Uncanny Reading

Abstract

UNCANNY READING PETER SCHWENGER Mount St. Vincent University I A t one point in his novel Absence, Peter Handke describes a nocturnal act of reading: The reader’s eyes are narrow and curve at the corners, widening at the temples as though the letters and words, though only a few inches away, form a distant horizon. These eyes show that it is not he who is digesting the book but the book that is digesting him; little by little, he is passing into the book, until — his ears have visibly flattened — he vanishes into it and becomes all book. In the book it is broad daylight and a horseman is about to ford the Rio Grande. (53) The impalpable act of reading here has a palpable effect — which is the paradoxical prelude to complete loss of the palpable, as the book ingests its reader. The flattened ears indicate a passage through what could be a birth canal as well as a gullet, but in either case is a passage out of the familiar self. Not merely absorbed in his book, this reader is absorbed by it, to the point of being taken over by an alien existence. This takeover is like the one spoken of by Georges Poulet in “Criticism and the Experience of Inferiority,” the paper that he delivered at the 1966 Johns Hopkins conference on structuralism. What Poulet, in that paper, finds most extraordinary about the book is its passage from object to subject — to a subjectivity which is not that of the reader. The reader’s response is indeed necessary to constitute it, but the subjectivity so constituted is that of an other. Otherness is no longer outside, in the material pages of the book; it constitutes itself “inside” the reading subject. However, at a certain point this ontology is turned inside out. Like Handke’s reader, we are soon drawn inside the book; we think thoughts that are not our own and perceive, outside of those thoughts, the objects of the fictional world. But because that fictional world has come into being through the experience of inferiority, the outside inhabited by these objects is also interior: they are what Poulet has called “subjectified objects.” There is a liberating effect to this: “the greatest advantage of literature,” Poulet asserts, “is that I 333 am persuaded by it that I am free from my usual sense of incompatibility between my consciousness and its objects” (58). Yet there is an undertone of terror to this process as well: “so long as it is animated by this vital inbreathing inspired by the act of reading, a work of literature becomes at the expense of the reader whose own life it suspends a sort of human being . . . it is a mind conscious of itself and constituting itself in me as the subject of its own objects” (62; emphasis added). Such language would justify us in seeing the act of reading as a kind of possession, a vampiric siphoning off of one’s life blood to give vitality and movement to long-dead thoughts. Recognizing this possibility, Poulet immediately denies it: If the work thinks itself in me, does this mean that, during a complete loss of consciousness on my part, another thinking entity invades me taking advantage of my unconsciousness in order to think itself without my being able to think it? Obviously not. (62-63) Rather, a common consciousness is produced. The loss of consciousness is not complete; this saves readers from an ultimate ingestion and turns them into critics. There is of course a certain critical distance in any act of reading. Most readers will agree with Poulet that their subjectivity while reading is in a sort of divided trance: vigorous actions are received by us passively; there is a certain delay between our feelings and those of the book’s subject; the book’s events concern us greatly and at the same time have nothing to do with us. This separation from the experience of inferiority is what defines criticism: “Aware of a certain gap, disclosing a feeling of identity, but of identity within difference, critical consciousness does not necessarily imply the total disappearence of the critic’s...