Reading Unruly: Interpretation and Its Ethical Demands (Symploke Studies in Contemporary Theory)
Language: English
Pages: 232
ISBN: 0803246277
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Drawing on literary theory and canonical French literature, Reading Unruly examines unruliness as both an aesthetic category and a mode of reading conceived as ethical response. Zahi Zalloua argues that when faced with an unruly work of art, readers confront an ethical double bind, hesitating then between the two conflicting injunctions of either thematizing (making sense) of the literary work, or attending to its aesthetic alterity or unreadability.
Creatively hesitating between incommensurable demands (to interpret but not to translate back into familiar terms), ethical readers are invited to cultivate an appreciation for the unruly, to curb the desire for hermeneutic mastery without simultaneously renouncing meaning or the interpretive endeavor as such. Examining French texts from Montaigne’s sixteenth-century Essays to Diderot’s fictional dialogue Rameau’s Nephew and Baudelaire’s prose poems The Spleen of Paris, to the more recent works of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea, Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Jealousy, and Marguerite Duras’s The Ravishing of Lol Stein, Reading Unruly demonstrates that in such an approach to literature and theory, reading itself becomes a desire for more, an ethical and aesthetic desire to prolong rather than to arrest the act of interpretation.
Two Novels: Jealousy and In the Labyrinth
Prevalent approaches to the Essays, and the essayistic process, within the field of Montaigne scholarship. In his 2007 book, How to Read Montaigne, Terence Cave explores such lines, explicitly addressing the hermeneutic pitfalls facing any reader of the Essays. For Cave, the interpretive dilemma turns on the split consciousness that an author like Montaigne demands of his audience. A . . . fundamental question is whether we are to read the Essais primarily as a product of late Renaissance.
One another: Now the subject who keeps the two texts in his field and in his hands the reins of pleasure and bliss is an anachronic subject, for he simultaneously and contradictorily participates in the profound hedonism of all culture (which permeates him quietly under cover of an art de vivre shared by the old books) and in the destruction of that culture: he enjoys the consistency of his selfhood (that is his pleasure) and seeks its loss (that is his bliss). He is a subject split twice over,.
Subject is mediated by cultural codes — language, desire, discourses of power, and epistemology itself.”26 What the reader confronts in the Ravishing of Lol Stein, then, is not a set of characters with whom one may or may not identify, but a hegemonic system of representation. Consequently Lol as an unmediated representation is unavailable to the reader; what emerges in Duras’s novel is not a subject in its own right (Lol as speaking subject) but a feminine figure produced by Jacques’s male.
Clearly precedes the narrating of his story. Jacques feels nevertheless compelled to write her story down, to inquire further into the being of Lol. Assuming something akin to a pre-ontological understanding of Lol, then, Jacques takes up the role of an archaeologist, and engages in a poetics of unearthing. He proceeds to reconstruct the object of Lol’s desire in order to better understand her state of mind and silence; in short, to bridge the temporal gap between the ball and the present: To.
Devenue unique mais innommable faute de mot. J’aime à croire, comme je l’aime, que si Lol est silencieuse dans la vie c’est qu’elle a cru, l’espace d’un éclair, que ce mot pouvait exister. Faute de son existence, elle se tait. Ç’aurait été un mot-absence, un mot-trou, creusé en son centre d’un trou, de ce trou où tous les autres mots auraient été enterrés. (48) Lacking the absolute word to verbalize the “experience” of her ravishment, to express what she wanted to see, “all that she succeeds in.