UNA HERRAMIENTA DEFICIENTEMENTE UTILIZADA EN LA LUCHA ANTI-CORRUPCION.
2 CONCEPTO Y FASES DEL GOBIERNO ELECTRÓNICO.
This chapter argues that Smith depicts readers as embodied subjects in her fiction, and analyses why the visceral nature of readers’ relationships with books is of particular importance in her work. Both the materiality of books and the bodily sensations of the reading subject are common preoccupations in her writing, and the explosive interactions she depicts between bodies and books are crucial to her efforts to re- envision the reader as an active, even subversive, agent of textual meaning, rather than
a passive recipient of it. Moreover, by involving the subject’s body in a highly material
experience of books and reading, Smith reveals the strong emotional responses that are provoked when undertaking this activity, providing a tangible manifestation of how
readers wrestle with books to ‘break open’ their meanings, and work constructively to
create new significance from them. This altercation between readers’ destructive and
creative responses towards books is significant throughout my analysis, and has already been supported by reader-response theorists such as Lynne Pearce, who suggests that criticism has neglected ‘the emotional rollercoaster on which we travel each and every
time we engage in a new textual encounter’.1 Susan L. Feagin has similarly suggested
that a critical focus on the ‘aesthetic experience’ of the reader does not always take into account the full range of emotions that can be stimulated by reading.2
1 Pearce, Feminism and the Politics of Reading, 183.
2 Feagin, Reading with Feeling, 6. According to this conception, even Rosenblatt’s term ‘aesthetic reading’ constrains the reader to a more thoughtful and reflective role rather than expressing their instinctive and guttural reactions. Feagin suggests it is important to expand the parameters of reading to incorporate bodily responses as well as intellectual ones.
For my purposes here, I have found it useful to consider the word ‘embodied’ to signify a person’s awareness of ‘having a body’ or being ‘invested with a body’,3 and
consequently the term ‘embodied reader’ to signify a reading subject whose interactions
with books are self-consciously physical or material in nature as well as thoughtful or intellectual. This definition poses a significant challenge to a more common perception of reading – one which is expanded upon in the paragraphs to follow – as an activity which is separate or divested from direct bodily experience. It is my intention to argue alternatively that Smith depicts readers who relish books for their material properties as well as their intellectual ones, and who respond instinctively to books, often using them to express more primitive emotions of anger and desire. The presentation of reader-characters who respond physically to books, leaving marks or even damaging them, as well as giving them new life and purpose through acts of re-making, allows Smith to explore opportunities for individual subjects to subvert the established order of the text, as well as that of the world beyond its pages.
In order to explore the subversive potential of the reading subject in Smith’s work, this chapter draws from several essays by the theorist Hélène Cixous, who envisages
both reading and writing as activities which implicate the subject’s body in lively and
dynamic interactions.4 My decision to focus on these essays to support my examination,
as well as drawing from Julia Kristeva’s seminal publication Revolution in Poetic Language, is due to their common refusal to impose a split between ‘the physical realm of the body and the symbolic realm of language’, and their shared emphasis on the bodily
experience of reading as a source of freedom and agency.5 I have also found it useful to
3‘embodied, adj.’, OED Online, Oxford UP, 2017
<http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/60904?redirectedFrom=embodied.> (accessed 16 March 2017).
4 As already mentioned, Cixous’ essays which have been most useful to me are ‘Sorties: Out and Out:
Attacks/Ways Out/Forays’,‘Difficult Joys’, and ‘Coming to Writing’.
5 Susan Sellers, Hélène Cixous: Authorship, Autobiography and Love (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996), 72.
pay attention to more recent examples of literary criticism, which emphasise the need to take real bodily experiences into account within critical discourse; materialist methodologies such as those proposed by Stacy Alaimo and Elizabeth Grosz, who similarly refuse to abstract or eliminate actual bodies from the theories which purport to discuss and analyse them.6 These perspectives have significant relevance for my
argument concerning characters who have highly tactile relationships with books, and whose bodies are implicated within the act of reading.
Another useful perspective when analysing these behaviours is Maurice Merleau-
Ponty’s conception of reading in his seminal text The Phenomenology of Perception.7
Merleau-Ponty disparages our reliance on a second-order experience of the world –
ideas that have been digested and packaged into neatly formed theories – and advocates a return to our most immediate sensations. ‘The world is not what I think, but what I live through’, he suggests, and it is through our basic perceptions that unrestricted playfulness and creativity abound.8 In this sense, it is necessary to engage with the
materiality of our environment in order to increase our understanding of it and expand its possibilities for meaning. Carol Bigwood draws on Merleau-Ponty’s work to
emphasise the importance of the body within this, which ‘is actively and continually in
touch with its surroundings. It is directed outside itself, inextricably entangled in
existence’.9 As a result of this constant contact between the body and the material world,
which elucidate the importance of the body in Cixous and Kristeva’s work include Kathy Davis ed.,
Embodied Practices: Feminist Perspectives on the Body (London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi: SAGE Publications, 1997);Elizabeth Grosz, ‘The Body of Signification’ in Abjection, Melancholia and Love: the work of Julia Kristeva (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), 80-103; and Kelly Oliver ed., French Feminism Reader (Maryland and Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000).
