Structure and Serendipity

As readers we are a profession of heterodox wranglers. Our diverse, often overlapping creeds of post-structuralism, French theory, cultural materialism, New Criticism, New Historicism, and psychoanalysis, among others, mean that our at times interchangeable ranks can range from blogging, face-booking, wiki-ing, early-adopting emissaries of it to historians of print culture, paleographers, epigraphists, and iconologists. Readers have been envisioned as itinerant poachers ("nomades bracconant à travers les champs qu'ils n'ont pas écrits," as Michel de Certeau described these travelers), as rapt listeners for whom George Eliot used the "drop of ink at the end of [her] pen" to offer "a faithful account of men and things,… as if narrating [her] experience on oath" (Eliot 3, 181), and, according to bibliographer D.F. McKenzie, as the makers of "new texts" (McKenzie 20). Readers can be oblivious hypocrites, refusing to recognize the frail monster of boredom smoking his hookah as he dreams of scaffolds, in Baudelaire's address to "Hypocrite lecteur,—mon semblable,—mon frère," or courteous, knowledgeable understanders, of the sort Rachel Speght welcomed, as distinct from

Readers too common and plentifull. . . that can read a.b.cAnd utter their verdict on what they doe view,Though none of the Muses they yet ever knew

(Speght 47)

I propose that we celebrate this very multeity as our curious, multiform strength, its amplitude reinforcing and invigorating our work. The only proviso I would add concerns the crucial element of engaging, active zeal. Not in the rabid obsession of Zeal of the Land Busy, but in the desire to communicate a passion about reading's encounter with other subjectivities and a rigorously social approach to this cultural activity that can promote "humane forms of collective life" (Schweickart 8). I'm endorsing Roger Chartier's image of the book—a repertoire of poetical, philosophical, fictional, scientific discourses, elite or plebeian, hand-held codex or digitized online scroll—as one of the most powerful metaphors "pour penser le cosmos, la nature, ou le corps humain" (Chartier 96). Attentive to writing's social and cultural constitution of historical subjects, reading is not a single "ontologically defined process of reception" but, rather, comprises what Janice Radway sketches as "the wayward and diffuse yet redundant and cumulative effects of engagements with books, texts, stories, images, films, music, video games and much more" (Radway 331).

In the interest of such responsible eclecticism, perhaps even latitudinarianism, and as a demonstration of the recursive activities reading prompts, I want to offer a little sample of the discoveries of my own reading and re-reading. Daniel Mendelsohn's essay on Herodotus, already the delight of several postmodern writers, took me back to the "dazzlingly associative style" of this fifth-century bce study of the imperial hubris of and catastrophic retribution for Darius and Xerxes, whose vastly superior Persian numbers were defeated by the Greeks. As well as pioneering a new form of writing—in prose, pedzos logos, walking language—to convey his idiosyncratic and now topical view of the differences between East and West, Herodotus's riffs and vagaries "replicate … the ambling, appetitive nature of the work as a whole." Robert Alter's new translation of the Psalms, that storehouse of phrase and allusion for writers, which is itself borrowed from earlier polytheistic poems of the Ancient Near East, strives to retain the "rhythmic compactness" and "forward thrust" (Alter xxiv) of the Hebrew originals without resorting to the elegance of the King James Bible. Whether in the "grip of despair" or riding the "crest of elation," his fresh version sounds "something like the Hebrew" but with "a slightly antique coloration" (Alter xxiv, xxx, xxxi). The concession he makes to English readers is retaining the address "Lord," as he explains his position on the prohibition of pronouncing the tetragrammaton (YHWH):

English readers of the Bible have been sufficiently conditioned over the past four centuries that the "Lord" is fluent and natural as an element of the poetry, whereas "Yahweh" might run the risk of sounding as though it belonged in the Journal of Biblical Literature, not in a poem.

(Alter xxxv)

James Simpson's study...