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Laborers and Voyagers: from the Text to the Reader

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Laborers and Voyagers: from the Text to the Reader e* LABORERS AND VOYAGERS: FROM THE TEXT TO THE READER ROGERCHARTIER aC' *: X xDi A wi.,^rtns m X lA f Farfrom being writers-founders of their own place, heirs to the peasants of earlier ages now workingon the soil of language, diggers of wells and builders of houses-readers are voyagers; they move across lands belonging to someone else, like nomadspoaching their way acrossfields they did not write, despoiling the wealth of Egypt to enjoy it themselves. Writingaccumu- lates, stocks up, resists time by the establishmentof a place and multipliesits productionthrough the expansionismof reproduction. Reading takes no measures against the erosion of time (oneforgets oneself and also forgets), reading does not keep what it acquires, or it does so poorly, and each of the places throughwhich it passes is a repetitionof the lost paradise. -Michel de Certeau,The Practice of EverydayLife diacritics / summ~er1992 diacritics22.2: 49-61 49 This magnificent text by Michel de Certeau, which contrasts writing (conservative, durable,and fixed) withreadings (always on the orderof the ephemeral)constitutes at the same time a necessaryfoundation and a disquietingchallenge for any historythat intends to inventoryand account for a practice-reading-that rarelyleaves traces, is scattered into an infinity of singularacts, andpurposely frees itself from all the constraintsseeking to subdueit. Such a projectfundamentally rests on a double assumption: thatreading is not already inscribed in the text, with no conceivable difference between the sense assigned to it (by the author, usage, criticism, and so forth) and the interpretation constructableby its readers;and that, correlatively, a text does not exist except for a reader who gives it signification: Whetherit is a newspaper or Proust, the text has a meaning only through its readers; it changes along with them;it is orderedin accordance with codes of perception that it does not control. It becomes a text only in its relation to the exteriorityof the reader, by an interplayof implicationand ruses between two sorts of "expectation" in combination: the expectation that organizes a readablespace (a literality),and one that organizes a procedure necessaryfor the actualizationof the work (a reading). [Practice 170-71]' The task of the historianis, then, to reconstructthe variationsthat differentiatethe "readablespace" (the texts in theirmaterial and discursive forms) and those which govern the circumstancesof their "actualization"(the readings seen as concrete practices and interpretiveprocedures). Based upon de Certeau's suggestions, I would like to indicate some of the stakes, problems, and conditions of possibility for such an historical project. Three poles, generally separatedby academic tradition,define the space of this history: first, the analysis of texts, eithercanonical or ordinary,deciphered in theirstructures, themes, and aims; second, the historyof books and, more generally,of all the objects and forms that carryout the circulationof writing;and finally, the study of practices which in various ways take hold of these objectsor formsand produce usages and differentiatedmeanings. A fundamentalquestion underlies this approachin associating textualcriticism, bibliog- raphy,and culturalhistory. Thatis to understandhow in the societies of the ancienregime between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries the increasing circulation of printed writingtransformed the modes of social interaction[sociabilitY], permitted new ways of thinking,and modified power relations. Hence the attention placed upon the manner in which (to use the terms of Paul Ricoeur) the encounterbetween "the world of the text" and "the world of the reader" functions [Time and Narrative 3: 6]. To reconstructin its historical dimensions this process of the "actualization"of texts above all requiresus to realize that their meaning dependsupon the formsthrough which they arereceived and appropriated by theirreaders (or listeners). Readers,in fact, neverconfront abstract, idealized texts detachedfrom any materiality.They hold in theirhands or perceive objects and forms whose structuresand modalitiesgovern their reading or hearing,and consequentlythe possible comprehension of the text read or heard. In contrastto a purely semantic definition of the text, which characterizesnot only structuralistcriticism in all its variantsbut also literarytheories concernedwith reconstructing the modesof receptionof works,it is necessaryto maintain thatforms produce meaning, and thateven a fixed text is invested with new meaningand The translatorand editorsgratefully acknowledge supportfor the translationof this essay provided by the Centerfor CulturalStudies, Universityof California, Santa Cruz. 1. On the reading-writingduo in this book see the article by Anne-MarieChartier and Jean HIbrard, "L'inventiondu quotidien, une lecture, des usages," Le Debat49 (March-April1988): 97-108. 