trajan and the Trojan Ripheus had been saved, expands on exactly the same point at great length (20.88–138). But what is the whole content of the Commedia if not an entirely unqualified, dogmatic anticipation of divine judgment in an enormous number of particular cases? How can Dante possibly escape the indictment thus implied by Thomas and the eagle? And fi nally, there is a riddle that summarizes this whole aspect of the work. In the lowest circle of hell, when Dante fi nally sees Satan, he says Io non mori’ e non rimasi vivo; pensa oggimai per te, s’hai fior d’ingegno, qual io divenni, d’uno e d’altro privo. (Inf. 34.25–27) [I did not die and did not stay alive. Think for yourself now, reader, if you have any genius at all, what I became, deprived of death and also of life.]

The commentators, to the extent that I know them, are thoroughly unimaginative here. Dante, we are told, has produced a three-line circumlocution for the Latin adjective semianimis, meaning “half-alive” or “halfdead,” and means to say simply that he was half-dead with fear.33 Where, one asks, is the riddle? Why would even the smallest bit of “genius” be needed to understand this? The actual solution to the riddle is given in the preceding canto where Friar Alberigo tells how, in the case of the worst traitors, the soul sometimes goes to hell leaving behind the body, which then does not actually die but is henceforth inhabited by a demon until its death finally arrives (33.124–32). This is the condition of not having died, yet not really being alive, that Dante is referring to; and in making this reference, he accuses himself by implication of grievous treachery, a crime we also actually observe in Canto 33, where he makes a solemn promise to Alberigo: “If you want me to help you (by removing the frozen tears from your face, to give you the chance to relieve yourself by weeping), then tell me who you are, and if I do not disencumber you, may I be forced to go to the bottom of the ice” (33.115–17). And then he simply breaks that promise (149–50). (His use of courtly terminology, cortesia/villania, in attempting to excuse

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this breach of faith, only draws attention to his guilt in a more philosophical or theological sense.) But what happens to Alberigo is not ultimately the issue, for there is also an allegorical level to the action here. Dante, after all, has promised to open our eyes for us—“aprimi li occhi” (33.149), begs Alberigo—in return for our (as it were) telling him our name, for our committing our contingent being to his project. He has promised to free our eternal eyesight from the blindness imposed by our weeping—our “state of misery.” And in making this promise, the allegory implies, he has lied to us, for which he is now symbolically punished in the lowest circle of hell, “the bottom of the ice,” face to face with Satan himself. How can we possibly defend Dante against this indictment, which he himself brings against himself ?

Defense of Dante At least the fi rst of the two questions we began with is answered—the question of exactly what risk Dante is taking as the writer of this poem. At the very least, the poem can be read as the indictment of its own writer that I have described. And curiously enough, if we agree yet further that that indictment is inescapable, we fi nd that we have answered the second question as well, the question of how Dante makes available to his reader the crucial idea of reading for the process, rather than for what one might receive through the process. For the contradictory situation that arises when in reading I fi nd myself inclined to form an increasingly negative judgment of my author, must compel me fairly quickly either to stop reading altogether (as Dante suggests that most readers should do at the beginning of Paradiso 2) or else to conduct a radical reexamination of what I am doing as a reader, to ask whether the attitude of “listening” to the author and forming a judgment about him is adequate under the circumstances. Only when I ask this question (unless I am a trained modern novel reader) can I begin to lay hold of this text’s hermeneutic complications and understand my responsibility not as a judge but as an originator of meaning, whereupon the path to recognizing the work’s whole “comic” plot in every moment of reading (by an act of purified but still perilous self-assertion) lies open before me. This contradictoriness in a reader’s situation—at least until reader and re-reader have learned to see themselves in the identity of pilgrim and poet—this contradictoriness which, like the endangering of Scriptural

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veracity in the citing of Ezekiel and Revelation, compels me to go back to the beginning of my activity and start over, reaches a climax in the Paradiso, where Dante’s fault appears primarily as the fault of anticipatory judgment. For I now fi nd myself in the tricky position of not being able to judge Dante (obvious as such a judgment may appear) without ipso facto pronouncing the same judgment on myself, since I will have anticipated divine judgment in Dante’s case. Thus, again, I am compelled to ask after—to stretch my neck for, as it were—a manner of reading that does not judge but rather takes responsibility for the meaning of what is read, and takes responsibility not absolutely (not as if I were God) but rather in my quality as a particular, contingent, fallible individual engaged with the contingent individuality of the actual writer, in that I “have the vision,” but as my vision. I must do this: I, io, ego, as reader, and as the particular, unique, contingent individual I happen to be—I, io, ego, in a sense that paradoxically creates, in my insisting on it (as Dante does at the end of the Paradiso), exactly the needful “we” by which the poem’s meaning is validated. (There is no such “we” in modern Jamesian novel reading, where The Reader must be, as far as possible, everywhere The Same Reader; there is no true “we” except where it is composed of different individuals who all say “I” in a manner that asserts their contingency.) And once we make that move, “we” of the Commedia, we fi nd that not even the cruelly transparent riddle in Inferno 34 need trouble us any longer. For that riddle has a second solution. In the Paradiso we hear a great deal about how hard it is to conceive or imagine or retain in memory what needs to be related. But toward the end of the Inferno, we hear with increasing frequency how hard it is to write the account. The opening of Canto 28 laments the impossibility of expressing—even in prose (“con parole sciolte” [28.1]), let alone verse—what Dante has seen in the ninth ditch of Malebolge. Canto 32 opens with the avowedly hopeless wish for “rime aspre e chiocce [sour and harsh rhymes]” (32.1), which would suit an account of the “bottom of the universe” (32.8). And immediately before the riddle about neither dying nor living, we read Com’ io divenni allor gelato e fioco, nol dimandar, lettor, ch’i’ non lo scrivo, però ch’ogne parlar sarebbe poco. (34.22–24) [Do not ask, reader, how frozen and weak I became, for I will not write it, because all speaking would be paltry.]

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As we approach the bottom of hell, in other words, the poetic function (writing) is called more and more into question; and now, face to face with Satan, writing ceases altogether. The pilgrim has not died, but he is also no longer alive, because, as we recall, “the foot cannot move without the hand”—the pilgrim is only a reflection of the poetic process. But at least since the episode of the Great Poets’ unrecorded conversation in Limbo, we have understood that solving riddles is one instance of our contribution to the poetic production of meaning, so that as soon as we solve the riddle of Dante’s half-death in this sense (as the cessation of the poetic process), that poetic process, precisely thereby, is again set in motion. The bottom of the world can now be safely negotiated, and Dante (and we) can now mount toward the stars by way of the much simpler riddle about passing the earth’s central point (34.91–93).

Two Passages Let us look at two more passages from the Paradiso by way of summary. At the beginning of Canto 14, immediately after Thomas concludes his indictment of human judgment on a bitingly colloquial note (13.139–42), Dante says Dal centro al cerchio, e sì dal cerchio al centro movesi l’acqua in un ritondo vaso, secondo ch’è percosso fuori o dentro: ne la mia mente fé sùbito caso questo ch’io dico, sì come si tacque la glorïosa vita di Tommaso, per la similitudine che nacque del suo parlare e di quel di Beatrice, a cui sì cominciar, dopo lui, piacque: . . . (14.1–9) [From the center to the circumference, and so also from the circumference to the center the water moves in a round vessel according to whether it is struck from outside or inside. Into my mind fell suddenly what I am saying, just as the glorious life of Thomas fell silent, because of the similarity that arose from his speaking and from that of Beatrice, whom it pleased, after him, to begin thus: . . . ]

This is an extremely tricky passage. Dante claims that his metaphor had occurred to him at the very moment when Thomas had stopped speaking,

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thus before Beatrice had begun. But without Beatrice’s speaking (the movement, presumably, from the center outward [see 13.21]), the tenor of the metaphor is not yet complete! This complexity of time structure is reflected in three occurrences of a single word, sì, in the meanings: (1) “so also” (line 1), as I have said, past; (2) “just as” (line 5), at the same time, present; and (3) “thus” (line 9), as follows, future. Perhaps the best way to untangle the meaning here is to begin with the concrete. Dante’s observation is strikingly accurate. If the water is touched inside a round vessel, the surface disturbance radiates outward from the point of contact. But if the vessel is struck on the outside, the surface disturbance does not radiate from the point of striking but moves uniformly inward from the whole circumference toward the center. The experiment can be made by Dante’s reader in his or her kitchen, and recalls the experiment of the three mirrors suggested by Beatrice in Paradiso 2 (100–5). But this remarkable physical phenomenon has larger significance in at least two ways. It blunts Thomas’s implied indictment of Dante—as does also Beatrice’s changing of the subject (14.10–18)—by subsuming its otherwise sharp, pointed quality in an imagined universal inward surge. And it foreshadows the eternal Rose of Heaven and the equivalence of center and circumference in God (Par. 28.13–78). The theme of center and circumference, moreover, is thus repeated yet again in the relation between a simple physical fact and the infi nity of truth that it reflects. But to understand how these considerations are related to the apparent undoing of chronological categories in the metaphor, we must recognize that the idea of the thought’s falling into Dante’s mind suggests the dropping of an object into a pool of water, hence the whole metaphor all over again. And if the mind is thought of as a container of water, then the distinction between being struck from without and from within becomes equivalent to the psychological distinction between mental responses to external stimuli and ideas generated within the mind itself. Interestingly enough, however, since the same basic metaphor is now understood to represent both an external event (Thomas’s and Beatrice’s speaking) and an intrapsychic distinction (between response to stimuli and self-generated thought), it follows clearly enough that these two domains, the external and the intrapsychic, must now be thought of as equivalent to each other, or at least as being related (like center and circumference) by oscillating concentric ripples—which in turn suggests the concentric geometrical structure of each of the three eternal realms.

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Thus it is intimated that the idea that occurs to Dante at the moment of Thomas’s sharpest implied rebuke is: (1) the idea of the entire structure of the poem, as the only possible defense against the charge of hasty judgment; (2) an idea experienced as both externally real (pilgrim’s view) and mentally created (poet’s view), thus implying the identity of poet and pilgrim in a complex of thought that draws the reader (as reader and rereader) into the poem’s mechanism; yet also (3) Dante’s own personal idea, “questo ch’io dico,” an assertion of his fi nite contingent individuality as a kind of center vis-à-vis the huge circumference of the necessary and true and eternal with which it grapples, in a manner parallel to the situation of the simple physical fact vis-à-vis its huge blossoming of meaning. Thus also the disordering of temporal categories is explained because the metaphor, it is now revealed, no longer simply fits into the poem’s action by illustrating a particular event, and does not merely represent the poem’s original conception, but is—in being a verbal act, “questo ch’io dico”— none other than that instant of original conception itself, in which the poem’s quasi-temporal extension has not yet begun to unfold. And this recognition, fi nally, mirrors the reader’s task throughout, which is to find the whole conception of the poem, and its whole course, in every moment of reading. The loose end here is the question left open by Beatrice’s changing the subject: the question of how Dante might be justified in making the actual judgments he does make in the poem. But we can get some satisfaction on this point by turning to the end of Paradiso 28, where Beatrice takes up the matter of the angelic hierarchy and the difference between the accounts of it given by Dionysius the Areopagite and Gregory the Great: E Dïonisio con tanto disio a contemplar questi ordini si mise, che li nomò e distinse com’ io. Ma Gregorio da lui poi si divise; onde, sì tosto come li occhi aperse in questo ciel, di sé medesmo rise. E se tanto secreto ver proferse mortale in terra, non voglio ch’ammiri: ché chi ’l vide qua sù gliel discoperse con altro assai del ver di questi giri. (28.130–39) [And Dionysius with such desire set about contemplating these orders (of angels) that he named and distinguished them as I do. But Gregory

138 History later departed from that account, so that, as soon as he opened his eyes in this heaven, he smiled at his very self (for having been mistaken). And if a mortal on earth (Dionysius? think also of Dante) uttered such a secret truth, I don’t wish you to wonder at it. For it was revealed to him by one who saw it up here (Paul), along with a lot more of the truth about these circles.]

This passage appears to be torn between two confl icting senses. Was it the strength of Dionysius’ desire that enabled him to know the truth about the celestial pecking order, or did he simply get the information from Paul? And there are further questions. Does Gregory’s mistake, along with his smiling acceptance of it, not draw our attention to the possibility of Dante’s being mistaken—and not only about the orders of angels? By attaching his account of the angels to the superior authority of certain texts, as earlier with Ezekiel and Revelation, Dante reminds us not to take his “seeing” literally. But then, how can he still insist on the fiction that he did actually see everything he relates? Why is he less willing than Gregory to admit, if need be, an innocent mistake? And what relation to these questions is borne by Paul’s evasive boasting, which ends with the idea that it is “not lawful” to utter (in Dante’s version) “the secret things of God”? For that matter, if Paul is serious on this point, how can he have revealed his vision to the Areopagite? What did Paul, assuming he was consistent, really say to Dionysius? 34 The question of what may properly or possibly or lawfully be uttered by “a mortal on earth,” which is also raised by Beatrice, is crucial here. Precisely Paul, who the tradition insists was in very fact given a glimpse of heaven, is least willing to say anything about it. Those who are further from direct apprehension of the divine system, it seems, are also more inclined to describe it in detail. It is here that the combination of powerful yearning and an authoritative account, in Dionysius, becomes suggestive. If we truly desire to know and participate in the divine system, how shall we not work out for ourselves as complete an account as possible of it? The exactness of the account expresses not dogmatic certitude but powerful yearning, which, given the limits Paul recognizes to the lawful or the possible, is the only conceivable measure of authenticity for us mortals. This (and not the specific information about angels) is the “secret truth” that Paul “saw” and “discovered” to Dionysius, and that is now discovered to us in a veiled form. Such a truth cannot be true without being veiled. If we begin by admitting that our account of divine order is mere wishful

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speculation, no matter how strong or sincere the wish, we inevitably compromise thereby precisely the purity of our yearning to know that order. Only the image of Gregory’s smiling at himself is retained as a talisman, a sign of that infirmity, that distance from the divine, that weakness—“for strength is made perfect in weakness,” says God to Paul (2 Cor. 12:9)— which makes our yearning both necessary and possible to begin with.35 Obviously the same argument can be made for Dante’s judgments about the state of particular individual souls after death; that those judgments are peremptory and unqualified only expresses the depth of the poet’s yearning for truth. And that argument can be made yet again from the point of view of a reader. Surely the achievement of what I have called “having the vision” depends primarily—since it is a reflective act in each moment of reading—on the magnitude and focus of one’s desire for it, on how strongly one is prepared to insist on it, on how far one stretches one’s neck for the bread of angels. And once this point is agreed upon, we are no longer in any danger of confusing Dante’s reader (for art) with The Reader (for thrills) of modern theory. In accordance with Vergil’s lecture on the gradations and variations of universal love (Purg. 17.85–139), the desire by which the poem’s vision is realized must also exist in infi nitely many forms—one for each of us, as contingent individuals. The enormous variety of the poem’s fiction—in which real persons, with whom contemporary readers might have been in direct or indirect contact, rub shoulders with figures of ancient myth and Christian legend—is a simple and exact allegory of this state of affairs. Indeed, we can go further. For even a reader who does not feel the same virtuous yearning as Dante, or as Dionysius, is included. It is clear, after all, that the damned in the Inferno arrive at their proper places by a kind of personal volition that produces both their crime and their punishment, so that the situation of even the poem’s unfit readers belongs to the overall allegory. Merely by reading the poem, I express a will, a desire, that contributes to calling forth the whole divine system along with my own place in it. This is true no matter who I am, but not because I have been reduced to a predictable idea of The Reader. Every reader, then, by reading, evinces in some form (however degenerate) the same desire that characterizes Dante himself, or the poem’s “io,” that desire that insists on a fully detailed account of the divine system. But, at the same time, this system is presented to each reader—and, fictionally, to Dante—as an objective accomplished fact, which quality of objectivity, in turn (this being the “secret truth”), is validated by just that desire which is expressed in the act of reading. Thus we

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have a situation which—despite the differentness of the vision for each individual reader—reminds us very strongly of novel reading. The work exists only in being read, and what a reader gets from the work is only a developed or disguised form of the process of reading itself. Perhaps it is only because there once was this huge objective system of peremptory judgments—perhaps it is only because the Commedia has been there as a model—that novelists and theorists of the novel have ever, in their turn, dared ascribe a species of reality to their imaginings. And if it is asked, fi nally, how Dante can assert in the letter to Can Grande that the purpose of his poem is to lead people to felicity, yet at the same time recognize that many of his readers will fi nd destinies in the poem’s world that are not happy at all, we will respond, first, that the letter is mainly about the Paradiso and that readers who have made it this far as comprehending readers (“Voialtri pochi” [Par. 2.10]) are ipso facto destined for felicity. Second, we will recall Singleton’s idea of the poet as an imitator of “God’s way of writing.” Dante presumably wishes with all his heart to bring every reader to his or her own version of felicity; and it is not his fault if some readers do not make it all the way, any more than it is God’s fault if all human souls are not saved. And this, fi nally, is perhaps the ultimate, and at once supremely arrogant and supremely reverent, sense in which Dante lays claim to the status of founder in Christian poetry.

4.

Boccaccio, Cervantes, and the Path to Solitary Reading

One crucial component of The Reader of modern theory is still missing for Dante’s readers—the imagined escape from contingency by which The Reader becomes everywhere The Same Reader. My point now is that this escape is equivalent to the idea of The Reader’s strictly solitary condition, an idea which can perhaps also be traced back to Dante, but only by way of historical slippages of meaning. Dante’s own reader is not imagined as a solitary reader in the modern sense, and could not have been imagined thus in the historical circumstances. Only in a well-developed print culture, I will argue, can the idea of readerly solitude gain a secure footing. But the hermeneutics of Dante and Boccaccio is an indispensable precursor to the establishment of that idea in the sixteenth century and its defi nitive embodiment in the figure of Don Quixote.

How Solitary Is Solitary? Can it be maintained that reading, from the sixteenth or seventeenth century on, has become an ever more solitary activity? In the eighteenth century, throughout Europe, informal reading circles were very popular, where a small company would listen to one person, or to several persons in turn, reading aloud from a single fictional or nonfictional text. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the predilection of novelists for either naturalized or realistic fictions—fictions that in one way or another locate their readers with respect to indisputable facts, hence also with respect to each other—must surely be counted as favoring collectivity, not solitude, in the readership. (A naturalized text—for example, an epistolary novel— uses the factualness of the text’s own physical vehicle as a bridge uniting the fictional world with a reader’s real world. And by realism, here, I mean a realism like Balzac’s, which is linked to the verifiable factualness of particular things and places, mainly in Paris.) Even the more tenuous forms of realism that arise from subtleties of style or point of view may be reckoned 141

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as loosening a reader’s solitude in favor of a collectively available reality. And in the twentieth and twenty-fi rst centuries, the close association of narrative with new theatrical forms (especially cinema), the importance of certain narratives (like Finnegans Wake) that require special critical training in a reader, the emergence of “interactive” forms (like the loose-leaf novel and narratives in hypertext) and the increasing popularity of both high and low “performance” genres (in which text is still present but presumably does not have the fi nality and impersonality of writing): surely all of this has to be understood as operating against readerly solitude. I will not try to dismiss or explain away this factual material. On the contrary, I adduce all of it as evidence supporting my suggestion that from the sixteenth century on, reading in the West has become ever more exclusively a solitary activity, and that from very early in this development the solitary situation of readers has been regarded as socially dangerous, which accounts for the admittedly incomplete list above of attempts somehow to recollectivize that situation—attempts which, precisely by becoming necessary, are doomed to fail. In Chapter 2, I alluded to the continuing popularity of live poetry readings—in an age not only of the book, but of very high-quality audio and video reproduction. Is this phenomenon not evidence of our tacit recognition (and our dogged resistance to the recognition) of how desperately solitary reading has become for us? But why only since the sixteenth century? Why not at least since the early fourteenth century, where, at the beginning of Inferno 2, Dante recalls the moments of agonized nocturnal solitude in which he had gathered resolve for his huge and risky undertaking? Surely my argument on readerly identification with the poet implies that a reader will be subject to those dark, solitary moments as well. Or why not go back even further, to Augustine’s observation of Ambrose, who preserved a kind of solitude even in the presence of people watching him read? The argument of the preceding chapter makes it possible here (and necessary) to refine the notion of solitude. Both Dante and his reader are likely to find themselves in some sense alone with respect to the poem and its material. But even in their aloneness, I argued, it is crucial to the operation of theological and poetic-philosophical meaning that they still recognize themselves as the particular contingent individuals they have always been. And my point now is that the contingent individual cannot possibly be solitary in the sense that The modern Reader is solitary. Even if his or her present situation happens to be solitary, a contingent individual, by definition, is entangled in a network of causes and effects that includes other individuals and so

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prevents solitude from becoming anything more than one accident among others. A reader as contingent individual is not, like Henry James’s Reader, miraculously lifted out of the limits of his or her own experience, not, like Poulet’s Reader, freed from a “usual sense of incompatibility” between consciousness and its objects, not, like Iser’s Reader, liberated from the inconvenient opposition of subject and object—or at least he or she may not undergo any of these self-surpassing moves as a contingent individual. It seems to me, moreover, that a reader cannot even begin to imagine himself or herself (however deludedly) as The Reader, as that strict singularity, that Platonic chora, as that “someone” who, says Barthes, merely marks the place where meaning happens, until he or she has in some degree achieved anonymity; and I do not think this can happen, except perhaps sporadically, in a manuscript culture such as that of fourteenthcentury Italy—or any earlier period. In a manuscript culture, or even in an early print culture, where copies of books are still few and hard to come by, I cannot become a reader—since I cannot obtain reading material—except by having specific contacts (social, institutional, familial) with other individuals, which means except by being the particular contingent, nameable individual I happen to be. In many cases, it will probably even be possible for me to trace, person by real person, the process by which a given manuscript work, as either itself or an umpteenth copy, has reached me from its originator. But have I not myself attempted to show that The Reader—who embodies the performance of a unique, supposedly irreducible “act” of reading, or who bridges the category gap between the personal feeling of engagement with a text and the process by which texts seem to enter into historical relations with each other—is never really anything but a highly questionable theoretical construct? And why should it be impossible for this idea to be constructed in a manuscript culture? Does the idea of anonymity, the idea of having lost one’s name, not in fact neatly describe the condition of Dante the pilgrim in the space between Lethe and Eunoë? In principle it is possible for any strictly theoretical idea to arise at any time and under any circumstances. And it may be true, though difficult to substantiate, that The Reader is indebted in part for his and her modern existence to Dante’s solitude or to his period of name-deprivation, or for that matter to the temporarily anonymous questing knight of medieval romance, or to the figure of the rapt mystic or the hermit. For present purposes, however, the question is not whether it is possible in a manuscript culture for this or that individual to achieve by imagination a condition

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comparable to that of The Reader, but whether it is possible for that act of imagination or theorizing to become institutionalized, to be, for example, taught in schools, to be received as more or less axiomatic, to be taken so thoroughly for granted that most people think of it not as theory, not as an act of imagination, not as any kind of achievement at all, but as a simple fact of experience. And this level of acceptance cannot be expected unless the actual practical conditions of reading provide at least an excuse for it, which, in a manuscript culture, where one always participates as the particular individual one happens to be, they do not. What is required, in fact, for The Modern Anonymous, Solitary Reader to take hold as an institutionalized act of imagination is not only a print culture, but a culture of indiscriminate mass bibliopoly, where books are produced in large numbers and sold for reasonable sums of money to whoever comes through the door. Only in such a culture has anonymity become a normal quality of the process by which one acquires reading material; one can be anybody at all, as long as one has a bit of that most impersonal of possessions—money. And now, by consequence, the idea (or delusion) of The Reader, who is by defi nition anonymous and radically solitary, has at least a chance of being established on an institutional level. This is why I date that institution from no earlier than the sixteenth century. And this is why I consider it no accident that the fictional or fictionalized character who soon becomes, so to speak, the myth of The Modern Reader, Dr. Faustus, is so much a creature of precisely the sixteenth century. We will come back to Faustus in the next chapter.

Open Texts and Closed Texts I will come back later to the question of how it makes sense to speak of “the advent of modern reading” in both the eighteenth century and the sixteenth. For the time being, let it suffice to note that each instance of that “advent” is associated with different specific issues. In the eighteenth century the development of “literature” and the form of the novel are crucial; in the sixteenth century the issue is solitary reading. And just as The Modern novel Reader cannot have somehow leapt spontaneously into existence in the eighteenth century, it would also be wrong to imagine that That Reader’s anonymous and increasingly solitary precursor was somehow generated out of nothing by sixteenth-century conditions. But the case of the background of readerly solitude is perhaps a bit easier to deal with because, in the whole basic structure of written communication,

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the idea of strict or absolute solitude can truly originate only with respect to the authorial function—that point at which Dante must positively prevent the attribution of solitude by insisting upon his contingent individuality and upon the nonseparability of poet from pilgrim, hence upon his developing presence in the poem, by contrast with what might otherwise have been taken as his solitary authoritative distance behind it. In a Christian view, after all, there is but one original speaker, God, who is the model for all speakers, especially for those whose use of written form gives their words an aura of permanence or authority. And God is the very defi nition of solitary uniqueness. The introduction of print makes it possible for readerly solitude to become an institutionalized act of imagination. But possibility alone does not explain the fact. In manuscript cultures the condition of The strictly Solitary, Anonymous Reader is practically unthinkable. And if readers in early print culture are then induced to imagine or theorize their activity as strictly solitary, it is hard to see what the inducement—the positive source of the idea of radical solitude—can have been if not association with the condition of the author, the kind of association we discussed in connection with Dante’s hermeneutics, by which readers are obliged to take responsibility for the origination of meaning. In the Commedia itself this association does not involve the quality of radical solitude; when I read Dante, I am still a reader for art, whose vision is the reflective act of a contingent individual, not an illumination that bursts in upon me unbidden, like reality itself. But once the association as such (of reader and author) is established, and if it is established and imitated prominently enough to survive into the coming age of mass bibliopoly (where readerly anonymity becomes a simple fact), then it is available to be interpreted as implying The strictly Solitary Reader. This, I will argue, is precisely what happens. But fi rst we need a more exact understanding of the association of readers with the authorial function, especially in the Middle Ages. For this purpose, Gerald L. Bruns’s chapter, “The Originality of Texts in a Manuscript Culture,” can hardly be surpassed as a guide. Bruns begins with “a distinction between two kinds of text: the closed text of a print culture and the open text of a manuscript culture.”1 The case of print culture seems simple enough. “Print closes off the act of writing and authorizes or, in a technological way, canonizes its results” (45). But Bruns’s main concern, “the ways in which texts remain open in a manuscript culture” (45), is a matter that has an unexpected range of consequences. Chaucer’s “humility” in Troilus and Criseyde—his placing of his words “under correction” by

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others—says Bruns, “coincides with what we might call the grammarian’s ‘ethos,’ which enjoins the subordination of authorial will to the ideal of a correct text—a text correct, not in the sense that it reproduces an original, but in its words and usage, in the handling or rendering of its matter, and above all in its doctrine” (47). Petrarch’s substantial alteration of Boccaccio’s Griselda story (Decameron 10.10), for example, in the process of translating it into Latin, “is not unauthorized but is sanctioned [with respect to the ‘open’ manuscript original] by the grammarian’s ethos” (Bruns 48). What does this have to do with Dante? There are plenty of early commentaries on the Commedia; but the best known one, by Boccaccio, is written in Italian, not in the grammarian’s Latin. And Boccaccio also adds “Argomenti,” in “terza rima,” to Dante’s three cantiche.2 Do these texts constitute interventions of the type that interests Bruns? Bruns summarizes: My argument would be that in a manuscript culture the text is not reducible to the letter; that is, a text always contains more than it says, or more than what its letters contain, which is why we are privileged to read between the lines, and not to read between them only but to write between them as well, because the text is simply not complete—not fully what it could be. . . . The text is, in any case, tacitly unfi nished: it is never fully present but is always available for a later hand to bring it more completely into the open. (55–56)

When Bruns speaks of writing between the lines, he means it literally: adding to the text new material that has practically the same status and value as what is already there, indeed in some cases more. Is the text of the Commedia amenable to this sort of treatment? It does not appear so. One property of the terza rima is that it makes each canto into a single unbreakable chain of rhymes, which does not keep me from writing in the margin but does keep the margin at arm’s length by offering no pause or break for interpolation. And Dante’s attitude, his arrogance, his peremptoriness, is also a signal to readers: judge and comment all you please; you will always fi nd you have done so in a voice categorically different from the voice that says “I” (io, the poem’s most impenetrable word) in the main text. Yet Dante does write the Commedia in Italian, inviting the distinction in levels (which he himself makes) between his language (locutio) and the “grammar” that is Latin (Opere 319).3 Plenty of reasons have been given for his choice, most of which boil down to Boccaccio’s first reason of two: “per fare utilità più comune a’ suoi cittadini e agli altri italiani:

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conoscendo che, se metricamente in latino, come gli altri poeti passati, avesse scritto, solamente a’ letterati avrebbe fatto utile [to give (his poem) a more general usefulness for his fellow citizens and other Italians, knowing that if he had written in Latin verse, like other past poets, he would have made it useful only for men of letters].”4 Up to a point, this formulation perhaps captures Dante’s intention; but it is also highly questionable. Can anyone actually read the Commedia, which is full of Latinisms and almost as full of allusions to Vergil, without knowing Latin and without knowing Vergil? Dante himself, when he writes the only piece of self-commentary on the poem that we possess (the letter to Can Grande), writes in Latin. He must have recognized that he could not expect to be understood fully except by “grammarians” (like himself ) in Bruns’s sense.5 Thus, by writing in Italian, he sets up a situation in which his reader, being a grammarian confronted with a vernacular text (think of Petrarch and Griselda), is automatically tempted to tinker with it, to lay hands on it and, by doing so, to improve it by making it disclose more of itself. And when that grammarian then fi nds that this cannot be done by the addition of actual ink to the text, he has no choice but to carry out the movement of intervention virtually, by doing what is required by Dante’s hermeneutics: taking responsibility, in an act of reflection, for the origination of meaning. There are doubtless many reasons for the Italian of the Commedia. There are political reasons and reasons of cultural politics; and Boccaccio’s fi rst reason is valid up to a point. But it is also very convenient for Dante that his reader is placed in the position I have described—as it is further, for instance, that writing in Italian marks the work’s “author” (Boccaccio’s word, repeatedly, but not Dante’s) as nothing of the kind, but rather as the contingent individual required by an authority-sharing relation with readers.

Dante and Boccaccio The crucial hermeneutic component of Dante’s idea of his reader, the involvement of each reader in the production of meaning, is thus exactly locatable with respect to the actual practice of reading and writing in Dante’s time. But the propagation of that hermeneutics in history depends on Boccaccio’s more or less founding role in preserving and developing the legacy of his predecessor. And despite the considerable amount of writing he devoted specifically to Dante, I think the principal vehicle by which Boccaccio transmits that legacy is the Decameron. The form of this work,

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its division into a hundred parts (the forma tractatus, assuming that tractare is appropriate here), already reminds us of the Commedia. But in exactly what sense? As a simple tribute to Dante? As a comment upon Dante? As a parody of Dante? As a refocusing or reorienting of Dante’s project? I will try to answer this question by a consideration mainly of the frame of Boccaccio’s work, the cornice. We might begin by looking at two elements of that frame: at what Boccaccio suggests we call his work’s cognomen, “Prince Galeotto” (1, 964); 6 and at a passage from the “Author’s Epilogue”: Like all things in this world, stories, whatever their nature, may be harmful or useful, depending upon the listener. . . . If anyone should want to extract evil counsel from these tales, or fashion an evil design, there is nothing to prevent him, provided he twists and distorts them sufficiently to fi nd the thing he is seeking. And if anyone should study them for the usefulness and profit they may bring him, he will not be disappointed. Nor will they ever be thought of or described as anything but useful and seemly, if they are read at the proper time by the people for whom they were written. (960–61; McW 830–31)7

The name “Galeotto,” for Boccaccio’s audience, alludes much less directly to Gallehault of the French Lancelot than it does to the episode of Paolo and Francesca in Dante, and to Francesca’s famous complaint: “Galeotto fu ’l libro e chi lo scrisse [the book was Galeotto (a pander between Paolo and me) as was he who wrote it]” (Inf. 5.137). This complaint (Noakes points out) is unjustified; the book becomes a pander only by being misread, so the whole allusion illustrates by analogy Boccaccio’s point about each reader’s role in determining how the Decameron will operate in his or her life. Hence, immediately, two questions. Why does Boccaccio include the idea of pandering in his work’s title? And why, if it is necessary to locate this implied admonition to the reader so prominently, does he do so by way of an allusion to Dante? The fi rst question is easy enough. The work in effect has two titles, “Decameron” and “Prencipe Galeotto,” as a sign that it is in truth two different works at the same time; and which of the two works you read depends entirely upon who you are. If you are a serious and virtuous individual who is likely to read Dante with profit, then you will inevitably read the “Decameron,” whose numerical title points at its affi nity with the ordered universe—the level of truth—in the Commedia. If, on the other hand, you are a reader of titillating romances, or

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the sort of reader who reduces everything to titillating romance, then the book you will read, on exactly the same pages as the other reader, is “Prencipe Galeotto.” Thus, in the title of his work, Boccaccio has already set up the same type of situation that we fi nd in Dante, whose reader (depending on who he or she is) can read either (1) an indictment of Dante, which turns out to be an indictment of the reader as well by entangling him or her in exactly that fault of peremptory judgment of which Dante stands accused; or (2) a lofty, edifying work in which peremptory judgment is sublimated into a passion for truth by which every moment of reading, in turn, is revealed as a stretching toward divine grace. Thus our second question is answered as well. The allusion to Dante—the twofold allusion, once in each of the two titles—marks Boccaccio’s understanding, and his reckoning with his reader’s understanding, of the parallel between his work and Dante’s in the matter of ceding authority to its readers and so producing a text that can become (at least) two radically different works under different readerly circumstances. But why does Boccaccio thus merely “mark” his understanding of Dante? Why does he not explain it in detail, if perhaps not in the Decameron, then at least in his extensive commentaries on Dante, where we fi nd no such explanation? This question has already been answered in the discussion earlier of Paradiso 28 and of the “secret truth” revealed by Paul to Dionysius—the truth that the strength of our passion for knowledge is the only possible measure of the accuracy of our knowledge of things beyond nature. Dante cannot admit that his knowledge of the orders of angels is questionable because, in the strength of his passion, he is already fully committed to what he has asserted through Beatrice. Only the selfdeprecating smile of Pope Gregory remains as a token of our continuing human insufficiency, and of Dante’s. And Boccaccio, likewise, cannot develop the question of the two possible readings of Dante because he, as a reader of Dante, has for himself already answered that question once and for all and is fully committed to an edifying and salvific reading. (Otherwise he would in a sense be despairing of salvation.) Only his own work, in relation to which the question of opposed readings can be discussed—since it operates on a more secular plane where salvation is not immediately at stake—is offered, like Gregory’s smile, as a token of what happens behind the scenes in a reading of the Commedia. This argument can be carried a step further because the duality of possible readings in both the Commedia and the Decameron is replicated in the

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high–low or divine–secular duality by which the two texts are related to each other. It follows that when reading the Decameron—as long as one does not become a reader of “Prencipe Galeotto”—one can enact, or as it were mime, a lower reading of the Commedia, and so receive an understanding of that poem’s dual nature, but without needing to make the disastrous peremptory judgment upon Dante the poet that we have discussed. Thus Boccaccio (assuming he carries out his project consistently in detail) has created a pendant to the Commedia that discloses and consolidates Dante’s higher truth and so, in its own humility, itself partakes of that truth and becomes in effect an actual extension of the text of the Commedia. Boccaccio, it seems, may have succeeded in playing a kind of vulgar (Italian) “grammarian” to Dante after all, by adding actual ink to Dante’s manuscript—which, curiously enough, happens not to be the ink of his own detailed commentaries on Dante.8

Boccaccio and the Writer as Reader Boccaccio, one might say, is Dante’s secret grammarian, the writer of an additional hundred cantos to the Commedia, who cannot, however, lay claim to his own achievement without undoing it, for reasons I have just set forth. This is exactly the sort of achievement one would expect from Boccaccio, who showed himself elsewhere to be an expert at managing the relation between text and gloss. He produced, for example, a manuscript of Dante’s Vita nuova in which he copied all of the “divisions” (rudimentary analyses of the poems’ structure) as marginal glosses rather than parts of the main text. And while it may be true, as Noakes insists, that this manner of presentation thwarts Dante’s actual plan, it is also true that Boccaccio’s seemingly over-subtle distinction between “dichiarazioni per dichiarare” and “dichiarazioni” that are really “dimostrazioni delle cagioni che a fare lo ’ndussero i sonetti e le canzoni” is really very clear and important.9 Surely “dichiarazione” here should be translated not as “declaration” (what is that supposed to mean, in English?) but as “clarification” or “explanation,” in accordance with a well-established use of Latin declarare. Then it becomes clear that “clarifications for the sake of clarifying” (“dichiarazioni per dichiarare”) are explanations that do nothing but explain what is already there on the page, hence explanations that could be written by a reader, whereas the other “dichiarazioni,” which are “showings of the causes by which the poet was led to write his sonnets and canzoni,” could only have been written by

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the author, since only the author knows what those causes had been. Thus the latter are extensions of the authorial speaking, which Boccaccio calls “testo” (text), whereas the former—even if they happen to be written by the author—are essentially a reader’s comments, or glosses. It follows that Boccaccio, in reconfiguring Dante’s document, means to locate the reader, thus to articulate and in a sense dramatize the process of reading, thus further to place us, the actual readers, in the position of readers of reading (or re-readers, as I said in connection with Dante), which introduces a strong element of self-reflexivity into what we are doing. We now become readers with a compounded critical awareness of our own readerly situation and activity. And exactly this—if my earlier argument is sound—is also what is accomplished by the Decameron considered as a huge gloss on the Commedia. It is in any case quite wrong to suggest that Boccaccio’s work as a glossator shows him “moving toward a view of textual autonomy which declines to admit the reader as a partner in the generation of meaning” (Noakes 84). On the contrary, Dante’s acceptance of his reader as partner, which is an indisputable (I think) but still quite subtle element of his hermeneutics, is fully understood and affi rmed by Boccaccio, who then in turn, in his overt and covert practice of glossing, brings it much more to the fore and so establishes it much more fi rmly in European literary consciousness and practice than the example of the Commedia alone could ever have done. Boccaccio is Dante’s historical megaphone in this regard. Noakes’s position on Boccaccio’s supposed view of “textual autonomy” compels her to say that that view “did not prevent” him from writing glosses to his own epic poem, the Teseida delle Nozze di Emilia (Noakes 87). But, in truth, there is no discrepancy, with respect to “autonomy,” between Boccaccio’s treatment of Dante (either the Vita nuova or the Commedia) and his attitude toward his own work. Readers and reading are never lost sight of. Noakes shows, with great conciseness and clarity, how the Teseida glosses go far beyond mere exegesis into what she calls the domain of “interpretation,” because they “change the reader’s apprehension of the text without revising the text itself ” (91), or disclose nonverbatim repetitions and so “give the impression of unveiling a hidden pattern” (93), or in general “show the reader how to read a poem as a structure that has a power beyond its own plot and a temporality beyond the temporal framework of that plot” (93). We might even have been tempted to say that the Teseida is original in coming with instructions on how to read it, if we did not recognize that the Commedia is also such a poem, albeit less

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obviously so. What we can say is that Boccaccio learns from Dante the technique of accompanying poetry with extensive reader’s instructions, and then develops that technique enormously not only in the Teseida, but also, and most influentially, in the Decameron. (It should be borne in mind, for the argument later, that my analysis of the notion “dichiarazione” in Boccaccio’s treatment of the Vita nuova is meant only to show his attentiveness there to the situation of the reader, not to establish a general defi nition of his ideas of “text” and “gloss.” The ideas that govern his practice in the Vita nuova edition are uniquely adapted to the case of a work where the poems and the accounts of their origin are all part of a single, primarily autobiographical narrative. His glosses to the Teseida, by contrast, on occasion far surpass the limits of “dichiarazioni per dichiarare,” as does [I will argue] the implied gloss–text relation in the Decameron, where description of how the “text” came to be written is a normal form of the gloss.)10 Two further points need to be touched on. First—because of the historical significance of the idea of solitary reading, and because the path to solitary reading is hard to imagine without an analogy between reading and the authorial function—it is important that at certain key points in the Decameron the writer himself becomes recognizably a reader with respect to the internally self-referential structure of his composition, thus producing a situation in which an actual reader might reasonably infer an analogy between reading and the condition of being a writer. This state of affairs already obtains in the Commedia, where the reader is invited to participate in the origination of meaning. But the theological-hermeneutic meditation on which Dante bases the association of reader and writer, and the complex rhetorical mechanisms by which he carries it out—especially the production of two different poems, a vision of salvation and an abyss of temptation, using the same words—are his own invention. (What else does he mean by suggesting in Paradiso 1, in the invocation of Apollo, that he will have been the first to create a true synthesis of the Christian and the poetic?) And for this reason, it is difficult to think of the writer of the Commedia as a reader. He is too obviously and emphatically a creator. But Boccaccio’s position as second in line—provided we recognize the relation of the Decameron to the Commedia—gives rise to a different situation. Now we can receive in something like pure form, without any claim of originality, the figure of the writer as reader. Thus, in a movement that suggests Freudian Nachträglichkeit, at least one important element of Dante’s poetic project does not emerge fully into existence except by way

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of Boccaccio’s belated appropriation of it. Dante in a sense fully becomes Dante (including the quality of reader) only in being followed by Boccaccio. Hence the importance of the idea of the writer as reader in the Decameron, which is discussed below. My second point concerns the idea of a poetic text that contains its own instructions for reading, an idea that opens the question of genre.11 Only our recognition of a work’s genre can guide us in making the assumptions—adopting the readerly attitudes—needed to make sense of a text on a level that anyone would consider literary. Therefore, when a work of poetry makes the gesture of offering its own ad hoc instructions—which is of course never really more than a gesture because the question of the genre of the instructions immediately arises—we are alerted to a condition of discursive or literary crisis in the culture under consideration. The old system or collection of genres by which understanding had heretofore been guided (making ad hoc instructions unnecessary) now appears to be falling apart, ordinarily because it is unable to evolve fast enough to keep pace with new demands that are either engendered from within it or imposed from without. In the fourteenth century of Dante and Boccaccio, it seems likely that these new demands have to do with the emergence of an unprecedentedly large secular readership for vernacular texts. But I will not go into this matter. What interests me is the parallel between fourteenth-century Italy—at least as Dante and Boccaccio experience it—and the eighteenth century, especially in England, France, and Germany, where genre as such undergoes a crisis that becomes manifest in the ascendancy of a form that often positively revels in telling its readers how to read, a form soon recognized as capable of violating any conceivable generic boundary, the modern ironic novel. Resonances of this sort do not prove anything. But if a developmental line from Dante and Boccaccio to the modern novel can be made at all plausible, then it certainly becomes a bit more so if we can show in it the repetition of characteristic historical patterns.

Framing or Glossing? Is the “frame” of the Decameron really a system of frames? The metaphor of the frame becomes enormously complicated when it is developed in detail. Joy Hambuechen Potter, whose work in this area is thorough and illuminating, distinguishes five basic “worlds,” or “frames,” in the Decameron, which are, from the outside in:

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1. The world of Boccaccio’s book and its actual reader, where the whole book is “experienced” by the reader. 2. The world of the ladies for whom Boccaccio claims to be writing, where Boccaccio operates as the “narrator of the plague and ubi sunt themes.” 3. The world in which the plague takes place, where Boccaccio narrates the story of the group of ten. 4. The “idyllic world” of the ten cornice protagonists, in which they tell their hundred stories. 5. The constantly changing world of the stories themselves.12

And then she shows, convincingly, that after having created this structure, “Boccaccio deliberately demolished his elaborate frame system through breaks and shifts” (142). Her speculation on why the author should have done this, which involves the idea of “liminal experience,” is perhaps more open to question; but the basic facts of the case as she presents them, the presence of an elaborate structure riddled with cracks and Escher-esque anomalies, are indisputable—as long as one accepts the metaphor of the frame to begin with. Is it perhaps the metaphor itself that creates the difficulties it brings to light? The trouble with the frame metaphor is that it implies the idea of containment. A frame is not a frame unless it entirely encloses its object; and when it appears that “frames” in the Decameron fail to accomplish this, we have little choice—if we wish to retain the basic metaphor—but to speak of “broken” or “shifted” frames. Perhaps it would make more sense to take a starting point with somewhat less metaphorical reach. My own suggestion would be the notions of “text” and “context,” which preserve the basic directionality implied by “frames,” since context always in some measure encloses or contains text, but without requiring that it be uncompromised. Indeed, once the matter is thought through, it becomes difficult to see how the relation of text and context can even begin to operate without being in some degree reversible. And if we start with text and context, we shall also find it easier, when the time comes, to make the transition to “text” and “gloss,” the opposition that is most fi rmly rooted in Boccaccio’s actual thinking. Text and context, in any case, provide a fruitful basis for discussing the Decameron. The story of the plague in 1348 is doubly contextualized. It is told in the context of the author’s “introduction” of his material, where it is offered as the necessary, albeit unpleasant, account of “the origin of

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the events you [the ladies of the supposed audience] will read about later” (9, McW 49–50). And the whole introduction, in turn, is contextualized by the “Proemio” (3–6, McW 45–47), in which the author explains who those ladies are and why he is addressing them. But then, despite the author’s promise to keep it “short”—a promise that is underscored by the unnecessary explanation that “short” means “in few words”—the story of the plague fi lls eight long paragraphs (9–19, McW 50–58) and includes a considerable amount of what one could call uncharitably a wallowing in graphic detail. Obviously the significance of the plague is far greater than the author has let on. And after we hear Pampinea’s speech in defense of her plan (20–23, McW 59–62), which is also inordinately long and involved, we seem to understand quite clearly what that significance is. We observe, in the church of Santa Maria Novella, how the experience of the plague moves a number of young people to turn away from what had been their daily lives and give themselves over temporarily (as we already know from the “Proemio”) to the entertainment of storytelling. Does the author’s evident fascination with the plague, and with Pampinea’s justification of fleeing from it, not suggest to us immediately that the plague had also been his reason for becoming a storyteller? (There is even a parallel between the plague and that love-as-sickness to which, in the “Proemio,” he does explicitly attribute his storytelling.) I am not talking about Boccaccio’s real reason for writing the Decameron. I am talking about an obvious pattern of suggested inferences that is laid before us in our capacity as readers of fiction. The story of the plague is narrated in the context of the author’s story about whom he is writing for. But his broken promise about how he will treat the plague leads us to infer that in truth the story of the audience of lovelorn ladies had been invented in response to the plague, hence in the context of the story of the plague. Thus the story of the plague is unmasked as the context of its own context. This is the kind of situation we might have expected on purely theoretical grounds. If a story’s “context” means the circumstances in which it is told, then the explanatory power of that context, in all but the most rudimentary instances, will inevitably depend upon its being brought into a certain order—upon its being itself in effect explained by the inner story that it contextualizes. But Boccaccio gives an especially clear contour to this theoretically inevitable process. And he does so a second time in the progression from the story of the plague through the story of the brigata of ten and on down to their own stories in turn.13

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The fi rst thing that strikes us here is the lack of a strong connection between the story of the plague and the story of the brigata. Pampinea of course talks about the plague when outlining her plan; but Filomena, in response (24, McW 62), changes the subject to the question of whether men should not be included, and from that point on, the plague, apart from a few oblique references, is hardly even mentioned. These ten chosen people exist in a world that has somehow suddenly become perfect, a world supplied by nature with three loci amoeni in succession, each more delightful than the last, and supplied by the hand of man with luxurious living space, agreeable architecture, and an abundance of the best possible food and wine. It is almost as if the narrative had suddenly shifted from the world of real human affairs to that of the immortal gods. The author has pointed out at least twice that the expedient of leaving the city did not make people any safer from the plague than they would have been if they had stayed (14, 18, McW 53, 57). But for the ten young storytellers, the question of how leaving the city preserves them from contagion misses the point. They were never in any danger to begin with; they belong to another world. “Either these people will not be vanquished by death, or they will welcome it with joy” (783, McW 681), says an imaginary observer at the beginning of the ninth day. Pampinea does mention that people are also dying in the countryside; but she does so only in order to conclude that “the spectacle is less harrowing inasmuch as the houses and people are more widely scattered” (23, McW 61). Survival is not really an issue. Only comfort, convenience, the avoidance of harrowing spectacles, and the maintenance of well-being in general are matters for concern. There is a great deal to be said about this break in the chain—the fact that the plague does not operate as an explanatory context for the story of the brigata, except perhaps in the sense of contrast or negation—and I will come back to the matter later. But for the time being, let it be noted that the break between the plague and the brigata creates, in the whole structure of the Decameron, a bifurcation that isolates the relation between the author’s introduction and the plague story—thus bringing into focus the interchangeability of text and context in that relation—while also isolating the relation between the world of the ten young people and that of their stories. And the latter relation also exhibits an interchange of text and context, thus producing a duality (storytellers–stories) that echoes the duality from which it is isolated (love-sickeness–plague) and so forms a larger duality (ideal world–“real” world) which echoes in turn the constitutive duality of the whole work (“Decameron”–“Prencipe Galeotto”),

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which itself echoes finally the still larger duality (Commedia–Decameron) within which the work is conceived. The interchange of text and context in the relation between storytellers and stories, which supports this whole structure of dualities, is easily understood. Each of the hundred stories is told in the context of the story of the brigata in their ideal world. And it is suggested repeatedly that the character and situation of the storyteller should help us (and the other storytellers) understand how each story is meant (why precisely this story is told at this point). The trouble is that our knowledge of the storytellers is not sufficient to support this kind of reasoning. We are given enough in the way of hints to pique our interest. We know that each of the three men is in love with one of the ladies, and that “some of the remaining four [ladies] were directly related to one or other of the three [men]”; and we know that Pampinea is a “blood relation” while Neifi le is a beloved (25–26, McW 63). But since we never receive any further unambiguous information about these connections, we are obliged to speculate about the characters on the basis of what they say and do, and especially of course on the basis of the specific stories they tell. Thus the inner novellas form a potentially explanatory context for the overarching story of the brigata, which means they become a context for their own context.14 Or perhaps, instead of speaking of “text” and “context,” we should now use a fourteenth-century terminology and speak of “text” and “gloss,” “testo” and “chiosa” (keeping in mind that the narrow defi nitions that apply to the Vita nuova edition need not apply here). What we will have shown, then, is that the Decameron appears to be constructed so as to give contour to the idea of an inherent reversibility in the relation between text and gloss, which means that it is a book that wants to be understood as nothing but gloss (nothing but “context”), a book in which it is not possible to mark any particular section or strand of the writing as more basic or central—as the “text” for which all else serves as elaboration or commentary. If the model of Dante’s Vita nuova or his Convivio were being followed, then at least the poems in the Decameron would have the unambiguous quality of “text.” But they do not. Like the stories, they operate as glosses on the tantalizingly uncompleted story of the characters who sing them. This idea of an uncompleted story brings us to the question of the story that the author tells in his own person in the introduction to the fourth day. Boccaccio insists that he will here tell “not a complete story . . . but a part of one, so that its very incompleteness will set it apart from the others

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[from those of the ‘select company’]” (346, McW 326). He insists, in other words, that the stories of the “laudevole compagnia” of ten are truly stories told for their own sake (thus “text”), whereas his own story is told only to make a point about his work as a whole (which would make it a “gloss”) for the purpose of defending it against unfair critics. But in the very process of making this distinction, he also undermines it, by reminding us that precisely the incompleteness of the story of the brigata (comparable to the incompleteness of his story now) makes that story operate as a text to which the novellas are glosses; and also that there is in fact no difference in the manner in which the supposedly different types of story are conceived, as he himself (the author) had made clear in the “Proemio” by using the same verb, raccontare, to describe both his own relation to the inner stories and that of the fictional storytellers (5). And then, fi nally, in the very last paragraph of this book which, we have been told repeatedly, is an instance of the author’s using his tongue (that is, language) to give pleasure to ladies, the sexual aspect of that metaphor is at last brought into the open. In response to the charge that his scandalous stories about friars show “an evil and venomous tongue,” the author responds: But not long ago, distrusting my own opinion (which in matters concerning myself I trust as little as possible), I was told by a lady, a neighbour of mine, that I had the fi nest and sweetest tongue in the world. (964, McW 832–33)

When we fi nally hear it, it occurs to us that we had been expecting this joke for a long time. First, it is only a short step from the linguistic satisfying of ladies (by storytelling) and linguistic sex (in the form of erotic stories) to the lingual versions of both. And second, especially in the novellas of the earlier days, there had been considerable emphasis on the sexual appetite of women, and upon the inability of men, especially older men, to satisfy that appetite by genital sex alone. Thus the story of an older man (the author) who satisfies ladies, or at least one lady (“una mia vicina”) with his tongue, is a story that fits perfectly into the book’s pattern and turns out, moreover, to be itself the story of the whole book, in accordance with the statement of purpose (to give pleasure to ladies) in the “Proemio.” It is as if the whole book were suddenly turned inside out, as if one of the most frankly indecent and trivial of the inner stories had suddenly become the outermost story of all, overleaping the whole fiction of the brigata.

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Thus, again, the distinction of inner and outer, of interior and margin, of text and gloss, is obliterated. And thus also, moreover, the idea we might have been forming, the idea of a progression in the stories from day to day toward more serious themes, inspirited with an ever profounder sense of human goodness, explodes in our face. Even the insufferably (perhaps ironically) exemplary story of patient Griselda (10.10), it turns out, has only been part of the setup for a lewd, if also thoroughly sensible, punch-line. We find ourselves, in other words, not edified by an increasing fictional emphasis on virtue, but rather balanced on a kind of knife edge between the two works we might be reading, between “Decameron” and “Prencipe Galeotto,” where it lies only with our own free choice if we do not (in Guido Almansi’s words) perform “the act of reading [itself ] as a descent into transgression and indecency.”15

The Allegorical Story of Reading The result of this disruption of the relation of text and gloss, again, is to produce in effect a book that is nothing but gloss, nothing but the reading of itself, or the reading of instructions for reading itself, a book of which the very writing can be regarded as a kind of reading. And the question of why Boccaccio should have wanted to create this effect has already been answered. For if the Decameron is, in one aspect, a huge cryptic gloss on the Commedia—a gloss that is prevented by its own understanding of the Commedia from explaining in detail its relation to that text—then it must avoid being regarded as a “text” in its own right, which would entail a fundamental misunderstanding of its quality as gloss. This refusal to be “text,” in my opinion, is Boccaccio’s real reason for making the Decameron as complicatedly self-referential as it is. But the effect of that complication, its operation in European literary history, unfolds on a different plane. Boccaccio is induced—by his interest in understanding and propagating Dante’s “theological” meaning16 —to develop the idea of interchangeability between the actions of writing and reading; but the implied association of reading with the authorial function is understood by later readers in an entirely different sense. The passage in the Decameron that seems to me to form a crux here, a parting of the interpretive ways, occurs in the introduction to the fourth day, where Boccaccio defends himself against the accusation of having forsaken poetry in the present frivolous work:

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The Muses are ladies, and although ladies do not rank as highly as Muses, nevertheless they resemble them at fi rst sight, and hence it is natural, if only for this reason, that I should be fond of them. Moreover, ladies have caused me to compose a thousand lines of poetry in the course of my life, whereas the Muses never caused me to write any at all. It is true that they have helped me, and shown me how to write; and it is possible that they have been looking over my shoulder several times in the writing of these tales, however unassuming they may be, perhaps because they acknowledge and respect the affi nity between the ladies and themselves. And so, in composing these stories, I am not straying as far from Mount Parnassus or from the Muses as many people might be led to believe. (351, McW 330)

Here, and again in the next paragraph, Boccaccio identifies himself as a poet. But he does not directly assert that the Decameron is, or should be regarded as, a work of poetry. He comes very close to that assertion. In the next paragraph, he imagines “poeti” (poets) as living among their “favole” (tales), which is one of the terms he had earlier suggested for his own tales in this book (5). But he never actually claims that the Decameron was either conceived or completed within the domain of the poetic. The above passage is evidently meant to tease a critical reader. But modern Boccaccio criticism—almost unanimously, as far as I can see— declines to be teased and feels obliged either (1) to regard the Decameron as poetry after all, and as poetry in its author’s sense of the term, so that the thought of the Genealogie Deorum Gentilium becomes applicable to it, especially the idea of poetry’s veiled philosophical purport; or (2) to leave the question of poetry to one side and focus on issues of realism in either an absolute or an historically relative sense.17 My view, by contrast, is that by playing with the idea of nearness to poetry, Boccaccio is hinting at the quality of his work as a gloss on the Commedia. Nor are the dignity and significance of the Decameron at all compromised by this view. The gloss, in medieval thought, is not automatically relegated to a lower class of writing than its original. And with regard to the idea of combining two distinct works in one text, and the idea of writer as reader, the Commedia to an extent actually depends on Boccaccio’s hundred-part gloss in order to become more fully and perspicuously itself. It is also in the introduction to the fourth day that Boccaccio, in telling the supposedly incomplete story of Filippo Balducci, teases us with the question not merely of poetry, but of authorship in general, which opens

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the possibility of regarding the Decameron as a book that is nothing but gloss, a structure of criss-crossed self-glossings in which there is no writing that is not also a reading of some other part. And if it occurs to us to look for an allegorical representation of this structure, in which writing and reading, or speaking and listening, are combined in a single action, our attention is immediately drawn to the brigata. The starkly articulated ideality of these ten people’s world, the gaping lack of connection between their effortlessly unfolding plan and the excruciating detail (contrary to the author’s promise) in which the plague is described, already disposes us to receive them as an allegory rather than as part of the description of actual Florentine conditions. And if we understand the brigata as an allegory of the intertwinedness of speaking and listening, writing and reading, production and reception, then it is but a short step to recognizing in them an allegory of our situation, of the collective readership of the whole book, the Decameron. Are they somehow mysteriously detached from the conditions in which they are supposedly living? So are we, as readers, detached by the passing of time, and by the interposition of the book, from the plague experience that we are also encouraged to renew—to make immediate—in memory or imagination. Are they involved, as storytellers and singers and commentators, in producing the meaning of exactly the book that they are also readers or hearers of (and characters in)? If my argument about Boccaccio’s response to Dante has any merit—the argument that the relation between “Decameron” and “Prencipe Galeotto” articulates and repeats the possibility of two opposed readings of the Commedia— then we too (by choosing between those versions of Boccaccio’s work) are involved in producing the meaning we receive. Yet further, to the extent that it is recognized that each individual’s reading of the Commedia places him or her at a particular point in that poem’s structure, it follows now, since the Decameron as a comprehensive gloss must complete each such reading and bring it into focus, that we can complete the allegory of the brigata by fi nding ourselves, like them, to be characters in the fiction before us. The brigata form a kind of mirror held up to us, as readers who also operate as producers and as fictional characters. The Decameron thus puts us constantly under the obligation to reflect upon our readerly condition and activity—so much so that it would not be too much to say that the book is about that activity, about reading in the sense (as Boccaccio learns from Dante) that it is inevitably involved in the generation of meaning, hence

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never strictly distinct from writing. What we have in the brigata, then, is a very powerful image of readers and reading that contains all the salient points of Dante’s complex hermeneutics, but in magnified and clarified form. And as with Dante, the one crucial characteristic of The Modern novel Reader that is missing is solitude, which is excluded by the collectively imagined brigata.

