Relations with Texts

What does it mean to be a critical reader? For me, reading is always personal: a dynamic, aesthetic dialogue between self and other, in which judgements are repeated and exchanged. I befriend my texts, engaging with them as “the testaments of human beings who have lived and suffered in the world” (Edmundson, 63).

I write phenomenologically, in a way that “seeks to make the familiar newly surprising … exposing the strangeness of the self-evident” (Felski, 32). I take an individual as a starting point. The individual is in a relationship where reading the text, just like dating the boy, says something about the individual’s identity, and vise versa: the text, or the boy, is informed by the interaction with the individual.

I pose the question of who reads and who is read? When entering into a relationship with a new text we submit to the thrill of what Warner describes as “an open future of personal and collective liberation, of full citizenship and historical belonging” (Warner, 14). The nerves sing with anticipation.

My friend says to me that she has the key to her new text; that only she can open it and discover its answers. She sees something no-one else can. Her knowledge is possessive – anxiously, beautifully so. Because the relationship offers an aesthetic exploration of self, her identity is very much at stake. She discovers herself as she stands in front of the text as mirror, as she stands beside the text as a point of comparison and aesthetic identification.

I take this one step further. My investment in my individual interpretation and understanding of the text seems to preclude all other possible interpretations. Not only am I the only one who has seen these things before but, in imagining that I am the only one, the text itself loses value. In reciprocation I imagine that it doesn’t value me either, that I am not necessary to it. It would exist without me. The aesthetic relationship begins to crumble.

The individual and the text collide and lose themselves in one another. Each fails to appreciate the other in its own right, spiralling into co-dependency. The individual seems irrelevant to the text. The text seems irrelevant without the individual. The individual wants desperately to regain a privileged position as reader. The text expects the individual to clean up after him.

Distantiation begins: the text, or the boy, is observed as a distant object in “paranoid suspicion of textual attachment” (Warner, 16). Each fights to claim some universal truth. “The literary text performs a metacommentary on the traps of interpretation, a canny reading of its own possible readings, a knowing anticipation and exposure of all possible hermeneutic blunders” (Felksi, 29). The individual cannot distinguish “anxiously anticipatory knowingness… from ordinary critical distance” (Warner, 17).

A stand off: the individual and the boy-as-text, text-as-boy, stand in judgement of each other. Both wanting to expose or demystify the ‘truth’ of their relationship, to claim the role of reader over what is read, but each is too involved to comprehend it. Neither can determine ‘right’ action or judgement.

Attempting to escape the limitations of knowledge, the individual suspiciously believes that the text is transgressive. Perhaps this doubt rests on an inability to be honest about our own “attachment, investment, and fantasy” (Warner, 17). Each relationship with each text is a fantasy of identity, of desire. Our identity comes into conflict with the text, we fear its fixity, and we flee from commitment. Our poly-amorous relations with texts explore our multiple fantasies of self as we shift through time and space.

- Edmundson, Mark (2009) “Against Readings”, Profession, MLA

- Felski, Rita (2009) “After Suspicion”, Profession, MLA

- Warner, Michael (2004) “Uncritical Reading”, in Jane Gallop (ed.), Polemic: Critical or Uncritical, London & New York: Routledge