6 See Stacy Alaimo, Undomesticated Ground: Recasting Nature as Feminist Space (Ithaca and London:
Cornell UP, 2000) and Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1994).
7 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge, 2002). 8 Ibid., xviii.
9 See Carol Bigwood, ‘Renaturalizing the body (with the help of Merleau-Ponty)’ in Body and Flesh: A
Bigwood suggests that meaning is generated directly as a result of this lived tactility.
These ideas are reflected in Smith’s depiction of readers who, in their efforts to explore the true value of their books, do not retreat into cerebral contemplation, but respond physically to them, generating meaning through the use of their bodies.
Smith’s fiction envisages the experience of the reader as concrete and material: book- objects weigh heavily on the shelves of libraries waiting to be taken down and are
imbued with fresh meaning as a result of readers’ dynamic interactions with them. As
such, Smith presents inert books as heavy and lifeless, whilst opened books become immediately full of energy and potential. Readers are encouraged to have open and exploratory relationships with books, rather than leaving them untouched on the
shelves. One example is the short story ‘Text for the day’ in Smith’s first collection Free Love and other stories, in which the protagonist Melissa rips up the books in her home library, dispersing pages of poetry from her previously well-ordered bookshelves across the streets and into the hands of strangers.10 As already mentioned, an important aspect
of Smith’s depiction of an embodied reader concerns their destructive impulses: the
exertion of physical violence towards books, including throwing, burning and eating
them. In demonstration of this, Melissa’s disrupted bookshelves in ‘Text for the day’ are
compared to a crime scene in which the books themselves have become the victims of
their owner’s angry outburst:
the books, the books, the pride and joy, were so peculiar in both rooms, in such a mess, all over the floor or piled in haphazard order, great gaping holes in the bookcases all up the walls and books fall on their sides askew.11
10 Smith, ‘Text for the day’, 28. 11 Ibid., 21.
Melissa’s friend Austen is horrified to discover the maltreatment of the books in Melissa’s flat; ‘haphazard’, ‘great gapingholes’ and ‘askew’ all suggest that a physical
violation has taken place against the civilised order that previously reigned. It becomes clear that Melissa seeks to disrupt the established order of her environment through destructive actions towards the bookshelves. Her violence towards this impressive
collection of volumes, which have been kept for many years but are ‘yellowing, losing their colours, fading’,12 indicates a need to challenge their perceived authority, shaking
up the circumstances of her own life as well as the pages of the books themselves. In this instance, Smith undermines the prestige and value usually associated with old books and prioritises instead her character’s desire to defy social rules and establish a more visceral
relationship with her bookshelves.
Whilst this story initially presents a tale of destruction, for Melissa, dispersing lines of verse at random also opens up new opportunities for others to discover fresh significance in otherwise forgotten texts. Furthermore, the outdoor context of these experiences allows Smith to emphasise the textures of the ripped pages – which are compared to fallen leaves – and the subject’s physical sensations in response to these
pieces of litter. As has already been suggested, books in Smith’s fiction function as
targets or channels for the emotional lives of her characters; an outlet for feelings of passionate desire or anger that have been censored or suppressed. Subsequent to her release of anger, Melissa experiences a sense of relief that allows more creative impulses to take hold, as she embarks on a new life away from her previous abode. Smith’s
narrative implies that the physical destruction of the books has been necessary to release new life and energy from both the books and Melissa herself. Discovering new purposes for old books is also a feature of ‘the universal story’, in which copies of The Great Gatsby
are collected together and used to construct a boat. As in ‘Text for the day’, Smith
emphasises the practical qualities of the books, as well as conjuring a physical manifestation of Fitzgerald’s ambiguous final metaphor of the novel.13 This example
again draws attention to books’ material properties and suggests alternative contexts in
which they might be useful: not just in studies and libraries but in outdoor spaces, such as on streets, in parks and even at sea.