Cervantes’ Hermeneutics and the Question of Genre How do we get from Boccaccio to Cervantes? The two cases, across roughly two and a half centuries of separation, are remarkably similar. Each man was the author of a number of unquestionably “poetic” works, by contemporary standards, but each became famous and influential primarily for a long prose work that he himself would not have counted as poetic in the same sense as those others; and each of these long popular works is a book mainly about reading—Don Quixote perhaps more obviously so than the Decameron, since its principal figure is the type of solitary reader in whom we can recognize our own modern readerliness. How deep do these similarities go? Is the idea of reading as meaningproduction, which Boccaccio learns from Dante’s theologically grounded hermeneutics, still (or also) operative in Cervantes? And if there really is a connection, how does it arise and develop historically? Let us begin with a straightforward consideration of Don Quixote and its implied hermeneutics. Sancho Panza’s malapropisms, which are important in this regard, reach a kind of climax in part 2, chapter 7: “Sir,” began Sancho, “I have reduced my wife to let me go with your Grace wherever you choose to take me.” “Induced, you mean to say, Sancho, not reduced.” “Once or twice before, if I remember rightly,” said Sancho, “I have begged your Grace not to correct my words so long as you understand what I mean by them. When you don’t understand, all you have to do is to say, ‘Sancho, I don’t know what the devil you mean’; and then, if I don’t make myself plain, you can go ahead and correct me all you want to. You know how focile I am.” “I fail to understand you right now, Sancho,” said Don Quixote, “for I’m sure I don’t know what you mean when you say, ‘I am so focile.’ ” “So focile,” replied Sancho, “means, ‘I am so much that way.’ ” “I understand you less than ever,” said his master.

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“Well, if you can’t make it out,” answered the squire, “I don’t know what to say to you. That’s the best I can do, so help me God.” “Ah! I get it. What you mean to say is that you are so docile, easygoing, and tractable that you will accept whatever I say to you and follow my teachings.” “I will bet you,” said Sancho, “that you understood what I meant all the time and just wanted to mix me up so that you could hear me make a lot more blunders.” “You may be right,” replied Don Quixote.18

The point is that if you can understand Sancho well enough to correct him, then you must, in some sense, know what he is saying before he has succeeded in saying it. Sancho underscores this point (by stating its converse) when he concedes paradoxically that you can correct him all you want in cases where you really don’t understand him. Is the question here merely one of understanding a word from its “context”? We have noted that the “context” is not fully there to be applied as an interpretive tool until it has itself been explained by the text, or the questionable word, at its center. All we can say defi nitely about what Don Quixote accomplishes in conversing with Sancho is that at some point before Sancho’s utterance has been completely made, he understands that utterance. When Sancho suggests that the Don has been merely pretending to misunderstand him, the latter, before changing the subject, responds “You may be right.” This concession is hermeneutically unavoidable. When I am in the process of understanding an utterance, or a text, there is no perspective available to me from which I might identify the moment at which I have stopped misunderstanding. If you accuse me of deliberately misunderstanding, the only honest response I can make is “You may be right.” (We recall the discussion, in Chapter 3, of Purgatorio 21 and Dante’s understanding the earthquake, where the possibility of understanding that we understand is called into question.) There is a connection here to the idea of a reader’s or recipient’s role in the generation of meaning, as well as to the problem, from Chapter 1, of deciding where “reading” actually happens in our experience. These issues perhaps appear trivial when they are viewed by the example of conversation rather than reading. In conversation, the fluid or kinetic quality of understanding seems too obvious to be accorded the status of a theorem, and the recipient’s role in meaning-production is overshadowed by the apparent authority of the original speaker, who can always say either

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“yes, that is what I meant” or the contrary. But on the other hand, it is only a page or so after the passage quoted above, with Sancho still in the midst of being amusingly malaprop, that Don Quixote says “I understand you so well that I can read you like a book” (646). The metaphor is a standard one, but in the context of this conversation it implies that you and I, who are actually reading a book, are doing the same thing, making the same kinds of inference, as the Don. Thus the idea of the reader as an originator of meaning, which is amusingly obvious in the case of Don Quixote as a reader of romance (and of reality), is extended to cover our situation as well. The same basic hermeneutics is already well established in part 1, and is brought into focus especially by the remarks of the canon in chapter 47. After attacking the whole genre of chivalric romance with both passion and reason (498–500), the canon suddenly changes his ground and begins to praise the genre for unique opportunities that it offers an author: But for all the harsh things he had said of such books, the canon added, he had found one good thing about them, and that was the chance they afforded for a good mind to display its true worth, for they offered a broad and spacious field over which the author’s pen might run without impediment, describing shipwrecks, tempests, battles, and encounters. . . . The author could relate now a lamentable and tragic event and now some joyful and unexpected occurrence; he could picture here a lovely lady, modest, discreet, and reserved, and there a Christian knight, gentle and brave. . . . The author might further show himself to be an astrologer, an excellent cosmographer, a musician, a student of statecraft, or even upon occasion, if he chose, a necromancer. . . . These books, indeed, by their very nature, provided the author with an unlimited field in which to try his hand at the epic, lyric, tragic, and comic genres and depict in turn all the moods that are represented by these most sweet and pleasing branches of poetry and oratory; for the epic may be written in prose as well as in verse. (500–501)

The canon is talking here not about a genre in the abstract but about actual books that he has at least attempted to read (498). He is a reader who, in the process of reading what he must consider a bad book, also reads the possibility of an ideal book into his reading and so, as a reader, becomes a kind of author in his own right. In the next chapter, in fact, we hear that he has tried his hand at being an author in practice.

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And yet, it is not as if, in being an author, the canon has ceased being a reader; it is not as if, in imagining his ideal book, he has stopped paying attention to the real book in front of him. For what makes those real books inadequate—that “they are made up of so many disparate members that it would seem the author’s intention was to create a chimera or monster rather than a well-proportioned figure” (499)—is also exactly what makes the ideal book possible, the “broad and spacious field” in which infi nitely disparate things may be written of. The canon, then, is not first a reader and then an author. He is an author in being a reader, and in fact only in being a reader—since his attempts at actual authorship are never fully carried out. He excuses himself, in the next chapter, for never fi nishing and publishing a book, on the grounds that “while the praise of the discerning few offsets the scorn of the unknowing many, I still did not care to subject myself to the confused judgment of that vapid public to which the reading of such works is for the most part confined” (502–3). And then, to develop this thought, he changes the subject from “prose epic” (where the admissibility of infi nitely disparate areas of content is an advantage) to dramatic comedy (where disparateness tends to be a fault [504–5]). For in truth, his excuse is merely an excuse. The real problem that arises in trying to write the canon’s ideal book is that in a book of that “broad” type, there is no way of distinguishing conclusively between good and bad—since exactly the same textual feature can be both a fault and an opening for the ideal—hence no guide by which one might orient oneself in writing. And this problem, in turn, is a problem we have already touched on in connection with Dante and Boccaccio: the problem of genre, the general cultural problem that is signaled by books that make the gesture of containing instructions for their own reading—or for their own writing, which comes to the same thing—the problem of a loss of universally accepted criteria for judging particular types of writing, which is exactly the problem that the canon, even after changing the subject, identifies in his own literary milieu. Once we have come this far, the next step in our reasoning is obvious. The canon’s remarks are themselves a set of instructions to the reader, not to the reader of chivalric romance but to the reader of Don Quixote itself, instructions (however contradictory or confusing) on exactly how, as readers of Don Quixote, we must position ourselves with respect to the romances that our present author had at fi rst seemed merely to take as objects of mockery. Thus Don Quixote itself is marked as one of those

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books whose existence signals the problem of genre, a book that must contrive to make a cultural place for itself in a situation where the criteria for judging it, hence placing it, are crumbling—a book, therefore, that in the absence of objective criteria, depends for its very identity (in history, in culture) on contour and meaning that are originated by its readers. The discussion of part 1, in chapter 3 of part 2, suggests exactly this. Don Quixote opines that the published book of his adventures is probably comparable to the work of the painter Orbaneja, whose pictures have no representational purpose or identity but are simply “whatever they turn out to be.” And Sansón replies that on the contrary, that book has received a very strong cultural identity by way of the large number and variety of people who read it with pleasure (620–21). As in the case of the conversation on Sancho’s malapropisms, the specific example tends to make light of the theoretical issue. But the issue (of meaning-production in the process of reading) makes its presence felt nonetheless, along with the associated problems of readerly responsibility and an author’s subjection to the Geryon of his or her audience.

Cervantes and Boccaccio: The Book That Is Two Books There is a further level of suggestiveness in the canon’s critique of chivalric romance. For in reading such a book, the canon evidently reads two different books at the same time, the book that is really there and the ideal book that does not yet exist. And in this he is exactly paralleled by Don Quixote, who, in reading a book on chivalry, obviously reads a book not at all similar to the book that you or I might read on the same pages. The only difference is that the Don reads his books all the way through (whereas the canon always stops in frustration [498]) and then simply insists on the authenticity of his ideal versions. And as before, a further parallel suggests itself with respect to the book, Don Quixote, that we are actually reading here and now. For the Don is clearly also a reader of this book as well, except that he reads a version different from ours: most of the book’s events are known to him, but appear to him and to us in an entirely different light. Behind the actual text of Cervantes’ Don Quixote, in other words, is another whole book, an idealized “Don Quixote” that is being read only by the Don himself. This idea of writing and reading the book of one’s own life is itself thematized in the figure of the convict Ginés de Pasamonte, author of The Life of Ginés de Pasamonte, a presumably picaresque book which is of course not finished

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because his life is not yet fi nished (201). And the idea that the text before us is not the book itself, but only one version of it, is insisted upon repeatedly in the metanarrative concerning Cid Hamete’s Arabic original (82 et passim). The parallels that appear thus between Don Quixote and the Decameron are remarkably extensive. Not only do we find in Cervantes’ book a hermeneutics that recognizes a problem in distinguishing readership from authorship, but that hermeneutics also produces, as in Boccaccio, a sense that the book before us is two different books at the same time. And just as Boccaccio offers us a perspective from which to survey both sides of this duality—and so to receive an intimation of the perspective, relative to Dante, that we have sacrificed by “having the vision”—so also, in Don Quixote, we cannot read the public version without taking into account the Don’s private version, both as a plot element and as the critical perception of a world so corrupt that the only way to reform it is by reimagining reality itself. Sancho Panza certainly oversimplifies the matter when he concludes part 1: It is true that most of the adventures you meet with do not come out the way you’d like them to, for ninety-nine out of a hundred will prove to be all twisted and crosswise. I know that from experience, for I’ve come out of some of them blanketed and out of others beaten to a pulp. But, all the same, it’s a fi ne thing to go along waiting for what will happen next, crossing mountains, making your way through woods, climbing over cliffs, and putting up at inns free of charge, and the devil take the maravedi that is to pay. (539)

But still, are we any less able than Sancho to see both sides of the situation—which means to choose between reading the public text and reading the Don’s implied text—especially after we have learned from the canon to regard the whole genre of chivalric romance from two opposed perspectives, and have learned yet further that with respect to the problem of genre, chivalric romances are disturbingly similar to the putative antiromance we have before us? Or, if we choose to regard the Don’s text as an absent text, an impossible text, a text that will never get written, like the canon’s ideal romance, the parallel with Boccaccio still holds in a different form. For the effect of the complicated self-referentiality of Don Quixote—which reaches an absurd pinnacle in part 2, chapter 44 (935–45)—the effect of the book’s constantly reading itself over its own shoulder, is to create something very like our

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impression of the Decameron as a book that is nothing but self-reading, nothing but gloss. And, as with Boccaccio, this impression is confi rmed in reality; Don Quixote, like the Decameron in its relation to the Commedia, may be regarded as a gloss on the absent text that haunts it, a commentary on the Don’s reading of his own life. Cervantes calls this state of affairs to our attention directly in a wellknown passage on translation. After praising the ability of the translator from Italian in the printing shop, Don Quixote continues: But, for all of that, it appears to me that translating from one language into another, unless it be from one of those two queenly tongues, Greek and Latin, is like gazing at a Flemish tapestry with the wrong side out: even though the figures are visible, they are full of threads that obscure the view and are not bright and smooth as when seen from the other side. Moreover, translating from easy languages does not call for either wit or eloquence, any more than does the mere transcription or copying of a document. (1092)

But the book we are reading has itself been emphatically costumed as a translation. And if our text is therefore comparable to the wrong side of a tapestry, what would we expect to fi nd on “the other side”? Surely the self-referential point of this metaphor is not merely to remind us of the fiction of Cid Hamete—who, we are told, was probably a liar anyway (83, 615–16). The “bright and smooth” form of the tapestry figure—toward which our text but gropes as a kind of commentary—the perfect version of the text, which we will never quite get to see, is clearly meant to be understood as Don Quixote’s own “Don Quixote.” This point does not exhaust the implications of the passage that suggests it. But if we go further into those implications by treating the passage as a comment on translation in general, we only fi nd ourselves drawn into Boccaccio’s orbit from another direction. First, why does the Don make an exception for Greek and Latin, which implies that translations from these “queenly” languages do not necessarily have the same wrong-sideout quality as translations between vulgar tongues? And second, if translating from “easy” languages (which presumably means languages other than Greek and Latin) is not much more than a matter of transcribing or copying, where does that wrong-side-out quality of the translation come from? I think both of these questions can be answered by taking as a guide the distinction between gramatica and locutio vulgaris (“grammar,” meaning

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Latin or Greek, as against “vulgar tongue”) in Dante’s De Vulgari Eloquentia. A “queenly” or grammatical language is characterized mainly by the complicated edifice of rules that governs it; it can be learned only at the expense of much time and study. The vulgar tongue, by contrast, exists for the sole purpose of enabling individuals to expose their thoughts to one another, and can be used for this purpose even by children. It follows that when Latin or Greek is translated into a vulgar tongue, the demands made upon that tongue go far beyond its usual strictly communicative sphere of operation. The translator must therefore possess much “wit and eloquence” (a great ability to think beyond the exigencies of mere communication), which will give his or her translation the quality of a finished tapestry in its own right. When translating between vulgar tongues, on the other hand, one need only recognize what is being communicated and know how to communicate it in the target language. If the Italian text says “più,” the Spanish translator confidently writes “más” (1092). But it is in this last case that the process (Don Quixote suggests) becomes problematic, that a translation receives its wrong-side-out quality. And if más really means più—there seems to be no doubt on this point—if the communicative act that says “más” is the same as the act that says “più,” then the problem of translation must lie not in that act alone but in the whole communicative situation it belongs to, including the act of understanding or interpreting. If what the speaker does is the same in both cases, then there must be a difference between what a Spanish reader does, in reading más, and what an Italian reader does in reading più; and sensitive readers of the translation will detect that difference—unless the translation is so perfectly consistent in itself, in its own language, that it constitutes in effect a new “original,” as Don Quixote thinks happens in two actual cases (1092). Thus, in sum, a Boccaccian hermeneutics, emphasizing each reader’s role in constituting a text’s meaning, is strongly insisted upon.

Framing the Question How do we get from Boccaccio to Cervantes? The significance of this question is suggested in Don Quixote not only by the general idea of readers’ participation in the production of meaning, but also by a pattern of specific consequences—the book’s separation into two virtual texts for us to choose between, the book’s quality as a reading of itself, hence as nothing but gloss, the problem of genre—that reminds us strongly of the Decameron. For if what Bruns says about the distinction between a manuscript

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culture and a print culture is valid, then it is highly unlikely that the latter will produce of itself anything like that idea of readerly coauthorship. The printed book reaches its reader in finished form. Therefore it is reasonable to assume that the sense of readerly activity in Cervantes—and of making room for such activity—represents a survival from earlier manuscript culture, in this case a survival not only into the age of print, but into the beginnings of the age of mass bibliopoly, where readers’ participation in the authorial function can be readily transformed into the figure of The Anonymous and strictly Solitary Reader. And given the manner in which the reader-oriented hermeneutics of Don Quixote repeatedly produces echoes of the Decameron, plus Boccaccio’s position as the first major publicist of the idea of participatory reading developed by Dante, it is hard not to ask the question, how do we get from Boccaccio to Cervantes? The question is not merely, can we exhibit a tradition, a chain of influences, containing both Boccaccio and Cervantes, or a likelihood that Cervantes had direct knowledge of Boccaccio? The answer to this question is certainly yes. As a writer of novellas, which he is even in the course of Don Quixote, Cervantes belongs to a tradition that receives a major impetus from the Decameron; and since we know he spent time in Italy, and could quote in the original from such authors as Ariosto and Petrarch, it is unlikely that he had no knowledge of Boccaccio.19 But what we really need to know is whether the tradition from fourteenth-century Italy, as Cervantes and the Spain of his time received it, can be expected to have preserved all those elements of the figure of The Modern Reader that were discussed above in connection with Dante and Boccaccio. (It must be kept in mind that these “elements,” as they occur in Dante and Boccaccio, do not yet imply modern reading or reading for thrills. Participatory reading especially, for Dante’s or Boccaccio’s contingent reader, is closer to reading for art, an active reorigination of the work. Only when one has learned to theorize oneself as The Noncontingent Reader—the anonymous empty vessel waiting to be fi lled—does that participatory attitude become the need to experience “another life,” which is reading for thrills.) If this form of the question can be answered in the affi rmative, if we can show plausibly a path by which Cervantes’ print culture can have received those elements of modern reading that must have originated in a manuscript culture, then we shall have established—by way of the printrelated quality of readerly solitude as represented in the figure of Don Quixote (though not yet necessarily in the presumed actual readers of Don Quixote)—a plausible genealogy for the Jamesian or Iserian model of

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reading. The rest of the path, from Cervantes into the twentieth century, will, I assume, not be difficult to follow. I speak of a plausible genealogy, not of a fully demonstrated genealogy, nor even of a genealogy presumed to be unique. And I claim that the showing of plausibility is sufficient for present purposes. A principal consequence of the argument in Chapter 1 is that the idea of reading proposed by the tradition of theorists from James to Iser does not in any degree reflect or explain what we actually do when we read. The term Iser uses for his approach to reading is “phenomenological,” but what he really means is “empirical”; and my point is that the widespread idea of reading—especially novel reading—of which Iser gives an accurate account, is not empirical at all, but is a purely theoretical construct that has over time found for itself a niche in our thinking to which we ascribe (mistakenly) the quality of experience or memory of experience. The most pressing question created by this point is the question of genealogy. How does it happen in history that a narrowly defi ned and not very convincing theoretical construct—Iser’s own argument unwittingly reduces it to an absurdity—comes to be widely accepted as a description of experience itself? And although it would be doubly satisfying if one could prove exactly what the genealogy of modern reading theory is, still, in order to justify the present line of interrogation, it is enough to show that a plausible genealogy is available. Plausibility, then, is what we are after. And to construct in history a plausible path from Boccaccio’s theory of reading to that of Cervantes, we require only that single structural element of the Decameron into which the work’s whole hermeneutics is packed allegorically, the image of a brigata of storytellers considered as an allegorical mirroring of our own actual condition as readers. First, the brigata is a conspicuous and uncomplicated literary device, which finds its way into late sixteenth-century Spain if not through direct imitation of the Decameron (which was in official disfavor there, and had been on the Index since 1559), then certainly by way of the Ecatomiti of Giovanni Battista Giraldi Cinthio, a markedly post-Tridentine and therefore acceptable novella collection that had appeared in Spanish translation in 1590.20 In any event, Cervantes’ contemporary Antonio de Eslava uses a Boccaccian brigata in his Noches de invierno of 1609. And although Cervantes himself uses no such device in the Novelas ejemplares of 1613, I will argue that the technique of the brigata is present and crucial in Don Quixote, especially part 1.

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Second, the allegorical aspect of the brigata is not at all obscure. All that is needed is that we recognize, in the storytelling and story-hearing group before us, an image of our situation as readers. Once this happens, the whole of Boccaccio’s theory of reading lies open before our powers of inference: the interchangeability of writing and reading, or production and reception, the reader’s participation in the production of meaning, hence in authorship itself, the analogy (especially important for Cervantes) between written communication and conversational immediacy, by which the inherently fluid and kinetic quality of the former is exposed. Indeed, the relation between theoretical content and allegorical vehicle is so transparent here that it is not difficult to imagine the transmission of that content by way of a work in which the vehicle, the brigata, is used with no allegorical intent. Giraldi, it happens, was a literary theorist and is unlikely to have been entirely innocent in imitating Boccaccio’s brigata. But to make the connection between Boccaccio and Cervantes, one is under no obligation to show that Giraldi, or anyone else, attached theoretical significance to the device. If it is admitted that a hermeneutics of reading very like Boccaccio’s is developed by Cervantes in Don Quixote, and that Cervantes receives and employs the device of the brigata, then it follows as a plausible inference that Cervantes receives the allegorical content of the device, or at least the impetus toward that type of theorizing (which in itself would be much more at home in a manuscript culture than in his print culture), with the device itself. The argument in this form will lack only a basis for the idea of a reader’s solitary condition, which is not derivable from the brigata as allegory. But against the background of a print culture—hence for Cervantes, but not for Boccaccio—and especially against the background of an early culture of mass bibliopoly, the idea of a reader’s strictly solitary anonymity does become easily derivable from the idea of his or her participation in the authorial function. If we agree therefore that it is reasonable to regard Don Quixote as a representation of The Solitary Reader, and that Cervantes’ hermeneutics of reading is derived from that of the Boccaccian brigata, then the logical and structural connection between these two elements of Don Quixote becomes apparent, and the construction of a plausible genealogy for the figure of The Modern Reader is complete. If it is objected that this genealogy is entirely abstract—that it says nothing whatever about developments in the actual practice of reading—my response is that this is exactly my point: The Modern Reader originates as a strictly theoretical construct and achieves reality (in a sense) only after

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the fact, in the educational process by which we teach ourselves to approximate that fictional figure as closely as possible and by which we persuade ourselves (yet further after the fact) that our “experience” in reading, as we remember it, had corresponded to that figure’s theoretical foundation. Actual readers of Don Quixote, by contrast, will probably find it difficult to carry out these acts of self-delusion because the book itself, in assembling for the fi rst time all the crucial elements of modern reading, presents the assemblage as a warning against exactly that delusion, against believing that the undeniable participatory aspect of reading can be realized as an enveloping personal experience that utterly swamps the contingent personal identity of The (thus newborn) Reader for thrills.

Don Quixote’s Disruption of the Boccaccian Form A great deal of Don Quixote, especially part 1, is taken up by stories that have nothing to do immediately with Don Quixote himself or his adventures; but this fact alone does not imply that the work can be included in the tradition of the Boccaccian novella collection. Nor does the fact that all the interpolated novellas are told by characters in the main story (or in the case of “El Curioso Impertinente,” read aloud by a character) imply by itself that the work’s structure includes a component that is descended from the Boccaccian brigata. The facts are suggestive, but the points still need to be argued. The fi rst narrative digression in Don Quixote—the first instance of the structural move that is later associated with the introduction of novellas—is not a novella at all but a piece of frame narrative. At the beginning of chapter 9, a character who speaks in the fi rst person but cannot logically have been the narrator of the preceding chapters, intervenes and informs us that the “chronicle” we had been reading has broken off (80). Then he tells the little story of how he had found in Toledo an Arabic version of “Don Quixote,” written by Cid Hamete Benengeli (82), and how he had had it translated into Castilian, whereupon the main narrative (now presumably from Cid Hamete’s version) resumes. This is not a “novella” in the normal sense; but what it does is structurally indistinguishable from what is usually done by a novella because it is an interpolated piece of narrative involving premises and characters not present in the main story, and especially because there is no earlier “frame” narrative with which to connect it. Thus the little story of the Arabic version can be regarded as both “frame” and “novella,” which means it has the effect, familiar to us from

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Boccaccio and the use of the brigata, of suggesting a structure that tends to turn itself inside out, exposing the inherent reversibility of the relation of context to text, of reading to its object. The second digression, which follows quickly, is much more conventionally a novella—not only in the literary sense, but also in the sense of “news item.” It is the story of the death, attributed to unfulfi lled love, of “the famous student and shepherd known as Grisóstomo” (99). But it too then turns out to have a strong theoretical component when, at Grisóstomo’s funeral, the shepherdess Marcela steps as it were out of the novella and into the world of the main story (120–22) where, in the course of defending herself against the imputation of “being cruel and somewhat arrogant, and exceedingly disdainful” (119), she offers in effect an interpretation of the novella completely at variance with everything we had read up to that point. Yet Marcela’s view, however dramatic its introduction, is not simply accepted as truth. Ambrosio still intends to call her “faithless,” “cruel,” and “heartless” (123) in his epitaph for Grisóstomo; and Don Quixote, who had forbidden anyone from following her, now intends to seek her himself “and offer her any service that lay in his power” (124), which suggests that he has somehow worked out a third possibility for interpreting her story, an interpretation we can only guess at. Marcela’s appearance thus establishes not the truth of her story but rather (in keeping with the idea of a boundary violation) its exposure to interpretation, to being written and rewritten by its readers. By now it should be clear to a reader of Don Quixote that the practice of the novella here goes hand in hand with its theory. This impression is strengthened when, after the first adventures at the inn that will later be the scene of more boundary crossings between novella fiction and main fiction, we are presented with Sancho’s unfi nished story of Lope Ruiz and Torralba (173–76), which is often compared to Decameron 6.1 because it shows the subordination of a novella’s content to its method.21 And then we come upon the very suggestive case, narrated by Don Quixote himself, of a chivalric novella in the future tense (189–91). But with regard to theory, the true climax comes in the adventure of the galley slaves; for this collection of people, in Don Quixote’s view, is essentially a collection of stories, which he intends to listen to (196). In this theoretically charged atmosphere the galley slaves represent allegorically the novella collection as such, an allegory made clearer by the idea of arithmetical or geometric structure that is suggested by their being chained together in a line or by the image of ranks of rowing benches in

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a ship. Allegorically considered, what happens in chapter 22 of Cervantes’ novel is that the traditional, arithmetically structured Boccaccian novella sequence, in which stories are told in turn by members of a brigata, is disrupted, in a sense perhaps liberated, at all events thrown into confusion by Don Quixote. That is, the book Don Quixote, which might otherwise have been a typical collection of novellas—including presumably, as separate stories, even the various ridiculous episodes of what is now the main story—has been disrupted by its own central figure and forced to take another shape in which the boundaries separating individual novellas from their frame constantly collapse. There is still a kind of brigata—characters still tell the stories—but its membership changes constantly as new characters appear and as their stories (Cardenio’s and Dorotea’s, for instance) repeatedly fail to remain separate from one another and from the continuing story of those who tell them. And if we ask how it happens that Don Quixote’s presence disrupts the operation of the brigata, by obliterating the normal boundaries between romantic fictions and the postulated “reality” in which such fictions are recounted and listened to, the question practically answers itself. Don Quixote attempts to read the galley slaves like a book (we recall his using this metaphor in conversation with Sancho), and in doing so he necessarily transforms them into exactly his kind of book, a book of reversals and confusions between fiction and reality, in which (and in relation to which) the real-world constraints by which we are normally “chained” no longer apply. We thus have in the galley-slaves allegory a subtle and powerful theoretical meditation that becomes even more interesting when we consider that the elements by which Don Quixote works his disruption of the Boccaccian form—especially the idea of interchangeability among the roles of author, reader, and character—are already present in the form itself, at least in the form as represented by the Decameron. What Don Quixote does—or to unpack the allegory, what his presence as a character does—is not negate or alter the original form, but rather develop it beyond an inherent limit at which it begins to disrupt itself. And the nature of that limit has to do with the idea of solitary reading. As long as reading is understood as an activity of the contingent person, hence as fundamentally collective—which it is necessarily in a manuscript culture—the brigata, as Boccaccio uses it, remains an exact image of ourselves as readers. But once the possibility of strictly solitary reading has arisen, which swamps my contingent individuality in the anonymous

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generality of The Reader, the brigata in its original form is no longer adequate. The passages or interchanges among the conditions of author, reader, and character are no longer reflective acts carried out in relation to other individuals, but now take on the quality of disruptions, of boundary crossings by which the objective orderliness of my world, hence the limitedness or contingency of my individual being, is repeatedly obscured. (Cervantes thus anticipates Iser’s recognition that reading for thrills, if it could be made consistent, would imply ultimately an undoing of the basic structure of experience.) And Don Quixote, who in the course of reading imposes on himself an obligation to abandon his actual contingent identity in favor of a perfected self unlimited in virtue and in power, is a definitive instance of this newly oriented form of reading. But we must bear in mind that we are talking here not about a simple opposition between two types of reading or reader, but about a developmental mechanism by which Boccaccio’s reader (or for that matter, Dante’s), when a certain limit is overstepped even slightly, becomes something suddenly and entirely different. In Chapter 3, I discussed how Dante places his reader under an obligation simply to “have the poem’s vision” rather than follow a critical path that would threaten, for instance, an undermining of the authority of Scripture. And Don Quixote, with respect to his chivalric romances, obviously feels a similar obligation to “have the vision” rather than risk being critical. But with regard to the Commedia, having the vision must be the reflective act of a contingent individual; and there are several points in Cervantes’ novel where we seem to come within inches of being able to say the same of Don Quixote’s reading. When Sancho asks him what reason he has for “going mad” in imitation of Beltenebros, the Don replies: That is the point of the thing; that is the beautiful part of it. What thanks does a knight-errant deserve for going mad when he has good cause? The thing is to go out of my head without any occasion for it, thus letting my lady see, if I do this for her in the dry, what I would do in the wet. (232)

The speaking of these words is clearly a reflective act, and Don Quixote is clearly mad, if not precisely in the sense he means. The trouble (the minute but all-important difference from Dante’s adequate reader) is that his reflection does not achieve his madness. The gap, the space by which he misses the mark, is very small; it consists in the fact that his explanation of his reflection—to Sancho and to himself—has the effect of reserving for him a position of power or control with respect to both his reflection and

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his madness, reserving for him the separated godlike perspective of The strictly Solitary Reader/author, by which his contingent being is obscured. (In Dante’s world, he would be striving for the condition of agens, not that of poet-pilgrim.) Again, a couple of paragraphs further on, he admonishes Sancho: “How is it possible for you to have accompanied me all this time without coming to perceive that all the things that have to do with knights-errant appear to be mad, foolish, and chimerical, everything being done by contraries?” (233). Again, Don Quixote is on the verge of becoming Dante’s adequate reader in a reflective commitment of himself to absurdity. And again, in his next sentence, he goes one small step too far: “Not that they are so [‘mad, foolish, and chimerical’] in reality; it is simply that there are always a lot of enchanters going about among us, changing things and giving them a deceitful appearance.” Whereby he reserves for himself, again, a privileged perspective from which the absurd is not absurd after all. The difference here, in itself, is minuscule, but in its consequences it is a difference by which the whole direction of European literary history is shifted.

The Two Genres of Don Quixote To view the matter more in literary-historical terms, we recall that for Boccaccio the novella cycle is not a genre in the strict sense, but rather the sign of a problem in the operation of poetic genres; it is a sign which, when fully understood, will serve its reader as a gateway into Dante, where the problems of understanding are deeper and more existentially critical. But by Cervantes’ time the Boccaccian form had become a genre—one is tempted to say, had degenerated into a genre—in which a reader’s participation in meaning-production and the permeable boundary between being a reader and being a character (or an object of reading) are no longer grand historical strategies for fi nding one’s way into the transcendent possibilities of the Commedia, but simply readerly gestures that one has learned to make in response to certain textual cues, such as the brigata. The easy availability of exactly these gestures is a major part of what enables Don Quixote to become the kind of reader he is. But Don Quixote, I have just pointed out, is also a reader who gets the genre of the novella cycle wrong, and whose reading disrupts that form. In literary-historical terms, this means that he brings with him, or represents, a different and incompatible genre, and that the book Don Quixote is thus

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structured historically as a collision of genres. And once we have come this far, it is not hard to see that the second element in the collision is the venerable medieval genre of the quest romance, descended ultimately from the Aeneid. Genre is as much a problem for Cervantes as for Boccaccio, but it is not exactly the same type of problem. It cuts deeper for Cervantes, who possesses nothing comparable to the solid reference point (in Dante) by which Boccaccio steadies and orients himself. Yet the quest romance, as Cervantes receives it, also shows clear signs of degeneration. In its original form, this genre is characterized by a system of parallels involving biographical time, historical time, and the imagined time required for reading or writing the poem. “Tantae molis erat Romanam condere gentem [so difficult was the task of founding the Roman people]” (Aeneid 1.33) says Vergil, referring ostensibly to the combination of personal and historical aspects in Aeneas’ long struggle, but also referring cryptically to the process by which the poem’s language unfolds for both himself and his reader. The poem not only describes the city’s founding, but also itself carries out that founding in another register. But by the time it reaches Cervantes (and is mocked in the episode of Don Quixote’s library), not much remains of this generic structure except the extraordinary, often ridiculous prowess of the hero, prowess grounded originally in a basic continuity between the hero’s activity and that of author or reader. Don Quixote himself seems to understand vaguely that the poetic form he represents is one that has degenerated. What he actually says is that the time has degenerated, into an “age of iron” (170) where the knight’s task is “to revive what is known as the Golden Age.” But the effect of this thinking is to imagine a new kind of quest, now a quest for knights and knighthood, thus to imagine reviving precisely the quest character of chivalry that has been lost in the degenerate romances of prowess for its own sake. Without his quite knowing it, Don Quixote’s longing for a better age parallels the seriousness of the Aeneid or of the high medieval Grail poems. (The same sort of point could be made about his image of himself, later, as an unprecedentedly tested knight confronting the age of gunpowder [401–2].) But the genres that collide in Don Quixote are also at least potentially complementary. Each fi lls, or could conceivably fi ll, a crucial need of the other. With the loss of its political or religious seriousness, its quality as both a representation and an enactment of destiny, the quest romance has also lost the ability to engage a reader, to involve us directly (as Romans or as Christians) in its unfolding; and at least a substitute procedure for involving a reader in meaning-production is made available on a technical

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level in the novella cycle. The novella cycle, on the other hand, has lost its anchor, its reason for being. The Decameron is sustained as an enduring structure not only by its energy, wit, and variety, but especially by its unwavering relation to Dante; when that relation is lost, only gestures and conceits remain. What even the degenerate quest romance promises, from this point of view—even if Cervantes does not understand the relation of Boccaccio to Dante—is storytelling with an ideal dimension, in relation to which the gestures of Boccaccian technique might once again receive intellectual justification. In Don Quixote, then, we have a collision of narrative genres which at the same time looks very much like a last-ditch effort to rescue some form of generic legitimacy in narrative. But the effort fails. It produces a mere collision in which the constitutive and salutary limits of each genre are overstepped, producing not legitimacy but confusion. (Don Quixote’s quest for a quest is one step too abstract, just as his “having the vision” is one step too well planned.) And the result is a profoundly negative literary-historical vision—a vision of the collapse of genre as such, and of the legitimacy it confers. We recall the canon’s dream of an ideal chivalric romance that neither he nor anyone else will ever write because the absence of valid generic limitations makes it impossible for either author or reader to distinguish good from bad writing. Does this idea of negativity confl ict with the witty and cheerful quality of Cervantes’ writing? Not at all. Not here any more than in Heine, say, or Nietzsche. Negativity is not that easy to measure, and is certainly not measured by such qualities as earnest solemnity or melancholy. But in Cervantes’ case, there is quite a clear measure of the negativity of vision in the fi rst part of Don Quixote. It is his inability to sustain that vision, the extent to which he backs away from it in the book’s second part as well as in the Exemplary Novellas, which latter sever practically all connection with the Boccaccian form and its problematics. This basic point, if perhaps differently shaded in evaluation, has been made often in Cervantes scholarship, most notably, for Americans, by Ruth S. El Saffar, who writes in the introduction to her book Novel to Romance: Cervantes’s own literary development . . . is one which moves away from perspectivism, away from temporally structured works, and away from representations of “the way man is alienated from the ground of his being.” The questions of what is truth, what is reality, what is fiction, what is history—the questions which line the pages of Don Quixote I . . .

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and the problematics of characters who can fi nd their way neither within the confi nes of society nor outside of it—characters like Anselmo, in El curioso impertinente . . . characters like Don Quixote himself—dissolve within questions of broader scope in later works. The development . . . is one which reflects Cervantes’s emergence beyond despair and alienation in his own life to acceptance of an integrating totality the ultimate truth and perfection of which, though impossible to grasp in human terms, serves to obliterate the distinctions in this life which make such questions as individual vs. society, and truth vs. fiction appear relevant.22

In other words, Cervantes’ later works are marked by a backing away from problems raised in part 1 of Don Quixote, which seems to me the sign of an awareness on his part of the ineluctable negativity of his earlier vision. El Saffar adduces plenty of textual evidence for her thesis, to which I would add only a couple of instances that sharpen the focus on negativity. In chapter 32 of part 1, for example, the curate points out to the innkeeper that the royal license for printing chivalric romances does not imply that the romances relate true facts. On the contrary, he says, “in well-ordered states there are games of chess, handball, and billiards to amuse those that do not desire, are not obliged, or are unable to work” (326), and chivalric romances have a similar function. But this blithe deproblematizing of literary history—this reduction of books to nothing but entertainment—is not permitted to stand up as an acceptable general meaning. First, it is immediately followed by the story of “El Curioso Impertinente,” which, if we read it as an admonition against asking too many questions, hence against taking books too seriously, produces a contradiction, since we are now required to read allegorically, or to take the book seriously, in order to recognize how not to take it too seriously. And second, the curate’s dismissive attitude in chapter 32 is completely overpowered by the theoretical seriousness of his own discussion with the canon in chapters 47 and 48, which was discussed above. Thus the question of pure entertainment, once raised, is handled so as to redirect our attention toward the work’s uncomfortable deeper vision—its basic negativity. Therefore it is telling that in the prologue “To the Reader” that introduces the Exemplary Novellas, Cervantes returns to the image that the curate had used when talking to the innkeeper and now uses that image (of a gaming table) without qualification to explain his purpose in writing.23 It is as if he were simply wishing away all the problems he had created in his own earlier work. And similarly, although there is a great deal of

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important theoretical material in part 2 of Don Quixote—passages discussed above concern conversational hermeneutics and the Don’s hermeneutically crucial ideas on translation—there is also a confl icting tendency by which the consequences of that material are attenuated. This tendency becomes especially apparent at one of the book’s theoretical or self-reflexive high points, where the bachelor Sansón Carrasco is describing how popular the printed version of part 1 has become. When Don Quixote inquires which adventures in the book “have made the deepest impression,” Sansón answers that “opinions differ, for it is a matter of individual taste. There are some who are very fond of the adventure of the windmills. . . . Others like the episode of the fulling mill” (617), and so on. And a few pages later, he says [the book] is so clearly written that none can fail to understand it. Little children leaf through it, young people read it, and the aged sing its praises. . . . Those that like it best of all are the pages; for there is no lord’s antechamber where a Don Quixote is not to be found. If one lays it down, another will pick it up; one will pounce upon it, and another will beg for it. It affords the pleasantest and least harmful reading of any book that has been published up to now. (620–21)

It is as if Cervantes were now in a sense recanting, by recommending that his book never be read except one small piece at a time, that the reader never be bothered with following and putting together its vision as a whole. The powerful negative vision of part 1 is also fundamentally compromised in part 2 by the addition of the duke and duchess. Most readers agree that these particular characters do not improve the book as a whole. El Saffar, for instance, says: The Duke and Duchess, whose gratuitous manipulation of Don Quixote easily turns from diversion for its own sake to cruelty, replace the benign Barber and Curate of Part I. While we could share, in Part I, in Andrés’s anger with Don Quixote and understand why the muleteer and the Toledan merchants reacted to Don Quixote as they did, we cannot be sympathetic with the people who ridicule Don Quixote, unbidden, in Part II. (7)

But there is more to the matter than this. Given the operation in Don Quixote of a Boccaccian hermeneutics of reading, it is not hard to see the duke and the duchess as an allegory of how reading always participates

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in the shaping and staging of what it ostensibly receives from its text: an allegory, but a disapproving allegory, hence a recantation or rejection of exactly the hermeneutics that had originally generated the book’s vision. This insistent disavowal of the negativity of part 1—plus the presentation of Don Quixote, in relation to the duke and duchess, as an object of human sympathy, which obscures his quality as a cultural or historical signpost—seems to me the strongest evidence for the actual presence and potency of that negative historical vision.

Who Is Don Quixote? I think that the question I proposed for this chapter has been answered, at least if we agree that plausibility is a sufficient criterion. Dante imagines a reader who bears full responsibility for the meaning of the text he or she reads, a reader who could probably not have been invented except in a manuscript culture. How does this reader survive far enough into the development of print culture to emerge as The radically Solitary Reader of modern theory, who bears a new version of that Dantean responsibility in the sense that his and her now supposedly emptied or de-individualized self is needed as the vessel in which a text’s fiction must realize its destiny as personal experience? The hardest part of this question is the early part, the tracing of a plausible history by which the basic human type who will later be used as a model for The Reader is fi rst constructed. Once that type is accounted for—which I think it is in the person of Don Quixote—we can be fairly confident about the validity of the basic hypothesis. And for the time being, it might seem best to leave the matter at that. Even if we agree that The Reader is modeled preeminently on Don Quixote, the task of showing the exact mechanisms by which that fictional figure has imprinted himself subliminally upon the thinking of whole generations of readers of literature seems far too obviously complex for the present study. Still, there are one or two further remarks to be made about Don Quixote in this connection, especially about why he should be chosen before other candidates for the position of model in the development of modern reading. Don Quixote is not the only instance, nor even the earliest instance, of a fictional character whose madness is attributable to reading romances. The hero, Baldus, of Teofi lo Folengo’s mock epic Merlini Cocaii macaronicon (before 1526?), is quixotic in at least this sense. And if Folengo is perhaps not well enough known, what about the figure of Dr. Faustus,

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who, I will argue, has in common with Don Quixote that he is demonstrably erected as a warning against the possible consequences of becoming too deeply involved in the stuff of one’s solitary reading? Who, in other words, is Don Quixote exactly? He is a reader who reads in solitude—unlike critical readers, or readers for art, whose reading always positions them in relation to others—and takes his reading much too seriously. He is a fictional character who is described at sufficient length, in sufficient detail, and with sufficient stylistic energy to become what we are in the habit of calling a “believable human being.” But it is at least equally important that he is also a literary-historical signpost; he is the marker of a crucial general event in literary history, and an event, significantly, that does not take place on a large scale until about a century after his appearance. He marks the collapse of genre as a principal regulating category in the poetic universe, and the beginning, by consequence, of the establishment of The Reader’s mind as the only place where a text’s true nature and identity can be determined. In Dante and then in Boccaccio, readers are made fully responsible for a text’s meaning; but this responsibility is discharged by contingent individuals, hence always (even for readers who happen to be sitting by themselves) essentially in public. Don Quixote, by contrast, represents The Reader, who has shed his contingent individuality and reshaped himself as the perfect image (however ridiculous from our point of view) of his reading material. Don Quixote is a prophetic marker, a marker in advance, of the coming of the age of “literature” in the modern sense, which was discussed in Chapter 1 above, the age of the obsolescence of genre, the age of the “aesthetic” (or we might say, consumer-driven) reorientation of artistic thought, the age of the ascendancy of the novel, that nongenre, as a form. When this age looks back in history—as Sterne does, and Diderot, and plenty of others—it discovers its own unique likeness in the prophetic creator of Don Quixote. This is the sense in which it is accurate to say both: the age of modern reading begins in the eighteenth century, and the age of modern reading begins with Don Quixote. Readers of Bakhtin will object that I am not leaving enough room for Rabelais—who, interestingly, was a reader of Folengo—in the genealogy of the modern novel. But my subject is not the modern novel. It is the genealogy of just one figure, who happens not to be there in Rabelais, one single overpowering figure in ridiculous armor, on a ridiculous horse, with a ridiculous sidekick—that ridiculous figure who, even more ridiculously, is taken seriously in much of the operation of modern literature: the

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reader, by which we now mean for the first time—whether in the sense of negative or of positive valuation—The Reader. One fi nal point requires amplification. How do we get from the figure of The Reader, as it is displayed to us in Don Quixote, to an idea of our own activity as readers? To an extent this question has been answered. Our own activity as readers, I argued in Chapter 1, is not something we really know anything about, and our idea of that activity is therefore subject to being determined by theoretical models. But in relation to Don Quixote, one can add to this answer from another perspective, which has to do with the question of whether, when reading Cervantes’ book, we may consider ourselves exempt from the type of delusion that governs the Don’s reading. The answer to this question, I think, is no. We can of course adopt the suggestion (made via Sansón) that we read piecemeal and enjoy each episode strictly for its own sake, whereby the issue is avoided. But if we read the book as a whole with any degree of attentiveness, then the collision and collapse of genres marked by Don Quixote happens for us at least as directly as it does for him, which means that preliterary reading—reading as contingent individuals in an essentially public space that is defi ned and structured by a system of traditional genres—is no longer available to us as an option. We now therefore fi nd ourselves in the modern condition of not knowing about our reading, and so at least are no longer in a position to deny that our reading involves delusions of the same type as Don Quixote’s. The allegory of the duke and duchess reinforces this point. These aristocrats, in manipulating Don Quixote, are more perfectly confident of their superiority to him than any other characters in the whole two parts. But they are also an allegory of reading, and as such they represent readers who themselves concoct the adventures they read. This means they are readers of exactly the same type as Don Quixote, except perhaps that they are not as resolutely (thus not as honestly) committed to their concoctions as he is to his. And their situation mirrors mine, does it not? The more convinced I am of being exempt from Don Quixote’s delusions—of being superior to him—the more I am convicted (by the allegory) of not being exempt after all. Thus, in Don Quixote itself, there is at least the sketch of a bridge between seeing The Reader of the coming age and being That Reader. “They become what they behold,” says Blakean history.

5.

Magic and History: The Roots and Branches of Dr. Faustus

The conceptual situation, at this stage in the argument, is not particularly difficult, but there are a couple of points that must be kept carefully in mind: 1. The Reader, to whose supposed experience modern critics commonly appeal in formulating their perceptions about texts, does not exist in reality. That Reader is a strictly theoretical construct which achieves a species of reality only to the extent that it is internalized and mistaken for a memory of the mind’s actual encounter with a book. 2. Therefore, when I say that under certain historical conditions (in response to a perceived failure in the operation of poetic genres) the participating or coauthorial reader of Dante and Boccaccio tends to “become” That Modern Reader by acquiring the attribute of radical solitude, which enables him and her to function as a repository of univocal meaning, I am not referring to a development in the actual practice of reading. I am referring, to be exact, to a crisis in poetic thought at which the theoretical demands made upon reading become such that no “actual practice” can possibly satisfy them. Dante and Boccaccio both make considerable demands on their reader, but none that cannot actually be carried out by the contingent individual who happens now to be doing the reading—that individual who is always essentially a reader for art. But when the corrosion of genre and the remoteness of theology have progressed to the point where only reading can provide a guarantee of univocal textual meaning, all actual readers are rendered inadequate. The central coauthorial quality of Boccaccian reading is obviously still necessary as an anchor for meaning, but the quality of contingent individuality in readers must be replaced by something more uniquely authoritative. The Boccaccian reader thus “becomes” something different in the sense that he and she are catapulted out of reality altogether and into the fleshless logic of a strictly theoretical imperative. 3. But then how can the character Don Quixote be, or be an image of, This New Reader? I don’t think there is a problem here as long as we 185

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keep in mind that Cervantes is not documenting a new kind of reader, but rather imagining—in a wildly incongruous manner—what That New, theoretically necessary Reader would look like if he managed somehow to blunder his way into existence. The vision of Don Quixote—at least of part 1—is suspended between two confl icting propositions: fi rst, that a new kind of reader has become necessary in view of the present condition of poetic genres; and second, that That new kind of Reader cannot possibly exist without becoming ridiculous in his and her own eyes. This is why I say that Cervantes’ is a profoundly negative literary-historical vision, so thoroughly and discouragingly negative that he himself has no choice but to back away from it. 4. And yet, in one of the typical self-mocking moves of intellectual history (think of the history of the term “Baroque”), precisely Cervantes’ negative vision, by giving a human face to the theoretical dilemma that torments it, makes it possible for a later age to affi rm, and to install as an accepted description of actual experience, precisely the empirical impossibility that created the original dilemma. This leaves, as far as I can see, only one major question: assuming Cervantes’ literary-historical vision is as I have described it, is there any evidence that that vision is more than a personal fancy on his part? It is this question that brings us to Dr. Faustus, who is a rather surprisingly close relative of Don Quixote—or more exactly, a predecessor—in the matter of being a man who takes his fantastical reading too seriously, who manages, in an ultimately untenable manner, actually to live his books’ imaginings, and who, at the brink of death, at last abjures the books that had led him astray.

Reformation and Renaissance An important difference between Don Quixote and Dr. Faustus is that the latter is much more deeply and complicatedly involved with his own historical age. That Don Quixote was extremely popular in its time has more to do with the quality of the several stories, thus with the book considered as a collection of novellas—Sansón says as much—than with any special resonance attaching to the main character. Don Quixote, the character as well as the book, is a literary-historical signpost. But he is this only from a future perspective; he is the sign of an age still to come. Dr. Faustus, by contrast, is very much a creature of his own sixteenth century, and in a way that includes both the Reformation and Renaissance aspects of that century.

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The earliest significant literary version of the Faustus story, the Historia printed by Johann Spies in 1587, has a strong Lutheran tendency. The prominence of the devil as a positive agent, the categorical rejection of magic, the mockery of the Pope and of those monks in whose form the devil is inclined to be seen, the attribution of a special sanctity to marriage, the evident suspicion of all writing that is not Scripture, and the clear sense that Faustus’ fate is sealed from the outset, all point in that direction. But the story, as a story, is not inherently Lutheran; and certainly Marlowe, who receives it from quite a close translation of the Historia, does not read it in a Lutheran spirit. It has been suggested that Marlowe’s Faustus is an instance of the Renaissance Magus, a heroic thinker in the mold of Giordano Bruno. I think this suggestion needs to be qualified drastically before it tells us anything about the play; but the fact that it is not simply wrong also tells us something about the comprehensive historical reach of the Faustus myth as such. There are any number of ways to develop interpretively the apparent relation of Marlowe’s Faustus to the figure of the Renaissance Magus; but the two basic positions that offer themselves are best represented, I think, by Frances A. Yates and Hilary Gatti. Yates, in what I assume are her last words on the matter, argues that Marlowe’s play is an attack on John Dee and more generally an unequivocal “dismissal of the traditions of Renaissance magic and science,” a work that “tended to undermine the Elizabethan Renaissance, and can hardly have been welcome to the survivors of the Sidney circle, or to Edmund Spenser, or to Walter Raleigh . . . or indeed to the queen and her government.”1 Gatti, on the other hand, insists on a positive relation between Marlowe’s Faustus and the figure of Giordano Bruno, in that “Bruno offered Marlowe . . . the philosophical framework in which to create a new image of man, unsuccoured by theological dogma, committed to enlarging the sphere of human knowledge and to acquiring an ever-increasing dominion over nature.”2 There is no unambiguous evidence of this relation in the text of the play or in any of Marlowe’s writings—especially if one concedes, as Gatti does, that the episode of the anti-Pope, “Saxon Bruno,” which may allude to the Nolan philosopher, was probably added to the play after Marlowe’s death (Gatti 165–67). But the nontextual evidence to which she refers, especially concerning Marlowe’s relations with such figures as Raleigh, Thomas Harriot, and Walter Warner (77–81), permits Gatti to interpret precisely the text’s ambiguities in the direction of Brunian heroic science.

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The text passage that offers greatest resistance to this reading is probably Faustus’ despairing monologue at the end. Gatti attempts to get around this resistance by understanding Faustus’ fate not as a revelation of truth, but as the representation of a confl ict between philosophical hypotheses and as an exposure of power relations in British society. After clutching for a moment at the idea of Christian salvation, says Gatti, “Faustus’s mind turns at last to the idea of death implied in the metaphysics he himself has embraced” (109). At this point she quotes: Why wert thou not a creature wanting soule? Or why is this immortall that thou hast? Ah Pythagoras Metemsycosis; were that true, This soule should fl ie from me, and I be chang’d Unto some brutish beast. All beasts are happy, for when they die, Their soules are soone dissolv’d in elements, But mine must live still to be plagu’d in hell.3

“Here,” she continues, “we have a metaphysical hypothesis which, if true, as Faustus lucidly realizes, would allow him to die, even if he has failed in his heroic attempts, in quite different terms. Above all to die without fear, as Bruno had claimed in De la causa.” But Faustus does not manage to die “in the terms” he would have preferred. After one last verbal lunge in that direction, “O soule be chang’d into little water drops, / And fall into the Ocean, ne’re be found” (227), he is taken by devils and dies the death of one damned by the Christian God. Yet, according to Gatti, this means not that orthodox Christianity is proven true, but simply: The attempt to escape from the metaphysic which dominates his culture has failed, and the last, tragic moments of Dr Faustus on earth are an expression of his despairing recognition of that failure: he has no choice but to die in terms of the inevitable scenario. . . . Rather than repenting, Faustus recognizes in his fi nal words [“I’le burne my bookes” (227)] the force of a reigning metaphysic too strong and entrenched to resist. (110, my emphasis)

Faustus’ damnation, in other words, is nothing but a reflection back at the audience of conditions in their own intellectual and religious culture. Needless to say, this reading of the play is open to question. But if we do not read at least in this general direction, then it is hard not to agree with Yates, which leaves us faced with the question of how precisely Marlowe

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could have become as militantly orthodox as her reading implies. It is this sort of problem that prompts some critics to look for an entirely different approach to the play. Harold Bloom proposes that we concentrate less upon Faustus and more upon the subtleties and associations of the character Mephostophilis, and he gives the last word in his collection of essays on Doctor Faustus to Christopher Ricks’s suggestion that we read with special attention to “the pressure of the plague upon the play.”4 But these considerations only raise yet again the question of why this particular myth should be found usable for such a wide range of expressive purposes.

