Posts Tagged ‘Text’

Reading ‘The Unnamable’

Saturday, April 12th, 2014

In an attempt to describe the active and action experience of reading, I took notes on my thoughts and streams of consciousness while reading The Unnamable by Samuel Beckett. I read the novel in three separate sittings. I usually read novels quickly, often finding myself intensely caught up in the world of the novel. This applies especially to nineteenth century novels. I’ve been able to read War and Peace, The Brothers Karamazov, and Crime and Punishment in a single sitting, but with The Unnamable I had to take breaks in my reading because of the overwhelming nature of the novel.

Jerry Bauer. Portrait photograph of Samuel Beckett, not dated Gelatin silver © 2006 Jerry Bauer

Beginning the new novel was so daunting that even the name intimidated me. I had previously read a plurality of Beckett’s works, so I was aware of what I was getting myself into. During my reading of The Unnamable, I took notes on what my thoughts were at the time. (From now on my transcription of my reading of The Unnamable will be italicized.) Beckett’s novels always plainly spell out the undercurrents of my own thoughts. As a modernist writer, rather than creating a world through his novels, Beckett instead uses his novels as a method of sorting out his own problems, as well as holding a mirror to those of the reader.

Where now? Who now? When now? Unquestioning. I, say I. Unbelieving. Questions, hypotheses, call them that. Keep going, going on, call that going, call that on. Can it be that one day, off it goes on, that one day I simply stayed in, in where, instead of going out, in the old way, out to spend day and night as far away as possible, it wasn’t far. Perhaps that is how it began. You think you are simply resting, the better to act when the time comes, or for no reason, and you soon find yourself powerless ever to do anything again.”

1st edition (French)

From the moment I began, the words struck me. I read them in my head and I can feel felt the neurons in my brain jump to attention. ‘Where now? Who now? When now?’ I can almost see the black ink leaking out of the pages, waiting for me to soak it up with my fingers like a sponge. When reading I feel a need to absorb the text, rather than merely inhabiting its world. Beckett’s work is particularly conducive to this, because he doesn’t try to create a world that the reader can inhabit. He isn’t trying to tell a charming story that will distract me from the world. No. What he’s doing is redirecting my attention back to the world, and my thought/memory is my magnifying glass. He reminds me to check what I think and directs my mind, while I travel through with my own mind. However, too much time spent in this magnified world is a little overwhelming, so I occasionally stop for a cigarette, taking a break from staring at the thick black twists and turns on the page.

I used Beckett’s own words as a diving board to jump off of into a stream of consciousness.

He only tells the stories of these characters in order to aid his own view of himself. He says these are necessary for self-definition. Is there anything unnecessary for self-definition? How can one even tell? What good does it even do to self-define? Is that even the point? And even when one self-defines, or realizes oneself in one of these meaningless stories, how can one tell that one is supreme? There must be more than one. He keeps saying he’ll get onto serious matters soon, but nothing is serious. I shouldn’t even take his words so seriously. But I do. I take all literature seriously. I read the words of these authors, gasping through pages looking for the answer. I don’t really know what the question is, but if these men and women were able to write such things, they must understand something that I do not, and I wish to learn that from them. But even I know that there is no one supreme understanding, which is why I will continue reading and learn of every thing that I possibly can. But then again, nothing is serious, so why take it so seriously?

My thinking begins to mirror his writing style, as each of his statements leads my mind to wander into my own life and reflections. Like Beckett, I keep backtracking and having to remind myself against dogmatism. But at the same time, I am still constructing a meaning with the help of the text, and any meaning that I do construct is whatever meaning the text could give me in that moment. I’m put in a strange state of feeling consumed by Beckett, yet the consumption is coming from inside me; I’m collapsing into myself like a black hole over and over again with every sentence he causes to gestate in my mind. When he stops putting paragraph breaks in the text, there stops being paragraph breaks in my mind. I follow what he is doing in my own fashion, and I take everything that I can see him offering me; even with the daylight I can feel myself falling into his own pit. And it’s alright. I know what’s down there and I want him to guide me through it.

Now there are no more paragraph breaks. It is all a big chunk of stream of consciousness. I can feel that from now on there will be no more breaks in my mind or in his. You’re never not thinking about anything. Even pauses and nothingness are something. I guess this is not a change from how it was before, but something feels different. Like there’s something inescapable now about the mind and thought. He keeps changing the point of view over and over again. I cannot tell which character he wishes to talk about anymore. Not that it even matters.

Beckett fills me with a much different type of exhilaration than Tolstoy and the difference in the texts leads to a different kind of construction. In reading Beckett, I’m suffering alongside him, the narrator, and every character he’s ever constructed. I felt an urgency to finish not because I want as much of the world as possible as fast as possible, but because I urgently want to leave his world behind and return to anything but it. If I were to put it down and take a break, it would only extend both our suffering. I wished to return to my own world where reality isn’t so concentrated as it is in The Unnamable. But once I surfaced back in my own world, I’m left with an impression of the entire novel upon my brain. I felt his words burrowing deeper and deeper into my brain, and as I had with War and Peace, I looked upon the world in rose-coloured-Unnamable-glasses. And the beauty of it is that both Beckett and Tolstoy are right. They are as different as night and day but they both say the same things and are both trying to talk about the same thing; the world.

