In his Essai sur la lecture (1765), Louis Bollioud-Mermet exclaims over ubiquity of act of reading in eighteenth-century French society. Everybody reads, he affirms. It is life's ordinary occupation or amusement. The young and old, women as well as men, ignorant and wise give themselves up to reading with more or less ardor, depending on their capacities, their tastes, and their positions. (1) Readers may be everywhere in pre-Revolutionary France, but, for Bollioud-Mermet as for other eighteenth-century French critics, sudden public visibility of material apparatuses enabling activity of reading does little to facilitate attempts to determine effects of this activity on actual reading subjects. The growth of literate culture of bibliomanes during eighteenth century belies difficulty of discerning what, exactly, reading does to those who engage in it. (2) As Louis-Sebastien Mercier queries in his Discours sur la lecture (1764), Does reading perfect human spirit, does it nourish genius any more than reflection does, is it useful, is it harmful? (3) The gradual emergence of new reading publics throughout period--including the young, women, and the ignorant--only heightens urgency of central question that preoccupies Mercier and Bollioud-Mermet in their treatises: how should social effects of an act that each author describes as a conversation between reader and text be understood and narrated? (4) The raptness of reading subject, whether distracted or absorbed, both invites and defies interpretation. (5) As Michel de Certeau writes in L'Invention du quotidien, Despite everything, history of man's movements through his own texts remains in large part unknown. (6) In his discussion of modern reading practices, Certeau, like ancien regime authors cited above, is interested in way in which secret conversation that binds reader to her book may conceal moment of transformation, an instance of what Mercier calls the mind in metamorphosis. (7) Certeau makes point that frequent illegibility of act of reading itself--the difficulty of interpreting an event that generates so few material signs of its passing--need not inevitably foster reification of readerly passivity; reading, even as practice that leaves no traces, is always more than just reception [of text] from others without marking one's place there, without remaking text. (8) Instead, Certeau forcefully argues that reading can and, indeed, should be construed as productive activity. Yet product of act of reading tends, even for Certeau, to remain tantalizingly unlocalizable--or, sometimes, all too easily assimilable to an act of writing, in which something very different is at stake. In Certeau's description of silent, transgressive, ironic or poetic acts of readers, it is very silence of these acts that guarantees their disruptive potential: far from being writers, founding place for themselves..., readers are travelers; they circulate on others' lands. (9) In his rehabilitation of reading as an authentically dynamic interaction between reader and text, Certeau has in common with his eighteenth-century predecessors Bollioud-Mermet and Mercier both fascination with profound resistance of experience of reader to exegetical penetration and an investment in theorization of reading as constructive relation. (10) For Certeau, reader's muteness ideally hides possibility of her freedom, while for Bollioud-Mermet and Mercier secret conversation ideally works to solidify reader's private attachment to virtue. But, from both perspectives, results of reading remain tricky to measure with precision and difficult to regulate with any certainty. If event of reading has in some ways consistently been defined by difficulty of quantifying its productive effects, figure of woman reader can be considered in this context doubly evasive one. …
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Sep 1, 2009
Laurie Finke + 1
Open Access