Distraction Chronology and the state of the text of Doctor Faustus create serious problems for anyone who aims at a convincing interpretation. The facts are these: The German Historia fi rst appeared in an English translation, which is almost certainly the play’s main source, in 1592—unless a version had been circulated earlier. The play may already have been performed in the winter of 1592–93 and was certainly performed in 1594. By the end of May 1593 Marlowe was dead. The earliest known printed text of the play (called the A-text) did not appear until 1604, and a considerably different text (the B-text) was published in 1616. The immediate questions are obvious: How much of the play’s early versions will Marlowe have had time to work on before his death? And how much of anything resembling an original version will have survived the years intervening before the printed texts? Still, there is some consensus about which passages are likely to be Marlowe’s work, alone or with a collaborator; and the overall shape of the play seems clear enough. In my attempt at an interpretation I will try to give decisive weight only to the most convincingly Marlovian passages and to elements of the work that occur repeatedly. My suggestion for approaching the play is that we start with the devils and pageants and fi reworks and conjuring tricks by which we are distracted or diverted in the theater. This material exactly parallels the diverting entertainments Faustus provides for the Emperor, the Duke, and the two or three scholars who view Helen of Troy. And the pattern here is completed by the consideration that distracting entertainment, in the fi nal analysis, is all that Faustus receives from Mephostophilis. It is at this level that the idea of distracting entertainment, not mere diversion, is insisted upon. Faustus must be distracted from the warning written on his arm (176), from the idea of marriage (178), from the contemplation of suicide

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(“And long e’re this, I should have done the deed, / Had not sweete pleasure conquer’d deepe despaire” [180]), and especially from thoughts of repentance, which are driven out, curiously enough, by the procession of Deadly Sins (182–85). The self-reflexive theoretical question thus raised concerns how we must regard our own participation in the present theatrical entertainment. But is distraction simply infl icted upon Faustus by the devils he has conjured? Marlowe’s introduction of the characters Cornelius and Valdes, who do not appear in the Historia or its translation, answers this question conclusively. Surely those characters could have been dispensed with and the material in their speeches incorporated into Faustus’ monologues. Their only function in the play, since it is clear that they are Faustus’ intellectual inferiors, is to present Faustus’ turn to magic not as a direct development of his own thinking (which is the impression an unaided monologue would have conveyed), but as a distraction from his own thinking, from thinking at a level that would have been appropriate to his person and ability. This point is underscored later when we watch semiliterate clowns producing magical effects with Faustus’ books. Faustus, in other words, is already distracted at the outset. When he first appears, he is a thinker who has already deviated decisively from the proper course of his thought. (It should also occur to us, incidentally, to ask why Cornelius and Valdes bother with Faustus. If they already possess the knowledge necessary for conjuring powerful and obedient spirits, then it appears that their including Faustus in their work must only lead to a division of the proceeds three ways instead of two. There is, in any case, enough here to suggest that we must recognize something decidedly discordant in the motif of Faustus’ ravishment by magic.) How exactly are we meant to understand this situation? Can we conclude simply that Faustus is distracted by the study of magic from what might otherwise have been the wholesome pursuit of theology? Commentators never fail to point out that in his opening monologue, in what he claims is an attempt to “settle [his] studies” (162), Faustus cheats theology of its due by failing to put his two Scriptural quotations in context (163). But he also misrepresents the other arts and disciplines he mentions, and misrepresents them just as badly. He conflates the art of logic with the faculty and study of philosophy and places the question of how to “dispute well” in the same category as that of Being and Nonbeing; he dismisses medicine on the obviously irrelevant grounds that it cannot overcome death; and in the very act of naming the lofty ideal of a “universall body

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of the law” (no matter that Justinian’s Corpus juris fails actually to achieve organicity and totality), he rejects the whole practice and science of jurisprudence merely because it contains pronouncements on relatively insignificant matters. Faustus is already in the condition of being distracted when the play opens, and not only from the pious contemplation of Christian doctrine. He arbitrarily disparages every area of learning that occurs to him, with the aim, evidently, of justifying a decision in favor of magic that he has already taken. He has turned his back upon the whole of university learning. He will in future still be a “Studious Artizan” (163), but he will not merely have changed the area or object of his study. He will now be a “student” and an “artisan” in some entirely different construction of these terms. And as the play progresses, we discover—and are surely meant to be puzzled by our discovery—that he has thus abandoned a mode of intellectual being that offers him true personal distinction in favor of a mode in which his achievements cannot substantially surpass those of corrupt spirits, of inferior minds, and, under certain circumstances, of clowns. This riddling quality of the play is redoubled on the technical or selfreflexive level of the idea of distraction. For if we experience our diversion in the theater as a distraction similar to that by which Faustus is led astray from his studies, how can we possibly expect to profit from the play? The structural parallel places us on the same path as Faustus himself. It will not do to say that since we observe symbolically the consequences of our distraction in Faustus’ fate, we are forewarned and made aware of what we must do for our own welfare. If this kind of warning were really effective, then Faustus would be moved even more deeply toward repentance by the vision of “the seven deadly sinnes . . . in their owne proper shapes and likenesse” (183) with which Belzebub distracts him. It is, it seems to me, the main purpose of that curious scene to show that the distracting power of even a basically repugnant vision is greater than its edifying power. Which makes our situation as diverted spectators (of a repugnant but entertaining vision) into a serious problem. For the play to have positive value, there must be a significant difference between how we are distracted in the theater and how Faustus is distracted. What is this difference?

Divinitie adeiw? One more point needs to be made before we can answer this question. Before Faustus closes his deal with the devil, he dreams repeatedly of

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achieving power in the world: “All things that move betweene the quiet Poles / Shall be at my command” (163); “I’le leavy souldiers with the coyne they [the spirits] bring, / And chase the Prince of Parma from our Land, / And raigne sole King of all our Provinces” (164–65); “By him [Mephostophilis], I’le be great Emperour of the world” (171). But after the spirits have contracted to obey him, he never aspires to a condition higher than that of chief servant to various potentates. Even the rescue of Saxon Bruno—if it should happen to be authentic—is only an action in the service of “Charles the Germane Emperour” (201). What is the significance of our seeing Faustus moved by the dream of power, but then uninclined even to attempt that dream’s realization? It is not that Faustus strives for power and fails to achieve it. Rather he claims to be striving for power and then never makes even a gesture in the direction of achieving it. And as with power, so also with knowledge. It is not that Mephostophilis denies knowledge to him, or deceives him with the appearance of knowledge, so much as that he simply never presses Mephostophilis hard enough to extract anything significant. When he receives the fi rst of the two books that he vows to “keepe, as chary as [his] life” (179, 185), he seems repeatedly to be dissatisfied with the book’s contents despite Mephostophilis’ assurances. And the scene ends on a curiously vague note: Faustus: Nay let me have one booke more, and then I have done, wherein I might see al plants, hearbes and trees that grow upon the earth. Mephostophilis: Here they be [in the book we have been looking at]. Faustus: O thou art deceived. Mephostophilis: Tut I warrant thee. Turne to them. Exeunt. (179)

Clearly Faustus and Mephostophilis are talking at cross purposes here, which probably means that the book they are discussing does contain what Mephostophilis claims it does, but not in the sense in which Faustus had wanted it. And Faustus makes no move to press the issue, as he also does not press his astronomical questioning after receiving from Mephostophilis a thoroughly unsatisfactory explanation—“Per inæqualem motum respectu totius” (181)—of why celestial phenomena occur in their observed variable order. It is true that he is later lifted to a height from which he can see the whole movement of the heavens (186); but this does not answer his question, which had aimed at understanding the “why?”—the principles of that movement.

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Yet, on the other hand, there is one type of question about which Faustus does press Mephostophilis unrelentingly. “But leaving these vaine trifles of mens soules, / Tell me, what is that Lucifer, thy Lord?” (170), he asks at the fi rst interview. And after drafting and signing his contract, he begins: “First, I will question with thee about hell: / Tell me, where is the place that men call Hell?” (177). And after receiving Mephostophilis’ inadequate astronomical explanation, he willingly changes the subject: “Well, I am answer’d: now tell me who made the world?” (181). The questions he is really interested in are thus all theological, mainly about sin and damnation. He has bidden adieu to “Divinitie” (163), but the evident weakness of his desire for worldly knowledge and power and his evident obsession with questions of divine power and justice show that he is still really a theologian at heart. Gatti is thus right in a sense. There is a significant relation between Faustus and Giordano Bruno, but it is a relation mediated by self-deception and posturing. Faustus imagines himself a heroic Brunian thinker while at the same time, in truth, remaining the traditional theologian he had always been; and it is therefore perfect justice that he dies “in the terms” of orthodox theology. Inspired (we are perhaps meant to think) by Bruno’s stay in Wittenberg in 1586–88, Faustus is lured away from his comfortable academic situation by the idea of becoming a Renaissance Magus in the sense of what Yates calls “Man the operator.”5 But he does not have what it takes. For him, this idea is a mere distraction; for him, being a Brunian “operator” means nothing more than being a spectator or (at best) a producer of entertaining shows. It is this personal failure on Faustus’ part that is represented in his association with Cornelius and Valdes and in the comparison of his magical power with that of clowns. Thus the problem of how to understand our own positive relation to the play without disrupting the parallel of Faustus’ distraction with ours is to an extent solved. By showing the history not of a true Magus but of a failed Magus, and by studiously avoiding (in a list that contains Agrippa von Nettesheim, Roger Bacon, and Pietro d’Abano [165–66]) any mention of the man who was probably Faustus’ actual model (supposing we follow Gatti), Marlowe contrives to install Bruno and his more advanced magic on an esoteric level of meaning. We now recognize that Faustus does not have to be distracted. Brunian magic becomes a mere distraction for him because he does not have what it takes to be a true Magus; and correspondingly, it lies entirely with us whether we, for our part, receive the play as mere distraction or penetrate rather to the esoteric level on

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which it exhibits the affirmative Brunian tendency that we should in any case have expected from a man of Marlowe’s temper.

Faustus as Reader But why must Marlowe resort to a structure of esoteric and exoteric meaning? Why bother to show a failed Bruno in the fi rst place? Surely the real thing, a true hero of the intellect—even if he were made a bit less scandalous and a bit more Christian than the actual Bruno—would be a more powerful and engaging figure in the theater. These questions are already answered by our recognition that the play shows Faustus at a parting of the ways. He could, if he had sufficient heroic resolve, decide in favor of an entirely new mode of intellectual being; he could change the very defi nition of being a “Studious Artizan.” Or he can, as he does, merely feign such a decision while still in truth remaining the orthodox theologian of old. And my point is that the decision as such—the parting of the ways—can be focused upon only by showing its failure, since a successful decision would leave behind the actual moment of deciding and draw our attention instead to the quality and details of a new intellectual life. As the play stands, we see Faustus constantly attempting to present himself as what he is not—a heroic thinker, a Bruno—which keeps the gap between possibilities, the moment of decision, before our eyes. The decision is what counts, and it turns out, in essence, to be a decision between ways of reading. To say that reading and books are a central motif in Doctor Faustus, as well as in the Historia, is to state the obvious. But the question of how central, as far as I know, has not yet been asked with sufficient persistence. Faustus’ very last words are “I’le burne my bookes; ah Mephostophilis”—as if he were trying to shift the blame for his sins from himself to his books! As if he were trying to suggest that the actual living of his life had been carried out not by himself but somehow by his books. Or to translate this thought into a different terminology: Faustus is trying to present himself as The Reader, as that only recently possible human type, in an age of developing bibliopoly, who becomes perfectly anonymous in the process of reading, who in reading loses utterly his own contingent individuality and lives not his own life but what Henry James calls “another life,” a life for which (Faustus implies) he cannot be held responsible. We do not observe Faustus reading novels or romances. But the “actual” adventures in which we watch him are very like a novel reader’s adventures—quasi-experiences in which neither real knowledge

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nor real power operates, in which responsibility is therefore avoided, and in which the single most basic condition of real life, mortality, is juggled away by magic in the form of entertainment. Cervantes and Marlowe approach it from different directions, but the problem that engages them is the same. Cervantes concentrates on the type of book (chivalric romance) in relation to which the problem of modern solitary, anonymous reading unfolds most obviously. Marlowe is concerned, rather, with the process of reading itself, and with the position of modern readers who face a crucial choice between reading for art and reading for thrills. This choice is the parting of ways at which Marlowe’s Faustus fi nds himself. Once his attention is drawn to the magical books he speaks of, Faustus can proceed in one of two directions. He can insist, as a reader for art, on understanding those books in such a way as to become himself in effect their author; or he can remain something more like a consumer of magic than a producer, satisfied with power in a form that is still servility, with knowledge in a form that is still ignorance. His choice is between being a magician and having the experience of being a magician, which turns out not to be the same thing at all. This is not the fi rst case we have dealt with in which reading involves a choice. Dante’s reader must choose between mere “listening” and “stretching for the bread of angels”; and the attitude of Boccaccio’s reader determines whether the book is “Prencipe Galeotto” or the “Decameron.” (Even in the case of Don Quixote, the existence of two versions of the book is implied, although the element of choice is no longer prominent.) But for the sixteenth century, and from then on, the reader’s choice is more critical, and more dangerous, because a new version of the wrong path— reading for thrills—has become available or indeed customary. A reader who merely “listens” to the Commedia or a reader of “Prencipe Galeotto” is perhaps similar to the reader for thrills, but not to the extent of imagining (or aiming to achieve) a separation from his or her ordinary contingent individuality. With respect to the Commedia, even the merely listening reader, in reading thus, has created for him- or herself an exactly appropriate—and as such, unique (hence contingent)—relation to the work in the same way that the souls of the dead each fi nd an exactly appropriate station in the eternal realms. And if I read “Prencipe Galeotto” instead of the “Decameron,” then it is my own mode of reading that has placed that text before me, so I in effect act as its author. Thus, for Dante and Boccaccio, even an inadequate reader is still a reader for art, one who occupies the place of an author by tailoring the work to his or her own condition;

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and it follows that reading for art is understood there as the normal form of reading, which it practically has to be in a manuscript culture anyway. But in Doctor Faustus the situation appears to be reversed. Reading for thrills, the history of a failed Magus, is the work’s obvious content, whereas reading for art, the activity of the true magician who, even as a reader, will always be an “operator,” a kind of author, is suggested only esoterically— for a select few in the audience. The cultural situation to which, it seems, this textual strategy must be a response, is one in which reading for thrills has become the norm, and in which the idea of reading for art will simply not be understood except by those thoroughly predisposed in its favor. Faustus does his best. He understands that he is obliged to redefine the whole idea of being a “Studious Artizan,” which can only mean that he must transform reading from a passive into a radically active pursuit. He understands that he is being offered by Mephostophilis not wrong knowledge so much as knowledge in the wrong sense—although he lacks the will to force this issue. And when Mephostophilis laments movingly his own fallen state, Faustus answers like a true Brunian: What, is great Mephostophilis so passionate For being deprived of the Joyes of heaven? Learn thou of Faustus manly fortitude, And scorne those Joyes thou never shalt possesse. (171)

Later he even insists, “I thinke Hel’s a fable” (178). He is suggesting, in a genuine Brunian spirit, that hell is nothing but a condition experienced by those who are foolish enough to believe in it.6 This suggestion then dooms him, since it is precisely he who cannot in the end divest himself of his theologian’s fascination with hell. Faustus does his best to become a Bruno. But he does not have what it takes—for reasons that are not at all easy to see. He understands exactly what is required of him; he displays, especially in his fi nal lament (225–27), a very deep and powerful imagination; and he is certainly not shown as a person lacking determination or courage. Where does he go wrong? Is it something as simple as this exchange with the scholars? Faustus: Ah my sweet chamber-fellow, had I liv’d with thee, then had I lived still, but now must dye eternally. [. . . . . . . ] 3. Scholler: He is not well with being over solitarie. (222)

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Such a diagnosis would sort well with the idea of The Reader as a creature of absolute solitude. But if Faustus had actually remained in the company of those scholars, he would also simply have remained a professor, not striven to become a Magus. As far as I can see, there is no clear reason for Faustus’ failure except what must be inferred by default as the supreme difficulty of his project. Reading for thrills has become the norm, so much so that not even a Faustus can break free of it. In the very act of discovering an alternative to his career as a passive reader, a professor, one whose task is to transmit established authorities, he cannot prevent that alternative from itself changing inexorably into passive reading of an even less worthy sort, into the feigned and defective quasi-experience of The Romance Reader. Yet further, suppose we agree that Marlowe’s primary interest in Doctor Faustus is technical and theoretical—that the concept of distraction is at the play’s center, in the sense of (1) Faustus’ distraction from the development of his own thought, which might otherwise have brought him to the condition of Magus; (2) a whole culture of romance reading or passive reading or reading for thrills, by which readers are distracted from the particularity, contingency, and responsibility of their own personal situations; and, crucially, (3) our present situation, faced with the distracting entertainment in the theater. If we accept this supposition, then it follows that the play has opened the question of the relation between reading (2) and theatergoing (3), which involves in turn the opposition between an intrinsically universal or infinite audience (since The Reader represents anyone at all who might be reading) and the strictly finite, identifiable audience at any given theatrical performance, an opposition that is echoed and underscored by that between exoteric meaning, available to anyone at all, and the esoteric meaning that is available to only a chosen few. Thus the play allegorizes, for its theater audience, what was called in Chapter 2 “the advent of modern reading,” because the distinction between our present situation, in the theater, as members of a group of identifiable individuals, and the situation of the intrinsically infi nite reading public, is exactly parallel to the distinction between the audiences of Winckelmann and Friedrich Schlegel respectively in their writings on myth. Indeed, what else but our grasp of this allegory—hence of the dangerous new intellectual force represented by Faustian reading—what else but this is the work’s esoteric meaning, and the means by which we may perhaps hope after all to resist the distracting pressure of our culture?

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(Finally, one important formulative issue arises here and will reappear frequently later. When I speak of a “choice” between reading for thrills and reading for art, or between accepting the condition of The Reader and insisting on one’s own active and responsible contingency in reading, I can never say exactly what I mean. If the word “choice” had a single clear meaning here, then that meaning, and hence the choice itself, would be available by defi nition to The Reader [to “us,” in common parlance], who in turn is what he or she is only by having, like Faustus, renounced or avoided that choice. The choice is in truth available, and understandable, only to those who have already made it in favor of reading for art—and who, having made it, are also thus paradoxically faced with it. For the time being, I can see no alternative but to acknowledge this difficulty and continue using the problematic locutions anyway. But I will return to the whole issue at the end.)

The Myth of The Reader How can “the advent of modern reading,” that one historical boundary, be found in both the sixteenth century and the eighteenth? There is no contradiction here. Modern reading, in the sense of James’s or Iser’s idea of novel reading, can never be established once and for all as a cultural given, for the simple reason that it has no factual existence. It is a strictly theoretical construct—no matter how many of us may be convinced that it represents our actual experience—and as such it is always open to profound questioning, always in need of new forms of justification, as in twentiethcentury reader-response theory. Its “advent” will happen over and over again, in the face of each new form of resistance to it—although, because of its connection with the growth of literacy and of the selling of printed books, we shall not expect to fi nd instances before the sixteenth century. And resistance, at least up to now, has always been there. In the next chapter I will discuss an entire literary genre that is erected, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, for the principal purpose of opposing the deluded notion of The Reader of fiction. That Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus marks an instance of the advent of modern reading is particularly significant for two reasons. First, it lends a historical context to the appearance and the importance of the figure of Don Quixote, The Reader’s human face. For Don Quixote does not himself begin to become what he is historically, in this sense, until about a century after the fact, with the emergence of the European realist novel and

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especially with that novel’s ironic self-examination in the later eighteenth century. Thus an historical gap arises, which Doctor Faustus fi lls by bearing witness, before the novel itself appears on the scene, to the basic cultural problem that we are otherwise in the habit of associating with novel reading. But it is perhaps more significant that, by recognizing in Doctor Faustus a play about reading, we find ourselves in a position to understand the Faustus myth as a whole. Why is the Lutheran author of the 1587 Historia interested in Faustus in the fi rst place? How is his book supposed to be edifying, or an admonishment, for any but the most highly educated of its readers, always supposing that such readers would read this particular book? Faustus is not by any stretch of the imagination a typical sinner; his transgressions are not those against which the vast bulk of the book’s readers would need to be warned. The only possible connection between Faustus and those readers is the author’s centrally Lutheran concern with the uses of literacy. The Faustus of the Historia, in other words, is principally a reader; and when we recognize that exactly the same is true of Marlowe’s Faustus—despite all the differences between Lutheran and Marlovian thinking—we begin to get a feel for Faustus as a myth, and for what that myth says about the temper and problematics of the whole century in Europe. If Don Quixote eventually becomes the face of The strictly nonexistent novel Reader, then Dr. Faustus, from the outset— introduced, as he usually is, alone in his study—is the myth of The Modern Solitary Reader. Of course the myth does not die with the Historia and Marlowe. The case of Goethe’s Faust, for all its significance, is a fairly obvious one. Faust is here a man who seems to believe that by reading and studying he has managed actually to sever his connection with his own natural being—as if this were possible, as if reading, in its way, were not a natural human function. The question sometimes asked by critics (especially when part 2 is considered), of whether Faust can even reasonably be regarded as a single dramatic character, is a reflection of this basic confusion of categories, which in turn is related to the ambiguous ontological situation, torn between theory and experience, of The Modern Reader. There is a great deal to be said about the ramifications of Goethe’s thought here with respect to literature in general, but recognizing the sixteenth-century myth in Faust, and recognizing that it retains almost exactly its sixteenthcentury focus, is not a problem. A rather more interesting case, in this respect, is Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus.

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The Devil and His Disease This case is interesting because the author appears to deny that his version of Faustus belongs to the established tradition. Mann says “It is a great error in the legend and in [Goethe’s] poem, that Faust is not connected with music. He should have been musical, he should have been a musician.” 7 Does it follow that in the novel Doktor Faustus the centrality of the idea of reading, and particularly the idea of romance reading as a cultural danger, has been left behind? Adrian Leverkühn, the composer hero of Mann’s novel, is certainly meant to be seen as an individual whose reading, in a number of different languages, is exceptionally wide and deep. Most of both his major and his minor musical works are directly related to his reading and bear witness to this relation by including sung or spoken text in their structure. Especially important among his literary models is the Historia von D. Johann Fausten of 1587, which he uses for his symphonic cantata “Dr. Fausti Weheklag,” and in which he finds the twelve-syllable sentence, “Dann ich sterbe als ein böser und guter Christ,” that accompanies the work’s central twelve-tone row.8 But none of this makes him a reader in exactly the myth’s sixteenthcentury sense. The crucial scene, in this regard, is his conversation with the devil in chapter 25, about which the novel’s narrator, Serenus Zeitblom, is troubled especially by one question: A dialogue? Is it truly that? I would have to be crazy to believe so. And therefore I also cannot believe that he [Leverkühn] in his deepest soul regarded as real what he saw and heard—while he was seeing and hearing it and afterwards, when he put it down on paper. (295)

The two possibilities between which Zeitblom thinks he must choose are the real presence of the devil and the devil’s appearance as a hallucination that Leverkühn “sees and hears” yet does not truly believe in. The second possibility is even suggested in the dialogue itself, when the devil speaks of the small patch of Leverkühn’s brain in which the syphilitic spirochetes have so far established themselves (312–13). But are these really the only possibilities? 9 Since we know that Leverkühn has read a great deal, and that he reads attentively; and since we know that the conversation with the devil in Doktor Faustus is a parody of Ivan Karamazov’s conversation with the devil in Dostoyevsky; and since Leverkühn’s account of his conversation is written—neatly and

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systematically!—on music paper (295); and since the novel has reminded us earlier of Beethoven’s habit of “composing” by writing in “words, not notes . . . the conceptual development” of a planned musical piece (217–18); and since, later, in connection with the diving expedition that Leverkühn claims to have experienced with the American Capercailzie, Zeitblom instantly concludes “Of course he had only read of these things, had only gotten books about them, to feed his imagination” (354): why should we not now conclude, for our part, that the conversation with the devil, which is inherently much less credible than a diving expedition, is also nothing but an instance of Leverkühn’s verbal fantasy, inspired by a reading of Dostoyevsky and created for two main purposes: (1) to exploit on an artistic and religious plane the experience of living with syphilis; and (2) to begin planning for a musical work on the Faustus theme—in the same way that (as Zeitblom notes) he is later “aiming at a work” (365) in his astronomical fantasies? If we are willing to entertain this possibility, then at last a connection between Leverkühn and the sixteenthcentury Faustus myth begins to emerge. For it now appears possible that Leverkühn not only reads, but also plays with the idea of actually living, like Don Quixote, the “other life” shown in his books, that like Marlowe’s Faustus, he stylizes his life bookishly in order to imagine himself the vessel of a particular kind of magical creativity. We might even go so far as to question whether Leverkühn really has syphilis. There are no corroborating witnesses to the incident in the Leipzig brothel; we know that that incident is modeled on an incident in Nietzsche’s life that Leverkühn could have read about;10 and Leverkühn himself, in the same letter in which he relates the brothel incident, speaks admiringly of “das Abenteuerlose,” the adventureless quality of Chopin’s life (192), which could be a cryptic acknowledgment of his own lack of any but a reader’s adventures. Zeitblom, in any case, after an intervening chapter of professedly authoritative commentary on the letter and on Leverkühn’s sex life, begins chapter 18 of the novel by saying In following my presentation, my reports, let the reader not ask where my exact knowledge of all the details comes from, since, after all, I was not always present, not always at the side of the deceased hero of this biography. It is true that I repeatedly lived for long periods of time separated from him. (199)

But the rest of the paragraph then simply lists those periods of time, and never returns to the matter of why the reader should not question his

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second-hand reports. Which suggests precisely that we should question him here. Does Leverkühn really have syphilis, or is even his disease, along with his visit from the devil, an instance of fanciful self-stylization based mainly on reading? The return to the brothel, the trip to Pressburg in pursuit of a personal hetaera, the deliberate receiving of the infection, even the comic episode of the two doctors: for all this material (some of which is based on stories about Nietzsche that Leverkühn could have known of )11 Zeitblom again simply takes Leverkühn’s word (204–6), there being no corroborating witnesses for any of it. Or yet further, what of the actual progress of the disease? Zeitblom himself insists—and promises to “maintain this position against any doubts raised by medical specialists” (211)—that Leverkühn showed no secondary symptoms whatever. And although Leverkühn does in the end go mad, with all the world as witness (apparently as a result of what used to be called “progressive paralysis”), the association of this syndrome with syphilitic infection—even in Nietzsche’s case!—was still regarded as open to question at the time of the novel’s writing.12

Novel Readers, and a Dog’s Life At this point we need to pull up short. Are we not making ourselves ridiculous if we argue about whether Leverkühn “really” had syphilis? Leverkühn never really existed, so it follows that the question of his “real” disease is an absurdity. Yet—here is the catch—that question is exactly the sort of question we are habituated (by tradition) and trained (in school) to ask when we read a novel. Our business, as all the narrative theorists get around to telling us in one way or another, is to engender in our thoughts and feelings, in response to textual signals, the image of a reality sufficiently cohesive and credible to justify our treating it, precisely, as reality. And the existence of open or unanswerable questions in no way interferes with our readerly activity in this sense. There are plenty of open and unanswerable questions about the world we actually live in. ( Just as there were plenty of people who resisted the idea of Nietzsche’s syphilis.) But the open question of Leverkühn’s syphilis, and of whether he is simply costuming himself as Nietzsche (mainly for the benefit of Zeitblom, who he knows will pass it on), is a special type of question for two reasons. First, as soon as it is asked, it shades over into a technical question about the novel’s style. For it must now occur to us that in the whole of Doktor Faustus the word “Nietzsche” never once occurs, which is to say

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the least extraordinary in view of the intellectual backgrounds and tendencies represented by the book’s characters. Can we plausibly imagine even five minutes’ conversation in the Kridwiss circle without Nietzsche’s name being mentioned? The world depicted in Doktor Faustus thus appears to be a world from which Nietzsche (and Dostoyevsky) have been arbitrarily excised, which means apparently that Leverkühn cannot have been a reader of (or about) Nietzsche or Dostoyevsky after all. Does this imply that his syphilis—and his interview with the devil, at least considered as a true hallucination—must be accepted as “real”? If we draw this conclusion, then we fi nd ourselves making a judgment of “reality” not only in a highly constructed, artificial world, but on the basis of that world’s artificiality (its lack of Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky). The whole question, for stylistic critics confronted with a fictional world that is largely constituted by “montage,” thus becomes empty. Does it follow, then, that the question of Leverkühn’s syphilis has simply disappeared—that reality is not an issue? This proposition would reduce the disease to nothing but a word—to an allusion or an allegory—and how could it then operate, as either reality or pretense, in the life of a character? Whose syphilis is it, anyway? And in the second place, the open question of Leverkühn’s syphilis involves the idea of an individual’s stylizing his life to fit books, which makes it a self-reflexive question for us as novel readers, who operate under the assumption that we experience at least temporarily “another life.” It is no longer simply an uncertainty inside the fiction, but has become an interrogation into how a book’s real-seeming content can or should be used by its reader. And this interrogation has a political component that is connected to the theme of fascism. Discussions in the Kridwiss circle, says Zeitblom, center mainly on one phenomenon: It was a thing strongly felt and established objectively: the enormous loss of value that the individual as such had incurred in the events of war, the matter-of-factness with which life nowadays disregarded the individual, and which then settled in people’s minds as a universal indifference to individual suffering and ruin. . . . However, since this was not a matter of praise or blame, but one of objective perception and assessment, and since in the dispassionate recognition of the real, as a result precisely of the pleasure of recognition, there is always a measure of approval— how could a broad, indeed comprehensive critique . . . of the values of education, enlightenment, humanity . . . fail to associate itself with those observations? (484–85)

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The Kridwiss conferees, in other words, in the very process of understanding “objectively,” from a presumed distance, how “people’s minds” are hardened against individual values, themselves show exactly the hardening they observe. (They become what they behold, says Blake. The pleasure of understanding seduces the judgment, says Dante.) And this uncomfortably permeable boundary between objective distance and politically culpable involvement—comparable to the anatomical boundary traversed with the aid of osmosis by the perhaps imaginary spirochetes on their brainward way (313)—is exactly parallel to the boundary between knowing about novel reading and being entangled in its delusiveness nonetheless. In Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, at least for a theater audience, a certain amount of real distance is established from the condition of solitary reading upon which our critical attention is focused. In Mann’s Doktor Faustus, the corresponding distance is illusory, the boundary is uncomfortably permeable. By leaving open the possibility that Leverkühn’s life is nothing but a reader’s assimilation of reality to fiction, the novel creates for me a perhaps unflattering but still truly detached and critical perspective upon my own activity in reading. But I receive this perspective only by way of its association with the question of whether Leverkühn “really” sees the devil or has syphilis—since otherwise I would not be a compliant novel reader, and my newly achieved critical perspective would have no object—which keeps me entangled in exactly the activity that I have supposedly learned to criticize. The institution of novel reading thus ensnares me in exactly the way Nazi ideology must eventually ensnare the Kridwiss company: by way of precisely their pretense of critical superiority to it. Am I really ensnared? Do I not retain my original critical perspective? The system of logical slippages here creates a situation in which I cannot answer these questions—which is, for all I know, exactly the situation of being ensnared. (One’s only recourse, it seems, would be not to play the game in the fi rst place, as Mann’s magician in “Mario und der Zauberer” suggests to the young man who is about to pick a card [8:689].) There are plenty of other elements in the structure of Doktor Faustus that in a similar manner give us cause to worry about the political dimension of our situation as novel readers. For example, when Leverkühn takes up residence at the Schweigestill farm in Pfeiffering in 1912, where he will live the rest of his lucid life, the watchdog there, Kaschperl, already has a head full of scars from “old dogfights” (341). Let us say, for convenience, that he is a middle-aged dog, about six, having been born in 1906. When we hear of him later, on the occasion of Leverkühn’s walk home in 1925

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(575), we therefore already have cause to wonder at his longevity. But when we read that the same dog, at Leverkühn’s farewell gathering in 1930, now presumably aged about twenty-four, is “barking furiously and jumping around at the end of his chain” (653–54), surely our credulity has been used up. Dogs do occasionally last to the age of twenty or so, but not in that kind of physical condition. And Thomas Mann, the author of “Herr und Hund,” was not ignorant about dogs. It is interesting that Kaschperl’s age can be imagined as matching exactly the twenty-four years Leverkühn purchases from the devil. But in realistic terms, a dog’s life is the wrong device for this particular symbolic measurement. Why build an obvious chronological impossibility into the novel? And if this must be done, why do it so gratuitously?13 The dog is not a major figure in the novel’s action and could have been dispensed with altogether. The only available response to these questions, as far as I can see, is that the impossible dog is present in the novel for the sole purpose of reminding us how completely, as readers, we have placed ourselves in the power of our own reading material. If the chronological impossibility were part of the main plot, we would have a choice between two responses: either simply reject the novel as a piece of sloppy workmanship, or else take the impossibility as a vessel of meaning and interpret it, however unconvincingly. But as the text stands, the impossible dog does nothing but irritate us—or perhaps amuse us—as a sign that the text itself is under no obligation whatever to observe the rules by which we use it to construct the experience of “another life.” Once you have begun the business of novel reading, says Kaschperl the impossible dog, you cannot back out again. And you cannot pick and choose the elements of which to make your new fictional “life.” You are stuck (this being, we recall, a print culture) with what the text gives you. It is like signing a pact with the devil, or like ceding that one small extra fateful measure of arbitrary political power to your government.

Reading and System Of all the possible instances of Faustus as the myth of The Modern Reader, the most difficult and unlikely ones will be most interesting, for their probative value relative to the myth’s existence and extent. Now, therefore, I want to open the question of how readers are related to a systematic work of philosophy of the type represented by Kant’s Critiques or Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. These texts appear to resist, to the last possible degree,

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the idea of fruitful interaction with a reader. They leave no room for a reader’s participation in the constitution of their meaning. I can elaborate or elucidate the work’s system (for myself or for others), but I do not do so as a reader; my task as a reader is purely to understand, to accommodate my mind unreservedly to the given structure, the “true organism” in which, as Kant says in the preface to the second edition of The Critique of Pure Reason, “an attempt at altering even the smallest item produces at once contradictions, not only in the system, but in human reason in general.”14 Not even the writing of the work, let alone the reading, makes any difference in its basic content. Those people with a greater “talent for lucid exposition” (xlvi), who Kant supposes will follow him, may write the whole system over again in better style and with more striking illustrations; but the system of basic propositions itself, the meaning of Kant’s own however imperfect text, cannot change in the slightest. But even while appearing to have no special need of its readers, systematic philosophy in the manner of Kant presupposes The Modern Reader nevertheless. The only alternative, the only contingent individuals who might be imagined as readers of this sort of speculative philosophy, would be professionals, fellow philosophers; and the only reasonable way to approach such individuals would be in the expectation of debate. Leibniz, for instance, is often very fi rm in his convictions, but never to the extent of simply excluding debate. It never occurs to him, as it does to Kant (xxxiii; fn. to xxxv–xxxvi), to suggest that his work is a kind of Copernican revolution in philosophy. The relation between Kant and Leibniz, I think, parallels quite neatly the relation between Schlegel and Winckelmann that is developed in Chapter 2. Leibniz writes for a circumscribed audience of philosophical professionals, while Kant, for whatever cultural and historical reasons, has come to terms with the idea that his work must stand strictly on its own and so have the same basic relation to every possible reader—that in this sense too it must be “transcendental,” bound to no individual circumstances or conditions—that it must therefore address The Infi nitely Representative Reader of modern literate culture.15 That I, if I am an average reader, will not understand a word of the Critique of Pure Reason, makes no difference here. The fault is not Kant’s but mine, or that of my education. And The Reader is not an average reader anyway, but a theoretical construct who can be capable of understanding anything you please. Kant himself occasionally betrays a concern for his relation to readers, and he formulates it in a characteristically modern way (not at all as if he

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meant fellow professionals) when he says in the preface to the fi rst edition of the Critique of Pure Reason: [One effect of excessive illustrative material could be that] the reader does not arrive quickly enough at a survey of the whole, because the bright colours of illustrations hide and distort the articulation and concatenation of the whole system, which, after all, if we want to judge of its unity and sufficiency, are more important than anything else. Surely it should be an attraction to the reader if he is asked to join his own efforts with those of the author in order to carry out a great and important work, according to the plan here proposed, in a complete and lasting manner. (xxvii)

For a moment it is almost as if we were hearing Fielding ask his reader to cooperate in supplying fictional details. But Kant is soliciting our “efforts” toward erecting exactly his system and nothing else, not toward elaborating it (which seems to be what Fielding suggests) but precisely toward stripping it of any frills. And how, we might ask, can Kant then be understood as addressing The Reader, whose very reason for being is to provide the uncontaminated vessel for univocal textual meaning in the form of experience? What does the strictly systematic meaning of the Critique of Pure Reason have to do with the evocation of some particular personal experience?

System and Magic We can understand why a Fielding might at least toy with the idea of The Reader. But why should it occur to anyone to place before The Reader a Critique of Pure Reason? The book is of interest to people engaged in the study and production of metaphysics, which it criticizes. But the comparison with Copernicus suggests that at least certain aspects of Kant’s system are meant to establish themselves in the general public mind; and this suggestion, if it is not ridiculous on its face, has certainly been proven so by the event. Kant seems to think that moral questions will provide a link with the public mind because his system “is in reality of positive, and of very important use, if only we are convinced that there is an absolutely necessary use of pure reason (the moral use), in which reason must inevitably go beyond the limits of sensibility, and though not requiring for this purpose the assistance of speculative reason, must at all events be assured against its opposition” (xxxvii). But can the often deeply ironic author of

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the “Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Auf klärung?” of Zum ewigen Frieden and Der Streit der Fakultäten, actually have believed that his work would have a tangible effect in the history of public morals? It will help if we turn for a moment to Hegel’s Preface to The Phenomenology of Spirit. For Hegel is much more defi nite about how the content of his work is generated by its form, about why it is misleading to imagine the content of a work of philosophy as something that is simply out there waiting to be elucidated. This point follows from what he means by the concepts of philosophy and truth. “The true shape in which truth exists can only be the scientific systematizing of it,”16 he says, which means the process of dealing with it systematically. “The most important thing—in my opinion, which must be justified by the unfolding of the system itself— is to understand and express the true not as substance, but in equal measure as subject” (13–14), the last notion being taken in the sense of “thinking subject” or “subjectivity.” Thus the true cannot be imagined as simply standing over against our apprehension of it, but must be understood as including that apprehension as a process that can be represented in the work only by the work’s form. “Living substance, further, is being that is in truth subject, or in other words, being that is in truth real only by being the movement of self-positing or the mediation of its becoming-different with itself ” (14). The demands made upon the work’s form are thus considerable, and are immediately recognizable as artistic demands. The work, as it unfolds, must become different from itself (as a subject does in the process of knowing itself ), producing a kind of tension or dissonance that is then presumably overcome in a climax of reconciliation. But this artistic unfolding of the work (in particular, of The Phenomenology of Spirit itself ) is precisely the phenomenology of spirit, the work’s content, the system of spirit’s manifestations or appearances—it is not merely a representation. There is an essential analogy between the “long, hard journey” (21) of the spirit (which is world history) and the journey of every individual mind. The task of leading the individual to knowledge, from an uneducated start, had to be understood in its general sense, and the general individual or world-spirit had to be considered in its own formation or education. . . . Thus every individual passes through the formative stages of the general spirit . . . and we can recognize in an individual’s pedagogical progress a shadowy image of the history of the world’s formation. . . . This, however [the individual’s education], is nothing but the process by

The Roots and Branches of Dr. Faustus 209 which the general spirit or substance gives itself its own self-consciousness, its coming into being and its reflection into itself. (21–23)

The individual’s mental development is thus not only an image of the “world-spirit’s” becoming, but also a vehicle of that process, which enables Hegel to imagine an operative “ego” (“Ich”)—an ego that has learned its way past “fi xity” in both a Cartesian and a Kantian form (27)—at the conclusion of this phase of his argument. The disparity that takes place in consciousness, between the ego and the substance that is its object, is their difference, the negative as such. . . . Even if this negative appears at fi rst as a disparity of the ego from its object, still it is just as much a disparity of substance from itself. What seems to occur outside the substance, as an activity directed against it, is its own doing, and so it shows itself to be essentially a subject. In the perfection of this showing, spirit has made its existence the same as its essence; now it is an object to itself as it truly is. . . . Being is absolutely mediated;—it is a substantial content which is equally the ego’s property, itself self-like, or its concept. Herewith the phenomenology of spirit closes. (28–29)

And this image of an ego, an “I,” in the very heart of the system, represents the system’s nearness to my own activity in reading it. Thus the reading of the whole work can be understood as the enactment on a reader’s part of the work’s content, so that that content—the phenomenology of spirit—is immediately there for a reader, not merely represented. And this evoking of the work’s content as an immediate presence in the activity of reading is the only goal I can imagine that actually explains the need for huge, laborious, systematic presentation that we observe not only in Hegel but in Kant as well. Thus also the quasi-fictional experience that is meant to be offered The Reader is identified as precisely the phenomenology of spirit in its subjective dimension. The parallel with The Critique of Pure Reason is clear. Not the smallest structural element of his system, Kant insists, can be altered without producing “contradictions, not only in the system, but in human reason in general.” Which suggests inescapably that the structure of the system not only represents the structure of human reason, but, as structure, constitutes the very nature of human reason. As in Hegel, therefore, the reading of the work becomes an enactment of the work’s content, so that that content—human reason as a totality—is immediately present for The

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Reader, present as an experience, not merely represented or explained or glossed or gestured at. And as in Kant, so also in Hegel, this use of systematic structure as an artistic device to position a reader relative to the work’s thought does not affect or increase the strict philosophical value of that thought. An academic colleague could have understood and judged Hegel just as well, if not better, if he had built his system out of exactly the critical positions that are patiently explained in modern commentaries on his system.17 My suggestion is that Kant’s system and Hegel’s, and others in that tradition, are written primarily to provide a form of magically illuminating experience for The Reader—that ideally empty vessel—in a manner that parallels the supposed operation of the developing realist novel and its theory.18 What happens, I think, is that Kant and others in his wake perceive “the advent of modern reading” as an opportunity to escape from the narrow professionalism that had characterized their discipline. The other three faculties of the university—theology, law, and medicine—all have firm institutional connections with nonacademic public life, while only philosophy had seemed locked in its ivory tower. (Kant is still chewing on this problem in Der Streit der Fakultäten.) But now, by addressing The Reader (the vaguely imagined readership of modern “literature”)—without yet recognizing that he and she do not exist—philosophy hopes to take a leap even beyond its academic rivals by making itself available to practically everyone as a source of pure, immediate magical experience. And this means magical experience in exactly the sense of Faustus’ magic, in the sense of Renaissance sympathetic magic, which attracts spiritual or celestial influences by constructing, either in our own bodies or senses or in talismans or images or in musical forms or incantations, exact analogues to the shape or nature of those influences.19 The precise extent to which this comparison might or might not be considered “accidental” is not an easy matter to decide. There are plenty of people in eighteenthand nineteenth-century Germany who, like Goethe, are well versed in Hermetism and related areas; and now and again there is even an individual like Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi who had more than just a casual knowledge of Giordano Bruno, in whom he appears to have interested Schelling. But however it gets there, I think the ghostly presence of the Faustus myth is hard to deny. Kant and his successors enact exactly the fate of Marlowe’s doctor. Made restless by their academic isolation—by the limitedness of their tangible public power and influence—they seize the opportunity offered by a newly popular idea of The Reader and attempt

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to practice in an open public arena (of reading for thrills) those magical arts that are properly the hidden domain of only the most skillful and committed adepts (readers for art). And their attempts end in failure for the same reason Faustus’ attempt had: since The Reader is indispensably presupposed by their project, yet does not really exist, they find they have maneuvered themselves into that role, as readers for thrills with respect to their own work—who else but Kant can have “experienced” the Critiques, who else but Hegel alone the Phenomenology?—which produces a truly ruinous and truly Faustian absurdity, however little they themselves may recognize it.

Reading Music From this perspective upon the Faustus myth, we can return to Thomas Mann’s novel and say something about its musical aspect, about exactly what it means to hear music. After Wendell Kretzschmar’s lecture on “Beethoven and the Fugue,” Zeitblom tells us, with reference to the Missa solemnis, We did not know it, we had only heard about it. But . . . on the way home from Wendell Kretzschmar’s lecture, we had the feeling that we had heard the Missa, an illusion to which the image of the bleary-eyed and famished maestro, which Kretzschmar had imprinted upon our minds, contributed not a little. (81)

Can it really be true that having heard about a work of music may become the equivalent, in experience, of actually having heard it? This question is built into the novel’s whole structure by way of the question of whether our relation to Kretzschmar’s description, say, of the second movement of Beethoven’s sonata opus 111 (75–77), which does exist and which most of us have heard, is at all different from our relation to Zeitblom’s later descriptions of Leverkühn’s works, which do not exist and which we cannot have heard. If our answer to the last question is no—as it practically has to be if we read the novel as a novel, a consistent fiction—if there is no difference in what we get out of them between the two types of description, then it follows that we can be in the condition of having heard a musical work without ever passing through the experience of hearing it, which absurdity is similar to the incongruity (discussed in Chapter 1) of our situation with respect to the experience of reading. Like the experience of

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reading, the experience of hearing music does not exist in our memory as the experience we know it must have been. In the case of reading, the problem is that the experience is not localizable in our life history; it can never be clearly distinguished amid the instances of rereading and (in Corngold’s phrase) prereading that attach themselves to it. In the case of music the problem seems to be exactly the opposite. The experience is too perfectly localized, it is nothing but its own strict immediacy— which implies that when we talk about it, employing the mediation of memory, we always fi nd that we are talking about something other than what we mean (namely, about something no longer immediate), and the question of whether we have actually had the experience becomes difficult to focus on. This idea of hearing music is developed comically in a piece of music theory, Zeitblom’s insanely complicated analysis of the round “O wie wohl ist mir am Abend” (42–43), that is there for no other purpose than to show the unbridgeable gulf between hearing and discussing. Or perhaps the hearing of music as hearing is not ultimately at issue. When a piece of music is performed, it is meant to be, for its audience, the exclusive auditory content of a strictly bounded segment of time. But it is a special kind of auditory content. Its limiting and organizing of time is as much an intellectual event as a sense experience, and as such was compared in antiquity to the movement of the heavens. Which brings us back to Kretzschmar, and his lecture on “Music and the Eye.” He [Kretzschmar] cited several more of that sort of Pythagorean joke that music occasionally enjoys playing, jokes intended more for the eye than for the ear, which thus in a sense put one over on the ear. And then he came out and said that he ascribed these jokes, in the last analysis, to a certain innate non-sensuality, indeed anti-sensuality in this art, a secret fondness for asceticism. It was after all the most spiritual of all the arts, the clear proof being that form and content here, as in no other art, are entwined with each other and in fact are simply one and the same thing. People say that music “addresses itself to the ear”; but it does this only conditionally, only inasmuch as hearing, like the other senses, is a vicarious mediating and receiving organ for the spirit. Perhaps, said Kretzschmar, music’s deepest wish is not to be heard at all, nor even seen, nor felt, but—if this were possible—in some place beyond the senses, even beyond the mind, to be perceived and intuited in a spiritually pure manner. (85)

The Roots and Branches of Dr. Faustus 213

Beyond the senses, even beyond the mind: which means beyond all possibility of being noted as part of a life history. The adequate apprehension of music is an event that does not exist except in its own strict immediacy— not even as hearing but as contact with a plane of being entirely incommensurate with the rest of our experience. The writing and performing of music, like the writing and readerly understanding of German systematic philosophy, is thus imagined as an act of sympathetic magic, in that it aims to bring the pure spirituality of music down to us as an immediate presence. The only question here is how that magic is valued. I think it is clear that in Mann we find a highly complicated ambivalence, comparable to Marlowe’s, nothing like the simple moralistic rejection of magic in the Historia or the desperately credulous reliance upon it in Kant and Hegel. This ambivalence is evident not only in the idea of Leverkühn’s music— which can be understood as a cultural achievement, an assertion of the human, while at the same time it is a symptom of the sickness in European political history that produces, in Germany, the defi nitive instance of fascism—but also in the whole shape of the novel, which is meant to be recognized as parallel, in a number of ways, to the shape of that music, especially “Dr. Fausti Weheklag.” If Leverkühn’s cantata is a “retraction” of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony (634), then obviously we must ask about the extent to which Doktor Faustus is a retraction of Goethe’s presumably more liberal and optimistic Faust. And Zeitblom’s constant commenting upon and fiddling with chapter numbers, as well as his remarks about resonances between the novel’s time levels, tantalizes us with the idea that perhaps the whole book is constructed according to a strict numerical scheme. Mann even permits Kretzschmar to use the word “hineingeheimnißt” (84), alluding to a jocular coinage by which Goethe describes his introduction of surreptitious structural principles into his writing;20 and in imitation of Goethe’s practice with respect to Faust, he also exploits the parergon, the space outside the work’s actual boundaries, when he suggests a number of times in Die Entstehung des Doktor Faustus that his novel must itself become a kind of musical piece—a work of “constructivist music.”21 There is no way to ascertain exactly the depth to which Doktor Faustus is mathematically, or quasi-musically, structured. It is enough if we recognize the possibility of regarding the book as a musical work, thus as a kind of talisman that by sympathetic magic makes available to us some spiritual essence. This is exactly what the book is as a novel, as a reading exercise by means of which we (in the form of The Reader) are supposedly

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transported out of our own contingent existence into “another life.” Thus the novel’s ambivalence about the magic of music implies an ambivalence about the whole history and practice of the novel—an ambivalence, if the parallel with Leverkühn’s music holds, that has to do with totalitarian politics. Mann is doing exactly what Marlowe does: facing us with a choice. In Marlowe’s theater, either I allow myself to be distracted by the spectacle or I insist on the sterner pleasure of the play’s esoteric meaning. With Doktor Faustus, either I simply take the book as a novel and become a reader for thrills (no matter how virtuously liberal in my opinions), or else I deal with it as a reader for art and so make of it something quite other than a novel. What that “something quite other” is, since it is radically mine, can hardly even be hinted at in the text. But the two opposed possibilities for reading are clearly shown (in chiastic reversal with our way of seeing them!) in the two available stories of Leverkühn: the utterly committed, infected artist, with courage enough to face the very devil; or a mere dabbler, a reader for thrills, who maneuvers for cultural leverage by costuming himself as a Nietzsche or a Karamazov.

The Irrelevance of Understanding Heinrich Heine’s treatment of German systematic philosophy in the book Zur Geschichte der Religion und Philosophie in Deutschland (On the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany) provides a conclusion to this chapter by suggesting a link between the Faustus myth and basic theoretical considerations in Chapter 1, especially the question of the relation between the “two faces” of reading, reading as an individual activity, and reading as the generative principle of literary history. Heine’s procedure is typified by his treatment of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, whom he introduces in a simplistic and inaccurate comparison with Kant: “Kant’s business was only to set up a critique, which is something negative; but Fichte’s, later, was to set up a system, thus something positive.”22 He then subjects Fichte’s philosophical work, at the climax of his discussion, to a crushing dismissal: In Fichte there is a special difficulty: he requires of the mind that it observe itself in the midst of its activity. The ego must conduct observations upon its intellectual acts while it is carrying them out. Thought is to spy on itself while it thinks, while it gradually grows warm and

The Roots and Branches of Dr. Faustus 215 warmer and is fi nally cooked. This operation reminds us of the monkey sitting before a copper pot and boiling his own tail, having reckoned that the true art of cooking means not only cooking “objectively,” but also experiencing the process “subjectively.” (205)

This metaphor, by the way, fits quite exactly the relation between “substance” and “subject” in Hegel and could easily be taken as a dismissal of the whole genre of systematic philosophy in the manner of Kant. Heine is perfectly serious about rejecting Fichte’s philosophy. “Fichtean idealism,” he says, “belongs among the most colossal errors ever hatched by the human mind” (215). But despite this, he devotes no fewer than thirty full paragraphs (206–19)—with one interruption on Goethe and pantheism (212–14)—to a very sympathetic description of Fichte as a person in the years of his bitterest confl ict with the political and intellectual establishment in several German states. The reason he gives for doing so is that Fichtean philosophy [like Napoleon’s Empire] has perished utterly, but minds are still aroused by the thoughts that found a voice in Fichte, and the effect of his words in future is unknowable. Even though transcendental idealism was wholly wrong, still, in Fichte’s writings there lived a proud independence, a love of freedom, a manly dignity, that had a wholesome influence especially upon the young. Fichte’s Ego [the philosophical doctrine] was entirely in accord with his unbending, stubborn, iron [personal] character. The doctrine of such an Ego could perhaps emerge only from such a character, and such a character, re-rooting itself in such a doctrine, could only become still more unbending, more stubborn, more iron. (206–7)

The “wholesome effect” of this character upon young people must of course be understood as a political effect. But Heine is talking only about Fichte before 1800, before Die Bestimmung des Menschen (219), before his nationalistic phase. Yet Fichte’s early writings in support of the French Revolution are not mentioned. Only his strictly philosophical work is under consideration here; and the picture we are given is therefore one of a man whose inherently worthless systematic writings have a politically energizing effect on young people by being misunderstood—because if a young person happened to understand them correctly, he or she would recognize their worthlessness and not be energized at all. The only way we can possibly derive

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from Fichte’s system the feeling of “a proud independence, a love of freedom, a manly dignity” is by ignoring or putting aside (as Heine does) precisely the system, which means by paying no attention to what Fichte is actually trying to say. Heine can talk all he likes about resonances between Fichte’s character and his philosophy. We recognize (as he does) that this talk is empty. Any resonance between Fichte’s character and the thoughts of his young admirers (as long as only the systematic works are being considered) is accidental, the result of a failure of understanding. This sort of juggling of emptinesses is more or less Heine’s method in the whole book. In the preface to the first edition he lies cheerfully about how his project had been conceived, claiming that his simple-mindedness is a concession to French readers—as if this claim were not itself a concession to the amour propre of German readers. And in the book’s second paragraph he declares that since he lacks expertise in the “subtleties” of theology and metaphysics: I will therefore treat only of the large questions that are discussed in German theology and philosophy, I will only throw light upon their social importance, always making allowance for the limitedness of the clarifying devices available to me and for the French reader’s ability to comprehend. (131)

To discuss a thinker’s “large questions” without understanding the “subtleties”—by which, after all, the exact range and object of those large questions are determined—is to guarantee missing the thinker’s point, as is the peremptory insistence upon “social importance” in questions that need have no such importance as part of their original conception. Heine is admitting that he means to write his own book and is interested in theology and philosophy only to the extent that he can use them to develop his own social goals and opinions. In the next paragraph he defends this procedure explicitly: Major German philosophers who happen to take a look at these pages [of the present work] will shrug their shoulders indulgently at the paltriness of what I have to offer. But I ask them kindly to consider that the little that I say is expressed with perfect clarity and distinctness, whereas their own works—for all their great thoroughness, their immeasurable thoroughness, for all their great profundity, their stupendous profundity—are also correspondingly incomprehensible. What good to the people are

The Roots and Branches of Dr. Faustus 217 locked granaries to which they have no key? The people are starving for knowledge and will be grateful for the bits of intellectual bread that I share honestly with them. (131)

Heine is careful to avoid saying that what he offers “the people” is the same thing that systematic philosophy denies them—that he is giving them an understanding of that philosophy. For he knows (as we know) that he is doing nothing of the kind. The understanding of German systematic philosophy is as irrelevant to Heine’s purpose as the understanding of Kant and Fichte will be to that future generation of Germans who will make a revolution in their name. Even the adherents of “natural philosophy” in the manner of Schelling, says Heine, will become revolutionaries: For if the blows of the Kantian fall strong and certain, since his heart is moved by no traditional reverence; if the Fichtean courageously defies all danger, because for him it does not exist in reality: the natural philosopher too will be a fearsome fighter because of his connection with the aboriginal forces of nature. (228)

But such a thing could not possibly happen if those hypothetical revolutionaries actually understood the texts they fight from because in fact (or at least in Heine’s opinion) Schelling’s natural philosophy is an expression of weakness—imagined as sexual impotence in dealing with the Muses (221)—compared with the strong intellectual pioneering that we discover by misunderstanding Kant and Fichte. For the coming revolutionaries, as for Heine himself, the systematic texts of German philosophy are no more than excuses for a social program that need have nothing to do with any reasonable interpretation of what they say.