50 being [statut] when the physical form through which it is presented for interpretation changes. We must also realize that reading is always a practice embodied in gestures, spaces, and habits. Far from the phenomenology of reading, which erases the concrete modalityof the act of readingand characterizesit by its effects, postulatedas universals, a history of modes of reading must identify the specific dispositions that distinguish communitiesof readersand traditions of reading. This approachsupposes the recognition of a series of contrasts:to begin with, thedistinctions between reading competencies. The fundamentalbut rough separationbetween the literateand the illiteratedoes not exhaust the possible differencesin the relationto writing. Those who can readtexts do not all read them in the same fashion. There is a wide gap between the most skillful and the least competent readers-those who are obliged to read what they read aloud in order to understandit and who are at ease only with certain textual or typographicalforms. Anothercontrast distinguishes between the normsand conventions of reading, defining for each communityof readersthe legitimateuses of the book, the forms of reading,and the instrumentsand proceduresof interpretation.Finally, we have the contrastbetween the expectationsand diverse intereststhat different groups of readersinvest in the practice of reading. Upon these determiningfactors, which govern practice,depend the ways in which texts can be read-and readdifferently by readerswho are equippedwith different intellectual tools and maintainquite differentrelations to writing. Michel de Certeauillustrated such an approachin describingthe specific character- istics of the mystical reader: "By 'mystical readers'I have in mind all the proceduresof readingwhich were suggestedor practicedin the field of solitaryor collective experience designated in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as 'illuminated,' 'mystical,' or 'spiritual"'["La lecture" 67].2 In the minor,marginal, and dispersedcommunity that was mysticism's milieu, reading, determinedby norms and habits, invested the book with novel functions: to replace the ecclesiastical institutionconsidered to be inadequate;to make a certainkind of speech possible (thatof the prayer,the communicationwith God, the conversar); and to indicate the practices through which spiritual experience is constructed. The mystical relationto the book can also be understoodas a trajectoryin which several "moments"of reading succeed one another: the establishment of an otherness [alterit6] which founds the subjective quest; the development of ecstasy [jouissance];the markingof bodies physically reactingto the digestion [manducation]of the text;and, at the extreme,the interruptionof reading,the abandonmentof the book, and detachment.Consequently to locate the networkof practicesand rules of readingspecific to diverse communitiesof readers(spiritual, intellectual, professional, and so forth) is a primarytask for any history concerned with understanding,in its differentiations,the pragmaticfigure of the "poaching"reader [lecteur braconnier] [see, for example, Jardine and Grafton]. But to read is always to read something. Certainly, to exist at all, the history of reading must be radically distinguished from the history of what is read: "The reader emerges from the historyof the book, in which he was for a long time undifferentiatedor indistinct.... The reader was taken as the effect of the book. Today he has become detachedfrom the books of which he had seemed no more thana shadow. Suddenly this shadow has been released, has takenon a physiognomy, has acquiredan independence" [de Certeau,"La lecture"66-67]. But this founding independenceis not an arbitrary license. It is confined by the codes and conventions that govern the practices of a community. It is also confined by the discursive and materialforms of the texts read. "New readersmake new texts, and theirnew meaningsare a functionof theirnew forms" 2. The suggestions in this essay are reconsideredin one of Michel de Certeau's majorworks, La fablemystique [Paris: Gallimard,19821, inparticular the thirdpart, "Lascene de l' enonciation" [209-73]. This work has recently been translatedinto English: The Mystic Fable, trans. Michael B. Smith[Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992]. diacritics / summer 1992 51 [McKenzie,Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts20]. D. F. McKenzie thuspoints out with great acuity the double network of variations-variations of the dispositions of readersand variationsof textualand formaldevices-which must be taken into account in any history seeking to recover the
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