Rereading

[Mikko Keskinen]

In the possibility of not reading also lies the possibility of rereading.
The physical stability of writing permits the reader to read selectively
or stop reading for a period of time, since the text patiently awaits a
revisitation.  Roland Barthes dealt with this phenomenon on a few
occasions.  He saw the rhythm of reading and not reading as the
prerequisite for the pleasure of great narratives: instead of reading word
for word se skip, and upon rereading we skip different passages.
(_Plaisir_: 'bords').  Paradoxically, by making the text porous, holey,
the reader helps it sustain greater pressures of use.  Rereading runs, as
Barthes notes, counter the commercial and ideological trends of
consumerist society; instead of throwing away the story after having read
it and then buying  another one, the reader is urged to consume it again:
"for it alone saves the text from repetition (those who fail to reread are
obliged to read the same story everywhere)" (_S/Z_).

But not reading or deletion of text can also mean, in several senses of
the expression, the saving of _oneself_.  The rhetorical lure, the
interpretive constraint of fiction can be resisted at the outset, before
it even gets a chance to take effect.  "There is only one way to save
oneself the trouble of interpreting _The Trial_: not to read it." (Erich
Heller: _F.K._)  The abstinent reader can also save him/herself from
ideological contamination.  Chaucer's Wife of Bath destroys an
anti'feminist' book, but also appropriates texts in more subtle manner
when she selectively, for her own benefit, quotes the Bible.

The possibility of deletion, of personal customization can also be
anticipated in the text itself.  There are novels which come in boxes full
of unbound pages, which the reader is free to arrange to any order.  Or
there are electronically self-consuming artifacts, like William Gibson's
poem (whose title I forget; needless to say, I haven't read it but I have
read _about_ it), which defy the very permanence and rereadability of
inscription by making writing a disposable good.  In practice, however,
the experiments on inscriptive instability are likely be resisted.  The
particular, be it haphazard or intented by the author, order in which a
loose-leaf novel exists in a box easily gains the status of the original -
from which the rearrangements are, analogously, secondary versions.  Also,
the very difficulty of the saving and retrieval of of an electronic text
paradoxically urges the reader to fight against automatic deletion by
looking for ways of making rereading possible.

(The two cases above are not, of course, exactly of the same order.  A
freely rearrangeable ream of loose leaves is an invitation for the reader
to co-create the work, to recycle it, whereas the self-annihilating text
relates to some kind of aesthetic conspicuous consumption, in which the
art work, as it were, throws itself away.)

The anticipation of deletion is also liable to produce logical
double-binds or performative paradoxes.  If a text is titled 'Do Not Read
This Text,' the correct form of resistance would - apparently - be to read
it.  But what if this is a rhetorical trap designed to lure the reader to
obey the text by seemingly resisting it?

Saving a text what would otherwise be deleted means that it can be reread
- and deleted, i.e., opposed or resisted on various grounds.  Rereading,
hence, both consolidates a text (less and less unread or misunderstood
holes puncture its holy wholeness) but also embrittles it (the workings of
significatory counterforces, of opposing meanings get a chance to take
effect).


Mikko