The Faustian Bargain Thus we arrive at the idea I suggested in Chapter 1, Heine’s showing of the possibility that a text’s operation in history (the macroscopic view of reading) need not have any connection at all with what an individual (in the microscopic view) might get out of it. In Chapter 1 I argued that this possibility, together with the diametrically opposed possibility—that the connection between individual reading and a text’s place in history could conceivably be guaranteed by the influence of a collective national temper—defines an entire spectrum of answers to the question of how these two faces of reading

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are related, a spectrum which by its existence demonstrates the arbitrariness of any particular answer. But how did we ever get to this point? In the abstract, as a theoretical distinction, the idea of the “two faces” of reading—reading as individual activity and as the necessarily inferred medium in which texts combine into literary history—seems reasonable enough. But how does it happen that this theoretical distinction has come to affect our sense of specific texts in history—as it obviously does for Heine, and as I think it does for us all if we are honest? How did the two faces of reading get separated? When we discuss texts among ourselves—for instance, in a formal university setting—the discussion is surely part of any history in which the text might operate. Does it not follow that our understanding of the text and the text’s place in history will develop side by side, each influencing the other but never out of contact with the other? Something like this is what Gadamer imagines when he speaks of “hermeneutic conversation”; and this imagining would be entirely sound if we could also imagine the audience of literature as finite (no matter how large). Then there would be an automatic limit (no matter how broad) to the amount by which a text’s meaning could vary from itself historically; and we would be able to permit ourselves sufficient latitude—sufficient real tolerance—to keep a comfortable and fruitful discussion going. But once the institution of The Reader is established (as it is for Gadamer, no less than for the rest of us), the audience has become in effect infi nite, faceless, emptied of personality, accountable to no one. A text’s meaning can now not be permitted to vary in the slightest without threatening to evaporate altogether. Hence the other aspect of The Reader, the quality of being everywhere The Same Reader, which means The Only Reader, as he and she need to be in order to guarantee univocal meaning in the slippery domain of “experience.” The fi nite collectivity in which meaning can be permitted to vary has thus been reduced to nothing, which is why we, in the academy, are so appalled by how the texts that matter to us are treated in the public press, in secondary education, in book clubs, not to mention by certain of our benighted colleagues—even though it is we ourselves who, by thinking in terms of The Reader (by imagining reading as experience), have also authorized all those deviant readings! The theoretical institution of The Reader thus tends to confront us, in any particular instance, with an irresolvable tension between the tyranny of a single authorized reading (by The Unique Reader) and the threat of a perfect chaos in which all readings—hence no readings—are valid.

The Roots and Branches of Dr. Faustus 219

Can we not get rid of the institution of The Reader, or at least get rid of these disorienting effects of it? Within relatively well-organized scholarly communities, this problem does not bother us. Useful discussions still manage to take place, and the readership of our texts, if we imagine it confi ned to the participants in these discussions, is certainly fi nite enough. But Dr. Faustus was not satisfied with a comparable academic situation, and truth be told, neither are we. Otherwise we could never have accepted and preserved the convention of The Reader. Like Dr. Faustus, we cannot stop ourselves from desiring to make a difference in the world at large outside the academy; and like Dr. Faustus, we have learned to employ magic in the service of this desire: the institution of The Reader, for whom every literary text is a magical talisman that opens “another life,” a unique rush of immediate experience—and let it be noted, a spiritual experience, despite all our talk of “realist” novels, since a “real” experience cannot be universally available. This is the boon we have bargained for, the priesthood we have cooked up for ourselves; and the price we pay, like Faustus’ hell, is a price that would not even exist but for our overtheorized view of experience (that is, but for our idea of The Reader): the price, again, of requiring an authorized reading of each text in a world of infi nite possibility by which precisely authority is categorically excluded. But this is not the end of it. Heine parades before us, as typical phenomena of the age of The Reader, the systematic works of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German philosophy, which are in effect magical talismans available to an individual’s understanding only by an experience of sudden and complete illumination. The other side of this magical quality is that, in the real world of society and history, these works, with all their intellectual prestige, are available to be read however one pleases; and in this world, Heine suggests, since genuine understanding is simply absent, one can establish the authority of one’s reading of Kant or Fichte only by the strength of one’s right arm—by defeating, in politics or war, anyone who reads differently. These are, in part, the grounds on which Heine prophesies a German revolution in the name of systematic philosophy. Has that prophecy proved accurate, or is the question still open? It is certainly true that by developing the magical theory of The Reader, and so opening the alternatives of one authorized reading or no reading at all, we have created in the real world (outside the academy) at least the possibility of establishing that one authorized reading of any given text by raw political power. Has the defi nition of a “text,” in this connection, shifted enough to permit instances of totalitarian propaganda to be understood as

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“readings”? Heine’s prophecy suggests that the revolutionaries who will appropriate German systematic philosophy will be socialists. Is it exactly that role that was usurped by fascists? At least I hope it will be recognized that this question exists, and that the game and the gamble of modern reading create dangers well beyond the limits of the academy where they are taught.

Part III Response

6.

Intransitive Parody and the Trap of Reading: What Reading Really Is

From this point on I will be concerned almost exclusively with German literature. But this move must not be taken to indicate a substantive point, as if western literature’s “Response” to the ascendancy of modern reading were a responsibility shouldered primarily by Germans. I could easily have added, under the rubric of “Response,” a chapter on Gide, a chapter on Joyce, chapters on, say, Burroughs and Melville and Balzac, without repeating any of the principal arguments of this chapter or the next. The “Response” to modern reading, the search for a way to resist the uncomfortable political tendency of modern literary education, covers a great variety of authors and devices. The advantage of German literature is that it is possible there to deal with a wide range of cases in a single compact account that is focused upon one genre, the “Novelle,” which in German literary parlance designates the novella more or less in Boccaccio’s sense, but liberated from any inclusion within a frame or collection.

Trapped in First Class One of the most striking stylistic features of Gerhart Hauptmann’s “Bahnwärter Thiel” is the shift in tense, from the conventional narrative past to the present, and then back again, at the point where Tobias is struck by the train. Thiel keuchte; er mußte sich festhalten, um nicht umzusinken wie ein gefällter Stier. Wahrhaftig, man winkt ihm—“Nein!” Ein Aufschrei zerreißt die Luft . . . [And then, after two pages of nothing but present tense:] Thiel begleitet den Zug [the procession carrying Tobias] bis an die Grenze seines Reviers . . . Er meint sich zu erwecken; denn es wird ein Traum sein, wie der gestern, sagt er sich.—Vergebens.—Mehr taumelnd 223

224 Response als laufend erreichte er sein Häuschen. Drinnen fiel er auf die Erde, das Gesicht voran.1 [Thiel gasped; he had to hold on to keep from falling over like a mortally stricken bull. It’s true, people are gesturing at him—“No!” The air is rent by a scream. (...) Thiel accompanies the procession to the boundary of his track-section . . . He thinks he is waking up; for it’s probably a dream, like the one yesterday, he says to himself.—In vain.—More careening than running, he reached his guardhouse. Inside he fell face down on the ground.]

Evidently the change of tense is a signal to the reader. But what kind of signal, and a signal for what? I dismiss out of hand the idea that the present tense creates a more intense or immediate relation between the reader and a supposed “experience” of the narrated world, the idea that the present tense reflects back at us a sudden increase in our emotional involvement with the fiction. Presenttense narration is not of itself any more immediate or intense or vivid than past-tense narration, especially where it operates as a clear signal to readers, suggesting that they stop and reflect upon their reading. The idea of intensity or immediacy in reading, the whole idea of a linear reading of narrative, of a resonance between my own personal time and time in a fiction, mediated by the supposed cumulative linearity of my intellectual appropriation of the printed text: all this, in any case, has been called into question above, along with the whole idea that reading is a discriminable type of experience, a doubling and complication of my very self. And it seems to me that exactly this questioning is an integral component of all three of the texts I will talk about now: “Bahnwärter Thiel,” Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s “Reitergeschichte,” and Thomas Mann’s “Der Tod in Venedig.” But how are we to interpret the shift in tenses described above? Perhaps we will be inclined to associate it with the exercise of self-control on Thiel’s part. The present tense enters at the precise moment when Thiel must get hold of himself (“sich festhalten”) in order not to collapse under the shock of what he has just seen; and the past tense is reestablished at the precise moment when he again loses control, stumbles blindly into his shack, and collapses on the floor. The present tense, we might infer, signals the momentary possibility of contact between Thiel and a reader. Thiel

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is otherwise held up for our inspection as a markedly narrow character, in contrast to the broad and distanced character we put on as readers. But now, in his exercise of self-control, he achieves a kind of reader’s distance from his own fate, which he now actually confronts (and now at last sees as clearly as we do) for the first time. For a few moments his mental situation becomes analogous to ours, as readers, and the possibility of something like identification arises, which is reflected in the present tense. Thiel, for a short time, pulls himself up out of the restrictive narrative past and into our own immediate present, by becoming a kind of reader with respect to himself. I think this idea is plausible, but it must be modified by the recognition that that present-tense passage also contains a very clear and uncomfortable image of the process of reading. The train approaches, and Tobias is struck. The train stops, and the passengers—“the deathly pale, frightened faces of the travelers”—stare out of their windows for a few moments into another world, a narrow, tragic world with which they have nothing in common, and which they misunderstand completely—“ ‘Das arme, arme Weib,’ heißt es in den Coupés, ‘die arme, arme Mutter’ [‘The poor, poor woman,’ people were saying in the carriages, ‘the poor, poor mother’].” Then they throw money, which ostensibly expresses sympathy but actually asserts distance. And then the train leaves. It is as if, for a moment, our reading of the story had become visible inside the fiction; for the role of the suddenly visible train passengers is the role of readers. We are cast as those passengers. What do we actually do when we read? The progress of our lives in a larger world (a world mapped by train connections) is interrupted by a narrated event that catches our attention, an event that we observe from the comfort of our “carriages,” as if through windows; we perhaps even manage to feel a few real emotions (and pay some real money), which we then take as evidence of contact with that narrated world; but then the story is over, “time is costly,” and we move on. This picture of the process of reading is clearly an attack on each reader—who is attacked for being a reader, not for anything more specific—as are the numerous passages in the story that parody the style of the sensational popular press (fi lling in of background, summaries of what “people” had thought and said, “human-interest” touches about Thiel and the neighborhood children, etc.) and so cast doubt on our presumed literary sophistication. After the faces in the train windows are described, we read of Thiel: “Was geht’s ihn an? Er hat sich nie um den Inhalt dieser Polterkasten gekümmert [What does he care? He has never concerned

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himself with the contents of these noisy boxes].” “The contents of these noisy boxes”: that means us, the readers. Thiel thus has in fact been lifted up to our level (as if by the present tense) for a moment—but only in order to express his disdain toward us. The idea of reading as a broadening of our experience, as a multiplication of our ego, as the achievement of contact with a world that is otherwise strictly separate from our own—this idea is suggested in the long present-tense passage, but is also travestied and demolished, unmasked as a mere pose. The passage thus becomes a parody of what it might have been for other readers, a parody without an object, an intransitive parody—and as such it is paralleled by the many ostentatiously poetic descriptions of natural scenes in the text, descriptions that obviously engage in us conventional readerly sensibilities from which the characters in the fiction, however (especially Thiel), are brusquely dissociated. (Thiel walks through the compellingly described forest “without looking up”; and when he fi nally becomes aware of his surroundings, his only response is to think, “Godawful weather coming” [44–45].) Thiel dissociates himself from us in every possible way; he even refuses to entrust his child’s smashed body to the train that represents us. Reading “Bahnwärter Thiel,” therefore, is not a process of liberation or self-multiplication, but has become a trap for us. In the very process of recognizing how mistaken the passengers are in their view of the story’s situation—“the poor, poor mother”—we are compelled by analogy to question the validity of our own view of that situation, the genuineness of our contact with it, as well—or rather, we are compelled to recognize that the very concept of “validity” or “contact” has no meaning in this context. The assumption that reading fiction is somehow an expansion of our personal horizons here leads us into a trap—to an absurdity, to the recognition that reading is in truth only a narrowing of our horizons, like the popular press, that reading is not a form of contact with the external but merely a delusive exercise of our own preconceptions, a staring out through windows that are in truth nothing but mirrors. There is no way for us to avoid this trap. For by the time we recognize what this text shows us about reading—indeed, in order to recognize it, in order to recognize the parallel between readers and railway passengers—we must already have adopted the conventional readerly posture that is unmasked and demolished in the image of those passengers, because we must already have visualized them and made realistic inferences about their thoughts. This approach to “Bahnwärter Thiel” creates a number of problems. Why do we read the novella in the fi rst place? What do we get from it?

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Is the text’s whole function here merely to destroy itself as an object of reading? This last question is related to the question of the linearity of the process of reading, which we began by doubting. Does the idea of a “trap” of reading, which must be fi rst prepared and then sprung, not imply at least the analogy of a linear temporal process? If reading is something other than a cumulative linear process in time, how can a “trap” in the text possibly operate? I will return to this question shortly from another angle.

Reading and Seeing There is also a problem in my use, and what I think is Hauptmann’s use, of a visual metaphor for reading. The train passengers become mirror images of readers by looking (and imagining they see) into Thiel’s existence and experience. The trouble is that for this mirroring (another visual metaphor) to become effective, it appears necessary that the reader “see” into the fictional world after all—that we not only “see” the train and its passengers but also see through them, apprehend them not only as image but also as experience, as an experience that resonates significantly with our own immediate experience as readers and thus (as we “see” yet further) takes on the character of a symbol. Or to look at the same problem more generally: if the trap of reading takes the form of a sudden recognition of inadequacy in our relation to the fictional world, then precisely this recognition endows that world with a certain experiential integrity (as the object with respect to which our apprehension is inadequate) that might, after all, eventually admit an adequate relation on our part. Indeed it does already admit the adequacy of our sense of exclusion. Or if we insist that the trap of reading enforces in us not merely a recognition of inadequacy, but a criticism of the very idea of adequacy, we have still only succeeded in occupying the difficult and apparently useless position of limitless hermeneutic relativism. But are we thinking here of an inconsistency in the present argument or of a complication in the trap of reading itself? The point, it seems to me, is that in responding to the trap we inevitably continue to expose ourselves to it. The discrediting of the visual metaphor for reading is accomplished only through yet another visual metaphor; and any “recognition” afforded us by the springing of the trap thus turns out to be only another form of the delusion that had lured us into the trap to begin with. The trap, that is, is never actually sprung—never sprung once and for all, in a manner that might enable us to say we now know what it has to teach us—but

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rather is always only still about to be sprung. The springing of the trap is thus deferred interminably into the future—and interminably into the past as well, if we reflect that the trap is inevitable (thus in effect already sprung) as soon as we begin to read the text, or indeed as soon as we read any comparable text, or indeed as soon as we become the kind of creature who might read such a text. Therefore, while the trap of reading (at least in “Bahnwärter Thiel”) does occupy a defi nite place, as it were a visible place, in the text, it also lacks entirely the quality of an event that might assume the relation “before” or “after” to other events. It cannot occupy a particular point in any experienced temporal continuum; and in this respect it foregrounds an inherent quality of reading as such—the impossibility of locating reading in experience (or as experience) that was discussed in Chapter 1. By happening to us as we read, the trap of reading thus not only explodes certain superficial preconceptions about reading but also threatens the very idea of an event in experience, and so threatens the possibility of its own operation as a trap. By this paradox it directs our attention toward a mechanics of entrapment in reading that is located on a level incommensurately different from the one defined by the question of adequacy in the communication of experience, a level of inquiry on which the question of what reading “is” is itself called into question. This is a developed form of the paradoxical situation into which we are maneuvered by the problem of vision, by the recognition that while we are obliged to beware of entanglement in misleading metaphors, we cannot possibly avoid such entanglement. Let us look at one further trap-like structure in “Bahnwärter Thiel,” another structure that engages the idea of the visual metaphor as applied to reading. When Thiel arrives at his post, after having discovered Lene in the act of abusing Tobias, we read Die Strecke schnitt rechts und links gradlinig in den unabsehbaren grünen Forst hinein; zu ihren beiden Seiten stauten die Nadelmassen gleichsam zurück, zwischen sich eine Gasse frei lassend, die der rötlichbraune, kiesbestreute Bahndamm ausfüllte. Die schwarzen, parallellaufenden Geleise darauf glichen in ihrer Gesamtheit einer ungeheuren eisernen Netzmasche, deren schmale Strähne sich im äußersten Süden und Norden in einem Punkte des Horizontes zusammenzogen. (48–49) [The rail line cut, to the right and to the left, a straight line into the vast green forest. On both its sides the conifers seemed to be pushed back,

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leaving open between them a lane that was occupied by the reddish brown, graveled embankment, upon which the black rails, running parallel, resembled in their totality a huge iron mesh whose thin strands, in the extreme south and north, converged at a single point on the horizon.]

Since the two tracks, in each direction, do appear to converge at a point, the idea of an iron mesh—two strands of iron joined at both ends but separated in the middle—is logically plausible. But this idea is presented in the form of a visual image, which it cannot be literally because no actual observer could ever see simultaneously both the north and south points of convergence. The iron mesh is unquestionably there, and we unquestionably do in a sense see it as readers, even while recognizing that it cannot be seen. Thus we are trapped—caught in a “mesh” of our own—in a situation that makes both perfect sense and perfect nonsense, and so calls into question the very idea of making sense (or experiencing by the senses) in our reading. Or perhaps the adherent of an Iserian approach would say that even if we are thus trapped for a moment, the truth must soon dawn upon us— that our seeing of the unseeable is not really a trap at all, but a token of our transcendence as readers of the limited empirical ego, the token of a kind of temporary quasi-divinity that reading affords us. God, after all, does see the whole of the iron mesh. It is as if the text itself were deliberately making a mockery of this possibility when, later, Tobias spies a squirrel and asks, “Vater, ist das der liebe Gott? [Father, is that the good Lord?]” (57). For the squirrel, with eyes on the sides of its head, perhaps can see both north and south at the same time. This is what happens in “Bahnwärter Thiel” to the idea of reading as a quasi-divine transcendence of our particular ego and condition; at every possible point, the text reduces it to the absurd. Nor is the relation between a reader and the squirrel as utterly far-fetched as it might seem at fi rst glance. Given our aesthetic enjoyment of nature in a world where the real humans (the story’s characters) are enmeshed in a blind struggle to subsist, what are we really, as readers, if not a species of idyllically imagined woodland creature?

The Circle and the Mirror Hofmannsthal’s “Reitergeschichte” provides a marked stylistic contrast with “Bahnwärter Thiel.” But there are strong points of similarity between the two stories. The combination of deferred sexual desire and indirect

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discourse, for example, in Thiel’s encounter with Lene after he finds her beating Tobias, is matched almost exactly in Anton Lerch’s encounter with Vuic. And the assault upon the idea of reading as an expansion of our experiential horizon is also present in the “Reitergeschichte,” perhaps more deeply submerged than in Hauptmann, but in a form no less profound and implacable. The central character of the “Reitergeschichte,” Anton Lerch, is not the focus of attention at the beginning of the story. Not until after the ride through Milan, not until after he sees a familiar female face in the window of the yellow house, does Anton Lerch become the center of our quasi-experience as readers. Not, in other words, until after he himself becomes a kind of reader, dreaming himself into a realistically founded but increasingly fantastic “Zivilatmosphäre”2 (civilian atmosphere), just as we, in reading, might be considered to be dreaming our way into a realistically founded but increasingly phantasmal cavalry atmosphere. The symmetry here is exact. Given the central thematic opposition in the story between the military and the civilian, it must occur to us that our reading fiction, here and now, is a civilian act characterized by freedom and leisure. And if reading were in truth a relaxation of the limits of our ego, a transcending of its boundaries, then in this particular case we should expect that transcending to operate in the direction of the military. Not, of course, in the sense that our civilian experience would be replaced by a military experience; the whole point of reading (supposedly) is that the multiple components of our experience continue to exist side by side, each affording us a perspective upon, an enjoyment of, a learning from, the other. And such a transcending of the boundary between military and civilian seems to be exactly the structure of Anton Lerch’s experience: Der Wachtmeister [lebte sich] immer mehr in das Zimmer mit den Mahagonimöbeln und den Basilikumtöpfen hinein und zugleich in eine Zivilatmosphäre, durch welche doch das Kriegsmäßige durchschimmerte, eine Atmosphäre von Behaglichkeit und angenehmer Gewalttätigkeit ohne Dienstverhältnis, eine Existenz in Hausschuhen, den Korb des Säbels durch die linke Tasche des Schlafrockes durchgesteckt. (124–25) 3 [The sergeant imagined his way more and more into the room with the mahogany furniture and the pots of basil, and thus also into a civilian atmosphere that still had a tinge of the warlike about it, an atmosphere of contentment and agreeable brutality without subordination, an existence

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in bedroom slippers, with the saber’s hilt protruding from the left-hand pocket of one’s dressing gown.]

But does this mean that reading has become a liberation or an escape for us? On the contrary, it has become a trap. Our reading, which at fi rst appears to extend the range of our experience, now suddenly brings us back face to face (in Anton Lerch) with nothing but a mirror image of ourselves as readers, an image that shares with the actual image in a mirror even the quality of symmetrical reversal. For Anton Lerch’s “reading” moves in the opposite direction from ours, from the military toward the civilian, and so is as it were an unreading of our reading of the story, placing us in the position of both the subject and the object of reading (we think of Heine’s monkey, boiling its own tail), involving us therefore in a reading that now has no object whatever beyond the narrow, self-indulgent self that is doing the reading. Nor should it surprise us that the act of reading is thus mirrored here, for the whole story is made of mirror-like repetitions. The ride through Milan is repeated in the ride through the dirty village; Vuic is repeated in the woman who later crosses in front of Lerch’s horse; the muzzle of the enemy officer’s pistol is repeated in Baron Rofrano’s pistol; the stout man who becomes the focus of Lerch’s dreaming is actually seen in a mirror; and the climax of the story is Lerch’s meeting himself (a self-meeting that we also enact, as readers) at the bridge. The story is made of nothing but mirrors, mirrors that reflect in the end nothing but the process of mirroring, and so show back to us, over and over, the exclusively self-referred futility of the process of reading. “Handpferde auslassen! [Release the captured horses!]” (130) is the command that brings the story to its close. And it is a command that we too must at last obey, in our recognition that we may bring away no spoils, no profit, no learning, no self-development or self-renewal, from the process of reading. The operation of the trap of reading, the inevitable recognition of futility that is inherent in the process of reading, is represented with minute exactness in the structure of the “Reitergeschichte.” The long and wonderful sentence that describes the squadron’s ride through Milan is an irresistibly readable piece of prose, a kind of invitation to the dance of reading. Unter dem Geläute der Mittagsglocken, der Generalmarsch von den vier Trompeten hinaufgeschmettert in den stählern funkelnden Himmel, an tausend Fenstern hinklirrend und zurückgeblitzt auf achtundsiebzig Kürasse, achtundsiebzig aufgestemmte nackte Klingen; Straße rechts,

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Straße links, wie ein aufgewühlter Ameishaufen sich füllend mit staunenden Gesichtern; fluchende und erbleichende Gestalten hinter Haustoren verschwindend, verschlafene Fenster aufgerissen von den entblößten Armen schöner Unbekannter; vorbei an Santo Babila, an San Fedele, an San Carlo, am weltberühmten marmornen Dom, an San Satiro, San Giorgio, San Lorenzo, San Eustorgio; deren uralte Erztore alle sich auftuend und unter Kerzenschein und Weihrauchqualm silberne Heilige und brokatgekleidete strahlenäugige Frauen hervorwinkend; aus tausend Dachkammern, dunklen Torbogen, niedrigen Butiken Schüsse zu gewärtigen, und immer wieder nur halbwüchsige Mädchen und Buben, die weißen Zähne und dunklen Haare zeigend; vom trabenden Pferde herab funkelnden Auges auf alles dies hervorblickend aus einer Larve von blutbesprengtem Staub; zur Porta Venezia hinein, zur Porta Ticinese wieder hinaus: so ritt die schöne Schwadron durch Mailand. (122–23)

I will not attempt a translation of this passage because its content hardly even matters. What attracts us here, besides the flow and rhythm, is especially a multiplication of perspective. In reading, we are invited to occupy the position of both spectators and participants in a scene composed—by a corresponding paradox—of watchful actors (the riders) and visible spectators (the populace). For a moment (it seems) the walls of the ego are breached, the opposition of subject and object disappears, and we lead a philosophically liberated existence as it were in the language. Or, at least, this is the way we customarily account for what we imagine happens to us when reading a passage of this sort. But the very next sentence marks the point at which the story begins to focus on Anton Lerch. The seeming multiplication of perspective in reading, namely, turns out to be not a dissolution or transcendence of the ego, but merely an instance of that taking of the subject as object, an instance of that self-detaching process of reflection, by which a particular ego (like Anton Lerch) constitutes and perpetuates itself in the first place. The ego is no longer joyously dismembered in the language, but rather (since that dismemberment, and that joy, are in truth only an exercise in solitary self-reflection) it is again concentrated (as in truth it always had been) into a person—a person who, in the form of Anton Lerch within the fiction, had actually ridden through Milan, had actually been a vessel of that seductive watchful visibility, and a person who now, in that he becomes more and more a kind of reader in reverse, leads our consciousness in a circle that confronts us more and more clearly with our own true

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condition as particular, contingent, limited, unexploded, civilian persons. Reading, in other words, in the form of the ride through Milan, is itself the process that produces the need for reading—that sense of entrapment which prompts us to seek the extraordinary, the adventurous, “the other” (as Hofmannsthal puts it elsewhere), the dissolution and reorigination of the ego. It is inevitable, accordingly, that after having been exposed, in his dreaming, as a reader in reverse, Anton Lerch notices the little village that turns out to be a horribly parodistic re-reading of the ride through Milan. It is indeed a revelation of what that ride had in truth been to begin with, the revelation that reading in truth is never anything but a re-reading, the reading of a parody, of an intransitive parody, of a text that never does anything but imitate confusedly the text we had wanted it to be, that nonexistent “original” text—like the fancy of Anton Lerch’s capturing “an enemy general without much protection” (125)—in relation to which our actual reading is nothing but the confusion and mere squalor of an uncontrolled self-preoccupation. And then, fi nally, the trap of reading is sprung: at the end of the village, at the end of this reading, at the end of every reading, like Anton Lerch, I encounter myself—not even myself as a reader, which is still a generalization and a multiplication of myself—but simply, absolutely, myself, the utterly finite, undeveloped, unimproved, ungeneralized, mortal thing that I, inescapably, am. The ego-dismemberment of reading turns out to have been mere confusion, the joy of reading a mere concealment of my actual undeniable condition. And that confusion and concealment, being a movement of repression, in the end inevitably focuses upon and reveals precisely the inadmissible reality it had existed for the purpose of negating.

Reading Is Death The “Reitergeschichte,” like “Bahnwärter Thiel,” is thus an unreadable text. And again the question arises: what are we doing when we do read it after all? If we cannot adequately read these texts, in the sense of “reading” that is established in the tradition from James to Iser, then it follows, I think, that our reading must take a more active or productive or creative form, the form of something closer to writing. These texts, since they trap and attack and in effect destroy their “reader,” refuse to be anything but “writable” or “writerly” texts, texts characterized by what Barthes calls the “scriptible.” Barthes says “le texte scriptible, c’est nous en train

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d’écrire.”4 The text is not a thing produced by us, but is “us, in the process of writing.” This formula requires elucidation. We must be careful, above all, about how we imagine what is “written” or produced by us in the process of reading. Neither in hermeneutic theory (say in Gadamer) nor in readerresponse theory, and certainly not in Iser, is it ever assumed that reading is not a productive activity. In fact, a primary object of hermeneutic theory is to understand the historical operation of precisely the productive component of reading, while the object of reader-response theory is to understand the productivity of the individual reader. The key question is what we imagine to be the product of reading as a creative activity. That product, from a hermeneutic point of view, is roughly the meaning— hence the very identity—of the text considered as an utterance in which we now participate, whereas from a reader-response point of view it is the text’s fictional content in the sense that such content, in being constituted, is now continuous with The Reader’s own experience, with his or her very self. But, with respect to the two texts discussed above, the same question can be answered in neither of these two ways. The product of reading is always intimately involved with the self of the reader; it is not something that arises outside us. But if the trap of reading operates as I have suggested, in “Bahnwärter Thiel” and the “Reitergeschichte,” then the product of reading is nothing but my own strictly particular self: not the historically operative self posited by hermeneutics, and not the selfdeveloping and self-renewing self posited by reader-response theory—for these are ideas of the self that the trap makes nonsense of—but rather the self stripped of every attribute, every relation, stripped of everything that could be fictionalized and presented to it as an object of readerly contemplation; it is the self stripped of everything except its sheer particularity, its sheer differentness from everything else in existence. Anton Lerch’s encounter with himself—his encounter with a thing that is nothing but Anton Lerch—is exactly what is enacted by us in reading. The text, as Barthes suggests, stands in no experiential or revelatory relation to me, but has come simply to be me. (I realize that some readers will not admit even that the condition I am talking about exists. But I appeal, at least, to the experience of those readers who are also actually writers, and to their recollection of what it is like to finish a project. The final stages in making a book are the worst time, the time of greatest self-doubt, in the life of a writer, the resurgence

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of an enormous taedium vitae that is only the worse, only the more deadly, for being typical and expected. Now, at project’s end, we are brought face to face once again with the recognition that personal accomplishment—in the human sciences, in the humanities, perhaps especially in literature—is never in truth anything but a negative accomplishment, the recognition that our most precious insights, the ideas in which we imagine we have incorporated the last possible ounce of our vitality, will survive in the larger intellectual community only at the price of being misunderstood and decentered, only by assuming a rigid alien shape in which to be used as the furniture, the foil, the mere stage-setting, for new forms of chaotic excitement, new problems and ideas that we, for our part, may greet publicly with respect, even admiration, but never without thinking to ourselves that they have somehow missed the point. The excitement and energy, the nerve-racking precariousness of our work, when we look at the fi nished product, is suddenly, inevitably, subtracted from us, and we fi nd ourselves, for the moment at least, living nothing but our empty mortality.) This concept of the self as nothing but (if it is a “concept” at all) is not an easy one. Any statement of the form, “the self is this or that,” names a quality, “this or that,” that must be subtracted to arrive at the self I am talking about. As soon as we introduce, say, the general notion of identity as opposed to alterity, or the idea of some specific communal or interpersonal function or of a supposed principle in the process of consciousness, we have missed the point. Or if we try to visualize the self through our sense or image of our own selves, then the process of visualization or dramatization inevitably insinuates itself into the object, and we fi nd ourselves thinking about the self-developing readerly self which is precisely not what we mean. Yet, on the other hand, that minimal, utterly particular self that Anton Lerch encounters at the bridge is also undeniably a part of our knowledge of life. It is that happening of the self that Goethe, for example, calls not DAIMON but ANANKE.5 (I say a “happening” of the self, not an “experience,” for terminological reasons that are fairly clear already and will become more so as we go on.) It is the repeated and repeatedly sudden and shocking knowledge of our fi nitude and mortality; it is the repeated and repeatedly inescapable recognition that I am nothing but my utterly particular self, within limits so perfectly narrow and rigid as to be strictly beyond the possibility of conceptualization. (Individuum est ineffabile.) But in what sense can it be asserted that this “happening” or “knowledge” of the self is not an experience that arises from our reading, not a

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deepening of our experience in general, not a “learning” of the sort Iser envisages? Or if what we are talking about is a perfectly primitive knowledge, prior to all actual experience, how can this knowledge be regarded as a “product” of reading? My suggestion is that the two texts we have looked at do trap us into enacting, as readers, a perfectly primitive form of knowledge, and that this is a knowledge or happening that we come to only by way of the more complicated structures of experience, and especially of reading. Experience, as a process, is itself always already a self-expansion, self-multiplication, self-renewal; and the expansion or multiplication or renewal of our experience, which the tradition of romance theory associates with the process of reading, is thus practically identical with experience itself in the general sense. (Lubbock develops this relation with unparalleled clarity and economy.) 6 But if in Hauptmann and Hofmannsthal the imagined experiential self-complication of reading is suddenly collapsed, then the assumed identity of reading with experience as such—even if this is merely a theoretical identity, belonging to a highly questionable literary and critical tradition—must bring about a more general collapse that leaves us with nothing but the happening or knowledge I have spoken of. Part of the trap of reading, again, is precisely an entanglement in the condition of The Reader, or reading for thrills, from which our knowledge of its emptiness does not exempt us. And just this entanglement exposes experience itself (everything about us that arises by multiplication, everything but the utterly primitive) to the destructive contradictions of the trap. Like Anton Lerch, we undergo experience, and experience our experience, and experience the experiencing of our experience, in a process that inevitably makes self-readers of us, until (in the trap) that process fi nally becomes wholly reflective, nothing but mirrors, nothing but intransitive parody, which makes a subtractable object of itself and leaves us confronted with its absolute opposite, that horrifyingly mere thing that now appears across the sudden bridge to ourselves. Or we think again of Goethe’s “Urworte. Orphisch,” which begins by unfolding the basic components of experience, DAIMON and TYCHE—in Schiller’s terms “person” and “condition,” the indomitable Self and the intractable Other. The initially confusing and interesting interaction of these components, which is experience, eventually assumes a directed shape of its own, a focus, which Goethe identifies as EROS. And once experience as such has thus concentrated itself in itself, it also thereby becomes subtractable from my self, which now appears as the mere self, utterly subject to ANANKE or grim necessity.

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This notion of the mere or primitive self is not really defi ned and must be regarded as heuristic. But I think that the account it suggests of an adequate reading of “Bahnwärter Thiel” or the “Reitergeschichte” is better than any account in terms of a supposed experiential resonance between reading and fiction. The reading of these stories is not an “experience” at all, not a fictionalizable shape, but is mere life, nothing but life. In reader-response theory, reading is seen as life squared, or life to the nth power, multiplied by itself, developed, given extra dimensions. In the two stories we are concerned with, by contrast, reading has always already moved one step beyond the nth root of life, approaching an absolute primitive unity, life stripped of everything it can be stripped of—left as nothing but the shock of particularity, fi nitude, mortality. We might make a certain ethical sense of this situation by saying that in reading, we are offered the opportunity to realize the shock of fi nitude, the sheer particularity of ourselves, which can never be represented in any narrated fiction, as a positive writerly achievement, an active decision on our part—in that the “act” of reading must now truly be an act, since it is denied the possibility of being the mere response to a prior communicative act that might be associated with the text. Thus we perhaps fi nd ourselves in the vicinity of Schiller’s insistence that our “condition” must be transformed into our “deed,” or in the vicinity of Nietzsche and the idea of “amor fati.” Reading is life with no experiential content whatever, life as nothing but itself, which means nothing but naked mortality. Therefore I might as well have said “reading is death.” Or reading is the transformation of death into an achievement, a decision. But there is still an interpretive difficulty here. In “Bahnwärter Thiel,” the trap of reading and the truth of reading are kept behind the scenes, operating more on the level of style than on that of content or image, except for the moments where we see ourselves mirrored in train windows or fi nd ourselves mockingly incarnated as a sciuromorphic God. But in the “Reitergeschichte,” in Anton Lerch’s meeting himself, we receive something like a direct representation of what happens to us as readers. And how can the story now continue? Why does Anton Lerch die precisely as he does? Why, having encountered himself and his own particular mortal condition, does he not at least die quickly in the ensuing skirmish? The idea of death as decision is certainly relevant here; but the idea alone does not even come close to explaining the exact manner in which Anton Lerch’s final moments are described. How can description or representation operate here in the fi rst place? Before

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attempting to deal with this matter, let us turn to one more text. Reading, I have said, is death. More specifically, reading is “Der Tod in Venedig.”

Parody and Intertextuality The idea of intransitive parody is obviously applicable to “Der Tod in Venedig.” As soon as we read chapter 2, it becomes clear that the style in which the story is written is a parody of Aschenbach’s own “classical” style. But we know that the texts that this style parodies do not exist, so we have a perfect case of parody without an object.7 Moreover, the idea of intransitive parody and the idea of the trap of reading are indissolubly related. If reading is nothing but life (in the radical sense suggested above), then it follows that the integrity of the literary text, its identity as a “work” of literature, must somehow be nullified in the process of reading. If it is possible to regard the text as a work, as a palpable communicative initiative—if the text, that is, conveys any specific content whatever—then this content is superadded to the act of reading, and reading (that act) is no longer strictly nothing but life. Therefore reading (in the sense I mean) requires that the text contain nothing that is originally its own—which is to say, the text must be (or become) nothing but intertext, in the strict sense of the idea of the “intertextual” that Kristeva develops.8 But this creates a problem. In Kristeva’s argument, and in her reading of Bakhtin—if I have understood correctly—indeed from a semiotic perspective in general, it is simply true that every text in its entirety is intertextually constituted; at a sufficiently deep level of analysis there is never anything but intertext, just as there is no entity prior to difference in the universe of signs. A text considered as a semiotic entity, as a vessel of meaning—unlike that same text considered as a material object—has no existence that is strictly its own. It cannot begin to signify (hence to be what it is) except by virtue of its relations (“intertexts”) with other texts—most obviously, with all the texts in which the common meaning of its words has developed. The intertext, or the realm of the intertextual, is therefore constitutionally (not temporally) prior to any of the texts between which it appears to be stretched. The substantial existence of the text is an illusion because in truth each text is nothing but the accidental intersection of innumerable intertexts. Here, however, in discussing “Der Tod in Venedig,” we are not concerned with truth in this sense, but with the process of reading. And how shall the ultimate intertextual nature of a specific text (its specificity is

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already a problem) be conveyed to the text’s reader? If it is conveyed at all, then how shall it not take the form of a content or meaning that gives a substantial identity to the text being read, and so confuses the idea that it supposedly conveys? If a text focuses upon its own intertextuality, then precisely by focusing it presents itself to its reader as something more than merely intertextual. It presents itself thus, whatever the ultimate truth of the matter may be. Parody can be considered a response to this difficulty, because parody is always a strong gesture in the direction of the intertextual. But if the text is supposed to be realized, in the process of reading, as nothing but life, this gesture is not enough. Even if the parodistic text aims to desubstantialize itself, still the text that is being parodied, in order to operate as a target, is inevitably presented and identified as a text (a “work,” a communicative endeavor bearing a content), which anchors the specificity of the parodistic text, however much the latter may distance itself from that content. The idea of an “original” text is thus not circumvented, but only removed a step or two from the present process of reading. What is required is therefore intransitive parody (parody without an object), a text that is clearly parodistic but whose object is either nonexistent or else necessarily itself a parody. Hence the parodistic technique of “Bahnwärter Thiel,” in which the nature descriptions and the passages that show marked subtleties in the use of verb tense are parodies of the nonexistent texts that they themselves would have been if our reading of them had not turned out to be a trap; hence also the parodies of a popular press whose identifying qualities (especially its pandering to inadequate readers) turn out not to be dissociable from the parodistic text we are looking at. Hence, in the “Reitergeschichte,” the complex parodistic relation between the ride through Milan and Anton Lerch’s ride through the squalid village. The latter is clearly a parody of the former, in that Anton Lerch, now separate from the impersonal collectivity that had earlier been named by the number “seventy-eight” (the number of men in the squadron), exhibits for us the true deluded and confused condition of The supposedly Experiencing Reader in Milan. Thus the only actual content of the Milan passage (the pleasure of reading it) is discredited, so that that passage, even in its position as an “original” for the later parody, is unmasked as itself inherently parodistic—a parody of whatever nonexistent text is responded to in what we had imagined to be our reading of it. And thus, in turn, both passages—both rides—assume the character of intransitive parody, parody referring to no original whatever.

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But the parodistic operation of “Der Tod in Venedig” is even more economical. The main text of the novella that we read—because it parodies certain nonexistent texts that we only read about—is also paralleled with those texts, which means that the question of its existence is raised, the question of the existence of “Der Tod in Venedig.” In what sense is that text actually there for us—more immediately there than, say, Aschenbach’s Frederick the Great novel? Where exactly is the absolute readerly present in which we are actually reading the novella—that immediate present that must happen if we are to distinguish adequately between works that we can and works that we cannot “actually” read? (Compare the parallel, in Doktor Faustus, between music that we can and music that we cannot “actually” hear.) Do we not fi nd ourselves in the same dilemma as Hans Castorp with the second hand on his watch? Is that readerly present not always already past? Does our reading not always reduce itself to a re-reading, the remembering of reading, a parody of reading? Do we really have, of Thomas Mann’s novella, anything different from what we have of Aschenbach’s works by hearing about them? The parodistic move thus doubles back and reinforces its own questioning of the text’s substantiality, gestures with redoubled insistence in the direction of the text’s quality as intertext. Not that the strategy of intransitive parody could be said to “establish” for a reader the intertextual character of the story. Such a claim would be nonsense, contradicted by the very idea of establishment. The texts I am talking about do not somehow magically overcome the logical constraints that are inherent in the notion of intertext. My point, rather, is that the structure of these texts suggests the possibility of an entirely fundamental revision of our sense of what reading is, a revision in which the utterly theoretical and the utterly concrete—the truth of intertextuality and the primitive knowledge of my own particular mortality—are fused in a single move of illumination.

Aschenbach and Aschenbach In Hauptmann and Hofmannsthal, intransitive parody is naturally associated with the use of reading as a trap for each reader; and the same association operates in “Der Tod in Venedig.” Let us try to organize chronologically the story of Aschenbach’s career as it is described in chapter 2. Of his youth we read that

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Aschenbach war problematisch, war unbedingt gewesen wie nur irgendein Jüngling. Er hatte dem Geiste gefrönt, mit der Erkenntnis Raubbau getrieben, Saatfrucht vermahlen, Geheimnisse preisgegeben, das Talent verdächtigt, die Kunst verraten.9 [Aschenbach had been problematic, had been uncompromising, as only young men can be. He had indulged his intellect, practiced overexploitation with knowledge, milled his seed corn, divulged the secrets of his craft, cast suspicion upon his gift, committed treason against art.]

Irony and cynicism had characterized him; he had been a writer, but only in order to subject that profession to a destructive questioning. And the work with which he had rescued himself from this futile self-questioning had been his novel on Frederick the Great. But it is clear that this work had really been a self-portrait on Aschenbach’s part, and more specifically a portrait of himself in the process of creating the novel. The novel is about “Durchhalten” (451), and “Durchhalten”—sheer arbitrary perseverance in the face of his own self-questioning—is how Aschenbach had produced it. But the novel is thus about nothing but its own creation, and it therefore does not in truth overcome its author’s “sympathy with the abyss” (455), his questioning of the validity of all norms and values, after all; for it acknowledges implicitly that only its own genesis is available to it as a valid object. Moreover, that novel is still a giving-away of secrets (“Geheimnisse preisgeben”) on Aschenbach’s part; he achieves the conquest of his suffering artist’s condition only by depicting that conquest, which in turn involves displaying the original suffering itself, thus revealing the secret, the basis of radical doubt on which his achievement is built. Aschenbach has not yet climbed free of the abyss. Hence the need for his next major work, “der figurenreiche, so vielerlei Menschenschicksal im Schatten einer Idee versammelnde Romanteppich, ‘Maja’ mit Namen [that many-charactered novelistic tapestry—pulling together so many different kinds of human fate under the shadow of an idea—entitled ‘Maya’]” (450). The “idea” that unites the characters here is still basically the content of the Frederick novel, which the narrator later calls “heroism of weakness” (453), except that it is now presented not in the form of an ultimately humiliating confession, but as something closer to a philosophical doctrine (“Maja” suggests both Nietzsche and Schopenhauer), a general theory of personality. Aschenbach is now generalizing from his own experience—the experience of becoming the person

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he creates (like Frederick) in the very process of creating. All personality, he now suggests, is constituted in this manner: by “Selbstgestaltung” (selfformation; 456) in the face of a gaping void of truth that is concealed from us only by the veil of “maya,” the effort of a constantly self-creating fiction. Thus he attempts once again to suppress, or repress, the experience of radical self-doubt on which his own existence is founded, by presenting it now as the human condition in general, not a personal confession. But again he fails, and the manner in which he fails is very interesting. Here is the paragraph that describes his relation to his reading public: Damit ein bedeutendes Geistesprodukt auf der Stelle eine breite und tiefe Wirkung zu üben vermöge, muß eine geheime Verwandtschaft, ja Übereinstimmung zwischen dem persönlichen Schicksal seines Urhebers und dem allgemeinen des mitlebenden Geschlechts bestehen. Die Menschen wissen nicht warum sie einem Kunstwerke Ruhm bereiten. Weit entfernt von Kennerschaft, glauben sie hundert Vorzüge daran zu entdecken, um so viel Teilnahme zu rechtfertigen; aber der eigentliche Grund ihres Beifalls ist ein Unwägbares, ist Sympathie. [“Sympathie,” that dangerous word.] Aschenbach hatte es einmal an wenig sichtbarer Stelle unmittelbar ausgesprochen, daß beinahe alles Große, was dastehe, als ein Trotzdem dastehe, trotz Kummer und Qual, Armut, Verlassenheit, Körperschwäche, Laster, Leidenschaft und tausend Hemmnissen zustande gekommen sei. Aber das war mehr als eine Bemerkung, es war eine Erfahrung, war geradezu die Formel seines Lebens und Ruhmes, der Schlüssel zu seinem Werk; und was Wunder also, wenn es auch der sittliche Charakter, die äußere Gebärde seiner eigentümlichsten Figuren war? (452–53) [For an intellectual product of any importance to have immediately a broad and deep effect in the world, there must be a hidden relationship, indeed a resonance, between the author’s personal fate and the general fate of his living compatriots. People do not know why they bestow fame upon a work of art. Far from being connoisseurs, they imagine they fi nd a hundred excellences to justify their response to it; but the real reason for their approval is something incalculable, is sympathy. Aschenbach had once said it straight out, in an inconspicuous place: that practically everything great that exists, exists as a Nevertheless that has come into being in spite of misery and torment, poverty, abandonment, bodily weakness, vice, passion, and a thousand other hindrances. But that was more than a remark, it was an experience, it was in fact the formula of his life and

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fame, the key to his work; and it is therefore no wonder that it was also the moral character and the outward demeanor of his most characteristic figures.]

There is a discontinuity here, a slippage. The narrator begins by suggesting that he will explain Aschenbach’s popularity, the “sympathy” readers feel with his work; but then he backs off and simply describes the content of that work. Only after a considerable interval is the question of sympathy again taken up, when we hear “betrachtete man all dies Schicksal [especially all the figures of the ‘Maja’ novel] und wieviel Gleichartiges noch, so konnte man zweifeln, ob es überhaupt einen anderen Heroismus gäbe als denjenigen der Schwäche [having observed all these fates and others like them, one could easily doubt the existence of any heroism besides that of weakness]” (453). And then—finally—we hear that this type of heroism is “zeitgemäß,” characteristic of the age, that Aschenbach is “der Dichter all derer, die am Rande der Erschöpfung arbeiten . . . all dieser Moralisten der Leistung” who are “die Helden des Zeitalters [the poet of all those who work at the brink of exhaustion . . . all these moralists of achievement . . . the (true) heroes of the age]” (453–54). But the discontinuity—the long digression on the content of Aschenbach’s work before anything is said directly about the contemporary age—suggests the question of whether Aschenbach’s readers recognize in his work a personal situation they already experience, or whether, rather, that situation is one they create for themselves and put on in response to their reading. “Having observed all these fates . . . one could doubt the existence of any other heroism.” Aschenbach’s own theory of personality implies, after all, that personality types do not exist as prior givens, but are deliberately put on, as the product of continuing fictional creation. (And we think in general of the creation of “experience” out of theory in the history of modern reading.) It is not clear, in other words, that Aschenbach has not himself propagated that idea of the present age on which “sympathy” for his work is based. It is possible that Aschenbach, in attempting to conquer the experience of weakness, suffering, and radical self-doubt, not only has confessed that experience, but has now made it available, as an experience, to the general public, to the ignorant crowd, that he has thus cheapened and trivialized and prostituted his own self-conquest. And it is this possibility that is embodied in the main character of his next major work, the novella “Ein Elender” (A Miserable Wretch), in the character of that “Halbschurke, der sich ein Schicksal erschleicht, indem er sein Weib, aus

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Ohnmacht, aus Lasterhaftigkeit, aus ethischer Velleität, in die Arme eines Unbärtigen treibt und aus Tiefe Nichtswürdigkeiten begehen zu dürfen glaubt [that insipid villain who pilfers a fate for himself by driving his wife into the arms of a mere boy, out of impotence, corruptness, ethical velleity, and considers it permissible to commit vile acts in the name of profundity]” (455). Ethical velleity, or ambiguity, is exactly Aschenbach’s situation. In the very process of presenting himself and his characters as a model of ethical resolve, he has also propagated among his readers an experience of the abyss, of radical doubt, that necessarily undermines such resolve. Therefore, in the story “Ein Elender,” he attacks not only his own fictional personage, but the whole practice of fiction—of “art”— that inevitably produces that ethical ambiguity. He now creates a fictional personage only in order to destroy him; and as far as we can tell, he never creates another work of fiction. His next major work, the essay “Geist und Kunst” (Intellect and Art), proclaims his triumph over himself simply by being an essay, by no longer displaying the questionable and shameful conditions of its own genesis in the form of a narrated fiction. Aschenbach, so to speak, has written himself out of his own work and into a kind of monumental existence. But even in thus writing himself out of his work, Aschenbach is of course still writing himself. And the movement of repression is still by nature also a movement of confession. The text of the novella “Der Tod in Venedig” is therefore nothing but the fictional, confessional subtext behind Aschenbach’s own later, ostensibly impersonal, expository texts; it is the text Aschenbach writes (hence the stylistic parody) precisely by refusing to write it. The day on which the story opens, significantly, is a day on which Aschenbach’s creative energy troubles him by refusing to stop operating at the usual time (444). His writing now carries on as it were in spite of him; the repressed truth from which he had separated himself, the fiction he no longer permits himself, now begins to write itself as what appears to him in the form of an external world—a world fi lled with images of uncreated chaos (the jungle, the sea), images of a precarious artistic mastery of that chaos (Venice, Tadzio), and above all (as if the novel “Maja” were writing itself again), multiple images of Aschenbach himself, in the man with red hair, the captain of the boat to Venice, the old man made up as a young man, the illegal gondolier, the guitarist, the hairdresser—incessant images of himself, even in inanimate things, like Tadzio’s vulnerable sand castle or the abandoned camera in the last scene. Like Anton Lerch, Aschenbach comes face to face with himself; and as in the case of Anton Lerch,

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this encounter means death, a death with which Aschenbach eventually acknowledges his own complicity. Aschenbach’s fate can be read straight out of Schopenhauer. Individual existence is in truth nothing but the selfcreating struggle for individuality in the face of nothingness; and such existence, as soon as it is wrapped in the illusion of its own achievement, is thus also helplessly exposed to its own true nature as struggle (it encounters itself ) which inevitably destroys it. But there is a significant difference between Aschenbach’s selfencounter and Anton Lerch’s. Aschenbach, who lives uninterruptedly in the shadow of the knowledge that personal existence is never anything but an act of self-fictionalizing, encounters himself (appropriately) in fictionalized images, whereas Anton Lerch’s meeting himself is apparently a direct representation of the utterly primitive, unfictionalized self-knowledge that is the true product of reading. And of the two self-encounters, Anton Lerch’s is still the more problematic because it is a representation of the strictly unrepresentable. Evidently there is a profound relation between the two texts, but more interpretive work is needed to clarify it.

The Trap in Venice Aschenbach strives to write himself into existence, which means that he must write himself out of his own writing, and his existence collapses under this contradiction. This, in a nutshell, is the action of “Der Tod in Venedig.” But where am I located as a reader with respect to this structure? First, it follows both from the idea of reading suggested by Aschenbach’s relation to his public, and from the idealist philosophical background of Aschenbach’s self-fashioning, that reading is not strictly different, as an activity, from writing. If, in truth, there is no such thing as the individual—the personality in the form of a simple given—if the person in truth exists only in the process of its own self-articulation, then it follows that just as the author writes himself into existence, so a reader, in reading (as in any other activity), reads himself or herself into existence. But this does not mean that we as readers read our way into the story, that we “identify” with some character in it, any more than Aschenbach identifies with any of the characters he writes of. On the contrary, Aschenbach’s aim is always to move a step beyond the still questionable and endangered character he is writing about, which is why the revelatory or confessional quality of narrative fiction always subverts

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its own aim for him. And my reading, correspondingly, always leaves the text behind—uses the text for self-articulation, self-development, selfestablishment. We recall the parallel that is drawn, by parody, between “Der Tod in Venedig” itself and the works of Aschenbach that are described in it. Even now, even in reading—this parallel suggests—I have already left the text behind, relegated it to a distance from which it is no more immediately there for me than those nonexistent works that I also, in a sense, know quite well. And distance is also enforced by the narrator’s repeated distancing of himself from Aschenbach; identification is out of the question. We are invited to read and to recognize that reading for us, like writing for Aschenbach, is an instance of that necessary process of selffashioning on which our very existence depends. But we are invited to assume, in addition, that even now we also exist beyond our reading, like Aschenbach beyond his fiction, in a more fully achieved form of existence from which we can look at our reading and grasp and judge it. (We are encouraged, in other words, to believe that we have somehow gotten beyond reading for thrills.) And then the trap of reading is sprung. At the moment when Aschenbach eats the strawberries that will kill him, we read Er saß dort, der Meister, der würdig gewordene Künstler, der Autor des “Elenden,” der in so vorbildlich reiner Form dem Zigeunertum und der trüben Tiefe abgesagt, dem Abgrunde die Sympathie gekündigt und das Verworfene verworfen hatte, der Hochgestiegene, der, Überwinder seines Wissens und aller Ironie entwachsen, in die Verbindlichkeiten des Massenzutrauens sich gewöhnt hatte, dessen Ruhm amtlich, dessen Name geadelt war und an dessen Stil die Knaben sich zu bilden angehalten wurden,—er saß dort, seine Lider waren geschlossen, nur zuweilen glitt, rasch sich wieder verbergend, ein spöttischer und betretener Blick seitlich darunter hervor, und seine schlaffen Lippen, kosmetisch aufgehöht, bildeten einzelne Worte aus von dem, was sein halb schlummerndes Hirn an seltsamer Traumlogik hervorbrachte. (521) [There he sat, the master, the artist who had achieved dignity, the author of “A Miserable Wretch,” who in a style of such exemplary purity had renounced everything gyspylike, all muddied profundity, had canceled all sympathy with the abyss, rejected all corruption, he who had risen high, who—as conqueror of his own knowledge and beyond all irony—had become accustomed to the obligations imposed by the trust of a large

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public, he, whose fame was official, his named ennobled,—there he sat, his eyelids closed, only from time to time, and quickly hidden again, a mocking and embarrassed glance darted out to the side, and his slack lips, cosmetically improved, formed individual words of what his half slumbering brain was producing in the way of strange dream logic.]

The narrator points out contemptuously that Aschenbach, the contemptuous author of “Ein Elender,” has now become the object of his own contempt, that his rejection of fiction has exposed him more completely than ever to the danger and the degeneracy that fiction represents. But the narrator, in this passage, is himself doing exactly what Aschenbach had done. He is narrating himself into existence; he is detaching himself, raising himself above, the inevitable ethical and existential velleity associated with fiction; and by doing so, he is exposing himself to the conditions of his existence in exactly the same way Aschenbach had. But once I understand the replication of this process from the level of Aschenbach the character, who is a writer, up to the level of the narrator, who is positioned somewhere between the conditions of writer and reader, I cannot fail to acknowledge the further replication by which the same reasoning applies to myself. In the very process of looking down at the narrator (with a detachment not far from contempt) and recognizing the manner in which he has exposed himself to a fate like Aschenbach’s, I find myself making exactly the gesture by which both he and Aschenbach had exposed themselves. There is no escape. Like Aschenbach’s gondolier, I am perhaps, for the moment, more in control of my situation than either the narrator or the character, but I am still in the same boat. Precisely the clarity of my vision, the clarity of my abstract grasp of the relation between “Geist und Kunst”—between achieved self-possession and its unstable, unsavory precondition—precisely that clarity is the move that entraps me. My reading is no longer left behind after all, but now suddenly catches up with me in the form of nothing but life—nothing but the immediate exposure to mortality of my particular self, a self that protrudes (and so is exposed) entirely beyond what might have been (one imagines hopelessly) the comforting limits of a fictional role. The result of this trap is not a form of “identification” between any reader and Aschenbach any more than we can speak of “identification” with the glimpsed railway passengers in Hauptmann. To operate, the trap requires precisely our assertion of difference from Aschenbach, and indeed our continued assertion of difference: if, at the end, we acknowledge our

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similarity with Aschenbach and pretend to learn from it (if we pretend to accept our “sympathy with the abyss”), then we are not like Aschenbach after all but simply imagine ourselves changed by the encounter with him, which means we have merely joined the “respectfully shaken public” (525) that reads of his death in the papers. What we in truth share with Aschenbach—in a form of sharing that we cannot adequately acknowledge—is nothing but a fundamental existential contradiction that we have in common with everyone: we read ourselves into existence by pretending to read ourselves out of our reading, which produces a contradiction that exposes us to our mortality. This contradiction is not an object of experience, to be grasped and learned from. If it were, then the story would be called simply “Der Tod,” referring to death as an experience we all have in common. The actual title, “Der Tod in Venedig,” denies me this form of participation, excludes me, leaves me alone with a contradiction that is nothing but my own entirely primitive self-encounter—my own mortality. The connection between a reader and Aschenbach is definitely there, but is always occult and problematic. We think, for instance, of the abandoned camera on the beach (523). The story’s allusions to Oedipus—the Apollo and Dionysus chapters, which suggest Nietzsche’s idea of tragedy in general; the figure of a hero of intellect, infected with guilt, trapped in a plaguestricken city—associate that three-legged camera, by way of the Sphinx’s riddle, with the old man (Aschenbach) who has become nothing but eye, nothing but the vessel of a delicious vision that is now (like the camera) “scheinbar herrenlos” (apparently without a master), now governed by no formative moral will. But that camera is also as it were a pinhole in the text, which betrays my presence as a reader—the presence of a detached “aesthetic” seeing that turns out to be not a seeing or experiencing at all, but the mere gesture of seeing carried out by an apparatus that is in truth nothing but a helpless, particular, abandoned material object on a beach at the brink of oblivion. The problematics of the visual metaphor is here the same as in Hauptmann. The nullity of our supposed experiencing as readers, the nullity of our seeing, is conveyed only by being shown us in an image.

