Reading Tensions: Of Sterne, Klee, and the Secret Police

In literature, reading is often the object of a limited, because highly specialized, conception. There are a great number of texts, an infinity of readers of diverse competences, complex encyclopedias, but only one act of reading, only one task described. Reading is merely one exercise, at times better executed than others. Yet the forms taken by this act are multiple, ranging from close reading and criticism, to ludic and speed reading. Our life is indeed full of these various acts of reading, from the newspaper we hastily glance at to the literary text we endlessly comment upon. With the exception of Constance school reception theory and aesthetics (Iser, Jauss, Stierle), based on a hermeneutic tradition, some semiotics of reading (Eco, Riffaterre), and more recent reader-response criticism, literary studies use and put forth conceptions of reading that do not recognize or account for its diversity. Since it tries to establish the ground for one of its most accomplished practices, literary reading, it does not concern itself with its basic processes. As a result, the act of reading is seen less as a process than a result—a static view. ¹

In the following pages, I will present a view of reading that takes into consideration, in a literary setting, some of its means and processes. Reading, I will propose, consists of both progressing and comprehending, and its diversity depends on the importance given to one or the other. The complementarity of these processes are in fact fundamental to the act of reading. The aim of this study then is to describe reading as an activity whose form is closely related to the tension between two principles, progression and comprehension.

I will begin by describing the ongoing opposition established between progression and comprehension in traditional discussions of the act of reading and then move on to discuss the essential characteristics of both of these principles. This will allow me to present, in the last segment of this essay, a few elements pertaining to the constitution of literary reading. I will use, as an example, a short story by Donald Barthelme entitled “Paul Klee.” But first though, a few words on the general framework of this essay are needed.

I. Poetics of Reading

The objective here is to present a conception of reading in which the reader plays a role as important as the text in establishing how his or her act will be accomplished. This represents a shift, on a conceptual level, in who controls the reading situation and how it will develop. It is a way, also, to avoid certain pitfalls of what can be called a “poetics of reading.” ²

One of the dangers facing any literary theory of reading is a too great importance granted to the text read. The difference between what a reader does and what the text tells him to do must clearly be stated. Yet, the current trend in literary conceptions of reading tends to identify the text’s demands with the reader’s actions. Studies are often limited to the reader and his or her act inscribed in the text, as if this settled all queries. This type of study has been popularized by the arrival of poststructuralism; it is the immediate result of an initial recontextualization of the literary text. Russian formalism and structuralism, which had identified the text as an object of inquiry, had left it completely isolated. The first reflex has been to search for signs of its original situation. Like a torn limb, the text bears scars of its production and reading situations, and their description must allow its reinsertion. These scars take the shape of the implied or implicit reader and audience, the narratee, the Model Reader, and so on. They are the proof that the text is not an independent entity, closed and complete in itself, but they never go beyond the text itself. The object of study is never the reading situation, the relationship developed between the text and the reader while reading, but the trace of what it could be, according to only one of its terms, the text that...