 

 

 

 

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Marina Manoukian, Sarah Lawrence College

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You not only have to be there, you have to act there.

Thursday, February 20th, 2014

The idea of participation comes to us at an interesting time, especially since the idea of individuation seems to have flooded the mindsets of all college students. And that’s just the thing; college discounts and college savings won’t just come to you. Participation is required.

When thinking of the readers of a text, there are two discernable readers; the ideal reader that the author conceived of while writing the text, and the plurality of actual readers that encounter the text. However, neither one of these actually exist in a single construction. The ideal reader does not exist outside the mind of the author, and is, in a certain sense, useless. The ideal reader would have the exact same understanding as the author, “and identical code to that of the author”,[1] and would share the intentions of the author as well. If this were the case, the act of reading would be superfluous because any meaning or idea to be conveyed would already exist in the mind of the reader[2]. There would be nothing gained or changed by the act of reading. The other reader that exists is the actual reader of a text, and the experience of this reader is specific to that one reader. One may attempt to generalize texts in regard to how they affect readers, but every reader reads a text at a time, state, and mentality that cannot be replicated, not even within the reader himself. The response and construction of the text that is produced is based not only on the text itself and its possible constructions, but also the different values and moods of the reader. This is why readers can describe two entirely opposing constructions of the same text. Because of this, the phenomenology of reading can only be described by an individual, most often in regards to a specific text; it is much harder to generalize.

It is also in this way that it is somewhat superfluous to try to grasp what the objective world is, behind the veil of sight. If one saw the world as it were, so to say, intended, there would be no point in participating in the world; you’d already know everything. Instead, it seems to be more useful to focus on the relationships created by the participation, just as a text is only as much as a reader constructs it to be. Participation and action are the most important parts of the formula, because if one chooses to exist solely in the world of thought, he/she essentially wants to obtain all the knowledge without the actual action of obtaining. He/she wants to be a god; to pick up a book and know what it is about without going through the actual process of reading it and putting all those letters and words together through one’s own lens.

One’s entire life can be boiled down to the importance of participation. Certainly, if you are spending time with your friends, it is easy to sit back and watch the conversation and exchanges happen around you. You’re there, but you’re more of a spectator than an actor—a spectator in a play that you should be playing in. The best reality is one that is created by you, and creation can only happen through your own actions. One cannot dwell in the realm of thought forever. Otherwise you’ll end up like Hamlet.


[1] Iser, Wolfgang. The Act of Reading. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978. 29. Print.
[2] The Act of Reading, 29

 

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Marina Manoukian, Sarah Lawrence College

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Constructing A Text

Friday, February 7th, 2014

Reading a text is no different than looking at one’s college career and wondering where one’s going to find college savings and discounts in a world that seems to be framed for adults. In fact, you control the framing of the world just as you control the framing of a text.

When one reads a text, one is reading with one’s own rules for construction, as well as the rules and guidelines for construction that the text provides. A definition of the text cannot be given without consideration of the reader. A text does not exist until it has been read, and every reading is a unique interaction between the text and the participating reader[1]. Wolfgang Iser suggests that the text offers “‘schematized aspects’ through which the subject matter of the work can be produced, while the actual production takes place through an act of concretization”.[2] The text can offer several possible constructions of meaning, but these constructions do not exist until there is a reader to construct them. Iser identifies the two poles of a text as the artistic and the aesthetic; the artistic pole is the text as written by the author, and the aesthetic pole is the realization of the text by the reader.[3] Due to this plurality, a text cannot be defined by either pole; instead, it is defined by the relationship between the two poles.

By Louis Wain

When you see and understand anything in the world, it can always be interpreted as a split between these two poles. In a conversation, there exists the other participant with their own structure of beliefs, and you, who interprets and understands what they are saying. A conversation cannot be defined by either of these alone; it only exists as a relationship between these two poles, and that relationship is what should be focused on, understood and used as a basis for further activity. This parallels the split that exists in the world between thought and action.


The idea of a split seems to be a difficult thing to comprehend at first, because the world seems to be made up to wholes and unities. And while it is true that the split is a manmade construction, the split is in fact necessary towards the understanding of the whole. A human can be called the combination of thought and action, a simultaneously looping of one to the other, creating a state of becoming. Both particulars, thought and action, are necessary towards understanding the general relationship that is created out of the two. Just like how the two poles of a text, the artistic and the aesthetic, are both necessary towards the understanding of the text. And the text is simultaneously general and particular; it exists as the general book and as the particular reading. This is because language and speech are simultaneously thought and action, existing in both worlds. It is both a truth and an appearance.

Most things in life can be divided into the realms of truth and appearance. This is not to say that these are the only two realms of the world, but it can help one’s understanding to acknowledge these two realms. To recognize that someone can act differently from how they are thinking, regardless of intention, is what opened mankind up to the idea that things may not always be as they seem. But to be fair, in this instance there is an error in the rhetoric. Things will never be as they seem because things will never be anything. They are perpetually in a state of seeming, of becoming, and to become what you seem is an endless cycle.


[1] Iser, Wolfgang. The Act of Reading. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978. 20. Print.
[2] The Act of Reading  21
[3] The Act of Reading, 21

 

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Marina Manoukian, Sarah Lawrence College

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