The Content of an Empty Text But in this reading of “Der Tod in Venedig,” who is Tadzio? Tadzio could be omitted from the story—replaced by some completely different type of figure or narrative motif—with no damage to the work’s structure as I have presented it.

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Tadzio is clearly the content of “Der Tod in Venedig”—just as he is the content of the fictional bridge by which Aschenbach arrives at his death. But the idea of content has become problematic. To do what it does to a reader’s sense of reading, the story must be devoid of any substantial content—it must be intransitive parody, nothing but intertext. But, by defi nition, the story cannot present itself as nothing but intertext; its “presenting itself ” already contradicts this possibility. “Der Tod in Venedig” must therefore have a content after all—otherwise it would simply not be there—but a content that manages to become transparent with respect to its own irrelevance and its own insubstantiality, its strictly arbitrary or accidental quality as a kind of generalized happening of what Barthes calls “la voix du lecteur” (S/Z 157–58). And the constitution of the story’s content in this manner is itself strikingly fictionalized in Aschenbach’s deliberate constitution of Tadzio as the object of desire—in his letting slip the opportunity to regularize and conventionalize his relation to the boy (493). Moreover, the idea of Tadzio as the content of a contentless text is reflected exactly in the page and a half of prose that Aschenbach writes on the beach while looking at Tadzio. That text, like the other writings of Aschenbach we hear about, is a parody of (or, indifferently, is parodied by) “Der Tod in Venedig” itself, and in fact combines this parody with the mechanism of reversal that I have also discussed. “Der Tod in Venedig,” again, is the fictional text that Aschenbach represses (refuses to write) in writing his own later nonfictional texts, which means that the relation between visible and nonvisible texts for us, as readers, is exactly the reverse of what it is for people inside the fictional world. (We get to read the novella but not those essays; they read the essays but not the novella.) And similarly: whereas the ostensible content of Aschenbach’s page and a half is “ein gewisses großes und brennendes Problem der Kultur und des Geschmackes [a certain large and burning problem of culture and taste]” (492)—about which he had been invited to write, which gives it an intertextual flavor—while the true content is the figure of Tadzio, exactly the reverse is the case in the whole novella. Here, for us as readers, the ostensible content, the needful identifying veil spread over the truth of limitless intertextuality, is Tadzio, while the true content is indeed a burning cultural problem, the problem of reading. The symmetry could not be more exact. Nor is it insignificant that Aschenbach’s failure to make Tadzio’s acquaintance in a relatively harmless manner immediately follows his

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writing of that page and a half. Suppose, at this point in my reading, I have understood the novella. Does this mean that the problem of reading (the novella’s submerged or repressed content) has now been dealt with, rendered harmless by my understanding? This question is exactly parallel to the question of whether Aschenbach’s successful completion of that masterful page and a half (whose submerged content is Tadzio) has freed him from Tadzio’s spell. And the parallel with Aschenbach then reminds me that I do not even really want such an “Ernüchterung” (return to sobriety; 494)—that I myself still insist on the problem of reading, just as Aschenbach insists on the unattainable object of desire; that I still constitute the problem for myself by reading; that it is thus a problem I am alone with, my own perfectly primitive self-encounter. Similar considerations emerge from the discussion of “Bahnwärter Thiel” above. Given our basic sense of the work’s literary genre plus various parodistic gestures in style, the ostensible content—Thiel’s life and its crisis—as it were peels away to reveal a second layer: the relation, the gulf, between a coarse popular press and the relatively fi ner literary sensibility and human sympathy we bring to the material that such a press merely exploits. And when it then turns out that our relation to the text is not really distinguishable from that of the reader of the popular press, the work’s true content is revealed, accordingly, as nothing but the journalistic sensation at the end, the murder. But this still cannot be the text’s content for us. Just as our habitual readerly self-multiplication excludes us from Thiel’s dogged self-narrowing, so also precisely the process that makes newspaper readers of us reminds us, by being a literary and critical process, that we are not really newspaper readers after all, so that even the text’s sensational content is not available to us as a sensation. Thiel’s story, like Tadzio’s, thus becomes the content of an empty text, of a maximally intransitive parody. This brings us, fi nally, to the question of the end of the “Reitergeschichte.” Anton Lerch’s meeting himself across the bridge, I have suggested, represents each reader’s true situation, the happening of a primitive self-knowledge. But, as a representation, that image relegates the happening itself to the past. Like the trap of reading in Hauptmann, the happening of primitive self-knowledge in Hofmannsthal is not locatable at any particular point in real or in fictional time; it is deferred interminably into the future and recollected interminably into the past. The moment of representation (in the story) is itself already a movement beyond the unlocatable moment of truth (for a reader), which means that the continuation

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of the story beyond the moment of representation is necessary—if never demonstrably sufficient—precisely to validate the representation. The story moves beyond Anton Lerch’s self-encounter just as we ourselves have always already moved beyond what that encounter represents. The perfectly primitive self-knowledge that is exposed as the nature of reading in these three stories is a knowledge that we come to only by way of the complications of experience. But it is also a knowledge from which we have always already come away through the inherently temporal mechanism of experience. (Again we think of the second hand of Hans Castorp’s watch. The moment of truth is never there.) Hence the inevitability of representation (which is just such a coming away) in the “Reitergeschichte,” problematic as that representation may be. Hence also the inevitability of Barthes’ complicated formulation: the writable text is not, strictly speaking, the utterly particular “us” (or me) of primitive self-knowledge, but rather always fi nds us in the process of writing ourselves away from such knowledge, “nous en train d’écrire.” And Goethe’s ANANKE stanza, similarly, must be followed by something like an ELPIS stanza. The happening of the strictly mortal self—the moment of truth—cannot effectively happen except by being superseded by the experience of mortality, which is my turning-away from the moment “itself,” my holding-fast to something learned or rescued from it. Otherwise, precisely that moment of truth must lose the character of valid knowledge; for we do not actually die except by becoming persons and exposing ourselves in experience, in time. And Anton Lerch’s captured horse is clearly an allegory of what we inevitably (if contradictorily) rescue from our reading. His fate, from the moment at the bridge onward, is a perfect circle. He confronts the thing that is nothing but Anton Lerch, the happening of nothing but life, which, in the skirmish, inevitably receives content, substance, the quality of possessible experience; and this possession (the captured horse), in turn, is his actual exposure to death and so at once repeats and validates the original happening. This circle is repeated in the process of reading. My reading of the story gradually unmasks itself as nothing but life, and this idea then necessarily assumes the quality of a content belonging to the story—a captured prize I bring away with me, a victory like Anton Lerch’s in the skirmish, an achieved fictional experience. And this possession in turn exposes me precisely to my mortality—to that death I had already known directly in the moment of nothing but life. Like Anton Lerch, I cannot let go of my prize—I cannot unread the story or stop knowing what it

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means—even though I know (for this knowledge is the prize) that that possession means literally my death. There are further complications here. We pass beyond the blind selfindulgence of readerly “experience,” at the end of the story, only by finding ourselves mirrored yet again in the fiction, in Anton Lerch’s inability to release the captured horse. Thus the end of the story parodies the story as a whole and so relocates my primitive self-encounter in a non-time before I had even begun to read. Moreover, the allegorical circle of Anton Lerch’s fate at the end, like the self-encounter that initiates it, is itself a representation that relegates its object to the past and so initiates, for us, a still larger circle along which we must eventually return and so validate it—by dying. But we do not need to work out these complications in detail. That they exist, and can be multiplied indefinitely, is already implied by the story’s radical operation upon the idea and the supposed experience of reading.

The Question of Communication and the Trap of Agreement As far as I know, dying is something each of us does absolutely alone. It follows that if the three novellas we have looked at enable us to understand that reading is pure mortality—that reading is death—then we have found our way back to solitary reading, in spades. We have out-Faustused Faustus. We may have dispensed with the institution of The Reader, but we have done so, it appears, only by retreating utterly from the real world into a solitude that our opponents in any debate about literature will surely dismiss as a haven for political cowardice. Does this line of thought really describe the situation in which our readings of Hauptmann, Hofmannsthal, and Thomas Mann have—to use our own word—entrapped us? Or are there issues in the real world that those readings engage? Let us consider first the issues that are engaged by the theory of modern reading, the establishment of The Reader, from James to Iser. What types of question are crucial for that critical tendency? Iser himself comes close to putting his finger on a central point when he suggests that reading becomes a problem only after European secularization has removed the possibility of making a divine mind ultimately responsible for the meaning of texts. If our confidence in that divine mind has been lost, and if we agree that the very identity of a text is equivalent to its meaning (which in turn arises only in the process of its being read), then while the responsibility of an individual reader remains great (as it had been for Dante and Boccaccio), the responsibility of the theorist

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of reading (an intellectual type unknown before the age of the modern novel) has become even greater. It is up to that theorist to accomplish what had formerly been left to God alone—to understand how the infi nite variety of individual encounters with a given text can be reduced to a single basic structure (the experience of The Reader) that will guarantee the text’s identity in history. The trouble is that there are other assumptions at work here, besides that of a progressive secularization of western culture. The assumption that a text’s identity is equivalent to its meaning, for example, presupposes the age of our modern supergenre, the printed novel, and the collapse of what had once been our understanding that a text’s identity is constituted by its genre—by its response to a specific, conventionally given task or challenge. (For Dante, we recall, even being a Christian poet means not so much conveying a particular truth as founding a particular genre, a “better voice” for prayer, comparable to the genres founded by the other poets in Limbo.) But the most important (and as a rule, least noted) assumption behind Iser’s view of literary history is that the unequivocal identity of every literary text, associated now with that text’s univocal meaning, is a thing that must be preserved. Dante seems to have accepted as simple fact each reader’s entitlement to do with a text whatever he or she pleases, limited by no psychological or intellectual or historical mechanism whatever. But if we were to accept that fact today, then without a divine mind to settle matters in the end, it appears that no text would ever have an identity—that texts would become nothing but interchangeable empty boxes to be fi lled differently by every individual, nothing but excuses for the expression of each reader’s personal fancies. Heine does not seem unduly disturbed by this prospect. But for reader-response theory (and for hermeneutics) the possibility that any text might become anything anyone might want it to become is a disaster that cannot be permitted to happen. In Fish’s retrospective summary of his thinking, the idea “that there are (at least potentially) as many experiences as there are readers” is not a hypothesis to be considered but simply an “objection” which “it was necessary to remove.”10 Why is this possibility not even available for discussion, the possibility that interpretation need observe no limits whatever? One can only speculate here, since there is no existing debate on which to base an answer; but I think the ultimate issue is one of communication. Denial of the identity of texts seems to entail a denial of communication, at least in the larger social

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sense. Ordinary interpersonal communication—“I love you,” “I hate you,” “I need your help”—perhaps does not have much to do with the interpretation of texts. But it is possible—though not demonstrable—that communication on a scale sufficiently large to produce operating societies or cultures could not happen without some kind of stability in the identity and meaning of texts. For the sake of communication, along with the continuance of a fruitful social and intellectual interaction, therefore, it seems that the idea of reading as limitless textual revision must be dismissed. (Think of the hermeneutic circle and the comparable dismissal of the idea that it might be a vicious circle after all.) Thus we are brought back to the question of kinds of question. The question of communication (whether and to what extent it happens) does not admit an objective answer, because the answer itself would be subject to a test of communicability. It is not a question of what is or is not the case; it receives meaning as a question only when it becomes the question of what must be accepted or dismissed, of what position our situation in the present argument (and in human history and culture in general) obliges us to adopt, of what position can be considered responsible. It is an ethical question, which explains why the question of reading, which depends on it logically, is asked by authors as different as Pound and Bloom in the form “how should one read?” This is why Fish comes to recognize that his idea of reading is prescriptive, and why Poulet, in an unguarded moment (“when I read as I should,” he says), admits the same thing. Only Iser appears to reject absolutely the imputation of a prescriptive component to his theory. But even this rejection can be understood ethically, as an expression of the conviction that it would be irresponsible even to entertain speculatively any thought that might be associated—at whatever distance—with a radical doubting of communication. In the final analysis, then, the Jamesian or Iserian theory of reading is hortatory in character. We are encouraged to accept that theory—and to have it taught to our children in school, in the form of the idea that reading not only conveys information but generates the equivalent of immediate experience—in the hope that by insisting on it we may make it true, that we may thus shape our own thinking in a manner that will endow texts with clear historical identity and so favor the development and continuance of culture. Like those readers who are persuaded to recognize in Aschenbach’s writing the signature of the age, we are manufacturing the communicativeness of our texts in the very process of experiencing it. And like the

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citizens of the state imagined in Plato’s Republic (4.414–15), our children are fed a fairly transparent falsehood for the sake of political continuity. It is this institutionalized exhortation to read in a particular way (or to believe that we do) that is exposed by the trap of reading in the three instances discussed above. In the very process of empathizing my way into the tragedy of the lower classes, I am compelled by the mere image of some railway passengers to recognize that the content and the very idea of such empathy are but an intrinsically deluded examination of myself. In the very process of learning to see the world of civilian culture—like an undefended city—through “a mask of blood-spattered dust,” I discover that that mask has itself been seen through, has been entirely discredited, not by anything resembling a communicative act, but by none other than myself. In the very process of employing the leverage of a highly selfconscious art to attain perspective upon my historical and cultural situation, I am trapped into the understanding that there is no such perspective, that the effort of cultural self-consciousness, as its intensity increases, is increasingly focused upon precisely and exclusively itself. The idea of the self-and-nothing-but, the recognition that reading is death, is therefore not where these novellas begin. The starting point, in each case, is the idea of reading as a communication of experience: working-class suffering, the life of a cavalryman, the personal and cultural struggle of the artist. And the springing of the trap of reading, in each case, is not simply a device employed by the author, but arises directly from the communicative process we had thought we were engaged in. It is precisely modern reading—reading as the supposed sharing and communication of experience—that springs the trap and plunges us into the mortal solitude of the self-and-nothing-but. Or, to look at the matter in broader terms: precisely the institutionalized exhortation of modern reading theory— precisely the large cultural project of creating communication by insisting that we believe in the communicability of experience—in truth defeats its own aim by plunging us repeatedly into an experience that (while perhaps embodying truth) is the absolute opposite of anything communicable. The charge that might have been brought against us—that we have taken refuge in the indiscussible rather than face up to common problems in reality—turns out to be an indictment of modern reading itself, of the pretense that culture as a whole, or at least western culture, is preserved by our insistence on the validity of certain ideas that we know perfectly well are deluded.

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And a pretense it is, as empty and transparent a pretense as has ever been concocted. The simple facts of the case are these: (1) I do not know (and cannot know) whether there is (or can be) any such thing as the identity of a text. One thing I do know about texts, however, is that their importance can generally be measured by how much we disagree over them, and that every serious disagreement is a clash of competing identities for the text. Where shall the identity be found? (2) I do not know, and cannot know, whether the question of the identity of texts (or of any particular texts) is in truth related to the question of the existence and persistence of culture (or of any particular culture). How could I possibly make a judgment on this matter? My ignorance here extends even beyond my difficulty with the idea of a text’s identity. In particular, (3) I do not know if there is such a thing as culture in the fi rst place; and if there is, I do not know much about it in a general sense. If it exists for me personally then it does so in the character of an enveloping element within which my intellectual life unfolds, and how shall I gain anything like authoritative knowledge about it, knowledge (for instance) of how to preserve it? These are the facts, and anyone who thinks it is possible in this situation to exercise control over any aspect of the situation, by promulgating a doctrine or promoting an unsubstantiated belief, is not only wrong, but in all likelihood dangerously wrong. But is this any more than a negative position? May it not still be objected that our strategy—I mean at least my strategy, and that of at least the three authors discussed above—is one of simple retreat, leaving to others the task of dealing directly with the problems and crises of an increasingly secularized, fragmented, and (internally and externally) violent cultural situation? Even putting aside the question of how many problems and crises in contemporary culture are the invention of entities whose preconceived programs are costumed as measures to deal with them, there is a clear positive response to that objection: the idea and practice of honest criticism. Criticism is an idea that many of us have lost track of since Kant redefined it as a philosophical procedure by which bourgeois morality, eighteenth-century petty despotism, and Protestant Christianity are all laboriously rejustified. It is criticism in an older and better sense that is liberated by the trap of reading, a criticism whose proper task in the literary domain, as the name implies, is to question, challenge, dispute, problematize the identity of texts wherever possible, so that we might find ourselves again—God or no God—in a position similar to Dante’s, or to what Dante suggests was the position of Thomas Aquinas: the position of simply and absolutely not knowing how the question of the

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meaning of texts, even of those texts we ourselves produce, will play out in the long run. As the example of Gustav Aschenbach reminds us, we do not even honestly want to exercise control in this matter. Or as Lessing says to a God he may or may not have believed in: given the choice between actual possession of the truth and inevitable error in the quest for it, I prefer the latter.11 There is no hope of correctness in such criticism. But there is a certain amount of honesty. And honesty is at least a decent bet for meeting whatever problems and crises will actually turn out to have been there in our historical condition. Honest criticism, in any case, meaning criticism that never ceases to produce disagreement, can certainly never lead to the kind of irrelevant political consensus about texts that Heine prophetically imagines. But the idea of exercising control over what we vaguely imagine as our enveloping cultural situation, empty as it may appear under any sort of analysis, is not as easily expunged from our political life. Successful communication and a clear understanding of important texts seem innocent enough as values, and even democratic. But neither value is ever reliably translatable into fact, which means that it sometimes appears expedient to apply some sort of control mechanism in discourse, usually under the guise not of applying it but of postulating it theoretically. (One such mechanism is the experience of The Reader.) Eventually, at some point in this process of attempting to assure communication, a threshold is reached at which agreement as such, or consensus, becomes (tacitly, or indeed openly) an overriding value—agreement being the only conceivable evidence of communicative success—and the way is now open for the content of that desired consensus (especially in the obvious form of national or racial identity) to be supplied by whichever party has enough political power and demagogic appeal to impose it. None of the reading theorists I have mentioned can be accused, by any stretch of the imagination, of encouraging totalitarianism in his or her professional activity, any more than I could be similarly accused because I vote regularly (as I do) in a democratic polity of the sort that forms a necessary precondition for totalitarianism. But the association of totalitarian politics with modern reading theory (like its association with modern mass democracy) remains valid nonetheless. And I think this association suggests an explanation of why we fi nd, in the neighborhood of the turn of the twentieth century, at the dawn of the age of totalitarianism, the cluster of German stories we have looked at, which have in common that their meaning is such as not to admit being agreed upon. (They resist being read by The Reader, and instead offer themselves to only one reader at a

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time.) This is the political dimension of the interpretations I proposed, which arrive at the idea of each reader’s naked particularity: those texts are written against the possibility of agreement or consensus, hence against what I am fairly sure their authors—each in his own way—recognized as the besetting political threat of their time. Certain technical advances, especially broadcast radio, were needed before the totalitarian state could actually take shape; but the basic preconditions were there, and were, I think, better understood at the time than we usually assume.

The “Novelle” and the Novel and the “Novelle” It is perhaps tempting, at this point, to think in terms of an opposition between the German “Novelle” and the very form of the novel. But it is not clear what such an idea would mean, or how we might then explain the fact that two of the three authors treated so far in this chapter were themselves novelists, while Hofmannsthal at least tried doggedly to finish a novel. And we discussed earlier a novel of Thomas Mann’s that seems clearly to be written against the idea of experientially participatory reading—with an eye, precisely, to the danger of totalitarian politics. My own view is that a great many modern novelists share that oppositional direction: at least Goethe, Diderot, Sterne, Fielding, Wieland, Balzac, Dickens, Melville, Flaubert, Woolf, Conrad, Musil, Gide, and certainly Proust and Joyce. In fact it is not easy to think of novelists of acknowledged stature about whose work one could assert confidently that it fits the mold of reader-response theory. Henry James is perhaps the only unequivocal case, unless you read him as Pound does.12 But these points do not affect my historical argument. The theory of The Reader is not fundamentally a theory of the novel, no matter how often it is taken that way. And further, its lack of interpretive defi niteness and its seductive appeal to experience are such that once it has been accepted—whether or not on serious ethical grounds—it can be applied to all the works of all the authors I have mentioned, as well as to the three novellas treated above, and will yield misinterpretations that seem perfectly plausible because they are built on premises that one has already decided to avoid questioning. Approximate contemporaneity is therefore enough to ensure that the growth of what Watt calls the “realistic” novel will be associated with the idea of readers and reading that is codified in modern theories of The Reader. And the critical self-distancing of actual novelists will have little effect on those theories. The theory itself—in the various forms that enable it to masquerade as a simple record

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of experience—possesses not only its own history, but its own public and pedagogical life as well; so much so that it is not easy to see, for example, how a Hauptmann, a Hofmannsthal, a Thomas Mann, could have hoped even to make a dent in it using the devices I have described. Or perhaps there is after all a reason why precisely in German literature we fi nd a group of methodologically similar instances of resistance to modern reading as compact as the work of the three widely different authors treated above. In the course of the nineteenth century, German literature accustoms itself more and more to thinking of the genre “Novelle” as a particularly important German contribution to the shape of European literature of the period; and those three stories are all clearly recognizable as instances of that genre. By the end of the nineteenth century, in fact, something of a mystique has taken shape about the “Novelle,” not dissimilar to the agreeably puzzled perception of something special in the “short story” that arises at certain points in twentieth-century America.13 And against this background it is not difficult to imagine our authors’ conceiving of the “Novelle” (each in his own way) as a tool for detheorizing narrative, its relatively emphatic generic identity useful as leverage by which to set itself apart from what had become the established theory and practice of fiction reading. This idea of a relation between the “Novelle” as a genre and certain instances of resistance against an established culture of reading in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries would be more plausible if we could anchor it historically, if we could show an instance or two from the period in which the German conception of the “Novelle” was first formed. I think that at least one very important instance does exist in the story that Goethe had once intended to call “Die Jagd” (The Hunt), but to which he decides fi nally, in 1828, to give the simple title “Novelle.”14 That this title is meant to present the story as a model of its genre is confi rmed by Goethe’s conversation with Eckermann of 29 January 1827: We then discussed what the title of the novella should be. We weighed many suggestions; some suited the beginning, others the end, but none was right for the whole thing. “Do you know,” said Goethe, “let’s just call it the ‘Novelle.’ For what else is a Novelle if not an outrageous event that has actually happened [eine sich ereignete unerhörte Begebenheit]. This is the real conception, and so many things that appear in Germany under the title ‘Novelle’ are not Novellen at all but mere stories or whatever you might prefer to call them.” 15

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What is most important in the “Novelle,” it seems, is its central event, so much so that Goethe says not that the “Novelle” narrates, but that it is that event. And at this point Eckermann should have challenged him because, only eleven days earlier, Goethe had suggested a very different view, at least with respect to the text under discussion. In his account of the conversation of 18 January 1827, Eckermann states that he himself had had doubts about the way Goethe had ended the story later to be entitled “Novelle”: the “ideal” or “lyrical” ending that leaves open a number of reasonable questions about the plot, including especially how Honorio’s situation will be resolved. And Goethe, says Eckermann, responded: As a metaphor for how this novella develops, think of a green plant sprouting from its roots, which for a while puts forth healthy green leaves to the sides from its strong stem and at last ends in a flower.—The flower was unexpected, surprising, but it had to come; indeed the green foliage was only there for the flower’s sake and without it would not have been worth the effort of producing. . . . To show how energies that brook no restraint or domination are often better controlled by love and piety than by force was the aim of this novella, and this gratifying goal, imaged in the child and the lion, was what drew me to write it. This goal is the ideal, the flower. And the green foliage of the thoroughly real plot is only there for that goal’s sake; only in this respect is it worth anything. For what is the good of the real in itself? We enjoy it when it is faithfully rendered, and it can even provide us with a clearer knowledge of certain things. But the actual profit for our higher nature is located entirely in the ideal that is produced by the poet’s heart.

Surely what Goethe calls here “the real” includes what he later calls “the event” (Begebenheit), which produces a strong contradiction between the two utterances. Eckermann—perhaps fortunately—does not seem to be aware of this contradiction. But if we assume that Goethe himself was aware of it—an assumption that is certainly a good deal safer than its contrary, given the old man’s cryptic sense of humor—then we are attributing to him two mutually exclusive interpretations of his own story, and probably also two mutually exclusive defi nitions of the genre “Novelle.” Are these attributions justifiable, and if so, how? In fact, the idea of mutually exclusive or at least disjoint interpretations proves to be crucial in understanding Goethe’s story. The “ideal,”

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or poetic, meaning of the text emerges mainly from two passages: the description of a raging nocturnal fi re in a town fi lled with booths for a market fair (WA, 18:330–32), this being—by contrast with the tiger and the lion, which are actually tame—the story’s principal image of an invincible elemental force; and the image of the conquest of the elemental by “love and piety” in the description of the flute-playing and singing boy with his lion (346–48). The trouble is that both these passages are strongly disconnected from the “real” aspect of the story, in the sense of its plot. The description of the fi re is not a description of what is now (by daylight) “really” happening in the town below, but is a narrative rendering of the princess’s imaginative reconstruction of an event that she knows about only from narratives of the prince’s uncle based on his recollection from (it seems) a good many years ago. It is not a description at all, but the rendering of a memory of the rendering of a memory of an event; yet, in its verbal form, it is indistinguishable from descriptions of what we must take to be the “real” events of the story’s plot. In its separation from the story’s “reality,” therefore, it also calls into question the very idea of a reasonably locatable reality for a reader, whose understandings and perceptions are all linguistically mediated. The description of the fi re thus not only is distanced from the plot, but clashes with it on the level of presupposed discursive conventions. The description of the boy and the lion is disconnected from the plot not by a clash, but by a simple “realistic” impossibility which, however, also has to do with the operation of language in fictional narrative. When the woman and her son fi rst arrive on the scene, bewailing the loss of their tiger, we are given to understand that the language they ordinarily speak is not German, and probably not European. “The violently passionate outbursts of this unfortunate woman were followed . . . by a torrent of words, like a mountain stream falling in stages from rock to rock. A natural language, terse and abrupt, here took on urgency and emotional power. The attempt to translate it into our ways of speaking would be futile, but we must not conceal its approximate content” (336). Whereupon the substance of the woman’s speech is given in plain if poetic German. Thus, as readers, we are made privy to information that cannot possibly be available to the German or at all events European characters who are our representatives in the fiction. But the matter does not end there. It is clear, as the story goes on, that the father and mother in that exotic family both speak at least enough German to communicate with the prince and his family and entourage.

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(I will continue to say “German” even though it is perfectly possible to imagine the story as set elsewhere in Europe, in Italy for instance.) But it is not quite so clear that the father’s “enthusiastic” speech, after the prince has given his orders (340–42), is in German; it is not at all clear that the boy knows any German; and it is hardly even conceivable that German is the actual language, inside the plot, of the six stanzas of poetry (including two repetitions) that punctuate the story’s last pages (and are sung by the family, mostly the boy, to a presumably native melody, accompanied by a presumably native instrument). Which means that all the subtleties of thought and expression at the end of the story, including especially the transformation of the basic stanza with each variation, are completely lost upon the main (European) characters. There are, in other words, two disconnected stories in progress at the end: the story that we read, which is constituted by its verbal form, as a narrative plus poems in German; and the story constituted by a series of “real” events experienced directly by the European characters. That these two stories, however, are not the same story, and are disconnected in fact by “real” plot considerations, calls to our attention—especially since narrative conventions have also been shaken by the fi re episode—that the conventions of modern reading cannot tolerate such a disconnection. If reading means living “another life”—receiving the “real” material of a book’s plot in a form that mimics my own personal experience—then it follows that my grasp (as reader) of the book’s “ideal” meaning is in no way separable from my reception (as experiencer) of that material, which implies in turn that the book’s higher meaning must also be available to the fictional characters who “really” experience the plot, even if they fail to grasp it. Otherwise there is no possibility of a bridge or similitude between my subjectivity and that of those characters, which means that I cannot experience the story in the fi rst place. Something like Goethe’s “Novelle,” therefore, in which meaning and plot are disconnected to the extent of presupposing two confl icting definitions of the work’s very genre, has no right to exist in the world of narrative for The Modern Reader. There is, then, precedent for the idea of the “Novelle” as a renegade narrative form that is suggested by the three trap-of-reading stories treated above. There is in fact precedent, in the early history of the German “Novelle,” for other aspects of those stories as well. If we agree, for example, that Ludwig Tieck’s “Der blonde Eckbert” is at least as much a “Novelle” as a “Märchen,” and that Eckbert’s dying illumination, “what a horrible solitude I have lived out my life in!” includes a reference to

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the condition of the solitary reader, then we shall perhaps be tempted to look there for the idea of reading as the condition of strict naked mortality. And in Goethe’s “Novelle,” we may be inclined to take the themes of self-conquest and renunciation as suggesting that we renounce the claim to a fusion of subjectivity and objectivity that is implied by the idea of The Modern Reader, a fusion that is also perhaps allegorized in what I think we are meant to recognize as the rather silly plans for a combination of present nature and artistic antiquity in the ruins of the old castle. In this connection, fi nally, the name Heinrich von Kleist will immediately occur to anyone who thinks about innovation in early nineteenth-century narrative. But Kleist actually carries the tendencies we have discussed here to an entirely new level, which calls for a new chapter.

7.

Kleist, Kafka, and the Refutation of Reading

There has been a certain amount of debate about the relation between Kleist and Kaf ka,1 in which the question of “influence” tends to crop up—as if one could ever expect to be satisfied on so inherently vague an issue—because it is known that Kaf ka read Kleist’s stories carefully and repeatedly, and expressed deep admiration for them. The discussion tends often to focus upon minute points of style, as if in search of something like an instinctual level of writing, a level at which later writing might reproduce earlier writing without the suggestion of copying. I propose to leave all questions of this sort to one side. What matters about Kleist and Kaf ka, to my mind, is that they share (for whatever reason) a uniquely powerful grasp of what I have suggested is the mission and destiny of the “Novelle” vis-à-vis a nineteenth-century culture of reading. Neither man, it is true, would have spoken of his own work in these terms; neither, as far as I know, ever even spoke of himself as a writer of “Novellen.” But Kaf ka, whether or not he uses the concept, is writing in a tradition (shaped in part by Kleist) that understands short fiction primarily in terms of “Novelle” theory; and Kleist, at the gateway to that tradition, is shown by his choice of material to be conscious of operating with a legacy from Romance Europe, especially Italy, in which the Boccaccian novella is central.

Have You Read “Die Marquise von O. . . .”? In its original publication, in Kleist’s own periodical Phöbus, the subtitle of “Die Marquise von O. . . .” was printed only in the table of contents: “After an actual event, the location of which has been shifted from the north toward the south.”2 But even without the subtitle, we would have a pretty good idea that north and south are being intermixed here. The “. . . . war” (8)—as Kleist calls it, without even an initial—involving “troops of almost all powers,” would be recognized by most European readers of the early nineteenth century as a fictional composite based on the military and 264

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political situation of Europe in the early eighteenth. During the War of the Spanish Succession, Milan—obviously Kleist’s “M . . . , an important city in upper Italy” (7)—was occupied at various times by French, Austrians, and Savoyards, but not Russians; and Russia was prominent in the Great Northern War, but never invaded Italy. In other words, it is clear even without the subtitle that the geographical background is thoroughly disguised, which raises a number of questions: If Italy is called Italy in this fictional geography, why not let Milan be called Milan, especially since Naples is later called Naples (23)? If the whole setup is fictional, why mask any place names with ellipses to begin with, since the conventional reason for such masking is to mimic the gesture of protecting the identity of “real” participants in the story’s events? Isn’t the fictionalized geography enough to do that? And if initials are going to be used, why not at least use different initials for different places, to help readers keep them separate? The Marquise owns “a country estate near V . . .” (8) that later turns out to be easily reached from Milan (65); but there is also a country estate belonging to her brother “near V. . . .” (8, with four dots, not three). The same V . . . ? It happens that there are several good sized towns named V . . . within forty miles or so of Milan, including Varese, Vercelli, and, less than twenty miles away, Vigevano. What has happened to the idea of ellipses as masks or to the idea of a factually impossible Italy? Am I being eccentric in collecting and worrying about these historical and geographical facts? On the contrary, I think it takes a practically maniacal insistence on literary propriety to disregard the obvious overstraining and undermining of convention by which this text all but compels us to think extratextually in considering it. And once we have begun thus to measure the text against considerations drawn from the real world, rather than simply accept the fictional premises, we soon fi nd plenty more to worry about. The Russian count, having smashed the last of the Marquise’s attackers in the mouth with his sword hilt, addresses her politely in French and leads her to a safer part of the palace, where she falls unconscious. Then follows the sentence with the famous dash: Hier—traf er, da bald darauf ihre erschrockenen Frauen erschienen, Anstalten, einen Arzt zu rufen; versicherte, indem er sich den Hut aufsetzte, daß sie sich bald erholen würde; und kehrte in den Kampf zurück. (11)

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Response

[Here—he made arrangements, since soon thereafter her frightened waiting women appeared, to call a doctor, and assured them, while putting on his hat, that she would soon recover, and headed back for the battle.]

The dash supposedly marks the point in the action where the count rapes the unconscious Marquise. But there are odd things here. The word “da” (since) suggests that the count makes arrangements to call a doctor because the waiting women have appeared, even though he knows, as his assurances to the women suggest, that no doctor will be needed. And this impression is reinforced in the following paragraph where we hear that the Marquise “had already recovered fully from her faint, just as the Russian officer had predicted” (13). How can the count be so certain about his assessment of the Marquise’s condition that he apparently only goes through the motions of calling a doctor for the benefit of the worried women? And how can the Marquise, as soon as she recovers consciousness, already know that her rescuer is “Count F . . . , lieutenant colonel of the . . . teenth Infantry and knight of the order of merit and of several other orders” (13–14)? As far as we can tell from the description of the incident itself, she had been hurried “speechlessly” (11) to a safe area and had immediately fainted. Where and when had she received all that information? These points have not escaped notice. But as far as I know, they are always dealt with in a strictly literary-philosophical manner. What, it is asked, do the apparent inconsistencies in the story tell us about Kleist’s vision of reality, of what is called in the story itself “the fragile institution of the world” (102)? Even in reading we must learn to deal with apparently insoluble difficulties, just as the Marquise must learn to deal with her impossible pregnancy even before it is explained, and then with her confl icting feelings about her lover. The world as we actually experience it is never disclosed to us as a satisfactorily complete order, so why should we expect such disclosure in fiction? It should not disturb us, in other words, that a woman who has had two children can be pregnant for several months (18) without recognizing the significance not only of her vague feelings (19–20) but also of the unambiguous evidence of her missing menstrual periods, or that a sexually experienced woman can be raped in the course of a relatively short unconsciousness and not be aware of its aftereffects in the form of soreness and leaking seminal fluid.3 These considerations are unliterary in the sense of being imposed on the story from without, on the basis of a general factual

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knowledge that the story itself does not invoke. But precisely in this story, where all sorts of doubt is cast upon the conventions of literary narrative—even in utterly trivial matters, like the Marquise’s “several” children (7), “both” of whom (10) are mentioned a few pages later—are we really meant simply to keep our mouths (and our minds) shut and play along? The characters within the fiction do not have nearly as much reason as we do to suspect the Marquise’s veracity. But even so, there are moments when they seem to be a step or two ahead of us. After his wife shows him the response to the Marquise’s advertisement, and suggests that this proves the Marquise’s innocence, the commandant replies: Auswendig gelernt ist sie schon, die Fabel, die sie uns beide, sie und er [the man with whom the Marquise is involved], am 3ten 11 Uhr morgens hier auf bürden wollen. Mein liebes Töchterchen, soll ich sagen, das wußte ich nicht, wer konnte das denken, vergieb mir. (75) [It’s already been learnt by heart, the fairy-tale that the two of them, she and he, will try to pass off on us here on the third, at 11 a.m. My dear little daughter, I’m supposed to say, I didn’t know that, who could have thought it, forgive me.]

From our vantage point—given the extratextual inferences we have made about the Marquise’s prior acquaintance with the count—this statement is even better founded and more specific (we know that “he” is the count and that he had visited the Marquise at V . . . ) than it is for the commandant when he utters it. But then the commandant’s wife decides to prove, once and for all, whether her daughter is being truthful. She tells the latter that the mysterious father has already revealed himself to her and her husband (79–80). When the Marquise apparently believes this story, and even seems to be able to recall when her child’s conception might have occurred (82)—in a manner even less plausible than the one everybody later agrees on—her mother takes this as absolute proof of her innocence. Of course it is nothing of the kind. If the Marquise has been lying from the outset about her relations with the count, if the whole business of advertisement and counteradvertisement has been, as the commandant says, a put-up job—which on the face of it is much more likely than the contrary supposition—then the Marquise must recognize instantly that she is being tested by her mother, and she will know exactly how she must act in order to flatter her mother’s wish to believe in her innocence.

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Response

There is only one flaw in this reasoning. The story’s narrator neither occupies a place within the fiction nor poses as a kind of editor. Therefore, by the most basic of literary conventions, his direct statements about facts in the fictional world must be taken as both honest and accurate. Things simply are the way he says they are. But if we accept our own thoroughly reasonable inferences from what he himself has told us, we must conclude that he is lying (or is misinformed) when he tells us what happens during the count’s visit to the Marquise at V . . . (65–69) and when he describes the Marquise’s solitary consciousness of her own integrity (47, 59–63). Shall we draw those conclusions anyway, even though they expose us to the charge that we are no longer really reading at all, since the conventions we have dispensed with constitute the very defi nition of “reading” with respect to literary fiction? It is not even necessary that we do so. We could, like a great many actual readers, simply accept everything the narrator says and either disregard the improbabilities and contradictions that are produced, or else interpret them away philosophically. But the two groups of readers thus defi ned, those who do not accept a conventional relation to the narrator and those who do, do not merely disagree about the story. They do not even treat it as the same basic kind of object. Neither group, from the other’s point of view, really “reads” the story to begin with, which means that there is no real or possible person whom we could all agree to call a reader of the story, let alone the reader. Have you read “Die Marquise von O. . . .”? The answer to this question, in a certain sense, is always no.

Problems Does this whole argument not itself constitute a reading of Kleist’s text? Not in any normal sense of the term, for two reasons. First, there is no compromise between the two possible ways of responding to the story’s narrator. Once you have started to test the text’s statements and implications against common sense (how can the Marquise know everything about the count that she does? how can he be certain in his diagnosis of her condition?) and against factual knowledge from other sources (about sexual intercourse and pregnancy), you can never fi nd your way back into the text again as a totally involved reader. Or if, on the other hand, you have committed yourself to an attitude of complete aesthetic receptivity, then it can never occur to you to regard an inconvenient fact as anything but part of the show, a dissonance waiting to be resolved.

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Second, the separation between attitudes that I have described depends for its existence on circumstances, including the circumstance of how much influence I happen to permit my personal circumstances to have upon me while I read. Therefore that separation could simply cease to exist, could be utterly forgotten, without any recognizable consequences for the text or its meaning—unlike the separation between reading for plot and reading for meaning in Goethe’s “Novelle,” which arises from structures internal to the text. If I maintain that Kleist’s story “compels” us to think extratextually when considering it, this statement can have no effect whatever upon the opinion of anyone who is not already inclined to agree with it. If you happen to disagree with it fi rmly, it simply becomes (for you) a nonstatement and evaporates. It will not sharpen your focus on the text, as my assertions about Goethe’s “Novelle” might do even without convincing you. What I am saying is that the problems inside the text of “Die Marquise von O. . . .” are secondary, especially the psychological problems confronting not only the Marquise, but also especially her parents. The text’s primary accomplishment is that it creates a strong provocation and disruption in the tradition of conventions that govern literary fiction, that it throws a monkey wrench into the otherwise smoothly running history of narrative. And while it may be possible to aim at such an effect with intratextual devices—like the trap of reading or the split between meaning and plot—still the very idea of the “intra-textual” (the idea that a text can have an interior, hence identity and integrity) operates in the opposite direction. In the end, something like Kleist’s procedure, which rips the text open and exposes it to circumstances, is required. Let it be noted, in addition to the points made above, that “Die Marquise von O. . . .” is constructed in such a way that even if we refuse to accept the narrator’s word, we can offer no alternative to the story he tells. Here the contrived distance between Italy and Russia becomes important by making it practically impossible to tell a plausible story about the inferred prior relationship between the Marquise and the count. And where, in the basic sequence of events, is there room for the count and the Marquise to have hatched the stratagem of using advertisements to lend credibility to their fairytale? The point is that if an alternative story were available, we could reject the narrator and still remain, by the skin of our teeth, inside the postulated fiction. But this possibility is denied us. There is no compromise. To read this story is to unlearn how to read, or to learn how to read without reading.

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Response

This does not by any means settle the matter. For if my argument is agreed to, have we not lost a great deal of what might otherwise give us pleasure and perhaps even edification in the story? And if Kleist’s aim was primarily to create the provocation and disruption I have spoken of, how can we imagine his going to the trouble of working out the fiction in the enormous detail that we actually observe? Any number of interesting psychological and philosophical questions are raised by the story’s action, concerning our relation to our own bodies, our ability to deal with things that are apparently impossible, our ego-conditioned blindness to perfectly obvious facts—facts of the sort that her mother whispers in the Marquise’s ear (95)—and how one missing or misinterpreted circumstance can produce a swiftly self-augmenting fabric of deluded human relationships that approaches the quality of reality itself, which in turn suggests fundamental questions about the very constitution of reality. Have we simply lost all this material if the story unteaches us how to read?

Literature Against Literature? We can approach this question by looking at an interestingly parallel problem in Kaf ka’s story “In der Straf kolonie.” The punishment-machine at the story’s center is described in great detail; but as it is described, it cannot possibly exist, or at least cannot operate as it is supposed to. The lower part of the machine, or “bed,” is covered with a layer of cotton wool on which the prisoner is to be laid face down with his hands, feet, and neck secured to the machine by straps (207–8/142–43).4 Then, after the “harrow” has fi nished writing on his back, the cotton wool is rolled so that its surface moves laterally, which rolls the prisoner’s body so that his side is exposed to the “harrow” (218/149). In the course of the treatment, the prisoner’s body is apparently turned through at least one complete revolution, since we hear that “the script itself [better: the actual writing] runs around the body only in a narrow girdle” (218/149). But this is impossible. The prisoner’s body cannot be rotated with respect to the machine because his hands and feet, and even his neck, are fi rmly attached to the machine. We even hear that his hands are attached separately, out to the sides (220–21/150–51). The impossibility here, at fi rst glance, appears to be purely physical, therefore different from our sense of impossibility in “Die Marquise von O. . . .” which arises in the course of our stumbling over irregularities in the handling of narrative conventions, hence in an atmosphere that calls

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those conventions into question. But the difference disappears when we recognize that that physical object in Kaf ka is really an allegory of literary theory—an image, a mocking image, of the very defi nition of “literature.” Not only do the ideas of “writing” and “script” (Schrift) suggest this, but also especially the idea of a writing that is apprehended not with the sense of sight but with that of touch. The names of the five senses in German (not all in their common modern forms) have the appearance of a neat morphological family: Gesicht, Gehör, Geruch, Geschmack, Gefühl, translatable as “sight, hearing, smell, taste, feeling.” But the meaning of Gefühl, like that of its counterpart “feeling,” has shifted metaphorically and refers nowadays mainly to emotion, the term for the physical sense having been replaced by Tastsinn (touch). For a German speaker, however, the neat morphological parallels (Ge + verb stem) make that metaphorical shift, hence the association of emotion with the sense of touch, more a conscious part of knowing the language than for an English speaker. Therefore, when we read Kaf ka, the idea of a writing deciphered by touch, not sight, is easily associated with that of a writing read by the emotions, not reason, which immediately suggests what we know as “literature.” Once we are alerted to the basic connection here, other elements of the machine image quickly fall into place. Literature, we reflect, is supposed to affect us on something more like a bodily level—it is, so to speak, written on our bodies—than the level of abstract intellect. And one of the principal common justifications of literature is that it offers us not mere information, which we may extract as quickly as possible, but something better describable as “understanding” or “enlightenment” (219/150), which we receive only at the cost of prolonged effort. But how do we explain the idea of literature as a punishment infl icted upon one individual in the presence of a number of spectators? The answer to this question, I think, is provided by arguments made in previous chapters of this book. The prisoner, upon whom literature is meant to have a direct effect, is The Reader, a fictional construct created for the specific purpose of undergoing directly and completely the radically enlightening experience of literature that we ourselves, as contingent individuals (represented by the company of spectators), can never undergo in its full intensity. This situation is a mocking allegory of literature, and the physical impossibility of the machine’s operation reflects the absurdity of the notion of The Reader. But the serious social ramifications of literature’s establishment are also suggested, including the association of literature with a decidedly illiberal form of government, in the officer’s theory of

272 Response

justice (211–13/144–5), and the use of children’s education as a primary means of perpetuating the literary absurdity (226/154). Yet, even in understanding this attack on literature, even in assenting to it, we, the readers of “In der Straf kolonie,” have still not left the literary delusion behind us. We achieve a distanced, mocking perspective upon literature only by imagining a fictional individual, the “Forschungsreisender” (traveling researcher)—whom the translation calls, simply but misleadingly, the “explorer” (203/140)—for whom the object of our mockery is an immediate experience, and without whom we would have nothing to mock at, just as there would be no literary experience without the device of The Reader. As also in the history of the officer, whose consciousness of his verdict destroys both himself and his machine, we are confronted with, and entangled in, a situation in which literature has decayed utterly, has been utterly corrupted by the consciousness of its own absurdity, yet still remains essentially literature—still operates on the basis of exactly that discredited absurdity. Even in his distance from the condemned prisoner who is The Reader, the traveling researcher himself remains (as the needful enacter of our understanding) The Reader. We the actual readers are to the “explorer,” who is imprisoned in the machine of the story’s plot, as the island’s audience (however large or small) is to the executed prisoner. There are several small but deft touches in the story that highlight this structure. At the very beginning, we hear that “The explorer seemed to have accepted merely out of politeness the Commandant’s invitation to witness the execution” (203/140), and that “The explorer . . . walked up and down behind the prisoner with almost visible indifference” (204/140). From whose point of view does the explorer “seem” to do this or that, or from whose point of view is his state of mind “almost visible”? In the rest of the story, the explorer’s point of view is strictly adhered to; nothing appears or is shown to us except by appearing or being shown to him. For the purposes of the fiction, he simply is us—except for those two seeming slips of the pen where a distance between him and us, hence the true state of affairs (that he is our device for reading), betrays itself. And at the very end of the story, what is the allegorical dimension of the explorer’s refusal to permit the soldier and the condemned man to leave the island with him (248/167)? This image suggests a rejection of literature, an escape from everything associated with the literary absurdity. But it also completes the story’s deep ambivalence by suggesting a preservation of the island’s integrity (no one who belongs there may leave it), hence the perpetuation of literature as a self-enclosed

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or self-defi ning system. Again, in the very process of mocking the literary, we also enact it.

The Obscured Center The most biting piece of anti-literary satire in “In der Straf kolonie” occurs in a passage I have already mentioned. The officer explains how the writing on the prisoner’s body works: Es darf natürlich keine einfache Schrift sein; sie soll ja nicht sofort töten, sondern durchschnittlich erst in einem Zeitraum von zwölf Stunden; für die sechste Stunde ist der Wendepunkt berechnet. Es müssen also viele, viele Zieraten die eigentliche Schrift umgeben; die wirkliche Schrift umzieht den Leib nur in einem schmalen Gürtel; der übrige Körper ist für Verzierungen bestimmt. (217–18/149) [Of course the script can’t be a simple one; it’s not supposed to kill a man straight off, but only after an interval of, on an average, twelve hours; the turning point is reckoned to come at the sixth hour. So there have to be lots and lots of flourishes around the actual script; the script itself runs around the body only in a narrow girdle; the rest of the body is reserved for the embellishments.]

The meaning of a literary work—this passage suggests allegorically—is actually a simple matter, no more complicated than a single short clause. What makes that meaning seem profound and significant is only the way literary form deliberately obscures it. The meaning is hidden so as to compel us to expend considerable effort in fi nding it, whereby we are tricked into counting this effort, which would otherwise be wasted, as a measure of the meaning’s value. But this particular attack on literature raises a further question. Which passage in the present story, “In der Straf kolonie,” constitutes the true meaning, in relation to which everything else is mere embellishment, added only to obscure that meaning? And since we are asking this question on the basis of the passage I just quoted, it follows that we have taken that passage seriously, which implies that it, and no other, contains the story’s true meaning. This passage, and no other, is the ribbon of intelligible meaning around my waist. Therefore the true meaning of the story has no actual content, but only indicates (as this passage does) that everything that is not itself is mere embellishment designed to conceal it.

274

Response

The text thus does nothing but say that everything it says is not what it means—including the satirical allegory against literature, which is thus paradoxically confi rmed—and so creates a radical split between meaning and statement that makes the situation in Goethe’s “Novelle” look tame by comparison. The trouble is that, to reach this conclusion, we must take Kaf ka’s text seriously enough to interpret it, which means that we fi nd ourselves again on the horns of an absurd dilemma: we are interpreting the story in the very process of recognizing that it is composed of nothing but ornament and therefore is uninterpretable, just as we had found the meaning of the machine in the very process of fi nding that the machine cannot exist. Or, more generally, we are seeking an escape from literature in the idea that literature is inescapable. But at least the idea of a text that is nothing but embellishment permits us to go back and give a kind of answer to the last and most difficult question we asked about “Die Marquise von O. . . . ,” the question of how that story’s wealth of material has any right to exist if the story in truth only unteaches us to read. The situation is exactly parallel to that in Kaf ka’s story—which also contains a great deal of what looks like serious philosophical meaning, especially in relation to the suggestion that a “penal colony” is what our whole world becomes if we insist on regarding it as dependent on a vaguely imagined (distant, eternal) “homeland.” In Kleist’s case, as in Kaf ka’s, the ultimate irrelevance and uninterpretability of practically all the story’s material—our collision with which is itself an interpretation, whence it receives the character of a collision—places us in a contradictory situation with respect to literature, the situation by which we are untaught how to read. But that material (or at least some material) is still necessary as the substance of the collision in question. Neither Kleist’s story nor Kaf ka’s can be strictly empty (without simply not being there) any more than “Der Tod in Venedig” can. But the content that they cannot do without also has the luxury of being arbitrary, subject to no organizing discipline—practically nothing but pampered ornamentation, like Tadzio.

“I” and the Consequences There is, in Kaf ka’s work, an even more extreme and perhaps more instructive instance of the story’s construction out of strictly uninterpretable material—verbal material that manages to lack utterly the attribute of meaning, at least on any but the most superficial possible level. This

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quality of Kaf ka’s writing, and of Kleist’s, opens the way to a considerable cultural achievement. If words can actually be given the character of what Kaf ka calls mere “embellishments,” the character of opaque, practically material objects—rather than that of strictly semiotic entities that always point beyond themselves, transparently or at least translucently, in the direction of a meaning—then the problem of literacy and literature will tend to disappear because it will no longer be possible for readers to imagine that they are somehow magically thinking in their own minds the thought of another subject, or to experience their activity as participation in the perfectly receptive mind of The Reader. (These delusions depend on the semiotic transparency of the words before us.) We will, in other words, at last have unlearned how to read; we will “see” words in an entirely different light. To return to Kaf ka, the opening clause of “Ein Landarzt” invokes in its five words an entire system of linguistic philosophy: “Ich war in großer Verlegenheit [I was in great perplexity (or embarrassment)]” (252/220). The word Ich (I) is unique in being the only speech act that necessarily creates a fissure, an internal separation (between speaker and referent, between signifier and signified), in its own meaning—in the ego that pronounces it and so separates itself from itself by taking itself as an object. But the medium of this self-separation, the medium of self-consciousness, the medium in which I constantly find myself one step beyond myself, is time. Therefore the word Ich, the absolute origin of my self-conscious existence, logically requires the word that here follows it, war (was). To say “I” is always, strictly speaking, to say “I was.” And the statement “I was,” in turn, cannot hold absolutely without implying the statement “I am no more,” which is absurd, since I, being nonexistent, could not possibly say it. Therefore the statement “Ich war” cannot represent the ego’s self-separation without including a qualification that specifies the place or condition “in” which “I was.” Thus, by a type of strict logic, we can account for the first three words of that opening clause, using as a basis nothing but the quality of the word I as an inaugural act. And the most general possible word, in German, for that self-alienated condition “in” which the ego “was,” is probably Verlegenheit, which refers idiomatically to embarrassment or perplexity, but suggests etymologically the condition of being put in the wrong place or shifted out of one’s place, which is exactly what occurs when the ego speaks itself out of the condition of “is” into that of “was.” But what about the adjective great? “I was in great displacedness” might be a reasonable

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retranslation of our clause. Without any adjective at all, “displacedness” would name an absolute condition in which the displaced ego might expect to fi nd a measure of stability or permanence, which violates the very idea of displacement and is at any rate not the case with the constantly selfrenewing displacement of the ego in time. But the adjective great avoids this difficulty by implying that displacement happens not absolutely, but variously on a scale of relative possibilities, and that the displacement of the ego is always “great” with respect to its own expectations (from where else could the measurement be made?), that it thus has the character of uncontrollability, a constant headlong exposure to time and mortality. In this manner a complete system of linguistic philosophy is adumbrated. The primal or aboriginal event is the speaking of the word I, from which everything else follows by a process of qualification or relativizing of the absolute.5 The “I,” as an utterance, is self-relativizing, and the statements “I was” and “I was in displacedness” need to be qualified in order not to become self-contradictory. But at this point, once the first clause is established, the logic takes an interesting turn. Obviously the “great displacedness” in which I find myself will turn out to be the world of time and contingency and mortality in which I live out my empirical existence, the real world of objects that surrounds me in daily life. This world must be derived from its still abstract governing clause by the same process of relativization that unfolds that clause itself from the aboriginal “I.” At this point, therefore, the strictly contingent or accidental must emerge from the logically structured introductory clause as from the bosom of the necessary. But this move of emergence cannot be in any degree available to our understanding. For to the extent that we understand it—or can conceivably understand it—that which emerges will have been shown by our understanding, by our logic, to be (like the fi rst five words) not contingent after all, but logically necessary. Or, to look at the matter differently, my own personal “I,” as I speak it—whatever its content might be—is not in the least detail structurally or logically different from the word I in the story. Therefore my understanding of the rest of the story, after the initial clause, which would mean my ability to derive the rest of the story from that clause, would be equivalent to an understanding of my own contingent being; it would be a type of self-consciousness, but self-consciousness in the form of logically guaranteed knowledge. I would thus be fully in control of my own empirical condition, which means I would not be “in great displacedness” after all, and the logic in question would therefore be invalidated. Therefore, again,

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because of this contradiction, understanding of the story is strictly inaccessible to me. Thus it follows, by the same logic that generates the opening clause, that if we claim to understand anything at all about the rest of the story—if we claim to grasp on any level at all how the story’s elements fit together—exactly this claim proves that we are mistaken. We are not by any means logically or ethically prevented from trying to understand the story as long as we understand our efforts as a kind of game in which every success is ipso facto a failure, like Georg Bendemann’s attempts to understand his father. Nor does it follow that all stories necessarily escape the understanding, or that life itself does. What makes the narrated events (and ultimately the very words) of “Ein Landarzt” strictly inaccessible to interpretation is the establishment, in the story’s fi rst clause, of a hermeneutic system that we cannot violate without obviously misinterpreting the text from another angle, interpreting it as something other than an unfolding of the utterance “I.” Every word in the story tantalizes us with the possibility of its transparency, since we know that it must be derivable by degrees of relativization from the initial clause. But the same logic that warrants this knowledge also withholds transparency in every particular instance, so that the story’s words become for us, in the end, strictly opaque—emphatically so in relation to our semiotic expectations. They have become in effect brute material objects, possessing, at best, the quality of ornaments. Does this mean that the story’s words could be replaced by other words without altering the story? Not at all. If the words of the story were changed, then the text would look different on the page and would sound different when read aloud.6 Only its meaning would be unchanged, which proves that meaning is no longer a constitutive element in its identity, and that reading, or the apprehension of that identity, has become an activity hardly even comparable with the generally accepted procedure for dealing with fictional narrative. But it must be understood that “Ein Landarzt” implies no claims whatever about how narrative should work. The linguistic philosophy suggested by the first clause is not a textual content; and the question of its validity, whether in general or as a guide to literary composition, is entirely irrelevant to the story. It happens to generate a hermeneutics that Kaf ka fi nds useful for constructing a text meant to unteach its reader. But it is only a device, one among many that Kaf ka discovers or, as the case may be, invents. Its purpose is to render the words of the text opaque, and we shall

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only make fools of ourselves if we try to make of it a content to which exactly those words are transparent.

