Rereading (review)

REVIEWS One can, of course, easily blame the wretched state of research faciUties in the Arab world for this, but these figures are among the best examples of scholars whom the new generation of Arab comparatists might foUow and later go beyond. It is very important when mapping the history of a recent tradition not to overlook the most serious and probably most difficult work for the sake of the most popular. Comparative studies in the Arab world, owing to the nature ofArabic literature with its interaction with most world Uteratures from early times to the present, is a very promising branch of Uterary research. However difficult , demanding, and time consuming they might be, particularly in institutions that are striving to meet the very basics of academic life, these studies deserve as much encouragement as they can get, especiaUy from a noted scholar in the field such as al-Khatib. Nonetheless, al-Khatib's book wiU remain an extremely important contribution to the history ofcomparative Uterature in the Arab world, where the privilege of free thinking and writing is not always taken for granted. Abdul-Nabi Isstaif University ofDamascus; Fulbright Visiting Scholar, University ofSouth Florida MATEI CALINESCU. Rereading. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1993. xv + 327 pp. This book treats an important subject—important to readers at all events—and treats it in different frames and terms, drawing on other theorists such as Borges and Bakhtin but also on works by sociologists, psychologists, and phüosophers. The greater part of the book seems to rely somewhat heavüy on the interests and theories of Michel Picard in La lecture commejeu. The presence of Picard is, if not truly a secret, in part an enigma for the reader (to use terms that occupy one part of the book). Picard's name and a description ofhis theories do not arrive until page 172, by which time we have had almost too much of the "ludic." CaUnescu also adopts Kendal Walton's philosophic theory that the play of make-beUeve experienced and sought after in reading fiction attracts us because we are offered "the opportunity to experience a wide range of emotions that are make-beUevedly true" (189). To quote CaUnescu, Walton's theory provides an elegant explanation for how certain literary or artistic works are able to survive multiple readings, viewings, or hearings. To use one ofhis examples, a rereader of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer may be as concerned about Tom and Becky being lost in the cave as someone who reads Twain's novel for the first time. The rereader ofcourse knows the outcome but, being engaged once again in the same game ofmake-believe, may pretend for the sake ofplaying it effectively and satisfyingly that he or she does not know more about Vol. 19 (1995): 140. THE COMPAKATIST Tom and Becky in the cave episode now than on reading the book for the first time. (190) CaUnescu offers the interesting observation that "we must be endowed with the abiUty to portray ourselves as actors of our own selves" and notes that reading is reaUy a form of performance, but he does not summon up the darker perturbers of reading life, such as Derrida. CaUnescu is not really concerned with the kind of rereading that apparently interested Walton. It is almost unfair to quote the passage on Tom Sawyer because it is an unusual refreshment, a sport, coming from another author—this is "one of his [Walton's] examples." CaUnescu himself is anxious not to tread on ground so banal. An anxiety about remaining a superior modernist is evident in the very orthodox examples he chooses: Borges, Nabokov, Henry James. The psychological emphasis present in some other commentators on reading is not truly a factor in CaUnescu's vision ofthe thing: he likes rational hermeneutics, and the "ludic" just induces the reader to become cleverer, more rational. Many of his observations are interesting, although not, in the light of the theories prevalent in the last twenty years, particularly new. One has the soothing feeling of having read this before—as CaUnescu claims, most reading is largely rereading. He also suggests (following Harold Bloom) that reading is another form...