Black and White The narrative text has become a thing made of nothing but the black and white of its pages. Which brings us to Kleist’s story “Die Verlobung in St. Domingo.” The relation between blacks and whites in that text, I mean, bears a significant metaphorical relation to the idea of a printed page. But let us begin with a single scene in the story that is problematic in much the same way that the supposed rape is problematic in “Die Marquise von O. . . .” Toni, at the bedside of her sleeping lover Gustav von der Ried, is terrified by the unexpected arrival of the black Congo Hoango with his men in the courtyard below. She is afraid (we are told) that if she wakes Gustav and warns him, he will instinctively “go for his weapons” and only get himself killed instantly.7 Therefore, using a piece of rope that “God knows by what accident” (67) is hanging near the bed, she quickly ties Gustav’s hands and feet before he can wake up fully, and after planting a “joyful” kiss on his lips, sets about implementing the rest of her swiftly improvised plan: to persuade Congo Hoango that she has tied up Gustav only in order to deliver him as a prisoner to the blacks, while secretly hoping that she will later be able to free him with the help of his uncle and the other whites who are hidden nearby. This is, as Groucho Marx would have put it, a likely story. Even assuming that Toni could cook up that plan as quickly as she does, still no one who has ever actually attempted—in children’s (or even adults’) games—to tie someone’s hands securely with only a piece of rope, would believe that a girl of fifteen could succeed in doing this to a grown man in his sleep before he had awakened sufficiently to resist. But the difference from “Die Marquise von O. . . .” is that, in this case, we can very easily provide a complete alternative story that fits all the other major events in the plot. What really happens—our common sense tells us—is, as Babekan suggests specifically, that while she and Congo Hoango are talking in the courtyard, Gustav is being warned by Toni, and “the means of accomplishing his escape” are being discussed (66). That is, Toni has wakened Gustav and the two of them have agreed on her plan, whereupon she ties him up with his cooperation. The only problem this version of the story creates is the need to explain why Gustav kills Toni at the end. But this is a problem even if we accept the narrator’s version. We are told that Gustav is awake before Toni fi nishes

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binding him; therefore he is aware of her last “joyful” kiss, and, as far as we can tell, he also hears Babekan’s astute question—why tie up Gustav if he was asleep and knew nothing of his peril (70)?—along with Toni’s fabrications in response (70–71). In other words, even in the narrator’s version, Gustav has plenty of reason at least to be puzzled about what kind of game Toni is playing—and he has plenty of time to think further about the matter while lying bound in his bed. Why, then, does he kill Toni the instant he sees her again, rather than put some questions to her? The answer to this question is easy enough. He has to kill her as quickly as possible, because if he admits his debt of gratitude to her—or in the narrator’s version, if it should turn out somehow that she is innocent—then he will not be able to avoid taking her along to Port au Prince, and probably from there to Europe, where his promise to marry her will prove a serious embarrassment. Promising marriage to a mere mixed-race girl when one’s life hangs in the balance is one thing, but actually committing the rest of one’s life to a socially unthinkable alien union is quite another. This is what is going through Gustav’s mind as he sits “silent and distracted” (83) in the moments before Toni reappears; and the genuine “misery” (Gram) that affl icts him certainly has to do with the deed he knows needs to be done, but perhaps also reflects his growing remorse and the dawning recognition that he himself will have to commit suicide. Toni, after all, is not the fi rst woman who will have died because of his cowardly inability to fulfi ll the obligations of love—unless we are gullible enough to believe the blatantly self-justifying story he tells about how he had boldly defied the mob of murderous sans-culottes at the execution of his beloved Mariane Congreve, and had still managed to escape with his life (41–42). Even using the common-sense version of the story, then—as opposed to the narrator’s version—it is easy enough to see why Gustav cannot live with himself any longer, although the actual decision to kill himself is probably not made until after he has killed Toni and thereby made himself guilty of a greater perfidy than he could have imagined in advance. And although there are a few passages in the story’s final pages—Toni’s last speeches, for instance (86–87)—where, for the sake of the common-sense version, we must doubt the narrator’s account, still it is interesting that Gustav’s fi nal words fit the common-sense version better than they do the narrator’s: Gewiß! sagte er, da ihn die Vettern von der Leiche wegrissen: ich hätte dir nicht mißtrauen sollen; denn du warst mir durch einen Eidschwur verlobt, obschon wir keine Worte darüber gewechselt hatten! (87–88)

280 Response [That’s right! he said, as his cousins tore him away from the corpse. I should not have mistrusted you, for you were betrothed to me by a solemn oath, even though we had not exchanged words about it!]

The sign of his disingenuousness here is that his very last words on earth are a hair-splitting subordinate clause which also happens to be a lie. In fact (unless the narrator, for some reason, is lying in this case) he had repeatedly promised to marry Toni in completely unequivocal terms (43–46). His last speech is nothing but a final desperate attempt to save face with his family by upholding the fiction that he had “mistrusted” Toni and by suggesting that he had at least not actually violated a sworn oath. But even with a relatively simple common-sense version of the story to fall back on—which is lacking in “Die Marquise von O. . . .”—the fact that we are compelled to reject anything at all of what the conventionally reliable narrator tells us still tends to empty the text of its substance; tends to remind us of how deeply dependent we had become on a conventionally guaranteed idea of the story as apprehended by The Reader; and tends to show us, once this idea is exploded, that the true condition of the text, of all texts, is not clearly separable from the black and white of its material manifestation in print. And these points remain valid even when we know exactly why the narrator has not told us the true story.

Blacks and Whites Why should the narrator of “Die Verlobung in St. Domingo” be unwilling to tell us the story that we infer easily enough from the improbabilities in his account? This question, unlike the corresponding question concerning the narrator of “Die Marquise von O. . . . ,” is answerable. First of all, it is clear where the narrator’s version of “Die Verlobung in St. Domingo” comes from. It is not only the story Toni tells to her mother and Congo Hoango; it is also the story she tells (mutatis mutandis) to Gustav’s uncle when she intercepts the party of whites on the road. She cannot tell the whole truth at this point because she would need to explain in detail how Gustav had come to believe in her so completely as to entrust his very life to her desperate scheme. We the readers have no trouble following the psychological development that makes Gustav’s trust plausible. But Herr Strömli does not have our perspective; and if he is not to become suspicious or confused, he must be told a psychologically simpler version (Toni’s love has driven her to try, on her own, to save Gustav), which is already

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available in the form of the story Toni and Gustav had concocted to hoodwink the blacks, except that now Toni tells it with a different emphasis. What the supposedly omniscient narrator tells us, then, is the version of the story that the whites in the story agree to accept as valid—whereas the blacks in the story will probably have recognized that Babekan had been correct in her earlier suspicions. The narrator, therefore, is not merely a conventional all-knower—he is a white narrator, and indeed, we are led to suspect, a narrator who chooses the version he does because it shows whites in a better light than the truth would, the truth about Gustav’s perhaps agonizing but still inescapable decision to avoid at all costs being tied to the girl whose color, we have heard, is “repellent to him” (36). Thus we come to the question of race, of which Kleist’s grasp is quite unexpectedly modern. The prominence of mixed-race individuals in the story, along with the obviously inconsistent use of the concept “creole” (10, 21–22, 31, 32), makes it clear that in fact race must be understood as a continuum, not a simple opposition of black and white. But, as a result of social circumstances and their historical unfolding, it happens in effect that every individual is firmly assigned to one of the two opposed groups, either by him- or herself or by others, even when there is room for disagreement, as when Toni declares “I am a white” (81). Despite the factual existence of a racial continuum, and despite the possibility of disagreement about where individuals (especially those “creoles”) belong, there is—in effect, in the way things really work—no middle ground between whites and blacks. But it is precisely that nonexistent middle ground, the site of pure and simple and universal “humanity,” that the whites (including by implication the white narrator) claim to occupy. Babekan, as we might expect, understands this asymmetrical situation better than most whites do, and makes use of it to put Gustav at his ease: “ ‘Yes, this insane enmity,’ the old woman said hypocritically. ‘Isn’t it as if the hands of one body or the teeth in one mouth were to rage against one another merely because one member is not created exactly like the other?’ ” (19–20). (She also understands that since whites are in the habit of calculating the proportion of black blood [mulatto, mestizo, etc.] to categorize people, Gustav will readily believe that the same kind of arithmetic has been used against her and Toni by the blacks [20].) It is reasonable to infer, from her manipulation of white habits of thought, a recognition on her part that the whole rhetoric of universal humanity, by way of the ideas of toleration, reconciliation, and especially peace, always favors the dominant social group by validating its undisturbed enjoyment of the status quo.

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But where does this leave us, the readers? We recognize, fi rst of all, that by learning to doubt the story’s narrator, we have already carried out an analysis similar to Babekan’s. We have unmasked the narrator’s pretense of objectivity (in the guise of conventional narratorial omniscience and impartiality) as a self-justifying move by the white party, or at least the unquestioning acceptance of such a move. But does this imply that I, as a reader, have now taken the part of the blacks—that I have in effect declared “I am a black”? By no means. This implication does not hold even if I in fact happen to be a black. By learning to doubt the narrator and so stepping outside of the story, I have by defi nition adopted a more distanced position, which means a more objective, balanced, and universal position; which means in turn, again by definition, a position favoring the whites! Even in refusing to accept the narrator’s views at face value, therefore, I am still favoring the whites’ party—I have still not escaped the situation that the story depicts, in which there is no middle ground, no such thing as “humanity” in a universal sense. And this situation, fi nally, like the philosophical situation in “Ein Landarzt,” renders the text of the story inaccessible to our understanding. From sentence to sentence, from word to word, we recognize that our apprehension of the text is fundamentally biased, inaccurate, mistaken. (The historical facts and numbers given at the beginning [7–11] only make this recognition more acute.) But any move we make toward discovering how our apprehension is biased must inevitably place us on a higher level of “objectivity,” which is exactly the white position all over again. We have no leverage by which even to imagine an adequate understanding of the story, which has thus become a kind of Kantian thing-in-itself for us. The text, like that of “Ein Landarzt,” has become opaque, almost nothing but a material object; and it has become this precisely in our reading of it, which means that the whole practice of modern reading—the reading of supposedly transparent realist fiction—has been refuted.

The Writer as Person It is important to recognize how different “Ein Landarzt” is from “In der Straf kolonie,” or “Die Verlobung in St. Domingo” from “Die Marquise von O. . . .” despite the similar gesture of awakening doubt about the narrator. It is important to recognize that there is nothing formulaic about Kleist’s narrative work or Kaf ka’s, and certainly no formula for what relates them. The refutation of reading is not a concentrated attack upon

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some special weak point in the edifice of literary conventions, but rather a general and widely variable uncovering of the wrongness of that edifice as a whole. Especially the idea of The Reader, with its presuppositions and consequences, is not merely a flawed convention—it is a dangerous but also entirely substanceless convention and can be exposed as such by any number of different procedures that do not need to be directly related to each other. And by no means does everything in Kleist’s work or in Kaf ka’s belong immediately to one of those procedures. Indeed, one advantage of a strictly uninterpretable text like “Ein Landarzt” or “Die Verlobung in St. Domingo” is that its author is free to include all sorts of meanings and meaning fragments that need have nothing to do with each other or with any supposed governing order of the whole. At least a significant portion of the text can be fi lled with whatever the author feels like putting there, which reopens the possibility of strictly personal expression in writing—as opposed to the common Romantic and post-Romantic ideal of a text’s suprapersonal aesthetic or formal integrity. But it does not follow that the death of The Reader implies a rebirth of the author, or of what Dante calls the agens, which means not a person but the authorial function. It is not the author in this sense who reemerges when The Reader is refuted, but rather the writer simply as the contingent person who actually happens to be writing—the writer, precisely, as a kind of modern-day Dante. But it is one thing to understand the possibility of strictly personal expression in the wake of the refutation of reading; and it is quite another to demonstrate actual instances of such expression, which would certainly be useful as supporting evidence for the present argument on underlying tendencies in the narrative work of Kleist and Kaf ka. We cannot, for example, count as personal expression any passage in which the writer’s subjectivity appears to be thrown open for us to experience in the process of reading. First, precisely that procedure is how The Reader is invoked as the imagined vessel in which subjective experience is contained and transported into the domain of verbal communication. Second, that procedure always involves a delusion because (1) the existence of such a vessel contradicts the definition of subjectivity, (2) the absence of responsibility (think of Dr. Faustus) contradicts any reasonable idea of experience, and (3) you cannot talk about yourself, even by implication (think of Dante in the Convivio), without both lying and being mistaken, and for any number of other reasons that we have discussed at various points.

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In fact, in seeking instances of strictly personal expression in Kleist and Kaf ka, we are not seeking any particular type of content at all—the content of strictly personal expression, if we could discover it, would have to be a form of exactly the supposed literary subjectivity that is exposed as a delusion by the refutation of reading. We are looking, rather, for a particular kind of place in the narrative, for singularities in the shape of narrative unfolding that go beyond being merely uninterpretable, that belong somehow altogether outside the narrative while still somehow demanding to be accounted for—a combination of predicates that, as far as I can see, belongs uniquely to the presence of the actual contingent writer in the text.

The Illuminated Center These ideas will never give us anything like a defi nition of what we are looking for. Only an actual instance or two can lend them any clarity. To begin with Kleist, both of the stories we have looked at contain scenes that suggest what we might call deviant sexuality. The desperate moments in Gustav’s bedroom have overtones of sex-play in the form of bondage, and in “Die Marquise von O. . . .” it is not the rape scene that figures here—which is not a scene to begin with, and probably never happened anyway—but rather the incest scene, the image of something at least very close to sex between the Marquise and her father after they are reconciled (90–91), a scene that gains an extra dimension of deviance from the mother’s witnessing it with “her heart overflowing with joy” (90). But neither of these scenes is as close to the absolute center of its story’s structure as a corresponding scene in “Der Findling,” which we and Nicolo observe through a keyhole, the scene in which Elvire prostrates herself “in a state of ecstasy, at Someone’s feet.”8 The immediate suggestion, given what Nicolo expects to fi nd, is that Elvire is performing some type of submissive sexual act, perhaps oral sex. And when Nicolo then enters the room, after Elvire has left, and discovers that her secret partner is not a real man but only the painting of a man (39), the problems created by the scene become in a sense more complex. We now recognize that Elvire’s extramarital love is really only a form of masturbatory fantasy; but we must also infer that, unlike a real love affair, these ritualistic trysts with the painting are carried out with her husband’s full knowledge and consent. The room is called “Elvire’s room” (37); but we learn later that Piachi has a key to it and that it is the fi rst room he enters when returning at night

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from a trip (52), hence that he almost certainly sleeps there. There is even a fairly broad hint, earlier on, about why Piachi might be inclined to allow his wife that relatively harmless sexual outlet, when we hear that Elvire “could not hope to have any more children from the old man” (24). “Der Findling,” then, is composed of at least three different stories: (1) the story of Nicolo, which is an easily narratable series of events with a psychological aspect; (2) the story of Elvire, which is focused upon only one event, the fi re, and its psychological consequences; and (3) the story of the Piachis’ marriage, which is beyond the reach of our reading because it is composed (we infer) not of events at all, but rather of nothing but that endless patchwork of minuscule psychological adjustments by which the visible forms of our life, in one another’s company, are nudged into existence. It is a nonstory, a story in which nothing happens (a story, specifically, about sex acts that do not occur), yet also the story upon which everything else in the text depends—just as it is the type of story, or nonstory, upon which everything else in the real world depends. Kleist’s text as a whole is structured to create the impression of descending, by way of its three constituent stories, toward a mysterious central point, whose mystery in this case is represented not by obscurity but by simple illumination, in the image viewed through the keyhole, an image that produces new and more difficult questions in the very process of being explained—indeed, in the process of being correctly explained, as it is by Xaviera Tartini (49). The initial or superficial story, the story of Nicolo, by being set in Italy and involving the motif of the plague, obviously suggests Boccaccio, and in fact has a number of fairly clear Boccaccian features. Especially Piachi’s defiance of church law at the end, in being witty, outrageous, nonsensical, yet also unanswerable and perfectly understandable in human terms, is the kind of thing we might expect to find in a Decameron. Indeed the Boccaccian novella (the story of Nicolo) is almost complete in Kleist’s text. The fi rst part of the text, up to the point where Piachi retires and leaves everything to Nicolo (26), all belongs to this novella. Then follow three long paragraphs dealing with Elvire’s childhood trauma, her marriage to Piachi, and the incident of her fainting when she sees Nicolo return costumed from the carnival (26–33). But these three paragraphs could be omitted altogether, and there would be no immediate problem with continuity! For the next paragraph after them begins simply “Thus a year passed, and Constanze, Nicolo’s wife, died in childbirth, together with the infant she had borne” (33). It is in the course of this long paragraph (33–36) that fi rst Elvire and then Piachi recognize Xaviera’s maid on her visit to

286 Response

Nicolo; Piachi forges a billet-doux summoning Nicolo to the Church of Mary Magdalene in Xaviera’s name; and Nicolo keeps the appointment, only to be humiliated by fi nding the procession with his wife’s coffi n. In the next paragraph (36–37), fi nally, after making his peace with Piachi (for fi nancial reasons), Nicolo vows to take revenge on Elvire, whom he blames for his humiliation in the church. He intends specifically to spy out her presumed sexual transgressions and expose them to Piachi, as he assumes she had exposed his (37). But none of this material depends in any way upon the three earlier paragraphs containing Elvire’s story. Now, however, follows a long section (37–50) in which the painting and its story are discovered. And while this section could not simply be omitted, still, perfect continuity would be maintained (and the text would be much simplified and shortened) if the whole thing were replaced with nothing but a short paragraph describing Nicolo’s inability to find any evidence of sexual misbehavior on Elvire’s part, which would lead directly into the sentence “Er fühlte wohl, daß Elvirens reiner Seele nur durch einen Betrug beizukommen sei [He felt clearly that Elvire’s pure soul could be gotten at only by means of a deception]” (50). From this point on, an alternative ending could be supplied that would avoid Elvire’s story altogether. Only one new plot element would be needed: a “deception,” in the manner of Iago, by which Piachi would be made to doubt his wife’s fidelity, whereupon Elvire could die (as she does in the actual text) of a shock-induced “fever” (55). A remorseful and grief-stricken Piachi could then throw Nicolo out of the house, and the novella could end exactly as the actual text does, without ever mentioning Elvire’s past history. This relatively straightforward Boccaccian novella is clearly an element of the story as we have it; and Elvire’s story has the effect of twisting that basic novella out of shape. The first segment of it that is introduced could simply be omitted, leaving the novella intact. But the second segment, which engages Nicolo’s self-love, begins to undo the clarity of his motivation in the novella’s plot. “The thought of having aroused the passion of this woman, who paraded around as a paragon of virtue, flattered him almost as much as the desire to take revenge on her” (42–43). In fact, by the time we get to the passage about needing a “deception” to get at Elvire’s “pure soul”—a passage which, taken out of context, could conceivably belong to the simple novella—Nicolo has (in the full story) already been told the particulars of Elvire’s history by Xaviera, and the “deception” that he now plans is therefore really nothing but a rape, an act which (as far as we or he can tell in advance) can only have bad consequences for him. Under the

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influence of Elvire’s story, the simple vindictiveness of his role in the basic novella has been twisted into an utterly gratuitous malevolence, a malevolence so intense as to be oblivious to its own self-destructive tendency. Kleist’s text, then, is not simply a story—it is something more like a dramatic interaction, a kind of struggle, involving three different stories. What looks, on its fi rst page, like a typical Boccaccian novella, is twisted out of shape when Elvire’s story intrudes from behind it or from underneath it. And this movement of intrusion, in turn, appears to be driven by a still deeper and now entirely illegible level of sensibility that is, so to speak, garbed (but not disclosed) by our unanswerable but unavoidable questions about how the Piachis conduct the strictly private component of their married life—a level of sensibility or expression that is represented by the perfectly clear yet correspondingly uninterpretable image of Elvire on her knees before “Someone” (the emphatic capitalization is Kleist’s own). One is tempted to compare this image in the story to Freud’s notion of the “navel” of the dream.9

Who Is It? The main question that confronts us as critics is: where exactly does the struggle that is “Der Findling” take place, and for whom is it a struggle? If we have paid attention in our graduate courses, we will immediately be inclined to answer: the struggle of stories in “Der Findling” must be understood as taking place in and for The Reader. In modern narrative theory, everything that truly “happens” in narrative happens in and for The Reader. But in this case, the accepted answer does not work. If we were talking only about two stories, Nicolo’s and Elvire’s, we could perhaps understand the idea of text-as-struggle in a feminist sense; we could interpret Nicolo’s insane malevolence as a kind of metanarrative move, a violent outburst of resentment at having lost the central position in “his” story. (Would this explain what seems the wildly exaggerated idea of “die abscheulichste That, die je verübt worden ist [the most abominable deed that has ever been committed]” [50] by positing an act so perfectly outrageous that it takes revenge upon the very story in which it is related, perhaps as an allegory of how events and attitudes in history can have an [antifeminist] effect on the kind of thing history is?) This interpretation might even be valid for the text as we have it. But it does not in any degree make the quality of struggle available to us as an imaginable experience. The

288

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struggle in question is not, for example, Elvire’s struggle, with which we might conceivably sympathize; it is a struggle in which her story is a contestant, and this struggle can only take place in the mind of the storyteller. Are we, in our reading, in a position to identify with that storyteller and participate in his inner struggle? And in such an identification with the real (hence semiotically mysterious) storyteller, are we correspondingly joined with each other in that mysterious unity imagined by modern literary theory, are we fused into The Reader? The story of Nicolo is, in the sense of this question, an allegory of our situation, an allegory of reading. The true storyteller—the mysterious and for the moment invisible generating center of the text, who is positioned in a concealment even one step beyond story (3), the story that cannot be told—is named by the capitalized word “Someone” before whom we see Elvire kneeling. And when, like Nicolo, we go in search of that “Someone,” we quickly come to the flattering conclusion that he is a reflection of ourselves—ourselves as The Reader. But like Nicolo, we are simply wrong. (The true storyteller, after all, is separated from us by at least one story that cannot even be told, let alone understood.) Like Nicolo, we are compelled to recognize that that “Someone” is not a generalized, mirror-like entity at all, but a simple, actual, contingent individual—which in our case means the actual contingent individual (who in his unfictionalized personal privacy is strictly inaccessible to us, thus in effect dead) who happens to have written the text that is before us. If we require a document to show that the real person Heinrich von Kleist might actually have thought of himself as an individual in whom the story that he really wanted to tell must shape itself in struggle, by welling up in the midst of what could easily have become another story altogether, we might recall the little essay “Über die allmähliche Verfertigung der Gedanken beim Reden.”10 But the existence of this text over Kleist’s signature does not prove anything. Any conclusions we might draw from it could not possibly leap the category difference between a real person and the same person considered as an authorial function to which we might appeal when interpreting—at least not in a case where precisely that category difference is both the basis and the substance of the interpretation being proposed! The critical logic tends to get involuted here, and we would perhaps be well advised to settle for a negative conclusion: “Der Findling,” like the other stories treated in this chapter, offers a determined and ingenious resistance to the operation of The Reader, and so constitutes a refutation of reading.

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But critical habits die hard. We are still tempted to look for something like positive evidence of the writer-as-contingent-individual in the text. And if we look, we fi nd, for there are at least two very serious mistakes in the text that we must attribute to something we have no choice but to call “Heinrich von Kleist.” The first is the story’s title, which translates as “the foundling” in English. The trouble is that there is no sign of a foundling in the story; Nicolo was never an abandoned infant, but is an orphan, for which there is a perfectly good German word, Waise. The second mistake concerns the name “Colino,” which in Italian happens to be a very common affectionate diminutive form of “Nicolo.” Nicolo, therefore, should by rights already be convinced of Elvire’s passion for him the instant he hears her utter that name, and the whole business of children’s letter blocks and anagrams should be unnecessary. But when we say that these mistakes are attributable to “Kleist,” are we talking about a state of affairs in the real world or about an element in the semiotic weave of the text? Or is the obvious unanswerability of this question already enough to mark the text’s radical incompatibility with the theory and practice of modern reading?

The Sign of the Cross Competing stories figure not only in “Der Findling,” but also in the other two texts of Kleist that we have discussed, in the form of a tension between the narrator’s version of events and alternative versions suggested by common sense and common knowledge. But nowhere in Kleist is the motif of competing stories as prominent as it is in Kaf ka’s little story “Das Urteil.” And in “Das Urteil,” as in “Der Findling,” there is an illuminated center, a clear, bright image that appears to serve the semiotically inconceivable purpose of marking the text’s writer as an actual contingent individual. The scene I refer to is not, strictly speaking, even really a scene in the story, which is exactly what gives it the singular and pregnant quality we are looking for. It is an anecdote that Georg says had been told once by his friend during a visit back from his new home in Russia, an anecdote from the “Russian Revolution,” which here means the events of 1905: For instance, when he was on a business trip to Kiev and ran into a riot, and saw a priest on a balcony who cut a broad cross in blood on the palm of his hand and held the hand up and appealed to the mob. (54/83)

The friend in Russia is the bone of contention in “Das Urteil,” the hinge on which everything turns; but this is the only point in the text where

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any actual thought on the friend’s part (here in the form of experience or memory) is transmitted more or less directly. Once we grasp the uniqueness of this passage, its showing of “the friend’s” mind and its unique vividness and human extremity—once we thus recognize it as an expressive center or Freudian navel—it strikes us that the illumination here is even stronger than in “Der Findling” and that the vision of the priest on the balcony is an allegory of the story’s genesis. The story is about nothing but confl ict, a kind of absolutized confl ict whose reason for being, whose bone of contention, is not a reason at all, but merely an otherwise trivial pretext by which confl ict as such vaults itself into existence. And in German, as in English, the cross, especially in its linguistic form as the verb “kreuzen” (to cross), is an emblem of confl ict or contention. The story thus imagines its own genesis as an act of public self-laceration on the part of its creator—an act that is itself, as a selfmutilation, already an instance of the arbitrarily violent confl ict it displays before us in the form of its wound. The image, then, together with its meaning, could hardly be clearer. But of what use to us is this clarity? If we try to interpret the allegory further (if we ask, for example, whether the priest is inciting the crowd or attempting to quiet them) then we fi nd that we are really asking questions about ourselves, about the story’s operation (calming or inciting?) with respect to its readers; and we ourselves thus become an appropriate target for the father’s reproach when he says to Georg, in his very last speech, “So now you know what else there was in the world besides yourself, till now you’ve known only about yourself ” (60/87). For a moment, in the image of the bloody priest, we glimpse a reality beyond the story; but if we try to give substance to that image, to pin it down and know it as something akin to experience, we only demonstrate exactly that exclusive concern with ourselves—in the form of The Reader—that the father cites as Georg’s principal fault. The father continues: “An innocent child, yes, that you were, truly, but still more truly have you been a devilish human being!” Is it too much to see in these words an attack on The Reader? Of course we are innocent; if we read as The Reader, we are only doing what established tradition expects of us. But precisely this innocence— this childlike submergence of ourselves in a supposed “experience” that involves no responsibility on our part—is also a kind of crime, the crime for which Faustus faces damnation, which suggests yet another meaning of the priest’s bloody hand, displayed before us in a gesture of exclusion, like a flaming sword.

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To sustain this argument, we have to show Georg to be an allegorical representation of The Reader. The idea of competing stories, fi rst of all—the idea of producing one story in one’s imagination and then being compelled to test it against another version of the same story that is imposed from without—is a central component of the theory of modern reading. Our experience of the story in narrative fiction—as Iser and others never tire of telling us—arises as an interplay between our own imaginative activity (think Georg’s version) and the limiting and guiding influence of the text (think his father’s version). But as the analogy in “Das Urteil” suggests, this supposed fruitful interplay, in Kaf ka’s view, is a theoretical ideal that never happens in reality. If I attempt to realize that ideal interplay by submerging my real self in the imagined generality and uncommittedness of The Reader, then I—like Georg Bendemann with his letter—am in truth only writing my own story by not writing it; by avoiding, as far as possible, any actual authorial commitment (such as the display of one’s wounded writing instrument); by seeking, in particular, to transfer responsibility for my story to the text I happen to be reading, in the hope of finding myself confirmed there. And the text, like Georg’s father, will perhaps give me one last chance to admit that I am really only playing games with myself—“Georg . . . You’ve always been a leg-puller” (53/83)—before fi nally showing itself as what it truly is, as what every text truly is: a thing that is at once both maddeningly elusive and incomprehensible (problem of hermeneutics) yet also absolutely rigid and unalterable (problem of the text’s materiality). A text—Kaf ka’s allegory suggests—is a radically paradoxical and therefore by rights terrifying thing, suspended between its vertiginous hermeneutic indeterminacy and its implacable material unalterability, like the Torah between its two supporting rods. And an author, therefore, a maker of texts, a practitioner of “literature”—Kaf ka is at one point especially fond of this word, which comes as close as possible to meaning simply “text production”11—is always of necessity a sufferer, a practitioner of selfmutilation. But the technique of modern fiction reading simply denies these truths and attempts to dissolve the huge brazen paradox of text in some spit-up gruel of imagination; and “Das Urteil” is the story of its futility. Georg shrank into a corner, as far away from his father as possible. A long time ago he had fi rmly made up his mind to watch closely every least movement so that he should not be surprised by any indirect attack, a

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pounce from behind or above. At this moment he recalled his own longforgotten resolve and forgot it again, like a man drawing a short thread through the eye of a needle. (57/85)

This is an image of what happens to The Reader when he is confronted with the text as it really is, the text that is all there as a single material object and therefore (The Jamesian Reader supposes) ought to be all there and available as “another life” in his imagination, if only he manages to “watch it closely” enough; but a text can never be all there in that hermeneutic sense, and The Reader’s therefore hopelessly fragmented responses to it slip like bits of thread through the wrong end of a mind that is pointed in the wrong direction to deal with them.

The Problem of Getting It Right But what, then, for Kaf ka, is the right way to deal with texts? If Georg Bendemann is an allegory of The fiction Reader, then he is such in a strictly negative sense. He is The Reader who needs somehow to be imaginatively in control of the text while at the same time also in a position to be surprised, hence interested, by it. He is The Reader whose attention is focused on the text as experience, on the manner in which the text is passing through his mind here and now, confident (as his schooling has taught him to be) that this passing will resolve itself eventually into something like a world, a fabric of immediate bright experience; and as This Reader, he is then only bewildered by his inability to make those fragments of supposed textual immediacy add up to anything at all. He thus manages to represent practically everything that can be wrong with reading. Does it follow that Kaf ka is now obliged to provide us with perhaps not an explanation, but at least an allegorical image of how we might avoid Georg’s fate in our own reading? It would be unfair to require this. Even if his explanation of the correct way to deal with texts were cloaked in an allegorical image, still we would be able to understand the allegory only by unfolding it for ourselves as a kind of story, a story of reading, of which we would then have to become virtual readers and appropriate it as our own experience—which would produce a contradiction by reinforcing in us precisely the habits of modern reading that we were supposed to be leaving behind. Even the idea of reading for art does not help us here because there is no possible transition from The Reader to a reader for art. If The Reader could be placed somehow

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in a responsible generative position comparable to the position that Dante, for instance, makes available to every real contingent person who happens upon his text, then he or she (The noncontingent Reader, The Reader as such) would simply have found a new vicarious experience to enjoy irresponsibly. A true reader for art reoriginates the text; The Reader can hope, at best, to have the experience of reoriginating the text—which is not the same thing, as we saw with Faustus. You cannot think your way out from under the institution of The Reader. The Reader is strictly theoretical in nature and origin—to think him is to be him. Yet, when the refutation of reading is carried out in the form of a relatively straightforward negative allegory of The Reader, it is hard to see how we can possibly avoid the question of a corresponding positive idea. This, I suppose, is why, later in Kaf ka’s brief career, the technique of negative allegory is supplanted by the more complex and ingenious refutations of reading that we encounter in “In der Straf kolonie” and “Ein Landarzt.” Or perhaps it is after all possible for there to be an image of the right way to deal with texts, an image that is made available, so to speak, only to our peripheral vision as we read. The story “Ein Hungerkünstler” concludes as follows: “Well, clear this out now!” said the overseer, and they buried the hunger artist, straw and all. Into the cage they put a young panther. Even the most insensitive felt it refreshing to see this wild creature leaping around the cage that had so long been dreary. The panther was all right [better: he lacked nothing]. The food he liked was brought him without hesitation by the attendants; he seemed not even to miss his freedom; his noble body, furnished almost to the bursting point with all that it needed, seemed to carry freedom around with it too; somewhere in his jaws it seemed to lurk; and the joy of life streamed with such ardent passion from his throat that for the onlookers it was not easy to stand the shock of it. But they braced themselves, crowded around the cage, and did not want ever to move away. (349/277)

This passage seeks to draw our attention to the difference between the hunger artist and the panther, while what it actually says is that the latter is not much more than the former all over again. Like the panther, the hunger artist had been inexplicably satisfied with his imprisonment in the cage; and especially after moving to the sideshow, he had been provided

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with exactly what he had wanted to eat—in his case nothing. The structural parallel is striking: how can the hunger artist live without needing to eat? How can the panther be a wild animal without needing to be free? The public, then, is presented with two instances of incomprehensible self-sufficiency; and the difference between the two cases resides primarily in the mechanism of audience response, which in the case of the hunger artist is described (in the story’s fi rst sentence) as “interest” (333/268), as long as that interest happens to last. If we are inclined to look for allegories of text and textuality, this situation must strike us as significant. A public exhibit having exactly the qualities we have learned to recognize as eminently textual—in that it is all there (materially, self-containedly) yet inaccessible (hermeneutically)—is met in one case by interest, which clearly suggests the attitude of The Reader, and in the second case by something completely different from interest, something that seems to involve confronting the object as a source of power. It is as if we, in our reading, were enabled to glimpse out of the corner of our eye, to glimpse, but not in any degree to identify—a second possible way, perhaps a more fruitful way, of dealing with texts. There must be—we surmise, we hope—such a second way, a way of dealing with texts that circumvents the problems of modern reading. But our approach to an understanding of that second way must always be indirect; the object of our enquiry can never be brought into focus because, if it were, it would be instantly appropriated as quasi-experience by The Modern Reader. Kleist is no less constrained by these considerations than Kaf ka, and like Kaf ka he finds at least one appropriately inconspicuous way of coming to terms with them. The little story “Das Bettelweib von Locarno” opens with a oneparagraph description of the death of the beggar-woman—whom the marchese does not throw out of the house but simply orders to move behind the heating-stove, into an ignominious but also snug and comfortable space typically occupied by the family dog.12 In the next paragraph, it is already “a number of years later” (10), and the marchese, facing fi nancial ruin, needs to sell his castle. But all attempts to sell it fail because the room where the beggar-woman had died is now acoustically haunted, “in that something invisible to the eye, with a noise as if it had lain in straw, [gets up] in the corner and with audible steps [goes] slowly and feebly across the room and [sinks down] behind the heating-stove with moans and groans” (10–11). Finally the marchese, driven insane by this last straw added to his misfortunes, sets the castle alight and dies in the fire.

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The story’s basic meaning is obvious. The spirit of the beggar-woman takes revenge on the marchese for his hard-hearted treatment of her; or perhaps it is not a personal spirit but his own deed that comes back to haunt the marchese. But at least two things are wrong with this view of the story. First, the marchese’s treatment of the beggar-woman had not been particularly hard-hearted, certainly not enough to convict him even of negligently causing her death, which had been the result of a back injury she had sustained after her crutch had slipped on the floor (9–10). Second, there is no indication in the story that either the marchese, his wife, or anyone else associates the haunted room with the incident of the beggar-woman’s death; there is not the slightest indication that anyone inside the story has any memory at all of that incident from “a number of years” ago. And how can the haunting operate as revenge if the marchese is not aware of ever having done anything to deserve it? How can his deed come back to haunt him if he does not recall or recognize it as his deed? Thus we are maneuvered into a very curious and difficult situation. The story we read is a story of revenge beyond the grave, or of a misdeed’s return to haunt its doer. There is no way for us to unthink these thoughts once we have thought them; and in any case, the story’s last words will not permit us to unthink them because they describe the marchese’s “white bones” lying “in the corner of the room from which he had ordered the beggar-woman of Locarno to get up” (15). But, at the same time, we recognize that the text we have been dealing with does not contain that story; so a question arises: if we have read the story, but not, strictly speaking, the text, then what exactly have we been doing with the text? This question is clearly unanswerable; but even in simply persisting as a question it constitutes a kind of glimpse—in the mind’s unfocused peripheral vision—of the possibility of doing something appropriate with a text besides reading it, the possibility of a second way, of an encounter with texts that somehow bypasses the historically conditioned consequences of what we ordinarily understand as the reading of fiction.

Absolute Beginnings The refutation of reading does not have, for either Kleist or Kaf ka, the character of a project to which the goal of each individual work is subordinated. It operates, rather, in the background, never absent but also never obtrusive—never interfering with the wealth of ideas, images, problems, and speculations by which the various texts interest and entertain us. Yet

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there are also key texts, at least one for each of the two authors, by which most of the rest of their work is organized with respect to the critique of reading. We can approach this matter, in Kaf ka, by way of the idea of a text’s absolute beginning. The opening of “Ein Landarzt” is one instance of this idea. Everything in the story depends on the implications of its initial clause, and the structure of that clause is logically determined by the implications of its fi rst word, “Ich.” You can, if you wish, open your book and begin reading the story at some other point. But you cannot understand what you are reading, which must include understanding why your failure to understand is also unavoidable, without reference to the opening clause—so you have in effect yet again begun with that beginning, whether you would or no. It is an absolute beginning—nothing else in the story could conceivably have preceded it, and nothing else in the story can be read without presupposing it. Narratives with an absolute beginning are neither common nor easy to construct. In all of Kaf ka’s work, I can suggest only three possible instances: “Ein Landarzt,” perhaps Der Prozeß, and the story I will discuss here in more detail, “Die Verwandlung.” But the technique of absolute beginning is of great historical significance because it enforces, on our part, a recognition of our entrapment in the conventional figure of The Reader. As soon as I understand that some particular narrative has an absolute beginning, I must conclude (apparently) that the entrance to the narrative—the opening into its interior—is exactly the same for me as for every other reader, which means that as I embark upon my reading I represent all those other readers, and so operate as The Reader. (“Vor dem Gesetz” is perhaps an allegory of this situation, of the delusion that a textual “opening” can be there for every reader in the same way.) Interestingly enough—despite all the ink that has been spilt on the inaugural lines of the Commedia—an absolute beginning in this sense cannot possibly happen in a manuscript culture, where the artifact itself, in the handwriting of its producer, bears the indelible mark of an earlier reading, hence of my own position as one among a number of specific readers. But, for a writer like Kaf ka, the absolute beginning is available as a possibility and, in my opinion, appears in exemplary form in “Die Verwandlung.” By the beginning of the story, in this respect, I mean its first sentence: “Als Gregor Samsa eines Morgens aus unruhigen Träumen erwachte, fand er sich in seinem Bett zu einem ungeheueren Ungeziefer verwandelt [When Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from unsettling

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dreams, he found himself changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin]” (115/89).13 The fi rst thing that has to be shown is that that sentence is an absolute beginning in a sense comparable to that in which the first clause of “Ein Landarzt” is. At least one criterion for an absolute beginning is clearly met: no passage in “Die Verwandlung” can be made sense of without reference to the opening sentence; a reader must always be in the condition of having read that sentence. This is obviously true for passages in which Gregor’s bug form is alluded to; but it is also true for the many long passages that contain no such allusion—passages in which we learn what Gregor sees, hears, and thinks, but without having our attention drawn to his bodily condition. Indeed, the importance of the story’s fi rst sentence strikes us most strongly in passages of the second type. We find ourselves following a piece of narrative that makes perfectly good sense out of context, as if referring to normal human beings, but whose sense is radically changed when we think of it in relation to the story’s opening, changed often in the direction of the ridiculous. This applies to Gregor’s long complaints to himself and to the chief clerk in chapter I (117–18/90, 128–30/96–98, 135–37/101), to the passages in which he learns of and meditates upon his family’s fi nancial condition in chapter II (151–53/110–11, 153–55/111–12), and to the three paragraphs in chapter III that describe a typical evening in the Samsa apartment (173–75/123–24). But can it also be maintained that nothing else in the story could conceivably have come before its actual opening, especially since there are numerous flashbacks in Gregor’s reported thinking? Why could some of this flashback material not have been narrated before the episode of Gregor’s transformation? Or, to put the question differently, is there any reason why Gregor’s transformation could not have been narrated as one episode in the course of an action already in progress? Let us suppose that after a few pages or chapters on Gregor’s normal life we were to read “When Gregor Samsa woke up the next morning from unsettling dreams, he found himself changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin.” The trouble is that with this sentence the character of the fictional world would change so completely—its transformation, its metamorphosis, its Verwandlung, would be so radical—that the sentence in question might just as well be regarded as a new beginning. In the story as it stands, Kaf ka suggests this point by leaving one important plot question unanswered even while maintaining a plausible causal continuity in the fictional events actually mentioned: the question of how the bug’s presence in the Samsa apartment

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could possibly be kept secret from neighbors and from the public in general. The chief clerk at Gregor’s place of employment knows about the bug, as do at least three different serving women, one of whom, we are told, “made a solemn vow . . . not to give anything away to anyone” (150/110, SC 19)—which reminds us precisely of how impossible it would be to expect people to keep silent about something like Gregor. How could news of the giant vermin not spread in the city? How could the sensationalist popular press—which already existed in Kaf ka’s day—possibly fail to sniff it out? By simply leaving this question unanswered, Kaf ka creates an unobtrusive but undeniable difference between the “world” of the story and the world in which I actually find myself while reading it, a difference that is evidently attributable to the inaugural power of the story’s fi rst sentence, the sentence that—literally—makes all the difference. If some of the flashback material were narrated before that sentence, then the difference between worlds would be imported into the fiction (the difference between the world before and the world after that sentence), and the story would become a story about that difference, thus a completely different story from the one that it is—a story different not only in structure and atmosphere, but in subject matter on the deepest level.

The Reader in the Story The opening of “Die Verwandlung,” then, is an absolute beginning in the sense defi ned above, which implies that our attention is drawn to our entrapment in the generalized figure of The Reader—or at least to our exposure to such entrapment. And this fact has a bearing on the question of how we must understand that opening. As in the case of “Ein Landarzt,” there is no context for the first sentence, since an absolute beginning is by defi nition contextless. But in “Ein Landarzt,” an explicit context is not necessary because we can understand the opening sentence by reference to certain necessary consequences of the speaking of the word ich. The word ich is its own context. At the opening of “Die Verwandlung,” by contrast, no such linguistic-philosophical maneuver suggests itself; and there is nothing in the fi rst sentence that locates it, in either a real or an imagined world, with respect to anything outside of the bare event it narrates. But there is one other event that is necessarily associated with that sentence, even though it is not mentioned. The sentence unfolds in exactly the instant at which I start reading the story. Obviously this statement could not be made

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for a narrative that does not have an absolute beginning, a unique location from which its reading must start out. But can it be made even where an absolute beginning is present? The exact instant at which I begin reading this or that text is not identifiable in my life history. This negative theorem is an immediate corollary of arguments I made in Chapter 1, on which everything else is based, including the present discussion of Kleist and Kaf ka. But the whole point about an absolute beginning is that it is not linked to any specific time in anyone’s life history. It is a strictly singular, extensionless, contextless instant that leaps into view as needing to have been there (no matter where) every time I think about the text—an instant at which two things happen: the text opens, and I fi rst become its reader. Of course it is still not clear what sort of meaning can be ascribed to this coincidence. But I think we are at least justified in pursuing this matter heuristically with respect to Kaf ka’s story. Given that the absolute beginning puts us in mind of our exposure to the condition of The Reader, one interpretive path quickly suggests itself. Gregor’s metamorphosis, we speculate, is a way of imagining the actual entrance of a reader into the story—the entrance of The Reader for whom the story must become a piece of immediate experience.14 The idea that reading can generate an immediate experience of its content is thus reduced to an absurdity. The Reader, in the form of Gregor the bug, has succeeded literally in getting inside the fictional world, but is instantly recognized by other inhabitants of that world as the strictly alien being he in truth is. And he, for his part, though he can understand what the others say—he is after all a reader—obviously cannot make himself understood in turn. (How could a reader hope to make himself understood to a fictional character?) Beyond the practical measures his family must take to sustain him, there is only one actual effect his presence can have upon the fictional world: to subjectivize it, constrict it, turn it in upon itself, and cut it off from the larger world outside. The family members do everything they can to resist this tendency; they all seek paid work by way of connections outside the apartment, and they take in boarders. But they are still fundamentally hindered and trapped by Gregor’s presence: But the biggest complaint was always that they [the family] could not give up the apartment, which was much too big for their present needs, since no one could figure out how Gregor was supposed to be moved. But Gregor understood easily that it was not only consideration for him

300 Response which prevented their moving, for he could easily have been transported in a suitable crate with a few air holes; what mainly prevented the family from moving was their complete hopelessness and the thought that they had been struck by a misfortune as none of their relatives and acquaintances had ever been hit. (175–76/124–25, SC 31)

And above all, the unanswered question of how the outside world can remain ignorant of Gregor operates here. That world cannot know about Gregor because he simply does not belong to it. He has been imported from a completely alien dimension of the literary process; he belongs to a metauniverse in which the story’s reading takes place. It would not be strictly accurate to say simply that Gregor is The Reader. Gregor’s metamorphosis, rather, is the attempt to imagine what would happen to a maximally realistic fictional world if The Reader of the fiction could actually succeed in gaining entrance to it through the experience of the story’s central character, the character from whose point of view that world is seen. The character in question, here Gregor, would necessarily take on certain of The Reader’s characteristics, without which he could not serve the latter as a vehicle. He would have to become separated and unrecognizable; the other fictional characters, after all, cannot have direct knowledge of the person reading the story or direct contact with that person. He would have to withdraw into his own private sphere; the reader’s “experience,” after all, is strictly subjective. Certain unanswerable questions about the reality of the fictional world would have to arise in response to the radical anomaly of The Reader’s presence. And fi nally, as a consequence of precisely The Reader’s need for real experience— hence for a consistent reality—that anomaly would have to be removed; The Reader’s experiencing vehicle would have to die. “ ‘It has to go,’ cried his sister” (191/134, SC 38). Which carries the absurdity to its highest pitch: the perfected readerly experience of a fictional world can happen only by way of a character who dies and thus becomes unable to experience anything. And then Gregor does die. And, perhaps somewhat to our surprise, the story continues nonetheless. And with every word now, by continuing, it reminds us that we have not been reading by way of Gregor after all, that the effect of the structure of logical absurdity in the story is precisely to refute reading in this sense—to show that an experiential reading by The Reader is something that never really happens. And this point, I think, is a node in Kaf ka’s career, which gathers together earlier recognitions and

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perspectives, and from which the refutation of reading then radiates into the rest of his work.

Alien Invasions If there is a single narrative work of Kleist’s that has a similar nodal character, it is “Michael Kohlhaas.” And although this story does not have an absolute beginning comparable to that of “Die Verwandlung,” still we are struck by something distinctly aboriginal, not to say cosmogonic, in its structure. One might compare, in “Das Erdbeben in Chili,” the image of a newly innocent humanity encamped in a newly pure nature, or in “Der Findling” Nicolo’s complete lack of a past. Piachi’s apparently humdrum past, Elvire’s dramatic past, and the questions raised by their past as a married couple, are all significant in the story. But the only thing we ever learn of Nicolo’s past is that his father and mother had died of the plague. Our attention is drawn to this lack by the mistake of his being called a “foundling,” as if he were newborn at the point where Piachi takes him up. The situation in “Michael Kohlhaas,” however, is both more clearly marked and more interwoven into the story as a whole. The story is emphatically realistic: it is based on actual historical events; it refers several times to the “chronicles” from which it claims to be drawn; it describes in endless and entirely plausible detail the bureaucratic, political, and diplomatic maneuvering that accompanies and affects Kohlhaas’s career; and it abounds in minutely imagined and vivid scenes that are described sometimes at great length but never with any loss of narrative impetus—the episode, for instance, in which two broken-down black horses, supposedly belonging to Kohlhaas, are delivered to a public square in Dresden.15 But one effect of this realism—taken together with the strict consistency of Kohlhaas’s character, which is insisted upon repeatedly as his principal fault—is to force upon us a question: how could Kohlhaas possibly have lived the thirty odd years of his life before the story opens without getting himself entangled in a series of disastrous confl icts at least comparable to the ones actually recounted? Even if he has managed somehow to exist up to the point where he encounters the barrier at the castle of the Junker von Tronka, still it is clear that this point (64) is where his life really begins, a life that must take the form of deadly confl ict between his “Rechtgefühl” (feeling for justice) and the actual institutional shape of the world he lives in.

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“Michael Kohlhaas” thus has not an absolute beginning so much as what we might call a motivated beginning. It opens at exactly the point where its hero’s life fi rst begins to take its true form—to unfold as what it truly is. But it is not inconceivable that the story might have opened at some later point in narrated time from where the encounter at the barrier would have been relegated to some variety of flashback. A structure of exactly this type occurs later when the episode of the prophetic gypsy woman is introduced. The basic difference from “Die Verwandlung,” in any case, becomes clear if one tries to imagine Kaf ka’s story starting out with a typical day in the Samsa household, followed by a flashback explaining why the young man locked in one of the bedrooms happens to have the form of a giant bug. But more interesting is that despite this basic structural difference, Gregor Samsa is not really much more than Michael Kohlhaas all over again, at least insofar as the latter had been every bit as much an alien entity in his world. The beginning of the story—the episode at the barrier—is the point at which this alien quality begins to make itself felt. Kohlhaas, in his own eyes, is an eminently fair individual. His feeling for justice, which we hear is as delicate as a “jeweler’s balance” (76), is always prepared to give the world a second or third chance to prove that it is not as thoroughly corrupt and unjust as he might have had reason to consider it. And when the world then fails even his most patient and most charitably constructed testing—as of course it must—when the world in fact accepts his greatest possible sacrifice (his wife) and gives him nothing whatever in return, he sees no reason not to regard himself as excluded entirely from the systematic protection of that world—this being his selfdefense to Luther (149–59)—and therefore free to seek restitution for his losses by whatever means are available to him. It is in fact the world against which his violent actions are directed, not any particular persons or institutions. Even before the death of his wife, when he had fi rst mentioned the possibility of selling his establishment, he had said to his friend and prospective buyer, the councilor, that “his soul was set upon great things, which the other [the councilor] would perhaps soon hear about” (102–3). In the absoluteness of his demands upon the world, he is essentially an alien in the world, and he recognizes from the outset that he is therefore destined to perform “great things,” in the sense of infl icting conspicuous disruption upon it. Very early in the story, Kleist uses a phrase that also occurs near the end of “Die Marquise von O. . . . ,” when he speaks of Kohlhaas’s recognition that because of “die gebrechliche Einrichtung der Welt [the fragile constitution of the world]” (79) one

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must be very careful when making judgments. But the “fragility” of the world is also such that, once Kohlhaas has made his absolute judgment, he can set out with a company of only nine men (himself, Herse, and the other seven hands [117]) and eventually shake that whole edifice to its foundations.

“Die gebrechliche Einrichtung der Welt” The plot of the story, starting from when Kohlhaas goes forth to seek what at fi rst he (or at least the narrator) is candid enough to call “revenge” (116), runs as follows: (1) Kohlhaas burns the Tronka castle but fails to capture Junker Wenzel, and is prevented by an ominous stroke of lightning from burning the convent at Erlabrunn; (2) having discovered that Wenzel is in Wittenberg, he sets fi re to that city several times, increases his forces by attracting various unsavory elements in the populace, and enjoys some actual military success; (3) he sets fires in Leipzig, where he at fi rst believes Wenzel had been taken, and declares himself leader of a “provisional world government” in Lützen (141), whereupon Martin Luther undertakes “to guide him back into a normal human order” (143); (4) Kohlhaas engineers a secret meeting with Luther, after which the latter persuades the Elector of Saxony to treat Kohlhaas “more as a foreign invader . . . than as an internal rebel” (161) and to grant him an amnesty, which Kohlhaas accepts, that will enable him to bring his lawsuit against Junker Wenzel in Dresden; (5) disorder in the streets, and disorder in the countryside caused by the remnants of his band, gradually turn public opinion against Kohlhaas and, together with a number of predictable political and legal misfortunes, lead to his being made a prisoner in Dresden, whereupon his correspondence with one of his old confederates, intended to make possible his escaping from Europe altogether, gets him condemned to torture and death; then (6) the Elector of Brandenburg, for various political reasons, is moved to intervene and demand that Kohlhaas be brought to Berlin for trial, whereupon the Electorate of Saxony—although unable to reject this demand, for foreign-policy reasons concerning tensions with Poland—also reinstitutes all the old charges against Kohlhaas at the Imperial court in Vienna, which is not bound by the local amnesty; and (7) it is at this point that we hear, fi nally, the story of the old gypsy woman who gives Kohlhaas the sealed paper that she says will one day “save his life” (242). The progression here is easy to understand. Kohlhaas’s disruptive influence moves steadily outward through a succession of concentric circles.

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First he attacks private property, then whole cities; then he provokes a reaction from no less than Martin Luther, and then more than merely a reaction from the Electorate of Saxony; then, just when it seems that his outward, explosive power has been thwarted, that power reemerges on a level involving not only Saxony, but now also Brandenburg, Poland, and eventually the Hapsburg Empire itself; and fi nally, with the appearance of the prophetic old woman, the very order of nature seems to have suffered disruption from Kohlhaas’s presence. Nor is it difficult to grasp the sense of this progression in philosophical terms. The “world,” at each stage, is understood as some form of legal or collective fiction—property, the city, the state, religion, society, international law—until fi nally we arrive at “world” in the sense of the order of nature. The implication is that even the order of nature is ultimately constituted as the same type of fiction as the others—that nature, in other words, derives its order solely from the shaping and organizing activity of the mind that perceives it, which is not an implausible way of formulating Kantian philosophy as Kleist apparently understood it.16 The “fragility” that Kleist ascribes to the world (both political and natural) would then be an immediate result of the role of fiction in its constitution. From this point—especially if we bear in mind the story’s motivated beginning, our sense that our entrance as readers coincides with a radical reorigination in the main character’s life—it is only a short step to the question of literary fiction, of what actually happens when we read a story. And the intermingling of historical material in “Michael Kohlhaas” with events and descriptions that could not possibly have been derived from any sort of documentary evidence, suggests very strongly at least one possible answer to this question: in reading a literary fiction, and in contributing the fictionalizing activity of our own imagination, we do nothing beyond what we always do in the course of what we think of as the direct experience of reality—the reading of fiction is nothing but experience itself all over again, but with an increased level of philosophical self-knowledge, an increased reflective awareness of how experience is constituted. Every truly philosophical individual, in this view, would be an instance of The Reader. This view is clearly suggested. But is it suggested in a positive or a negative sense? It is possible to read Kohlhaas’s whole career as an allegory of why it is wrong to think of reality, experience, fiction, and also reading, in this manner. Assuming that the basic philosophy (“Kantian” philosophy, in Kleist’s view) is valid, it follows that we have what might be called a

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“right” to regard actual experience and fiction as similarly constituted—in a manner parallel to the manner in which Kohlhaas assumes compatibility between justice and actual worldly existence. Does it perhaps follow, further, that our insistence upon this philosophical “right,” thus upon fi nding experience itself in our reading, must have consequences as ruinous—if perhaps not as conspicuous—as the consequences of Kohlhaas’s absolute insistence on justice? Michael Kohlhaas is not yet quite Gregor Samsa. But if we can imagine the figure of Gregor Samsa somehow attenuated to the point where an interaction between himself and the world at large might become possible, then that interaction would have to take the same form as Kohlhaas’s interaction with the world; his alien presence, like Kohlhaas’s, would operate like an explosion in slow motion, disrupting the world’s structure in ever-widening circles.

Reader’s Choice The metaphor of an explosion, ending in the disruption of even natural law, to describe the plot progression in “Michael Kohlhaas,” depends on the gypsy woman’s coming last in the sequence of main episodes; and in the story’s telling, she does come last. The trouble is that the incident in which she demonstrates her supernatural powers is narrated as a recollected flashback and, inside the fictional world, is located chronologically even before Kohlhaas’s attack on the Tronka castle, thus at the very beginning of the supposedly explosive sequence of episodes. To make matters worse, the woman’s knowledge of the future—down to the highly improbable coincidence by which the Elector of Saxony becomes aware of Kohlhaas’s possession of the fateful paper—implies that Kohlhaas’s apparently explosive or world-disrupting career had been fully determined in advance and had been merely the passive carrying-out of fate’s preexisting decrees. And worst of all, from the point of view of a reader, the two contradictory ideas of Kohlhaas’s career imply each other logically. Precisely the extent to which we insist that the woman’s prophetic knowledge violates the order of nature determines the extent to which we agree that her foreknowledge is valid, hence that Kohlhaas’s career is not radically disruptive after all; and precisely our sense of Kohlhaas as a fated individual, whose fate is bound up with the political destiny of Europe, encourages us to think of him as a kind of earth-shaking titan. This paradox obviously has a cultural dimension (Oedipus: human action creates the fate that governs it), a philosophical dimension (Fichte:

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the ego and the non-ego; Schiller: person and condition; Schopenhauer: will and idea), a cosmogonic dimension (Hermetic philosophy: emanation as both surge and system; Blake’s Emanation and Spectre), and a theological dimension (human freedom vis-à-vis divine omniscience). But more important for present purposes is that it takes its paradoxical shape only for a reader—only for someone in a position to compare the order in which incidents are narrated with the order in which they are supposed to have occurred inside the fiction. And the only person inside the fiction whose perspective is at all comparable to a reader’s is Michael Kohlhaas himself, since, unlike the Elector of Saxony, he does not know about the supernaturally grounded significance of his “amulet” (242) until very late in the game. Does it follow from all this that the paradox we are talking about is a paradox of reading, and that Kohlhaas is its allegorical representative? Of course it is a paradox of reading, and of course Kohlhaas is an allegory of the agent of reading in this sense. Ever since the discussion of Poulet in Chapter 1, we have had available to us the idea that a text only comes to life when it is read—that the reader enters as a kind of alien element in response to which the text suddenly organizes itself and blossoms forth as something not easily distinguishable from experience itself. (For Poulet, the quality of alienness is seen from the opposite direction, but the basic structure is the same.) “Michael Kohlhaas” takes this idea a self-critical step further in the aspect of its hero’s career that presents the appearance of progressive world-disruption. And the opposed aspect of that career, as submission to fate, corresponds to the material intractability of a text—to the fact that my “future” when I read (which means the pages I have not yet turned) is already there and fully formed, in black and white, and will not be altered in the slightest detail by my reading of it. Philosophically considered, this opposition is clearly a paradox; and it is also a paradox from the point of view of a reader—but only if we understand that reader not as someone who simply knows the text, but as someone who experiences his or her reading of it, so that the order in which events are narrated and the presumed chronological order inside the fiction can collide with each other. Therefore the question arises: is it necessary that we think of the reader of “Michael Kohlhaas” in this way, or can the basic opposition suggested by this text also be understood as a choice, comparable to the choice Kohlhaas himself makes several times in his final days, and one last time in his final minutes when we actually see him in the posture of a reader? This choice—which he makes when he rejects the offer of the Jagdjunker vom Stein (250), when he disregards the

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gypsy woman’s advice about using the paper he possesses (276–77), and when he fi nally reads the paper and swallows it on the scaffold (290)—is in effect a choice to put the world back together again by eliminating two things from it: his own alien presence and the piece of paper which, if the Elector of Saxony could get hold of it, might disturb the orderly progression of history. Does this choice represent allegorically a choice that is open to us as readers? When we imagine Kohlhaas standing there on the scaffold reading the slip of paper, we in fact do have a clear choice between two ways of thinking about that object. We can think of it as a symbol of fate itself; we can think of Kohlhaas’s possession of it as a representation of our own ability to hold our fate in our hands—as a magical talisman by which we and Kohlhaas, as readers, dream of a power like Dr. Faustus’. Or we can think of it as a piece of paper containing a few bits of information that we already knew anyway: that the Elector of Saxony at the time, Johann Friedrich, of the Ernestine line, himself became the last of that line when, after his capture by the Emperor in 1547, in the Schmalkaldic war, he lost his Electoral office and most of his lands to Duke Moritz of the Albertine line. And this choice in turn represents a larger choice that is open to us. We can, in the manner more or less of Poulet, identify with Kohlhaas and glory in the text’s response to our provocative presence, its mysterious transformation into “world”; we can thus employ Kohlhaas, so to speak, as our “Statthalter” (viceroy, 140) in the fiction—despite the bad taste this word later acquires in the mouth of Nagelschmidt (200). Or alternatively, in the manner suggested by Kohlhaas’s fi nal choices, we can turn our backs resolutely upon “world” in this sense and instead insist on our own immediate fi nitude, thus confronting the text directly in all its intractable materiality, which involves us in the more powerful and by rights terrifying paradox that is allegorized by Georg Bendemann’s father. And once we are faced with this larger choice, our response to it is practically dictated, since the choice does not even exist as such for The “experiencing” Reader. Thus, again, Iserian or Jamesian or experiential reading is refuted avant la lettre.

“Deine Elisabeth” Two further points suggest themselves. First, if Kohlhaas’s dying choices are truly metaphysical in scope—a putting back together of the otherwise disrupted real world—why are they presented as the result of petty

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personal considerations, of Kohlhaas’s desire to cause the Elector of Saxony as much pain as he possibly can? The answer is that precisely for metaphysical reasons, his motives must be petty and personal. Otherwise he would not in truth be putting the real world back together again; he would still be reserving for himself a position of power with respect to it—a metaphysical or alien position—which would in this text naturally cause all over again the disruption he now seeks to avoid. This state of affairs is also reflected in the note that the gypsy woman sends to Kohlhaas over the signature “Deine Elisabeth” (285). Does this simple identification of the old woman with Kohlhaas’s dead wife not trivialize matters? That the old woman should bear a certain resemblance to Lisbeth, which both Kohlhaas and his dog seem to recognize (275), suggests a mysterious link between them. In view of her supernatural powers, should this not be enough? The point is that the word “Elisabeth” has the effect of stripping Kohlhaas of any world-historical significance and positioning him as nothing but his wife’s husband, as one particular contingent individual in whom—as in a mirror, but a different kind of mirror from that of “literature”—I recognize the single contingent individual who I am, and who I must remain in order to confront the text I am reading as Kohlhaas confronts the note and not lose myself in the complicated but ultimately pointless self-magnifying convolutions of The Reader. But then, why read fiction to begin with? Why should I not simply be what I am and not tempt forth even the possibility of becoming The Reader? Because, as Kleist suggests, it is after all true that the world is “fragile,” and because that truth endangers us not only in fiction, but everywhere in life itself. Because being, as a reader, nothing but the contingent individual I am, models exactly the same achievement in the real world. And it is in truth an achievement; it is the achievement, being entirely myself, that Montaigne, for example, considered the highest available in human life. And as for Montaigne, and for Kleist, so also for Kaf ka. Surely the important question raised by “Die Verwandlung” is not what is the significance of Gregor Samsa’s becoming a bug?—but rather what is the significance of my not becoming a bug?

The Parting of the Ways: A Concluding Note on the Novel and Literary Studies

Who or what, exactly, is The Reader? An established institution in our civilized life, a component of our discursive practice so thoroughly ingrained in the way we read and understand that we could not communicate without it? Or a simple choice that I make every time I pick up a book, a choice that can always turn out differently? It is both. But if it is to be the second, if I am to dispense with The Reader, I must also be willing and able to do without a belief in the text’s identity as an aesthetic object, an object whose existence is fully realized in the experience of a recipient. This point follows from the argument in Chapter 6. And even if I succeed in making that necessary move of renunciation, I must now still be prepared to negotiate the terrifying paradox of the text as Kaf ka displays it, where a supposed reliable identity is replaced by simple dumb materiality and a supposed aesthetic communication by limitless hermeneutic vertigo. Is it possible for readers to meet this challenge? This question itself is infected by modern reading—or trapped in the trap of reading. If I answer in the affi rmative, then—since I am talking only about a possibility, not about a fact—my answer embraces in principle all readers, hence The Reader, which produces a contradiction. As if The Reader could dispense with The Reader. I might as well have answered in the negative. In other words, The Reader can be dispensed with only locally, never generally—only by one reader at a time. The choice is there for every individual reader, but the institution, which governs reading in general, is indestructible—at least as far as we can tell. Or, to phrase it differently, it is not “possible” to dispense with The Reader, but I can still do so if I am willing to deal with the consequences. This state of affairs provokes at least two questions. How did it come about? What are its implications for the future? The number of pages left in this book will tell you that I am not going to attempt a complete or defi nitive answer to those questions—especially 309

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because the idea I have for an answer involves the form of the novel, which I have done my best to keep at arm’s length throughout so as not to overcomplicate matters. But I will try to give a reasonably complete account of my idea within the limits of the situation.

“Literature” and the Novel Once More “Literature,” when it arrives as a concept and a discipline in the eighteenth century, and the modern realist novel, which develops at about the same time, are evidently related to one another. In the large domain of “literature,” where each traditional poetic genre occupies but a relatively compact area, there is plenty of room for newcomers, especially for varieties of fictional and nonfictional prose that might have been dismissed as either merely popular or merely technical—thus not poetic—in an earlier age. I suppose it could even be argued that under pressure from changes in the market for types of writing, the very purpose of “literature” was to make room in the category of the poetic for things like the novel. And looked at the other way round, once the novel (for whatever reasons) gains enough prestige to be considered its own genre, it creates serious problems both for the other poetic genres individually and for the whole idea of genre, whence the overarching idea of “literature” becomes necessary as a form in which to preserve the poetic. Bakhtin is very eloquent, if overstrained, on the issue of the novel’s power as an agent of change.1 But once the category of literature is established—I will dispense with quotation marks from here on—the criteria for including a text, especially for including a new text, can no longer be permitted to vary arbitrarily from genre to genre as they had for most of the history of poetry. The old poetic genres no longer have that sort of independent existence anyway. A single criterion, or type of criterion, is now needed, which turns out to be aesthetic—as it more or less has to in that age—having to do with the feelings of a reader. And in the case of the prose romance or novel, where there is nothing special in the work’s form to engage a reader’s feelings, but where a significant part of the content is emotional, it seems to follow logically that reading for thrills will be called for—reading that aims to realize the work’s content as one’s own intimate personal experience. Those works are now regarded as truly poetic that, we agree, give us the most genuine, the most vivid, and the most significant emotional experience. It appears that the very act of judging a novel worthy of inclusion

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in literature (or in what used to be known as the poetic) must entail approaching that novel as a reader for thrills. The trouble is that this reasoning can never be confi rmed in the case of any particular text. The evidence in a text can never support a characterization of readers deep enough to distinguish the reader for thrills. Iser, we recall, appeals to a passage in Tristram Shandy which, in a somewhat fuller version, runs as follows: Writing, when properly managed, (as you may be sure I think mine is) is but a different name for conversation: As no one, who knows what he is about in good company, would venture to talk all;—so no author, who understands the just boundaries of decorum and good breeding, would presume to think all: The truest respect which you can pay to the reader’s understanding, is to halve this matter amicably, and leave him something to imagine, in his turn, as well as yourself.2

Iser takes this passage as literally as possible, to mean what Sterne (not Tristram) thinks actually happens when he writes and I read. My own opinion is that Sterne is pointing out, by irony, the absurdity of exactly the view that Iser was later to espouse. Writer and reader “halve this matter,” he says, but exactly what “matter” is he referring to? The absence of an antecedent here betrays the emptiness of the thought. And if Sterne had really meant what Iser wants him to mean, he would have said “say all,” not “talk all,” anyway. And are we not moved here to think precisely of the difference between writing and conversation? This is my fi rm opinion. But it is in the end only an opinion. When a text speaks of its “reader,” that reader, by being spoken of, becomes a character—an element in the semiotic weave. The real reader—I, as I sit here—lives in an entirely different universe, out of range of those textual meanings. Any application to any real reader therefore remains strictly a matter of opinion. But on a more general level—on the level of the novel as a form, apart from any particular instances—the argument I suggested above is still valid. Or at least it must be confronted; it cannot be dismissed as the belaboring of a matter that can never be more than one of opinion. It is at least arguable, then (and I think true), that the modern realist novel as a form is inextricably connected with modern reading or reading for thrills (it being understood, as earlier, that this is a connection after the fact, not the result of a common genesis). This basic idea is widely subscribed to. It

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is part of Watt’s thinking, and also of Bakhtin’s, on the special attachment of the novel to the same reality that its readers experience directly. It is present in Lubbock’s discussion of how narrative positions its reader, and in Dorrit Cohn’s idea of “psychological realism,” the availability of alien subjectivity in nineteenth-century literature, especially novels.3 I think one can go a bit further. Not only reading for thrills but the whole institution of The Reader attaches itself inseparably to the historically evolved condition of the novel as a form. The Reader does not arise necessarily from the practice of reading for thrills. Something at least comparable to reading for thrills has a place in relation to the Commedia and the Decameron (Dante’s merely “listening” reader, the reader of “Prencipe Galeotto”); but the institution of The Reader is still inconceivable in the manuscript culture to which both of those works belong. Or to look at it differently, neither Dante’s work nor Boccaccio’s is aesthetically constituted; therefore reading for thrills cannot be directly involved in making the work what it is. But the congenital association of the novel with literature carries the implication that each novel, as an instance of its form, is aesthetically constituted, which opens the question of how the work’s meaning is regulated—the question that Sterne makes the ironic gesture of answering with his idea of “halving” something or other. In the absence of some regulating mechanism (which would be the level of assumed, if unattainable, truth in Dante and Boccaccio), reading for thrills becomes literally nothing but daydreaming. And the only such mechanism that can operate in an aesthetically constituted work is a mechanism that limits how a reader can feel, which means The Reader. Thus the whole paradox of The Reader, as an indestructible general institution that can still perhaps be dispensed with locally, is given in the emergence of the modern realist novel—in that The Reader cannot be separated from the form but also cannot be demonstrated in any particular text.

Eighteenth-Century Choices Exactly how is it possible to dispense with an institution in individual cases while the institution itself remains intact and as much in force as ever? Exactly how is it possible to dispense, in individual novels, with an ingrained characteristic of the novel as a form? Might we not simply collect all instances in which The Reader is dispensed with and define that collection as a new genre? The trouble is that instances are not unambiguously identifiable as such. By an “instance” we can only mean a text, and

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texts do not provide useful information about their readers. We recall the difference between James reading James and Pound reading James. And there are plenty of readers for whom the reading of any text whatever, no matter how obviously ironic, takes place under the auspices of The Reader. To see how the paradox works in detail, it will be useful to look at a couple of cases from early in the history of the modern novel. The marbled leaf in Tristram Shandy, for example, which Tristram calls the “motly emblem of my work!” (3:204), is unique in every copy of the book. It has therefore almost exactly the same superficial meaning as the double title of the Decameron: what you read depends on who you are. There is no such thing as The Reader relative to this book, hence no such thing as the meaning, indeed no such thing as the book. There is only a motley—a heterogeneous plurality—of readers, meanings, books. Hence the ironic dimension of Tristram’s assertion that without much reading, by which your reverence knows, I mean much knowledge, you will no more be able to penetrate the moral of the next marbled page (motly emblem of my work!) than the world with all its sagacity has been able to unraval the many opinions, transactions and truths which still lie mystically hid under the dark veil of the black one.

The point is that if you possess enough reading, enough knowledge, to make sense of the marbled page, then you have missed the point, which is that there is no sense to be made, either of the marbled page or of the rest of the paragraph that introduces it—or, for that matter, of all your reading. But this is not the end of the matter. Suppose you agree with me and tell me, yes, I have put my fi nger on the meaning of that passage in Tristram Shandy. I must still respond that, no, that is not the case, because the whole point is that the meaning does not exist. This is the parting of the ways. Such is the power of the institution of The Reader, and hence of the meaning (even if it should be ambiguous or plural or internally contradictory), that it is apparently impossible to discuss even the truth about the above passage without falling under that power. Yet, on the other hand, it is also possible (or at least seems so to me) simply to accept the evaporation of meaning here—simply to confront myself here with words that have become gross material objects in the manner of Kaf ka. Indeed, it is not only possible, it is logically necessary, since otherwise I fi nd myself in the contradictory position of taking the absence of meaning as a meaning.

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But however I manage the matter for myself, The Reader is well enough ensconced on an institutional plane to ignore that logic altogether. The separation here is the same as the separation, for Dr. Faustus, between being a Magus and having the experience of being a Magus, which latter is the position of one who reads as The Reader. It is the difference, in turn, between being the master of Diderot’s “fatalist” and being Jacques himself—between (1) having the perspective, the mastery, the self-distance by which The Reader is enabled to accept as a possibility that all things are foreordained, and (2) simply being (exactly and exclusively) what one is, as Jacques’ belief in the writtenness of his life corresponds exactly to his nature as a character in a book. And then, by a brilliant chiasm, it is the difference between (1) understanding, as The Reader, that the narrator’s speculations about what he might or might not have written are all part of the single structure of Jacques le fataliste, and (2) actually reading what is not written, failing to fi nd any difference from what is written, undeterred by the knowledge that what you read depends on who you are. It is, fi nally, the difference, when you get to the end of Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, between (1) understanding that the secret Tower Society represents something like a conspiracy of the book’s readers and (2) actually belonging to that conspiracy as to a limited group that is thus strictly separate from The Reader. And if you have to ask how one qualifies for membership, if you ask after the needful learning or change in your condition—it having failed to impress you that Wilhelm is a member before he learns anything at all—then you are asking as The Reader and so have yourself excluded yourself from the supposed secret, like the man in Kafka’s parable “Vor dem Gesetz.” The choice is a fugitive one, and is there for only one reader at a time. But it is definitely there.

The Parting of the Ways and the Future of Literary Studies It is therefore perfectly possible that, as I have suggested, practically every major novel is written in direct opposition to the idea of The Reader, and can be understood thus by any individual who wants to, while at the same time the reading of those novels, considered as a general cultural phenomenon, conforms completely to the idea of The Reader and cannot even reasonably be called a misreading. But is this possibility also an actual fact? And even if it is, is it a fact with a future? Is it not inevitable that the institution of The Reader will eventually overwhelm all resistance to it on the part of scattered individuals? The only disadvantages of The Reader

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in this struggle are that it does not actually exist and that an essential component of it, reading for thrills, can never actually be carried out in the manner described by its own theory. But since when have chimeras or delusions ever had any trouble sustaining themselves in public intellectual life, especially if they are associated with practices as popular as the writing and reading of novels? It seems to me, nevertheless, that resistance against The Reader is in good shape and likely to remain so, although perhaps not for the right reasons. I am referring to a veritable army of readers who are instantly recognizable by the fact that they never read without pen or pencil in hand and can never read more than two or three pages without scribbling something in a margin—even, sad to tell, if the book happens to belong to a library. I am talking, in other words, about a group whose practice tends very strongly toward the creation of a new manuscript age—however futile it may seem to scribble in printed books—toward an age in which reading for art is the norm and reading for thrills an aberration. I am talking about a relatively well defi ned academic community that is called by various names, of which “literary studies” is probably the least misleading. Of course not everyone in the field of literary studies is committed to the struggle against The Reader. Plenty of scholars and critics have openly thrown in their lot with the opposition, and even more promote the institutional purposes of The Reader without knowing it, usually by not paying attention to their own critical rhetoric as rhetoric or by offering their work for exploitation in inappropriate public settings. But the practice itself—reading with pen in hand, scribbling in margins, seeking always somehow to re-originate the text under discussion—cannot (I think) but have enough of an effect on its practitioners to ensure the existence of a reasonable number of genuine readers for art. (I almost said “a solid core” of such readers, forgetting that they are what they are only as individuals.) And these are the readers who carry on the business of what I called “honest criticism” in Chapter 6, a critical standpoint that is irreconcilable with any degree of deep consensus, a critical practice that can never produce anything but unending and therefore often bitter disagreement. Do we really have a viable population of such readers for art, a sufficiently far-flung conspiracy? There is no way to tell, because these readers are cut off from any public acknowledgment of what they really do. They can play a part in actual public life only to the extent that they are mistaken for partisans of The Reader, which is after all the principal public institution for understanding literature. It follows that they no sooner

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A Concluding Note on the Novel and Literary Studies

become available for counting than we find that we cannot recognize them in order to count them. Nor does the depth of our disagreement with other critics help us here, for in most cases we have no way of knowing whether the disagreement is one of honest criticism or merely a result of the gulf between opposed modes of reading. We do not in the end know very much about those honest critics or genuine readers for art. But the novel in a sense reassures us about them; for we can recognize in every novel that is written or read a kind of token of their existence, a surfacing of that history of genres and especially of that concomitant parting of the ways that defi nes their calling. And we do know that their existence, in turn, brings with it the sacrifice of any true public role or function in modern societies; for they have unlearned to read in the only meaning that reading has for those societies. (They operate in public, they draw paychecks, only for the wrong reasons, under false flags.) And what of their politics? Adorno might have said: their function in society is to have no function, their politics is to have no politics. But if such a thing is true, then it is so only from a public perspective, not from that of those critics themselves, for whom it would require a generalizing move they are incapable of. Their distinction is not that they know more than everybody else, but that they know less. (Montaigne is perhaps the one subject they come closest to agreeing about.) And maybe there is something political here after all. Where else, if not in this “less,” in a materializing of the linguistic vehicle, an unlearning to read, is leverage to be found against the breakneck intellectual ride that Heine warns us of?

Notes

Introduction 1. Arthur Schopenhauer, Vereinzelte, jedoch systematisch geordnete Gedanken über vielerlei Gegenstände, §§ 266–67 (“Selbstdenken”) and § 299 (“Über Lesen und Bücher”), Sämtliche Werke, 6 vols. (Berlin: Globus, n.d.), 5:428, 429, 477–78. 2. The importance of broadcast radio for totalitarian politics is understood very early on, for example by O. W. Riegel, Mobilizing for Chaos: The Story of the New Propaganda (New Haven, 1934), esp. 85–107. 3. The interpretation of Thomas Mann’s “Mario und der Zauberer” in my Theater As Problem: Modern Drama and Its Place in Literature (Ithaca, 1990), 164–71, includes an attempt to explain this process of propaganda reception in detail, with reference specifically to the reading of literature. Norman N. Holland, The Dynamics of Literary Response (New York: Norton, 1975; orig. 1968), who treats literary reading in greater psychological detail than anyone else I know of, notes in his chapter on “The ‘Willing Suspension of Disbelief ’” that “most of us have felt in everyday life that special relaxation into the mental set appropriate to fiction” (68). He is referring to the operation of the fantastic; but my point is that under certain circumstances the same “relaxation” can be made to occur even in our thinking on matters of direct practical importance to us. 4. See Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, trans. (Baltimore, 1976; orig. 1967), esp. 15–17, 97–98, 292. What is discredited is Plato’s (or Rousseau’s) argument considered as an opposition to writing. But writing and reading are not equivalents for the purpose of being called into question. On the complications of this duality, see Roland Barthes, S/Z (Paris, 1970), 9–10 et passim, on the “scriptible” and the “lisible.” Writing without reading, in various senses—hence an acceptance of Derrida’s argument without sacrificing the argument against literacy—is discussed in a number of instances below. “I can write reading but I can’t read writing,” says Albert the Alligator, which may make him the most consistent democratic thinker of his time.

Chapter One: Reading and the Theory of Reading 1. Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading (New York: New Directions, 1960), 36.

317

318

Notes to pages 12–25

2. T. S. Eliot, “The Metaphysical Poets,” Selected Essays: New Edition (New York, 1960), 247. It seems to me, despite Eliot, that a talent for poetry (Eliot’s talent, for example) involves precisely a failure to form “wholes” of experience, a healthy skepticism about those supposed experiential “wholes” that make it easier for the untalented to imagine themselves satisfied with existence. 3. Stanley Fish, “Literature in the Reader: Affective Stylistics” (orig. 1970). This essay has been printed, in slightly differing versions, at least four times. I quote below from Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge, Mass., 1980), 21–67. 4. Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of Literature (Ithaca, 1975), 121. 5. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (New York: Atheneum, 1966; orig. 1957), 11. 6. Stanley Corngold, “The Curtain Half Drawn: Prereading in Flaubert and Kaf ka,” Clayton Koelb and Susan Noakes, eds., The Comparative Perspective on Literature: Approaches to Theory and Practice (Ithaca, 1988), 263. 7. Fish, “Literature in the Reader,” 28. For the idea of making, unmaking, and remaking “sense,” see Fish, “Interpreting the Variorum,” Is There a Text in This Class?, 162. 8. Fish, Is There a Text, 3–4. 9. Ibid., 4. 10. On theology and reading in Milton, see of course Stanley Fish, Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, Mass., 1977; orig. 1967), especially that aspect of the book that Fish summarizes thus: “Milton’s method is to re-create in the mind of the reader (which is, fi nally, the poem’s scene) the drama of the Fall, to make him fall again exactly as Adam did and with Adam’s troubled clarity, that is to say, ‘not deceived’ ” (1). 11. Stanley E. Fish, Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of SeventeenthCentury Literature (Berkeley, 1972). 12. Culler, Structuralist Poetics, 128. 13. Georges Poulet, “Criticism and the Experience of Interiority,” The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man: The Structuralist Controversy, Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato, eds. (Baltimore, 1970), 56–72. References to Poulet’s essay and its “Discussion” are by page in parentheses. 14. “Longinus,” On the Sublime, VII.2 (182v.); my translation. 15. Harold Bloom, How to Read and Why (New York: Touchstone, 2001), 28. 16. Henry James, “Alphonse Daudet,” Partial Portraits (Westport, Conn., 1970; orig. 1888), 227–28. I will speak frequently below of a “Jamesian” idea of reading, and I will always mean thereby only what this quotation says: the idea that reading offers us “another life . . . a miraculous enlargement of experience.” It seems to me that this idea is breathed forth by practically all James’s writing, perhaps especially in the “critical prefaces” to the New York edition of 1907–1909 that are collected in The Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces, intro. by Richard P. Blackmur (New York, 1934). James being James, however, the idea

Notes to pages 25–26

319

is breathed forth without (as far as I know) ever being stated as clearly as in that one passage from Partial Portraits. And yet, there are moments where James seems to go even further. In a well-known passage from the preface to The Golden Bowl, we read: “It’s not that the muffled majesty of authorship doesn’t here ostensibly reign; but I catch myself again shaking it off and disavowing the pretence of it while I get down into the arena and do my best to live and breathe and rub shoulders and converse with the persons engaged in the struggle that provides for the others in the circling tiers the entertainment of the great game” (The Art of the Novel, p. 328). Not only the unsuspecting reader, it appears, but even the all-knowing author is enabled to live “another life” in the fiction. And this ability to live a double life is then mirrored (doubly) in the Prince and Princess. The Prince, in the “clear glass” of his consciousness, “makes us see the things that may most interest us,” while still “being just as consistently a foredoomed, entangled, embarrassed agent in the general imbroglio, actor in the offered play” (329). And the Princess, “in addition to feeling everything she has to, and to playing her part just in that proportion, duplicates, as it were, her value and becomes a compositional resource.” It is as if James were trying to forestall the argument I have just made by showing how even the reader for art (whether man or woman), precisely in carrying out a quasi-authorial reorigination of the work, must here fi nd himself or herself also a reader for thrills, living “another life” inside the fiction. I do not concede any validity to this position. I cite it only as an index of James’s commitment to the idea of reading for thrills. 17. If it occurs to the reader to cite Montaigne’s statement about the individual’s “forme maistresse” in the essay on repentance, I will respond that the context of that statement involves a contradiction—Montaigne admits repeatedly that he himself cannot fi nd such a form in his own being and activity— which creates what I claim is his questioning position. 18. Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author” (orig. 1968), Image. Music. Text, Stephen Heath, trans. (New York: Noonday, 1988), 148. In connection with this focus on “the reader,” I think again of Henry James. See note 16. In particular I recall a statement not of James himself but of his admirer and editor R. P. Blackmur: “But the novel was not a play however dramatic it might be, and among the distinctions between the two forms [novel and drama] was the possibility, which belonged to the novel alone, of setting up a fi ne central intelligence in terms of which everything in it might be unified and upon which everything might be made to depend. No other art could do this; no other art could dramatize the individual at his fi nest; and James worked this possibility for all it was worth. It was the very substance upon which the directed attention, the cultivated appreciation, might be concentrated. And this central intelligence served a dual purpose, with many modifications and exchanges among its branches. It made a compositional centre for art such as life never saw. If it could be created at all, then it presided over everything else, and would compel the story to be nothing but the story of what that intelligence felt about what

320 Notes to pages 26–29 happened” (The Art of the Novel, xviii). Of course Blackmur is talking here about an element of content and structure. But it is equally obvious that James’s “central intelligence,” assuming Blackmur is right about it, is meant to engulf the mind of every particular reader and transform him or her into the single proper reader of the book. 19. Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading, 61, 76, 90. 20. Friedrich Schlegel, Kritische Schriften und Fragmente, 6 vols., Ernst Behler and Hans Eichner, eds. (Paderborn, 1988), 2:214. 21. Günther Blaicher, “‘The Improvement of the Mind’: Auffassungen vom Lesen bei John Locke, Richard Steele und Joseph Addison,” Lesen und Schreiben im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert: Studien zu ihrer Bewertung in Deutschland, England, Frankreich, Paul Goetsch, ed. (Tübingen, 1994), 106. 22. See Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (Berkeley, 1964; orig. 1957), 48–49. The passages Watt quotes are from Steele, The Guardian (no. 60), John Calhoun Stephens, ed. (Lexington, Ky., 1982), 230; and a translation of Huet used as the introductory text in Samuel Croxall, A Select Collection of Novels, vol. 1 (London: J. Watts, 1720), xlv. Watt uses the 1729 edition of Croxall, and gives the page number erroneously as “xiv.” The original of Huet can be found in Fabienne Gégou, ed., Lettre-traité de Pierre-Daniel Huet sur l’origine des romans/La lecture des vieux romans par Jean Chapelain (Paris, 1971), 132. 23. Michael Riffaterre, “Describing poetic structures: Two approaches to Baudelaire’s les Chats,” Jacques Ehrmann, ed., Structuralism (New York: Anchor, 1970; orig. 1966), 203. 24. A great many critics assert the contrary of the fi rst proposition here; and most of them are careful not to see too clearly what they are doing. Among the more honest ones, I think Wolfgang Iser is still the best, and he will be treated later. A fairly recent instance is Garrett Stewart, Dear Reader: The Conscripted Audience in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction (Baltimore, 1996), whose idea of “conscription” is very ingenious, combining the suggestions of compulsion by the book, cowriting of the book, and being written into the book. But the argument is ultimately only an attempt to evade by wit—“you are deliberately drafted [!] by the text, written with . . . your input is a predigested function of the text’s output” (8)—the problems that Iser gets deeper into by plodding. The second proposition—that the history of The Reader must be separate from that of any literary forms—is not attacked so much as it is ignored. Nancy Armstrong, How Novels Think: The Limits of British Individualism from 1719–1900 (New York, 2005), introduces her project, in part, as follows: “This book argues that the history of the novel and the history of the modern subject are, quite literally, one and the same. The British novel . . . came into being . . . as writers sought to formulate a kind of subject that had not yet existed in writing. Once formulated in fiction, however, this subject proved uniquely capable of reproducing itself not only in authors but also in readers, in other novels, and across British culture” (3). The book as a whole turns out to be very intelligent and

Notes to pages 30–34

321

convincing, its main weakness being the inherent improbability that a mere literary form should have the sort of concrete influence here attributed to it. If the independent development of The Reader as an institution is added to the picture, however, that improbability practically vanishes. For actual readers’ willingness to imagine themselves as The Reader—hence to divest themselves (or to imagine themselves divested) of a significant portion of their own specific persons, hence to become (or to imagine themselves become) practically empty vessels awaiting the infusion of new personal qualities—goes a long way toward explaining how a subject “formulated” in the novel, or in any other public arena, might become contagious in reality. 25. Harold Bloom, A Map of Misreading: with a New Preface (New York: Oxford, 2003; orig. 1975), 3. 26. Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford, 1973), 72, 11. 27. Riffaterre, “Describing poetic structures,” 203. 28. Plenty has been written about “literature” as a concept, but as far as I know, no one has yet undertaken a careful and comprehensive study of the history of that word, by which we now designate both our whole academic discipline and its object. Existing scholarship is at many points hampered by this failure. René Wellek, The Rise of English Literary History (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1941), admirable as it is in its actual form, could have benefited in depth and focus from a better understanding of the concept “literature” and its problems. Wolfgang Pfaffenberger, Blütezeiten und nationale Literaturgeschichtsschreibung (Frankfurt/Main, 1981), by contrast, could have found plenty of depth and focus without feeling it necessary to narrow his inquiry as much as he does. Even Lionel Gossman, Between History and Literature (Cambridge, Mass., 1990), stumbles occasionally over the problem of “literature,” despite being fully cognizant of it in his fi rst two chapters. But above all, the association of the aesthetically limited concept of “literature” with various projects for histories of national literature would be clarified if we could put into context, for example, the fact (if it is strictly that) that by the second half of the eighteenth century both German (Briefe, die neueste Literatur betreffend) and French (Voltaire, and then Batteux, but with a tendency to exclude works of “genius”) have developed the new concept, whereas in England (according to the OED) the fi rst occurrence of “literature” in its modern sense is in Sir Humphry Davy, Elements of Chemical Philosophy (1812). Histories of German and French “literature,” in any case, occur from the 1770s on. My own thoughts on the general conceptual situation are developed a bit in my All Theater Is Revolutionary Theater (Ithaca, 2005), esp. 35–41, 219–22, and in my “It’s a Word! It’s a Claim! . . . : Modernism and Related Instances of an Inherently Discredited Conceptual Type,” artUS, special issue 5/6 ( Jan./Feb. 2005), 10–15. 29. See Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore, 1978; orig. German, 1976), 153–55, for a response to Georges Poulet, “Phenomenology of Reading,” NLH 1 (1969–70), 53–68. Iser accuses Poulet of

322 Notes to pages 35–48 “Hegelianism,” of advocating a “substantialist concept of consciousness,” on the grounds that the idea that “a work of literature becomes . . . a mind conscious of itself and constituting itself in me as the subject of its own objects” (Poulet 59) implies “consciousness as an absolute in itself,” consciousness that is not “consciousness of something.” This is nonsense. The new consciousness posited by Poulet has exactly the same objects, the same content, as the “new and real consciousness” (Iser 157) imagined by Iser himself, namely the objects or schemata or images or gestalten (however one wishes to conceive them) that make up the work’s fiction. That Poulet locates this new consciousness in the work, and Iser locates it in a move of “spontaneity” in the reader, whose “subject is separated from himself ” (by engagement with the work), is a distinction without a difference. To say, as Poulet does, that the work itself “becomes” the reading consciousness, is only a somewhat imprecise way of formulating Iser’s insistence on “the ‘presentness’ of the text” (131), on the idea that “Through gestalt-forming, we actually participate in the text” (127)—imprecise in that it neglects the inevitable persistence of “the virtual background of our own orientations” (155). 30. See for example Stanley Fish, “Why No One’s Afraid of Wolfgang Iser,” Diacritics 11, no. 1 (Spring 1981), 2–13, along with the comments in my Beyond Theory: Eighteenth-Century German Literature and the Poetics of Irony (Ithaca, 1993), 14–20, 38–39. Perhaps the most searching critique of Iser, including especially the exposure of his misuse of his authorities, is Samuel Weber, “Caught in the Act of Reading” (orig. 1986), Institution and Interpretation: Expanded Edition (Stanford, 2001), 180–206. 31. Wolfgang Iser, “The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach,” The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (Baltimore, 1974; orig. German, 1972), 274. Page references in the text are not to this book but to The Act of Reading. 32. Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading, 20. 33. See Jean Starobinski, Psychoanalyse und Literatur, Eckhart Rohloff, trans. (Frankfurt/Main, 1973), 78. 34. Jean Starobinski, La relation critique (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), 252. 35. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Illuminations, Hannah Arendt, ed., Harry Zohn, trans. (New York, 1985), 218–19. 36. See Jennifer Wise, Dionysus Writes: The Invention of Theatre in Ancient Greece (Ithaca, 1998). 37. Georges Poulet, “Criticism and the Experience of Interiority,” 59–60. 38. Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading, 128.

Chapter Two: Poems, Myths, and the Advent of Modern Reading 1. Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading (New York: New Directions, 1960), 6, 26. 2. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Goethes Werke, “Weimarer Ausgabe,” 143 vols. (Weimar, 1887–1918), 1:78. Abbreviated “WA” below.

Notes to pages 49–61

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3. Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, Ausgewählte Werke (Munich, 1962), 53–55. 4. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Poems of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Ernest Hartley Coleridge, ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1912), 94. 5. Other instances among Goethe’s poems of initial “Und” in this general sense of “as usual” include “Ultimatum” (WA, 3:106), “An Frau von Stein” (“Und ich geh’,” 4:210), “Familien-Gruß” (4:260), “Altschottisch” (4:336). 6. There are many versions in Goethe’s writing of the idea that rational reflection itself has as much the character of a natural phenomenon as those phenomena it takes as its scientific objects. In the “Vorwort” to the Farbenlehre, a need for “Ironie” in scientific thinking is recognized (WA, pt. 2, 1:xii). In the essay “Der Versuch als Vermittler von Object und Subject” (WA, pt. 2, 11:21–37), the development of scientific knowledge is seen as a kind of dramatic interaction involving characteristic operations of both reason (including debate and consensus in society) and nature. And there are a couple of well known aphorisms in Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre (WA, pt. 2, 11:118)—in “Aus Makariens Archiv,” the aphorisms beginning “Der Mensch an sich selbst, insofern” and “Dafür steht aber der Mensch so hoch,” nos. 706 and 708 in Hecker’s “Maximen und Reflexionen”—which assert that the best possible scientific instrument is the combination of sense perception and reflective reason in the human make-up. 7. See, for example, WA, 2:156, 287; 3:153, 154; 4:167. 8. The poem thus perhaps represents an early form of the thinking on language and terminology at which the Farbenlehre culminates: with the idea that “die einfachste Erscheinung” in a given area of natural science can itself be taken as a “Grundformel” and incorporated directly into scientific discourse (WA, pt. 2, 1:305). 9. The readings I have especially in mind—each of them excellent in its own way—are Sigurd Burckhardt, “The Metaphorical Structure of Goethe’s ‘Auf dem See,’ ” GR 31 (1956), 35–48; Joachim Dyck, “Die Physiognomie der Selbsterkenntnis: Goethes Gedicht Auf dem See,” Euphorion 67 (1973), 74–84; Brigitte Peucker, “Goethe’s Mirror of Art: The Case of ‘Auf dem See,’ ” Goethe Yearbook 2 (1984), 43–49; and Volker Kaiser, “Goethes ‘Ich’ und das Subjekt der Dichtung: Zur Genealogie des Gedichts Auf dem See,” Goethe Yearbook 11 (2002), 197–211. 10. Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Kleine Schriften, Vorreden, Entwürfe, Walter Rehm, ed. (Berlin, 1968), 29–30. 11. This way of looking at things is of course not original with Winckelmann. The initiate, who knows, and the expert, who practices, are also combined in the Renaissance understanding of the Latin term “poeta”; and in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the technical German term for belles-lettres is “schöne Wissenschaften,” literally “beautiful sciences,” which stresses knowing in an area defi ned by practice. 12. The idea of “simple-mindedness” here presupposes an eighteenthcentury perspective. For forms of what Winckelmann calls “allegory” had

324

Notes to pages 62–72

long existed and had been called mainly “iconologies” in the wake of Cesare Ripa, Iconologia: overo descrittione di diverse imagini cavate dall’ antichità, & di propria inventione (1593, 1603)—which Winckelmann mentions and claims he will supersede (56). But Stephen Orgel points out (correctly I think) in the introductory remark to his facsimile edition of J. J. Winckelmann, Versuch einer Allegorie, besonders für die Kunst (1766; rpt. New York, 1976), which also includes a French version of 1799, that Winckelmann’s work “is unexpectedly far closer to Ripa and Pierio Valeriano than to Addison and Spence.” Interestingly enough, there is a German book, printed by Johann Georg Hertel in Augsburg, that claims to be a version of Ripa and is almost exactly contemporaneous with Winckelmann’s Versuch. See Ilse Wirth, ed., Des berühmten Italienischen Ritters Caesaris Ripae allerley Künsten und Wissenschaften dienliche Sinnbilder und Gedancken (Munich: Fink, 1970). (For dating, see p. 16 of this edition.) And it is immediately apparent that this book is meant more to show off its own engravings than to be useful to artists, which latter is the stated aim of both Ripa and Winckelmann. It appears, then, that in reality Winckelmann is attempting not so much to supersede Ripa’s project as to revive it, in the form of a book meant not for a broad audience of artistic consumers, but for a smaller group of productively oriented readers (readers for art, I have said), a work that will be, in the words of Ripa’s 1603 title page, “Non meno utile che necessaria a Poeti, Pittori, Scultori, & altri, per rappresentare le Virtù, Vitii, Affetti, & Passioni humane.” 13. Friedrich Schlegel, Kritische Schriften und Fragmente, “Studienausgabe,” 6 vols., Ernst Behler and Hans Eichner, eds. (Paderborn, 1988), 2:201. 14. Goethe says specifically, “Jeder sei auf seine Art ein Grieche! Aber er sei’s” (WA, 49/1:156), in the essay “Antik und Modern.” 15. See the sections “Antikes” and “Heidnisches” in Goethe’s Winckelmann essay (WA, 46:21–26). These pieces can be read in their intended context in Goethe (author and editor), Winckelmann und sein Jahrhundert, Helmut Holtzhauer, ed. (Leipzig, 1969), 210–12. 16. J. J. Winckelmann, Versuch einer Allegorie [and De l’Allégorie], Stephen Orgel, ed. (New York, 1976), 3, cited by page below. 17. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Werke, 8 vols., Herbert G. Göpfert et al., eds. (Munich, 1970–79), 8:454. Cited below by page in vol. 8. 18. There are also some formal tricks in the text that suggest the game Lessing is playing. Our attention is immediately attracted by the subtitle, “Gespräche für Freimäurer.” Why conversations for Freemasons? Does this mean conversations “as a model for” Freemasons, for how to talk about Freemasonry? Or is it “conversations to be read by Freemasons”? In this case, the implication is that they will be read differently by Freemasons and by the general public, which means that even in print they will constitute a kind of exclusive conversation with Freemasons after all. And then, in the “Vorrede eines Dritten” that introduces the fourth conversation—an intermediate preface that most editors deny Lessing wrote, on the basis of no hard evidence that I have ever seen—the self-styled “Herausgeber” speaks of “Der Verfasser” (singular!) of the first three conversations (955), which

Notes to pages 72–87

325

would mean that he himself is not really a “third party” at all, but only a second party, and of course also that the conversations are not really conversations but a treatise in dialogue form. And then the situation is complicated further by an editorial note at the end of the whole work, which speaks of “ein sechstes Gespräch, welches unter diesen Freunden vorfiel” (969), thus resurrecting the fiction of actual conversations yet once more. Devices of this sort are not atypical of Lessing. The author of Pope ein Metaphysiker!, for instance, speaks of himself repeatedly as “ich,” which becomes a problem when one considers that the work is a collaboration of Lessing and Mendelssohn. (The use of “wir” would not have been unusual, even for a single author.) And the objection that this feature of the text makes no difference, since the work was published anonymously, only transforms the “ich” into an esoteric joke for those in the know. 19. Iser, The Implied Reader, 274–75. 20. I realize that this is not a generally accepted view. But I make the assertion nonetheless. See my Beyond Theory, 10, 337. 21. For what it is worth, the whole of Enobarbus’s praise of Cleopatra in Antony and Cleopatra (II, ii) is side-marked, and underscored line by line, in Keats’s Shakespeare, including the lines: “I saw her once / Hop forty paces through the public street: / And having lost her breath, she spoke and panted, / That she did make defect, perfection, / And, breathless, power breathe forth.” See Caroline F. E. Spurgeon, Keats’s Shakespeare: A Descriptive Study Based on New Material (Oxford, 1928), 126.

Chapter Three: Dante and the Invention of the Novel Reader 1. The edition of the Commedia I use is Dante Alighieri, Commedia, commentary by Anna Maria Chiavacci Leonardi, 3 vols. (Milan: Mondadori, 1991–97). The text is practically identical to that of Giorgio Petrocchi, ed., La Commedia secondo l’antica vulgata, 4 vols. (Milan: Mondadori, 1966–67). 2. See Le Opere di Dante, testo critico della Società Dantesca Italiana (Florence, 1921), 444–45. I use this edition for everything of Dante’s except the Commedia. 3. Apart from ellipses, of which there are several, the main deviation from the Vulgate here is in the words “et vidit arcana Dei,” where the Vulgate ordinarily has “et audivit arcana verba.” Thomas Ricklin, in his searching and learned edition with commentary of Dante Alighieri, Das Schreiben an Cangrande della Scala (Hamburg, 1993), 192, says he knows of no other occurrence of this particular variant. 4. All of this, starting with the reference to Matthew, is in section 80 of the letter to Can Grande (Opere 445). Ricklin, in his commentary (193–200), goes as far as he can in giving Dante the benefit of the doubt, by associating (194) the idea of forgetting with Paul’s “nescio,” with ignorance of the body–soul relation during the rapture. But he admits that he still cannot make Dante’s argument hold together logically or gibe with the texts he appeals to.

326

Notes to pages 89–97

5. It is possible that in Inferno 2 Dante is also alluding to the much translated and distributed Visio Pauli. For references to a number of passages in the Inferno that could be reflections of the Visio Pauli, see, for example, H. T. Silverstein, “Dante and the Visio Pauli,” MLN 47 (1932), 397–99. But the reference to Second Corinthians is of course not excluded by this possibility. 6. Convivio 2.i.2–4; Opere 171–72. 7. Charles S. Singleton, Commedia: Elements of Structure, Dante Studies 1 (Cambridge, Mass., 1954), especially the fi rst chapter, “Allegory” (1–17), and the “Appendix: The Two Kinds of Allegory” (84–98). 8. I think this basic problem is widely recognized, but I am not sure it is often recognized as a problem. For instance, Peter S. Hawkins, “All Smiles: Poetry and Theology in Dante,” PMLA 121 (2006), 371–87, says, “we need to be aware that Dante is contrasting his certain vision of truth with the theologians’ mere speculation about it. Like him, they have scripture and tradition as their authorities; but Dante—like Paul [!]—sees for himself ” (376). How exactly are “authorities” and the claim of “certain truth” related? Is Dante’s claim to have seen true in exactly the same sense that Paul’s is? Hawkins understands perfectly well that “for the reader of Paradiso 28 who is adept in angelology, it is evident that the poet’s spokeswoman, Beatrice, is following Dionysius to the letter. But instead of acknowledging a debt to an authoritative theologian, the poet makes it appear that Dionysius is in accord with Dante/Beatrice and not the other way around” (373). How is this arrogation of authority—even if it is transparent—consistent with Christian humility or scholarly honesty? 9. Chiavacci Leonardi, 1.118–19, comes close to making this point in her commentary on the passage. She thinks in terms of “styles” rather than types or genres. 10. The following is not a complete list, but a reasonable sampling of types of noncommunication: Par. 1.67–72; 5.109–14; 10.70–75; 14.79–81, 103–5; 20.10–11; 23.40–45; 30.19–27; 31.133–38; 33.55–63, 91–93. 11. Ricklin notes in connection with Dante’s evasiveness here, “Vielleicht ist diese Zurückhaltung von der Vorsicht diktiert. Eine allzu präzise Angabe bezüglich der Art und Weise des Interesses am subiectum seiner Comm., nämlich dem ‘status animarum post mortem’ könnte sowohl dem Verfasser als auch den Lesern und Leserinnen zum Verhängnis werden. . . . In der nützlichen Anleitung De modo, arte et ingenio inquirendi hereticos [des ‘bekannten Inquisitors’ Bernhard Gui] heißt es . . . daß verdächtige Personen z.B. danach zu befragen sind, ob sie etwas wissen ‘de statu animarum defunctorum; item de prenuntiatonibus futurorum eventuum’ ” (111–12). In his introduction, moreover, Ricklin gives a very detailed and (as far as I can see) entirely sound argument for not simply rejecting the authenticity of the second part of the letter on the grounds that there is a change of style at section 14 (Opere 437). 12. Augustine, De Civitate Dei, 11.26. 13. Summa Theologica, 1a.27.1. The discussion of univocal, equivocal, and analogical predicates is found at 1a.13.5.

Notes to pages 98–126

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14. In structure this point is parallel to Singleton’s point that to employ a Scripture-like allegory of the theologians, Dante must “lay provision [in the fi rst two cantos considered as a prologue] as God’s word need not do” (16). He must, that is, teach his reader how to read. 15. Susan Noakes, Timely Reading: Between Exegesis and Interpretation (Ithaca, 1988), 55. 16. There are basically two schools of thought about this word. One, using the present passage and especially also Inf. 32.93, sees the “note” as written signs; the other, citing Inf. 19.118 and Par. 19.98, emphasizes a musical aspect in their meaning. Of course these opinions are not mutually exclusive. 17. The prophecy is fi rst stated, along with the image of the greyhound (veltro) as a political savior, in Inf. 1.100–111, and is alluded to in Cantos 20 (10–15) and 33 of the Purgatorio and in the part of Cacciaguida’s prophecy that Dante is not permitted to record (Par. 17.91–93). 18. Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, Willard R. Trask, trans. (New York, 1963; orig. German, 1948), p. 222, notes, in connection with this passage, “Tractare is a technical term in medieval philosophy and means ‘to treat philosophically.’ ” 19. For example, Par. 1.4–9, 67–72; 10.70–75; 14.103–8; 18.7–12; 23.40–63. For obvious reasons, this list overlaps with the list in note 10 above. 20. See Chapter 1, note 16. 21. She is referring mainly to Iser, The Implied Reader, 4–10. 22. Chiavacci Leonardi, in her commentary to the Commedia, 3:492, records the fact that obscure people are shown—she mentions Ciacco, Belacqua, and Piccarda—but makes an excuse for it and does not press the question. 23. Curtius, European Literature, 367. “The personnel of the Commedia” is Curtius’s phrase (365). 24. Francis Fergusson, Dante’s Drama of the Mind: A Modern Reading of the Purgatorio (Princeton, 1953), 143, says that in the course of the Purgatorio, “Dante the Pilgrim and Dante the author are gradually revealed as one. The point at which they coincide, the climax of this sequence (and of so much else) when Dante’s own name is mentioned for the fi rst and only time, is the meeting with Beatrice in Canto XXX, line 55.” Fergusson has a point here (as he always does), but it is not exactly the one he states. I will argue later that the fact of the coincidence of poet and pilgrim is displayed emphatically as early as Inferno 2. 25. See Chiavacci Leonardi, commentary to the Commedia, 3:588. 26. Fergusson, Dante’s Drama, 9–10. 27. The instance that will be most familiar to most readers is Augustine, Civ. Dei, 10.27. 28. After Matelda draws a parallel between the Garden of Eden and antiquity’s dream of a lost Golden Age, Purgatorio 28 ends as follows: “Io mi rivolsi ’n dietro allora tutto / a’ miei poeti, e vidi che con riso / udito avëan l’ultimo costrutto; / poi a la bella donna torna’ il viso” (145–48). Hawkins takes this

328

Notes to pages 128–38

smile as one of relatively simple joy (“All Smiles” 379), but I don’t see why all the smiles in Dante (even among the blessed or soon to be blessed) need to have this quality. Surely there is some indulgent irony here, especially in the recognition that Matelda is being polite to the poets by imputing some truth to their conventional visions. Her statement is called a “costrutto,” which, if it does not mean “interpretation,” is even more dismissive, meaning a grammatical construction in the abstract apart from any claim to truth or meaning. And if Matelda can sacrifice strict truth to politeness, then surely her explanation of how the two rivers work can have been watered down a bit to make it easier to understand. 29. The Greek name Κίρρα refers actually to a port city near Delphi. Dante, who, as far as I can tell, has the name “Cirrha” from Statius, apparently thinks of it as one of the two peaks of Parnassus. The places in Statius’ Thebaid where the word seems most clearly associated with Apollo or Parnassus or both are: 1.62, 641; 3.106, 455, 611; 7.347, 410, 664, 779; 8.331, 337, 453. 30. The metaphor goes back ultimately to Heraclitus, fragment 48 (Diels/ Kranz), who plays on the similarity of βιός (bow) and βίος (life). 31. Apart from the passages mentioned, the word esperïenza occurs eight times in the poem. In Inf. 31.99 it is used by the pilgrim to express a perhaps frivolous desire to see sensational sights (the giant Briareus), but in general its meaning is ethically positive. It refers to instructive experience (Inf. 17.38; Purg. 26.75), to scientific experiments (Purg. 15.21; Par. 2.95), and to imposing experiences by which personal wisdom is developed (Purg. 4.13; Par. 1.72, 20.47). Thus there are no grounds on which to dismiss Ulysses’ use of the word as meaning something substantially different from Vergil’s. 32. Of course the sense of this passage, for present purposes, is not changed if the two Guidos are taken to be Guido Guinizelli and Guittone of Arezzo, which is also possible. 33. Chiavacci Leonardi calls the tercet a “tipica espressione dantesca, che fa concreta nei due verbi la consunta immagine dell’aggettivo latino semianimis (in italiano ‘mezzo morto’)” (1:1014). The famous commentary of Scartazzini, reproduced in Dante Alighieri, La Divina Commedia, Società Dantesca Italiana, Giuseppe Vandelli, ed., 17th ed. (Milan: Hoepli, 1958), 288, offers even less. 34. I realize that readers are sorely tempted simply to identify Beatrice’s “secret truth” with the angelic hierarchy she describes. The passage, after all, appears to mark Dante’s change of mind from what he had said in the Convivio, book 2, chapter 6 (chapter 5 in the numbering suggested by some mss., Opere 179–82). But in my opinion: First, the shadow of Paul’s reticence about giving information in Second Corinthians hangs much too heavy over the whole Commedia for us to imagine that he simply provided the details of “God’s secret things” to Dionysius. Second, the hermeneutics of the Commedia, which we have worked out at length, stipulate that no doctrinal statement, no matter who makes it, can be counted an absolute “secret truth” of God. And third, precisely with respect to the Celestial Hierarchies of Dionysius, it is highly unlikely that

Notes to pages 139–50 329 Dante, just this once, would have claimed access to the absolutely true. Certainly Dionysius makes no such claim. Diego Sbacchi, La Presenza di Dionigi Areopagita nel Paradiso di Dante (Florence, 2006), makes what seems to me a convincing argument that Dante, guided by the thought of Albertus Magnus, put together his own version of Neoplatonism out of materials largely from Dionysius; and my own sense of Neoplatonic theology is that it is focused much more on the process of knowing than on the objects thereof. I am not qualified to judge on this matter, or on the question of how much of Dionysius Dante knew directly. But it strikes me as interesting that in the Celestial Hierarchies, in chapters 5 and 6, when the author gets to the point of mentioning sources (which the tradition identifies with Paul) for his specific descriptions of heaven, he does so (if I read him right) not to guarantee the truth of what he says but rather to excuse its individualized symbolic shape, hence its distance from truth. 35. On this passage in Dante, and especially on the smile, see Hawkins, “All Smiles,” 373–75.

Chapter Four: Boccaccio, Cervantes, and the Path to Solitary Reading 1. Gerald L. Bruns, Inventions: Writing, Textuality, and Understanding in Literary History (New Haven, 1982), 44. 2. Giovanni Boccaccio, Il Comento alla Divina Commedia e gli altri scritti intorno a Dante, Domenico Guerri, ed., 3 vols. (Bari, 1918), 3.235–56. 3. Le Opere di Dante (1921), see Chapter 3, note 2. 4. Tutte le Opere di Giovanni Boccaccio, Vittore Branca, ed., 12 vols. (Milan: Mondadori, 1964–), 3:486. 5. Against these points will be cited Dante’s impassioned arguments in the Convivio, book 1, chapters 5–13, in favor of Italian commentary upon Italian texts. But the canzoni commented on in the Convivio do not require of their reader anything like the classical education that the Commedia does, whose Latinity Boccaccio, in his Italian commentary, spends much ink in supplying— for example, when Vergil is fi rst introduced. (See Tutte le Opere 6:29–46.) It is certainly true that Dante wrote in Italian for the sake of usefulness to his fellow countrymen. But it is also true that the Commedia will not be fully understood— especially in its hermeneutic aspect—except by a “grammarian.” 6. Page numbers for the Decameron refer to Tutte le Opere, vol. 4. 7. Numbers after “McW” refer to pages in Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron, G. H. McWilliam, trans. (London: Penguin, 1972). 8. Robert Hollander, Boccaccio’s Dante and the Shaping Force of Satire (Ann Arbor, 1997), summarizes and gives both contour and very detailed corroboration to the increasingly accepted view that “the Decameron is thick with reminiscences of the Commedia” and that Boccaccio “can hardly make a move without thinking of how Dante moved before him” (2–3). My own argument goes a step further: to the assertion that its relation with the Commedia is part of the basic conception of the Decameron.

330

Notes to pages 150–60

9. Noakes’s discussion of this passage is found in Timely Reading, 83–85. Boccaccio’s note is quoted from La Vita nuova, Michele Barbi, ed. (Milan: Hoepli, 1907), xv, note 1. Noakes quotes from a 1932 edition of the same book. 10. I do not think we can fi nd any sort of coherent development in Boccaccio’s ideas of “text” and “gloss.” He simply understands these concepts differently under different circumstances. Noakes gives the impression that the Vita nuova edition shows his basic ideas, from which the Teseida represents a deviation. But the Teseida is certainly an early work, probably from before 1340, whereas the Vita nuova edition—to judge from its frequent association with Boccaccio’s Vita di Dante (or Trattatello) in Barbi’s “Gruppo b” of manuscripts (cxix–cxx, see note 9 for reference)—is likely to be from after 1355. 11. Guido Almansi, The Writer as Liar: Narrative Technique in the Decameron (London, 1975), recognizes the importance of these concepts for understanding Boccaccio when he says “Perhaps it is true that a book, any book, contains its own inbuilt reader’s guide: instructions to the recipient about what to expect, how to interpret what he has before him. This idea of the book containing the key to itself is in a wide sense already implicit in any defi nition in terms of literary genre” (19). What he misses here, and what I think Boccaccio does not miss, is the problem created by the idea of a book’s “containing” a specification of its genre. 12. Joy Hambuechen Potter, Five Frames for the Decameron: Communication and Social Systems in the Cornice (Princeton, 1982), 96, 110, 121. 13. I will use this word as a convenient designation for the “company” of ten storytellers. Boccaccio (fi rst in the “Proemio” 5) and writers on Boccaccio use it frequently for this purpose. The designation “lieta brigata” ( joyful company) that some critics use is found at the end of the ninth day (844, McW 731). 14. If we happen to know Boccaccio’s other works, we will be inclined to identify Panfi lo as the lover of Fiammetta (cf. Fiammetta) and Filostrato as the lover of Filomena (cf. Filostrato), which means that Dioneo’s beloved must be Neifi le. But this knowledge, if knowledge it is, only tantalizes us further with questions (raised by the stories and songs in their function as glosses) about the specific quality of these love relationships. 15. Almansi, The Writer as Liar, 49. 16. For Boccaccio’s view on this point, see the Trattatello and the theoretical book 14 of the Genealogie Deorum Gentilium, in Tutte le Opere 3:475–76, 7/8:1420. 17. The critical focus upon Boccaccio’s realism, or “naturalism,” is by all accounts the more widespread and persistent of these two tendencies, dating back at least to Francesco De Sanctis, Storia della Letteratura Italiana (1870). Aldo D. Scaglione, Nature and Love in the Late Middle Ages (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1963), at the beginning of his own highly developed version of the naturalistic view, gives a nuanced and lucid description of the evolution of critical positions (48–53). The establishment of a contrary perspective, from which the Decameron appears as an instance of more or less pure “poesia,” is credited generally to

Notes to pages 163–70

331

Attilio Momigliano in his 1924 edition of forty-nine of the novellas, but seems to have been sustained principally by the influence of Benedetto Croce. At least Vittore Branca, who certainly had a clear sense of the Boccaccio debates, and whose espousal of the naturalist view included a pioneering grasp of its relation to medieval tradition, speaks of a “dittatura ideologica del grande Croce,” in the preface to the third edition (1970) of his Boccaccio medievale e nuovi studi sul Decameron, 5th ed. (Florence, 1981; orig. 1956), ix. The relevant parts of book 14 of the Genealogie, in any case, for understanding “poetry” in a sense that may or may not be applicable to the Decameron, are sections 10, 12, and 13 (Tutte le Opere, 7/8:1418–22, 1430–50). A good deal of sophisticated recent criticism actually belongs to that old aesthetic school without admitting it, and perhaps without knowing it. Joy Hambuechen Potter summarizes her endeavor by saying “My intention is more to build further implications into the text than to attempt to present defi nitive answers to all of the problems examined. . . . Literary criticism stands in a relationship that can best be described as symbiotic with the works it examines, and any reductive approach to a text is self-serving rather than serving the text, as it should” (Five Frames 153). This seems a reasonable and liberal view until one considers the implications that can be “built into” the idea of “serving the text,” which tend strongly toward what I see as a kind of religion of literature, a religion whose refusal to admit being such opens it especially to the danger of becoming an “ideological dictatorship” in exactly (I think) Branca’s sense. Potter’s book is still an excellent one, as are, for instance, Millicent Joy Marcus, An Allegory of Form: Literary Self-Consciousness in the Decameron (Saratoga, Cal., 1979) and Giuseppe Mazzotta, The World at Play in Boccaccio’s Decameron (Princeton, 1986). But the religion of literature makes itself felt in all of them, in the last two especially where they force a separation from Dante—“critics err in reading Boccaccio with Dante in mind” (Marcus 110); “[esthetics] makes Boccaccio suspicious of the grand designs of Dante’s vatic voice” (Mazzotta 11)—in search (I think) of a Crocean, or ultimately Hegelian, independent “unity” for the Decameron. In any case, the whole spectrum of Boccaccio criticism seems still to be alive and well: the aesthetic wing (but without reference, curiously, to Walter Benjamin) in Richard Kuhns, Decameron and the Philosophy of Storytelling: Author as Midwife and Pimp (New York, 2005); the realist wing in Pier Massimo Forni, Adventures in Speech: Rhetoric and Narration in Boccaccio’s Decameron (Philadelphia, 1996); and positions toward which I incline personally, in Hollander on Boccaccio’s Dante, of course, and in Roberta Bruno Pagnamenta, Il Decameron: L’ambiguità come strategia narrativa (Ravenna, 1999), which calls attention strongly to the cornice. 18. Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote de la Mancha, Samuel Putnam, trans. (New York: Modern Library, 1998), 644–45. 19. Franco Meregalli, “La literatura italiana en la obra de Cervantes,” Arcadia 6 (1971): 1–15, summarizes scholarly opinion on the relation between Cervantes and Boccaccio: “Alguna relación entre los dos existe sin duda y se admite por todos, aunque no se encuentra una sola cita de Boccaccio en toda la obra de

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Notes to pages 171–88

Cervantes, hecho que se explica perfectamente si pensamos que Boccaccio resulta incluído en el Índice de libros prohibidos desde 1559” (8). He then goes on to point out that although the Decameron had not been published in Spain, a censored and corrupt Italian version had appeared in 1573, and “en 1573 Cervantes estaba en Italia.” Of course this does not prove anything. Personally, I do not see how Cervantes could have been ignorant of Boccaccio, but the argument I will make for connecting them does not depend on any assumptions in this regard. 20. Carmen R. Rabell, Rewriting the Italian Novella in Counter-Reformation Spain (Woodbridge, UK, 2003), treats ingeniously (with reference to legal issues) and succinctly, but in considerable depth, the very tricky question of why Spanish authors of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries should even want to work with a literary form that was so strongly associated with Boccaccio’s morally and ecclesiastically unacceptable stories. When Cervantes calls the novellas in his collection “exemplary,” he apparently means the word to be understood as implying non- or indeed anti-Boccaccian. Meregalli, incidentally, does not mention Giraldi, and I assume therefore that there is no evidence that Cervantes had read him. But again, my argument does not depend on the existence of any such evidence. Giraldi represents just one more possible path (an especially interesting one, to be sure, since his work appeared in Spanish) by which the technique of the brigata could have reached Cervantes. Other versions of the brigata in Boccaccio’s wake that Cervantes could have read while in Italy include the Piacevoli notti (1550–53) of Gian Francesco Straparola, the Novelle (1560) of Pietro Fortini, and the Sei giornate (1567) of Sebastiano Erizzo. Information on these collections can be found in Robert J. Clements and Joseph Gibaldi, Anatomy of the Novella: The European Tale Collection from Boccaccio and Chaucer to Cervantes (New York, 1997). 21. See for example Alban K. Forcione, Cervantes and the Humanist Vision: A Study of Four Exemplary Novels (Princeton, 1982), 37–38n9. Also, on Decameron 6.1, see Almansi, The Writer as Liar, 20–24. 22. Ruth S. El Saffar, Novel to Romance: A Study of Cervantes’s Novelas ejemplares (Baltimore, 1974), xii–xiii. The inner quotation is from J. Hillis Miller, The Form of Victorian Fiction: Thackeray, Dickens, Trollope, George Eliot, Meredith, and Hardy (South Bend, Ind., 1968), 46. 23. Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Exemplary Novels, B. W. Ife, ed., 4 vols. (Warminster, UK, 1992), 1:5.

Chapter Five: Magic and History: The Roots and Branches of Dr. Faustus 1. Frances Yates, The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age (London: Routledge, 2001; orig. 1979), 141–42. 2. Hilary Gatti, The Renaissance Drama of Knowledge: Giordano Bruno in England (London: Routledge, 1989), 75. 3. Fredson Bowers, ed., The Complete Works of Christopher Marlowe, 2 vols., 2nd ed. (Cambridge, 1981), 2.226. All quotations from Dr. Faustus are located by page number in this volume.

Notes to pages 189–202

333

4. See Harold Bloom, ed., Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, Modern Critical Interpretations (New York, 1988), esp. Bloom, “Introduction,” 8–11, and Christopher Ricks, “Doctor Faustus and Hell on Earth” (orig. 1985), 115–32, the quote in the text being on 117. 5. Frances A. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (Chicago, 1991; orig. 1964), 144. 6. With regard to Bruno’s actual thinking, of course, it is not so much the question of hell as that of death that is suggested here. Bruno does after all affi rm the “metempsychosis” Faustus later longs for, which reduces the whole question of hell to an irrelevancy, a fable. 7. Thomas Mann, “Deutschland und die Deutschen,” Gesammelte Werke in dreizehn Bänden, 2nd ed. (Frankfurt/Main: S. Fischer, 1974), 11:1131. 8. Historia von D. Johann Fausten, in Deutsche Volksbücher, Karl Otto Conrady, ed. (n.p.: Rowohlt, 1968), 141, in the section “Oratio Fausti ad Studiosos.” Mann modernizes the initial “Dann” to “Denn” in his Gesammelte Werke, 6:646. All quotations from Doktor Faustus are located by page number in this volume. 9. Some critics are dissatisfied with the choice here. See, for instance, Inken Steen, Parodie und parodistische Schreibweise in Thomas Manns “Doktor Faustus” (Tübingen, 2001), 161–69, who argues that the conversation with the devil marks a fundamental shift in the novel’s discourse type. For a more politically oriented discussion of the problems here, see my Beyond Theory, 312–20. 10. See Paul Deussen, Erinnerungen an Friedrich Nietzsche (Leipzig, 1901), 24. 11. The closer one gets to the question of Nietzsche’s syphilis, the more confused the biographical situation becomes, thanks especially to the early efforts at denial and obfuscation on the part of Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche. As far as I can tell, the idea that Nietzsche deliberately got himself infected is based entirely on one remark in a medical report—“[Patient] Gibt an, daß er sich zweimal specifisch inficiert habe”—that was not made public (in print) until 1930, in E. F. Podach, Nietzsches Zusammenbruch (Heidelberg, 1930), 110, and does not even name the disease in question. But the idea itself appears to have spread by word of mouth long before that. And the episode of the two doctors, which is also widely reported, appears to rest upon no extant original documents whatever. Wilhelm Lange-Eichbaum lets it be known that “a prominent Berlin neurologist” (whom he does not name) had told him that Nietzsche had received antisyphilitic treatment from “two doctors in Leipzig.” (See Curt Paul Janz, Friedrich Nietzsche: Biographie, 3 vols., 2nd ed. [Munich, 1993; orig. 1978], 1:202.) Perhaps these sources in Leipzig are the same mysterious “Gewährsmänner” cited by P. J. Möbius, Nietzsche (Leipzig, 1909), 50. And so on. The game continues to be played into the late twentieth and early twenty-fi rst centuries. Joachim Köhler, Zarathustras Geheimnis: Friedrich Nietzsche und seine verschlüsselte Botschaft (Nördlingen, 1989), xii, refers to an unnamed “source” for the supposed information that Nietzsche might have been infected at a male brothel in Genoa. And Curtis Cate, Friedrich Nietzsche (Woodstock and New York, 2005)—a book

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Notes to pages 202–10

that is especially useful because it gives its sources in great detail—mentions the visits to doctors in Leipzig (72) as well as a third-hand report about Nietzsche’s contracting syphilis during his military service in 1870 (554). And of course there are plenty of authors who are willing to build ambitious theories upon all this at best fragmentary factual material—beginning with Henry Walter Brann, Nietzsche und die Frauen (Bonn, 1978; orig. 1931), who suggests that Nietzsche’s deliberate self-infection can be understood as a self-punishment incorporated directly into the act being punished (208). In this general atmosphere, it is easy to see how Thomas Mann found room for the fanciful development of his own Nietzsche figure; and it is equally easy, I think, to visualize a similar imaginative process (a corresponding self-stylization) on Leverkühn’s part. 12. Even as late as 1978, Janz, in his more or less defi nitive biography, 1:202–3, is only grudgingly prepared to accept the conclusion that Nietzsche’s recorded symptoms justify an unchallenged diagnosis of syphilis. 13. It is possible that Mann is imitating Goethe here. On 3 July 1796, Schiller points out to Goethe that in the fi fth book of Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre the character Werner is not yet married, but at the beginning of the eighth book (not more than a year or two later in fictional time) he already has several sons who “are writing and figuring, negotiating and peddling, and for each of whom he has already set up a little business.” Goethe placates Schiller by making a few changes, including the words “im Geiste schon” (WA, 23:135)—Werner now sees his children’s future activities “in his mind’s eye”—but the several children are still there! 14. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, F. Max Müller, trans. (Garden City, N.Y., 1966), xliii. 15. This point is sometimes confi rmed even by the most diehard admirers of Kant. Willi Goetschel, Constituting Critique: Kant’s Writing as Critical Praxis (Durham, N.C., 1994), 11–12, says, “Any history of the essay that overlooks Kant’s deepening of the form is thus constrained to follow the general tendency that defi nes the criteria of the essay as openness, incompleteness, and a view to the infi nite. Such an approach will be unable to grasp the decisive criterion: transcendental reflectivity. What makes Kant’s use of the essay so interesting, from the perspective of both philosophy and literary theory, is that it brought about a qualitative transformation in the philosophical essay as such, by employing the essay as a means of reflecting upon method itself. Kant’s essays can therefore be understood as a series of experiments, extending over decades, at the end of which stands a new literary genus, the Critique.” Leaving aside the enormously naive idea of genre (or “genus”) here, what is actually said is that Kant fi nds a way to give philosophical writing the sort of quasi-literary pretentiousness that makes honest disagreement or debate seem merely vulgar, like disagreeing with a Mozart symphony. 16. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, HansFriedrich Wessels and Heinrich Clairmont, eds. (Hamburg, 1988), 6. 17. See for example most recently, Yirmiyahu Yovel, trans. and comm., Hegel’s Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit (Princeton, 2005).

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335

18. Compare M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York, 1971), 227–37, on the Phenomenology as a work of modern novelistic literature. 19. See for example D. P. Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella (London, 1958). 20. Goethe’s letter to Zelter of 26 July 1828, about Faust. 21. Thomas Mann, Die Entstehung des Doktor Faustus: Roman eines Romans, in Gesammelte Werke, 11:187. See also 11:171, 172, on the novel’s being the sort of composition it describes. 22. Heinrich Heine, Säkularausgabe: Werke, Briefwechsel, Lebenszeugnisse (Berlin and Paris, 1970ff.), 8:204.

Chapter Six: Intransitive Parody and the Trap of Reading: What Reading Really Is 1. Gerhart Hauptmann, Sämtliche Werke, Centenar-Ausgabe, Hans-Egon Hass, ed., 11 vols. (Frankfurt/Main, 1962), 6:58, 60. 2. Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Erzählungen: Erfundene Gespräche und Briefe: Reisen, Bernd Schoeller, ed. (Frankfurt/Main: S. Fischer, n.d.), 124, in the edition Gesammelte Werke in zehn Einzelbänden. 3. Pots of basil, as every reader of Boccaccio knows (Dec. 4.5), contain the heads of dead lovers. It is as if Anton Lerch’s dreaming mind—as the mind of a dead man—were actually inside that room. 4. Roland Barthes, S/Z (n.p.: Seuil, 1970), 11. 5. The reference is to Goethe’s poem “Urworte. Orphisch” (WA, 3:95–96). 6. Percy Lubbock, The Craft of Fiction (New York, 1957; orig. 1921). 7. It is interesting, if not strictly relevant, that all Aschenbach’s major works correspond to plans that Mann himself had abandoned. For references on where to fi nd detailed information, see Hans Rudolf Vaget, Thomas Mann—Kommentar zu sämtlichen Erzählungen (Munich, 1984), 171. 8. Julia Kristeva, Σημειωτικὴ: Recherches pour une sémanalyse (n.p.: Seuil, 1969), 84–85. Other references can be found in her topics index. 9. Thomas Mann, Gesammelte Werke, 8:454. All quotations from “Der Tod in Venedig” are located by page number in this volume. 10. Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? 4. 11. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, “Eine Duplik,” I, Werke, 8 vols., Herbert G. Göpfert, ed. (Munich, 1970–79), 8:33. 12. The case for reading James as an author whose work, especially The Ambassadors, practically legislates the activity of The Modern Reader, is made brilliantly by Lubbock. 13. For a collection of typical nineteenth-century pronouncements on the “Novelle,” see Karl Konrad Polheim, Theorie und Kritik der deutschen Novelle von Wieland bis Musil (Tübingen, 1970). The most influential event in establishing the “Novelle” as a recognized cultural focus in Germany was probably the publication of the Deutscher Novellenschatz, edited by Paul Heyse, in the nationally significant year 1871.

336

Notes to pages 259–84

14. For documents concerning this decision, and the elimination of such possibilities as “Die Novelle” and “Eine Novelle,” see WA, 18:460–61. 15. Both this entry and the one quoted afterwards are from the fi rst part of Johann Peter Eckermann, Gespräche mit Goethe.

Chapter Seven: Kleist, Kafka, and the Refutation of Reading 1. See especially John M. Grandin, Kafka’s Prussian Advocate: A Study of the Influence of Heinrich von Kleist on Franz Kafka (Columbia, S. C., 1987). An instance of the tendency toward stylistic comparisons that I mention immediately below is Lilian R. Furst, “Reading Kleist and Kaf ka,” JEGP 84 (1985): 374–95, which is one of the best studies of its kind and also resonates with my reading of “Das Bettelweib von Locarno” later on. 2. Heinrich von Kleist, Die Marquise von O. . . . , in Kleist, Sämtliche Werke, Berliner Ausgabe, II/2, Roland Reuß and Peter Staengle, eds. (Basel and Frankfurt/Main, 1989), 7n. 3. It is well known that Kleist’s story has a precedent in Montaigne’s essay “De l’yvrognerie.” See Michel de Montaigne, Œuvres completes, Albert Thibaudet and Maurice Rat, eds. (n.p.: Gallimard, 1962), 321–30, esp. 323–24. But Montaigne’s account is inherently a bit less improbable because the woman there is dead drunk and apparently unconscious for a much longer period than the Marquise. 4. The fi rst number in each parenthesis refers to pages in Franz Kaf ka, Drucke zu Lebzeiten, vol. 1, Wolf Kittler, Hans-Gerd Koch, and Gerhard Neumann, eds. (n.p.: S. Fischer, 1994). The second number refers to pages in Kaf ka, The Complete Stories, Nahum N. Glatzer, ed. (New York: Schocken, 1971). 5. One thinks here of Fichte, of course, and the metaphysics of the transcendental ego, and also of the rather complex suggestions about Kaf ka’s situation relative to Fichte in Walter H. Sokel, The Myth of Power and the Self: Essays on Franz Kafka (Detroit, 2002), 87–89. In fact my whole reading of “Ein Landarzt” could be considered a gloss on Sokel’s chapter, “Between Gnosticism and Jehovah: The Dilemma in Kaf ka’s Religious Attitude” (292–310). In response to a call (cf. Sokel 299), the “Ich” presents itself (Abraham-like) and instantly undergoes a split into “two diametrically opposed ways of being and experiencing” (Sokel 298), which is manifest in the absolute incomprehensibility of the story’s details even for the “ego” from which they take their origin. 6. Grandin 59–66, makes an important and convincing point about the auditory identity of texts (both his own and Kleist’s) for Kaf ka. 7. Heinrich von Kleist, Die Verlobung in St. Domingo, Berliner Ausgabe II/4 (Basel and Frankfurt/Main, 1988), 66. 8. Heinrich von Kleist, Das Bettelweib von Locarno, Der Findling, Die heilige Cäcilie oder die Gewalt der Musik, Berliner Ausgabe II/5 (Basel and Frankfurt/ Main, 1997), 38.

Notes to pages 287–99

337

9. See Sigmund Freud, Die Traumdeutung, VII.A), Gesammelte Werke: Chronologisch geordnet, 18 vols. plus Nachtragsband (Frankfurt/Main, 1999), 2/3:530. 10. This essay, which Kleist never published, has not yet appeared in the Berliner Ausgabe, as far as I know. It can be found in Kleist, Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, 5th ed., Helmut Sembdner, ed., 2 vols. (Munich, 1970), 2:319–24. 11. Actually it is only later, and only for a short period in the summer of 1913, that Kaf ka is suddenly fascinated by the concept of “Litteratur” (as he spells it). But his manner of expressing himself on this point is quite extreme. “Mein Posten ist mir unerträglich, weil er meinem einzigen Verlangen und meinem einzigen Beruf das ist der Litteratur widerspricht. Da ich nichts anderes bin als Litteratur und nichts anderes sein kann und will.” Franz Kaf ka, Tagebücher, Hans-Gerd Koch, Michael Müller, and Malcolm Pasley, eds., 3 vols. (Frankfurt/Main, 1990), 1:579. What does it mean to “be” literature? See also 1:569 and Franz Kaf ka, Briefe an Felice, und andere Korrespondenz aus der Verlobungszeit, Erich Heller and Jürgen Born, eds., (n.p.: S. Fischer, 1967), 444, 456 (letters of 14 August 1913 to Felice, 28 August 1913 to Carl Bauer). 12. Kleist, “Das Bettelweib von Locarno,” Berliner Ausgabe II/5:9. 13. I will continue to give page references for the translation in Kaf ka, Complete Stories, but the actual translation of “Die Verwandlung” that I will use in the text is from Franz Kaf ka, The Metamorphosis: Translation, Backgrounds and Contexts, Criticism, Stanley Corngold, ed. and trans. (New York: Norton, 1996). The present passage is on page 3. Pages in Corngold’s translation are indicated by the abbreviation “SC.” The same volume also contains an essay by Corngold, “Kaf ka’s The Metamorphosis: Metamorphosis of the Metaphor,” which is the adaptation of a chapter in his Franz Kafka: The Necessity of Form (Ithaca, 1988). In that essay Corngold discusses the matter of the beginnings of Kaf ka’s stories (80), and buys into a formulation of Edward W. Said’s, from an essay “Beginnings,” Salmagundi 2, no. 4 (Fall 1968): 49, which suggests that in one “aspect,” all beginnings may be regarded as absolute beginnings. At least for the purpose of interpreting Kaf ka, this distinction of “aspects” is useless. With practically any text you can start reading somewhere in the middle, and when you return to the beginning your understanding may be modified (as it is by reading any other part of the text) but will not be completely overturned. When you start in the middle of a text with an absolute beginning, what you read simply does not make sense, or does not make the same kind of sense that it does in light of the beginning. 14. The idea of the “literalized metaphor” has been a staple of Kaf ka criticism for decades. See Corngold, 81–85, for a short summary of this critical strain. In the present case, one thinks of the common idea, in German, of “sich in [einen Text] vertiefen,” to describe one’s relation to a text, or “sich in [etwas] hineinträumen.” Gregor Samsa, then, would simply be an instance of these things’ literally happening with respect to the text of the story.

338

Notes to pages 301–12

15. Berliner Ausgabe II/1 (1990), 181–95. This volume appears in two separately bound but consecutively paginated parts, of which I quote only from the second, which contains the story’s fi nal version. 16. See especially Kleist’s letters to Wilhelmine von Zenge of 22 March 1801 and to Ulrike von Kleist of 23 March 1801.

The Parting of the Ways: A Concluding Note on the Novel and Literary Studies 1. See M. M. Bakhtin, “Epic and Novel,” The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, Michael Holquist, ed. (Austin, 1981), esp. 5–7. 2. Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, Melvyn New and Joan New, eds. (London: Penguin, 1997), 96 (vol. 2, ch. 11). 3. Dorrit Cohn, Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction (Princeton, 1978).

Index

d’Abano, Pietro, 193 Abrams, M. H., 335n18 Absolute beginnings, 295–99, 301, 337n13; and motivated beginnings, 302, 304 Addison, Joseph, 28, 320n21, 324n12 Adorno, Theodor W., 316 Agrippa von Nettesheim, Cornelius, 193 Albertus Magnus, 329 Allegory, 6, 51–53, 55–56, 59–66, 68–70, 78, 90–91, 94, 97–98, 104, 120–21, 124–26, 129, 133, 139, 159–62, 171–72, 174–75, 180–82, 184, 197, 203, 251–52, 263, 271–74, 287–88, 290–94, 296, 304, 306–7, 323–24n12, 324n16, 326n7, 327n14, 331n17 Almansi, Guido, 159, 330n11, 330n15, 332n21 Ambrose, Saint, Bishop of Milan, 142 Aquinas, Thomas, 91, 97, 99, 103, 105, 106, 113, 123, 132, 135–37, 256, 326n13 Arendt, Hannah, 322n35 Armstrong, Nancy, 320–21n24 Ariosto, Lodovico, 170 Augustine, Saint, 87, 97, 142, 326n12, 327n27 Austin, J. L., 41 Bacon, Roger, 193 Bakhtin, M. M., 183, 238, 310, 312, 338n1 Balzac, Honoré de, 37, 141, 223, 258 Barbi, Michele, 330n9, 330n10 Barthes, Roland, 25, 26, 27, 143, 233–34, 249, 251, 317n4, 319n18, 335n4

Batteux, Charles, 321n29 Bauer, Carl, 337n11 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 201, 211, 213 Behler, Ernst, 320n20, 324n13 Benjamin, Walter, 38–42, 331n17, 322n35; aura (of poetic works), 38–43 Bennett, Benjamin, All Theater Is Revolutionary Theater, 321n28; Beyond Theory, 322n30, 325n20, 333n9; “It’s a Word! It’s a Claim!” 321n28; Theater As Problem, 317n3 Bernard of Clairvaux, 87, 105 Blackmur, Richard P., 318n16, 319–20n18 Blaicher, Günther, 28, 320n21 Blake, William, 184, 204, 306 Bloom, Harold, 24–25, 30–31, 32–34, 47, 189, 254, 318n15, 321n25, 321n26, 333n4 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 6, 141–84, 185, 195, 223, 252, 285, 312, 329–32, 335n3; brigata, 6, 155–58, 161–62, 171–77, 330n13, 332n20; Decameron, 6, 146, 147–62, 167–68, 169–75, 179, 195, 285, 312, 313, 329n6, 329n7, 329n8, 330n11, 330n12, 330–31n17, 332n19, 332n21; Fiammetta, 330n14; Filostrato, 330n14; frame (cornice), 148, 153–59, 173, 175, 223, 330n12, 331n17; Genealogie Deorum Gentilium, 160, 330n16, 331n17; gloss versus text, 6, 150–61, 168–69, 330n10, 330n14; Griselda, 146, 147, 159; “Prencipe Galeotto” (“Prince Galeotto”), 148–50, 156, 159, 161,

339

340 Index 195, 312; Teseida delle Nozze di Emilia, 151–52, 330n10; Vita di Dante (or Trattatello), 330n10, 330n16. See also Plague; Text versus context Books as physical objects, 12, 19, 40, 45, 55, 75–80, 102, 141, 238, 271, 275, 277, 278, 280, 282, 291–92, 294, 306–7, 309, 313, 316. See also Manuscript culture Borderline theorist, 73, 80–81 Born, Jürgen, 337n11 Bowers, Fredson, 332n3 Branca, Vittore, 329n4, 331n17 Brann, Henry Walter, 334n11 Briefe, die neueste Literatur betreffend, 321n28 Browning, Robert, 45 Bruno, Giordano, 187, 192–94, 196, 210, 332n2, 333n5, 333n6; De la Causa, Principio, ed Uno, 188 Bruns, Gerald R., 145–47, 169, 329n1 Burckhardt, Sigurd, 323n9 Burroughs, William, 223 Castiglione, Baldassare, 60 Cate, Curtis, 333n11 Cervantes, Miguel de, 6, 141, 162–72, 175–81, 184, 186, 195, 331n18, 331–32n19, 332n20, 332n21, 332n22, 332n23; Cid Hamete Benengeli, 167–68, 173; Don Quixote de la Mancha, 27, 141, 162–84, 185, 186, 195, 198–99, 201, 331n18; Duke and Duchess, 181–82, 184, 189; Exemplary Novellas (Novelas ejemplares), 171, 179, 180, 332n21, 332n22, 332n23; Sancho Panza, 162–67, 174–77 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 145, 332n20 Chiavacci Leonardi, Anna Maria, 325n1, 326n9, 327n22, 327n25, 328n33 Churchill, Winston, 4 Cinema, 40, 42, 142 Cinthio. See Giraldi Clairmont, Heinrich, 334n16 Clements, Robert J., 332n20 Cohn, Dorrit, 312, 338n3

Coleridge, Ernst Hartley, 323n4 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 50, 323n4 Comedy, 91, 101, 103, 165 Conrad, Joseph, 258 Conrady, Karl Otto, 333n8 Consciousness, 20, 31, 44, 100, 123, 143, 151, 209, 232, 235, 255, 264, 265–66, 268, 271, 272, 275–76, 319n16, 322n29, 331n17, 336n3, 338n3 Contingency, 6, 104–14, 121, 124, 133–37, 139, 141–43, 145, 147, 148, 170, 173, 175–77, 183–85, 194–95, 197–98, 206, 214, 233, 271, 276, 283–84, 288–89, 293, 308 Copernicus, Nicolaus, 206, 207 Corinthians, St. Paul’s second letter to, 87, 89, 326n5, 328n34 Corngold, Stanley, 13, 16, 118, 212, 318n6, 337n13, 337n14 Croce, Benedetto, 331n17 Croxall, Samuel, 320n22 Culler, Jonathan, 13, 18, 27, 318n12, 318n4 Curtius, Ernst Robert, 110, 113, 327n18, 327n23 Dante Alighieri, 6, 64, 85–140, 141–43, 145–53, 157, 159, 161–63, 165, 167, 169, 170, 176–79, 182–83, 185, 195, 204, 252–53, 256, 283, 293, 312, 325–29, 329n2, 329n3, 329n5, 329n8, 330n10, 331n17; agens, 112, 115, 177, 283; Alberigo, Friar, 132–33; and analogy, 97–98; and boasting, 88–89, 127, 129, 131, 138, 140, 326n8; “bread of angels,” 99, 103–4, 117, 119, 126, 129, 139, 195; and Christian poetry, 6, 91, 128, 139–40, 152, 253; Commedia, 6, 85–140, 145–52, 157, 159–61, 168, 176–77, 195, 296, 312, 325n1, 325n2, 326n7, 327n22, 327n23, 327n25, 328n33, 328n34, 329n2, 329n5, 329n8; Convivio, 90, 111, 130, 157, 283, 326n6, 328n34, 329n5; Dante’s name, 111–12, 143; Dante’s readers, 86, 95–100, 102–4, 106–8,

Index 110, 112, 114, 116–24, 126–30, 133– 37, 139, 141–42, 145–52, 161–62, 170, 176, 183, 185, 195, 326n8, 326n11, 327n14; and felicitas, 96–97, 129, 140; and fraud, 98, 101–4, 109–11, 124, 129–34, 138; Geryon episode, 98, 100–3, 107, 111, 119, 166; Great Poets, 91, 135; “having the vision,” 122–24, 126, 129, 134, 139–40, 167, 176, 179; Lethe and Eunoë, 104, 116, 124–27, 129, 143; Letter to Can Grande, 87–90, 95–98, 105, 112, 140, 147, 325n3, 325n4, 326n11; Paolo and Francesca, 98–101, 103–4, 148; as pilgrim, 99–102, 106, 114–18, 126–27, 129–31, 133, 135, 137, 143, 145, 177, 327n24; as poet, 91, 101–2, 104, 110, 114–18, 126–31, 133, 135, 137, 139–40, 142, 145, 147, 150, 152, 177, 253, 326n8, 327n24, 327–28n28, 328n31; and St. John the Divine, 121–23; and St. Paul, 87–91, 103, 105, 111–12, 127–29, 138–39, 149, 325n4, 326n5, 326n8, 328–29n34; and terza rima, 105, 146; Vita nuova, 150–52, 157, 330n9, 330n10; De Vulgari Eloquentia, 92, 99, 169 Davy, Sir Humphry, 321n28 “Death of the author,” 25–26, 319n18 Dee, John, 187 Derrida, Jacques, 3, 317n4 De Sanctis, Francesco, 330n17 Descartes, René, 31, 37, 209 Deussen, Paul, 333n10 Dickens, Charles, 258, 332n22 Diderot, Denis, 183, 258, 314 Dionysius the Areopagite, 137–39, 149, 326n8, 328–29n34 Donato, Eugenio, 318n13 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 200–1, 203 Dyck, Joachim, 323n9 Eckermann, Johann Peter, 259–60, 336n15 Ego (ich, io), 92, 95, 134, 139, 146, 209, 214–15, 226, 229–30, 232–33,

341

270, 275–76, 296, 298, 306, 323n9, 325n18, 336n5 Ehrmann, Jacques, 320n23 Eichner, Hans, 320n20, 324n13 Eliot, T. S., 12, 318n2 El Saffar, Ruth S., 179–81, 332n22 Epic, 91, 151, 164–65, 182, 338n1 Erizzo, Sebastiano, 332n20 Eslava, Antonio de, 171 Euclid, 64 Exodus, of the Israelites, 90–91 Faculties (theology, law, medicine, philosophy), 17, 63–64, 68–71, 73–74, 97, 104, 105, 185, 190–91, 193, 205–6, 208, 210, 213–17, 219, 275–77, 304, 306, 318n10, 321n28, 326n8, 327n18, 329n34, 332n1, 334n15 Feminism, 287 Fergusson, Francis, 114, 116, 327n24, 327n26 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 66, 69, 73, 214–17, 219, 305, 336n5 Fielding, Henry, 207, 258, 320n22 Fish, Stanley, 13–14, 16–18, 23–24, 26, 29, 253–54, 318n3, 318n7, 318n8, 335n10, 318n11, 332n30 Flaubert, Gustave, 258, 318n6 Folengo, Teofi lo, 182 Forcione, Alban K., 332n21 Forni, Pier Massimo, 331n17 Förster-Nietzsche, Elisabeth, 333n11 Fortini, Pietro, 332n20 Frederick the Great. See Mann, Thomas Freemasonry, 70–73, 324n18 Freud, Sigmund, 44, 152, 287, 290, 337n9 Frost, Robert, 45 Frye, Northrop, 13, 318n5 Furst, Lilian R., 336n1 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 218, 234 Galilei, Galileo, 44 Gatti, Hilary, 187–88, 193, 332n2 Gégou, Fabienne, 320n22 Gibaldi, Joseph, 332n20

342 Index Gide, André, 223, 258 Giraldi Cinthio, Giovanni Battista, 171–72, 332n20 Girard, René, 21 Glatzer, Nahum N., 336n4 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 7, 13, 47–50, 53–54, 56–57, 66, 68, 73, 75, 80–81, 104, 199–200, 210, 213, 215, 235–36, 251, 258–60, 262–63, 269, 274, 322n2, 323n5, 323n6, 323n9, 324n14, 324n15, 334n13, 335n20, 335n5, 336n15; “Antik und Modern,” 324n14; “Auf dem See,” 47–57, 73, 80, 323n9; Farbenlehre, 323n6, 323n8; Faust, 54, 199–200, 213, 335n20; Iphigenie auf Tauris, 68; Die Leiden des jungen Werthers, 56; “Novelle,” 259–63, 269, 274, 336n14; “Urworte. Orphisch,” 236, 335n5; “Der Versuch als Vermittler von Object und Subject,” 323n6; Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, 314, 334n13; Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre, 13, 323n6; Winckelmann und sein Jahrhundert, 324n15 Goetsch, Paul, 320n21 Goetschel, Willi, 334n15 Göpfert, Herbert G., 324n17, 335n11 Gossman, Lionel, 321n28 Grandin, John M., 336n1, 336n6 Gregory the Great, 137–39, 149 Griselda (in Boccaccio), 146, 147, 159 Guerri, Domenico, 329n2 Harriot, Thomas, 187 Hass, Hans-Egon, 335n1 Hauptmann, Gerhart, 7, 223, 227, 230, 236, 240, 247–48, 250, 252, 259, 335n1; “Bahnwärter Thiel,” 223–30, 233–34, 237, 239, 250; problem of visual metaphor, 227–29; trap of reading, 226–29, 231, 234, 236, 239 Hawkins, Peter S., 326n8, 327–28n28, 329n34 Heath, Stephen, 319n18 Hecker, Max, 323n6

Hegel, G. W. F., 7, 208–11, 213, 215, 322n29, 331n17; Phänomenologie des Geistes (Phenomenology of Spirit), 205–6, 208–9, 211, 334n16, 334n17, 335n18 Heine, Heinrich, 33, 179, 214–20, 231, 253, 257, 316, 335n22 Heller, Erich, 337n11 Hellzapoppin’, 77 Heraclitus, 328n30 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 54 Hermeneutics and hermeneutic theory, 6, 13, 17, 57, 74, 86, 92–95, 104, 106, 112, 117, 122, 129, 133, 141, 145, 147, 151–52, 162–67, 169–72, 181–82, 218, 227, 234, 253–54, 277, 291–92, 294, 309, 328n34, 329n5 Hermetism, 210 Hertel, Johann Georg, 324n12 Heyse, Paul, 335n13 Historia von D. Johann Fausten (1587), 187, 189–90, 194, 199–200, 213, 333n8 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, 7, 224, 229, 233, 236, 240, 250, 252, 258–59, 335n2; “Reitergeschichte,” 224, 229–34, 237, 239, 250–51 Holland, Norman N., 317n3 Hollander, Robert, 329n8, 331n17 Holquist, Michael, 338n1 Holtzhauer, Helmut, 324n15 Homer, 32, 58, 64, 91 Horace, 91 Huet, Pierre-Daniel, 28, 320n22 Husserl, Edmund, 86 Ich. See ego Idealism, 63–64, 68, 70, 73, 215 Ife, B. W., 332n23 Index (of prohibited books), 171 Intertextuality, 14, 32, 238–40, 249 Io, see ego Iser, Wolfgang, 4, 34–40, 42, 56, 72, 81, 86, 104, 107–8, 123, 124, 143, 170–71, 176, 198, 229, 233–34, 236, 252–54, 291, 307, 311, 320n24,

Index 321–22n29, 322n30, 322n31, 322n32, 322n38, 325n19, 327n21 Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich, 210 James, Henry, 318–19n16, 320n18, 335n12. See also Reading, Jamesian theory of Janz, Curt Paul, 333n11, 334n12 Jesus of Nazareth, 15, 17, 90, 94, 120, 130, 200 John (disciple of Jesus), 17 Johnson, Samuel, 25 Joyce, James, 142, 223, 258 Justinian: Corpus juris, 191 Kaf ka, Franz, 7, 264, 270–75, 277, 282–84, 289–300, 302–8, 309, 313–14, 318n6, 336n1, 336n4, 336n5, 336n6, 337n11, 337n13, 337n14; “Ein Hungerkünstler,” 293–94; “In der Straf kolonie,” 270, 272–74, 282, 293; “Ein Landarzt,” 275–77, 282–83, 293, 296–98, 336n5; Der Prozeß, 296; “Das Urteil,” 289–92; “Die Verwandlung,” 296–302, 308, 337n13; “Vor dem Gesetz,” 296, 314 Kaiser, Volker, 323n9 Kant, Immanuel, 7, 36–37, 66, 205, 206–7, 209–11, 213–15, 217, 219, 256, 282, 304, 334n15; “Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Auf klärung?,” 208; Critique of Pure Reason, 206–7, 209, 334n14; Der Streit der Fakultäten, 208, 210 Keats, John, 75–81, 325n21; “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” 75–78, 80 Kittler, Wolf, 336n4 Kleist, Ewald von, 50 Kleist, Heinrich von, 7, 263, 264–66, 268–70, 274–75, 278, 281–85, 287–89, 294–95, 299, 301–2, 304, 308, 336n1, 336n2, 336n3, 336n6, 336n7, 336n8, 337n10, 337n12, 338n16; “Das Bettelweib von Locarno,” 294–95, 336n1, 336n8, 337n12; “Das Erdbeben in Chili,” 301; “Der Findling,” 284–90, 301, 336n8; “Die heilige Cäcilie,”

343

336n8; “Die Marquise von O. . . .,” 264–70, 274, 278, 280, 282, 284, 302, 336n2, 336n3; “Michael Kohlhaas,” 301–8; “Über die allmähliche Verfertigung der Gedanken beim Reden,” 288; “Die Verlobung in St. Domingo,” 278–83, 336n7 Kleist, Ulrike von, 338n16 Klopstock, Friedrich Gottlieb: “Der Zürchersee” (“The Lake of Zürich”), 49, 323n3 Koch, Hans-Gerd, 336n4, 337n11 Koelb, Clayton, 318n6 Köhler, Joachim, 333n11 Kristeva, Julia, 238, 335n8 Kuhns, Richard, 333n17 Lancelot, 98, 100, 104, 148 Lange-Eichbaum, Wilhelm, 333n11 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 206 Leonardi. See Chiavacci Leonardi Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 70–73, 75, 81, 257, 324n17, 324–25n18, 335n11; “Ernst und Falk,” 70–72 Literature, 4–5, 7, 13–14, 18, 27–33, 36–40, 42, 47, 73–74, 104, 108, 144, 166, 182–83, 199, 210, 218, 223, 235, 238, 252, 259, 270–75, 291, 308, 310– 12, 315, 317n3, 318n3, 318n4, 318n6, 318n7, 318n11, 321n28, 322n29, 322n30, 327n18, 327n23, 330n11, 331n17, 335n18, 337n11; as belleslettres, 27, 323n11; “high” literature, 3–4, 142, 150; and history, 1, 5–7, 16, 18–19, 26, 27–34, 39–42, 44, 47, 53–57, 66, 69–70, 73–74, 80, 83, 86, 90–91, 108, 109, 110, 114, 122, 124, 125, 126, 141, 143, 147, 151, 153, 159, 160, 162, 171, 177–80, 182–87, 193, 196, 198–99, 206, 208, 212–14, 217, 218, 219, 234, 243, 253–55, 257, 258, 259, 262, 264–65, 269, 281–82, 287, 295, 296, 299, 301, 304, 307–8, 310, 312–13, 316, 320n24, 321n28, 329n1, 334n15; national literature, 33, 74, 321n28. See also Nationalism

344 Index Longinus: On the Sublime, 22, 26, 318n14 Lubbock, Percy, 236, 312, 335n6, 335n12 Lucan, 91 Luther, Martin, 187, 199, 302–4 Lyric, 44, 49, 164 Macksey, Richard, 318n13 Magic, 6, 185, 187, 189–91, 193, 195–97, 201, 204, 207–11, 213–14, 219, 307, 335n19 Magus (the Renaissance Magus), 187, 193, 196–97, 314 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 104 Mann, Thomas 7, 199–200, 204–5, 211, 213–14, 224, 240, 251, 252, 258–59, 317n3, 333n7, 333n8, 333n9, 334n11, 334n13, 335n21, 335n7, 335n9; “Deutschland und die Deutschen,” 333n7; Doktor Faustus, 199–205, 213–14, 240, 333n8, 333n9, 335n21; Frederick the Great, 240–42; and heroism, 241, 243, 248; “Herr und Hund,” 205; “Mario und der Zauberer,” 204, 317n3; “Der Tod in Venedig,” 224, 238, 240–50, 274 Manuscript culture, 160, 175, 182, 196, 312; versus print culture, 6, 38–39, 141, 143–46, 169–70, 172, 182, 198, 205, 253, 315 Marcus, Millicent Joy, 331n17 Marlowe, Christopher, 187–90, 193–95, 197–99, 201, 204, 210, 213–14, 332n3, 333n4; distraction in, 189–91, 193, 197, 214; Doctor Faustus, 189–99, 204, 333n4; and Giordano Bruno, 187–88, 192–94, 196, 210, 333n6; textual problems, 187–89 Marx, Groucho, 278 Marx, Karl, 44 Mazzotta, Giuseppe, 331n17 McWilliam, G. H., 329n7 Media/technology, 2–3, 38–40, 42, 76–77, 142, 258, 322n35; alphabetic writing, 38, 66; broadcast radio, 2, 258, 317n2; technology of printing, 28, 38–39, 198

Medusa, 94 Melville, Herman, 223, 258 Memory and memorization, 12, 17–19, 29, 34, 45, 49, 53–54, 76, 78, 88, 115, 123, 125–26, 134, 161, 171, 185, 212, 240, 261, 290, 295 Mendelssohn, Moses, 325n18 Meregalli, Franco, 331n19, 332n20 Michelangelo Buonarroti, 60 Miller, J. Hillis, 332n22 Milton, John, 14–17, 318n10 Möbius, P. J., 333n11 Momigliano, Attilio, 331n17 Montaigne, Michel de, 25, 308, 316, 319n17, 336n3 Motivated beginnings. See absolute beginnings Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 334n15 Müller, F. Max, 334n14 Müller, Michael, 337n11 Music, 75, 78–80, 90, 107, 109, 125, 164, 200–1, 210–14, 240, 262, 319n18, 327n16 Musil, Robert 258 Myth, Mythology, 5, 7, 26, 31, 44, 57, 61, 62–66, 68–70, 73, 76, 80, 110, 139, 144, 187, 189, 197, 198–201, 205, 210–11, 214, 336n5 Narrative, 7, 13, 38, 49–51, 53, 55, 76–79, 115, 142, 152, 156, 167, 173, 179, 223–25, 245, 247, 248, 259, 261–62, 269, 270, 277–78, 282–84, 287, 291, 296, 299, 301, 312, 330n10, 331n17, 338n3 Narrative reliability, 265–71, 274, 278–82, 289 Narrative theory, 202, 287 Nationalism, 28, 71, 73–75, 215, 217. See also Literature Neumann, Gerhard, 336n4 New, Joan, 338n2 New, Melvyn, 338n2 Nicomachus of Thebes, 58 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 179, 201–3, 214, 237, 241, 248, 333–34n11, 334n12

Index Noakes, Susan, 98–104, 108, 148, 150, 151, 318n6, 327n15, 330n9, 330n10 Novel, theory and history of, 5–7, 11, 13, 20–21, 26–29, 37, 38, 41, 42, 44–45, 53, 55–57, 72, 79–80, 85, 95–97, 104, 107–8, 114, 118, 122–24, 126, 128–29, 133, 134, 140, 141–42, 144, 153, 162, 171, 179, 183, 194, 198–99, 202–5, 210, 211, 213–14, 219, 253, 258–63, 309–16, 318–19n16, 319–20n18, 320n22, 320–21n24, 332n22, 333n9, 338, 338n1 Novella/Novelle, 7, 157–58, 170–71, 173–75, 177, 179, 180, 186, 223, 226, 240, 243–44, 249–50, 252, 255, 258–64, 269, 274, 285–87, 331n17, 332n20, 335n13, 336n14 Oedipus, 248, 305 Orgel, Stephen, 324n12, 324n16 Orpheus, 90 Ovid, 90, 91, 116, 128, 130 Pagnamenta, Roberta Bruno, 331n17 Parody, 148, 200, 223, 225–26, 233, 236, 238–40, 244, 246, 249–50 Parrhasius of Ephesus, 61 Pasley, Malcolm, 337n11 Paul, Saint, 87–91, 103, 105, 111–12, 127–29, 138–39, 149, 325n4, 326n8, 328–29n34 Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca), 146–47, 170 Petrocchi, Giorgio, 325n1 Peucker, Brigitte, 323n9 Pfaffenberger, Wolfgang, 321n28 Phaethon, 128 Picaresque, 38, 166 Picasso, Pablo, 42 des Piles (= Roger de Piles), 60 Plague, the, 154–56, 161, 189, 248, 285, 301 Plato, 2, 55, 143, 255, 317n4 Podach, E. F., 333n11 Polheim, Karl Konrad, 335n13 Politics/Political systems, 2–5, 7, 12, 28, 38, 41, 57, 74, 85, 147, 178, 203–5,

345

215, 219, 220, 223, 252, 255, 257–58, 263, 265, 301, 303–5, 316, 317n2, 327n17, 333n9; democracy, 3–4, 257, 317n4; fascism, 41, 203, 213, 220; propaganda, 3, 219, 317n2, 317n3; totalitarianism, 2–4, 7, 214, 219, 257–58, 317n2. See also Nationalism Polyclitus, 60 Potter, Joy Hambuechen, 153, 330n12, 331n17 Poulet, Georges, 20, 24, 26, 29, 34–36, 38–40, 42, 56, 86, 95, 108, 114, 123, 124, 143, 254, 306–7, 321–22n29; “Criticism and the Experience of Interiority,” 19–22, 42, 318n13, 322n37 Pound, Ezra, 11, 13, 22, 26, 29, 46, 254, 258, 313, 317n1, 320n19, 322n1 Proust, Marcel, 258 Putnam, Samuel, 331n18 Rabelais, François, 183 Rabell, Carmen R., 332n20 Raleigh, Walter, 187 Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio), 60–61, 65 Rat, Maurice, 336n3 Reading: and change of mind, 1–3, 14–17, 19–20, 23; aesthetic reader, 31, 33; artists versus connoisseurs (experts versus initiates), 42, 58–59, 62, 65, 68–69, 80, 323n11; as danger, 1–3, 28, 100, 104, 142, 182, 195, 197, 200, 218, 220, 247, 255–56, 258, 283, 290, 308, 331n17; as death, 233–38, 252; defi nition of “The Reader,” 27, 29; Jamesian theory of, 5–7, 25–26, 29, 37, 38, 40–41, 56, 85, 96, 107–8, 123–24, 134, 143, 170–71, 194, 198, 233, 252, 254, 258, 292, 307, 313, 318–19n16, 319–20n18, 335n12; and linearity/ order, 13, 34, 55, 137, 155, 179, 204–5, 224, 227, 240, 266, 283, 304–5, 306; macroscopic and microscopic view, 32, 217; perceived benefits of, 1–3, 28; readers as consumers, 27, 144, 195; reader–response theory, 198,

346 Index 234, 237, 253, 258; readers as producers of meaning, 147, 151–52, 161–67, 169–70, 172–73, 175, 177–79, 181–85, 195, 207, 233–34, 245, 253, 293, 315; reading aloud, 45; reading for art, 22–27, 33–34, 45, 108, 124, 139, 145, 170, 183, 185, 195–96, 198, 211, 214, 292–93, 315–16, 319n16, 324n12; reading for thrills, 19–22, 24, 26–27, 29, 32, 34, 44–45, 47, 55–57, 108, 117, 124, 126, 139, 170, 173, 176, 180, 195–98, 211, 214, 236, 246, 310–12, 315, 319n16; reading for wisdom, 24–26; supposed “experience” of reading, 4–5, 11–23, 25–26, 29, 31–43, 45, 48–50, 53–57, 73, 76–77, 79–80, 85, 96–97, 98, 99, 108, 117, 122–25, 129, 131, 143–44, 154, 163, 170–71, 173, 176, 182, 185, 186, 194, 197–99, 203, 205, 207, 209–13, 218–19, 224, 226–28, 230–31, 234–37, 243–44, 248, 251–55, 257–59, 262, 271–72, 275, 283, 287, 290–94, 299–300, 304–7, 309–10, 312, 314; and time, 2–3 13–14, 15, 17–18, 24, 28, 30, 38–39, 44, 47–49, 54–55, 59, 69, 72, 75–79, 81, 98–99, 115, 136, 151, 161, 171, 178, 201, 224–25, 227–28, 250–52, 275–76, 299, 302, 334n13; Überleser, 31; unlearning how to read, 43, 269–70, 274–75, 288, 295, 300–1 Realism, 29, 64, 141, 160, 198, 205, 210, 219, 258, 261, 282, 300, 301, 310–12, 330–31n17 Reformation, 186–89 Rehm, Walter, 323n10 Reuß, Roland, 336n2 Richard of St. Victor, 87 Richardson, Samuel, 72 Ricklin, Thomas, 325n3, 325n4, 326n11 Ricks, Christopher, 189, 333n4 Riddles, 53, 90, 92, 96, 105–6, 118, 120, 132, 134–35, 191, 248 Riegel, O. W., 317n2 Riffaterre, Michael, 13, 23, 29, 31, 320n23, 321n27

Ripa, Cesare, 324n12 Rohloff, Eckhart, 322n23 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 3, 317n4 Said, Edward W., 337n13 Satire, 91, 273–74, 329n8 Sbacchi, Diego, 329n34 Scaglione, Aldo D. 330n17 Scartazzini, Giovanni Andrea, 328n33 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von, 210, 217 Schiller, Friedrich, 236–37, 306, 334n13 Schlegel, Friedrich, 57, 62–66, 68–74, 80–81, 197, 206, 320n20, 324n13; “Brief über den Roman,” 27; “Rede über die Mythologie” (Speech on Mythology), 62–66 Schoeller, Bernd, 335n2 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 1–2, 241, 245, 306, 317n1 Sembdner, Helmut, 337n10 Semiotics, 238, 275, 277, 288–89, 311 Shakespeare, William, 24–25, 80, 325n21 Sidney, Sir Philip, 187 Silverstein, H. T., 326n5 Singleton, Charles S., 90–91, 140, 326n7, 327n14 Sokel, Walter H., 336n5 Solitude (readerly), 6, 141–45, 152, 162, 170, 172, 175, 177, 179, 182–83, 185, 195–97, 199, 204, 250, 252, 255, 262–63 Spence, Joseph, 324 Spenser, Edmund, 187 Spies, Johann, 187 Spinoza, Benedictus de (Baruch), 12, 64, 69 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 317n4 Spurgeon, Caroline F. E., 325n21 Staengle, Peter, 336n2 Starobinski, Jean, 37, 322n33, 322n34 Statius, 105, 107, 118–20, 328n29 Steele, Richard, 28, 320n21, 320n22 Steen, Inken, 333n9 Stephens, John Calhoun, 320n22

Index Sterne, Laurence, 183, 258; marbled page, 114, 313; Tristram Shandy, 27, 72, 114, 311–13, 338n2 Stewart, Garrett, 320 Straparola, Gian Francesco, 332n20 Subject/object division, 19–20, 36–37, 85, 125, 143, 208–9, 215, 231–32, 262–63, 275, 283–84, 300, 312, 322n29, 323n6 Text versus context, 154–58, 163, 174 Thibaudet, Albert, 336n3 Tieck, Ludwig, 262 Torah, 291 Trask, Willard R., 327n18 Vaget, Hans Rudolf, 335n7 Valeriano, Pierio, 324n12 Valéry, Paul, 50 Vandelli, Giuseppe, 328n33 Vergil, 89, 91, 93–94, 100, 105–6, 112–13, 116, 118, 119–20, 125, 127, 130–31, 139, 147, 178, 328n31, 329n5; Aeneid, 119, 178; “Messianic eclogue,” 120 Visio Pauli, 326n5 Voltaire (François Marie Arouet), 321

347

Walker, D. P., 335n19 Warner, Walter, 187 Watt, Ian, 28–29, 258, 312, 320n22 Weber, Samuel, 322n30 Wellek, René, 321n28 Wessels, Hans-Friedrich, 334n16 Whitman, Walt, 50 Wieland, Christoph Martin, 258, 335n13 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 57–69, 72–73, 75, 78, 80–81, 197, 323n10, 323–24n12, 324n15; Gedancken über die Nachahmung (Thoughts on Imitation), 57–62, 66; Versuch einer Allegorie, 61–63, 66–69, 324n12, 324n16 Wirth, Ilse, 324n12 Wise, Jennifer, 322n36 Woolf, Virginia, 258 Yates, Frances A., 187–88, 193, 332n1, 333n5 Yiddish, 75 Yovel, Yirmiyahu, 334n17 Zenge, Wilhelmine von, 348n16 Zeno’s paradox, 17–18 Zohn, Harry, 322n35