Starting from these initial examples, my intention in this chapter is to explore how reader-characters in Smith’s fiction are presented as embodied figures whose alternating destructive and creative reactions towards books have both transgressive and liberating consequences on their lives. As outlined in my introduction, reader- response critics such as Rosenblatt and Iser have emphasised the need for readers to channel their potential as active agents in relation to books towards becoming more critical and subversive in real-life circumstances. In Literature as Exploration, for example, Rosenblatt describes how the reader ‘comes to the book from life . . . He will resume his concern with (it) when the book is closed’, thus demonstrating her interest in the ways that readers might take elements of what they read back to the experiential world in which they live.14 Iser meanwhile discusses the ‘self-sharpening’ potential of
reading, as the reader’s personality is developed through the act of reading, and their actions become more considered as a result of this activity.15 In this chapter, I explore
this argument through Smith’s first novel Like, which carefully intertwines characters’
relationships with each other and their relationships with books. Of particular interest to me is the impact of burning and destroying books on her protagonists, and how these actions help them to address their hidden desires for each other and break out of
13 See F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (London: Penguin, 1994), 188.
14 Rosenblatt, Literature as Exploration, 34. See also Hallin, ‘A Rhetoric for Audiences’, 294. 15 Iser, The Act of Reading, 32.
constricting life circumstances. Following this, I turn towards Smith’s depiction of
books as an organic product of trees to emphasise the more constructive effects of reading, which often occur as a result of the aforementioned violence and destruction. By emphasising the material connections between books and the trees from which they are made, I argue that Smith portrays readers as caught up in the same organic cycles of life, death and renewal. Before turning to these arguments however, it is necessary to further outline the key theoretical ideas that have been used to underpin my analysis. One of the key theoretical bases for my interest in the embodied manifestation of the reader has been the historical tendency to disassociate reading – and intellectual activities in general – from the human body. This disconnection is a vast terrain which has been well documented, and whilst I do not have space to expand on this history at length, it is useful to make a few remarks about how this disassociation between body and mind continues to pervade discourse to the present day. Elizabeth Grosz, for example, who has already been mentioned, argues forcefully that since its early philosophy, critical discourse has persistently separated the activities of body and mind from each other, privileging the more rational operations of the mind over those of the interfering and unpredictable body.16 In this regard, Grosz suggests, the body is seen as
harbouring irrational impulses and emotions that cannot be trusted when making a considered argument or constructing a thesis. Even in the contemporary era, she argues, the body is subordinated as an object of study for the rational mind, or as a vehicle for the expression of internal thoughts, which must be trained according to the mind's will.17 Others have agreed that disdain for the body and disregard for its place within
activities such as reading and writing have pervaded critical discourse, with many
16 See Grosz, Volatile Bodies, 6 and ‘The Body of Signification’, 81. 17 Grosz, Volatile Bodies, 8-9.
theorists seeking refuge from embodied experience in more abstract and theoretical realms. Following a resurgence of interest in this area in the early 1990s, Brian S.
Turner remarked that ‘In western philosophy and theory . . . the body appears simultaneously as constraint and potential’, suggesting that the role of the body within
intellectual discussion continues to be a polarising issue.18 In the same year, Arthur W.
Frank produced another review of body theories, concluding that whilst many theorists continue to silence the body within discourse, other narrative forms are emerging which better enable the expression of physiological responses.19 Whilst a full discussion of the
debate concerning the relationship between bodily experience and intellectual discourse is impossible within the scope of this study, I outline below two contemporary perspectives, which specifically concern the separation of the body from the act of reading. Both of these perspectives raise concerns about the abstraction of reading from the subject’s embodied reality and everyday experience.
The first is Michel De Certeau, whose essay ‘Reading as Poaching’ describes the
contemporary reader as withdrawn and detached from their own body. In predominantly literate societies, he suggests, reading has transformed from being a largely oral and communal activity, to one which is now largely undertaken by individuals in isolation and silence:
Today, the text no longer imposes its own rhythm on the subject, it no longer manifests itself through the reader’s voice. The withdrawal of the body, which is the condition of autonomy, is a distancing of the text.20
18 Brian S. Turner, ‘Recent Developments in the Theory of the Body’ in The Body: Social Process and
Cultural Theory (London: Sage, 1991), 4.
19 Arthur W. Frank, ‘For a Sociology of the Body: an Analytical Review’ in The Body: Social Process and
Cultural Theory, 80. These ideas are supported by recent critical movements, which assert the importance of material experience as a basis for experience. See Sonia Kruks, Retrieving Experience
(Cornell: Cornell UP, 2001).
De Certeau draws attention to the way that reading practices have changed from the communal traditions of the past – when literature was often consumed through listening to one person speak in large groups - to the increasingly individualised and internalised nature of reading in Western societies today. This change has resulted in the
detachment of the reader’s body, as they no longer hear a speaker’s voice or understand language as something which is produced primarily by the body through oral speech. Reading has transformed into a visual exercise of interpreting written signs on a page rather than one of oral comprehension. Even more so than writing, De Certeau suggests, reading has become a stagnant activity, and contemporary readers are treated more like passive consumers of finished texts than creative agents who are capable of responding to what they read, and challenging its original author.21 This is an important perspective
to consider in relation to Smith’s depictions of the reader, who has a strong bodily presence in relation to the books they read.22 It is evident that Smith seeks to overcome
such reductive portrayals through her emphasis on characters’ physical interactions
with books, which are based on instinctive responses, and which often have a transformational impact on their lives. Through her depiction of characters who literally eat pages, for example, she plays with the notion of what it means to be a ‘consumer’ of
books, suggesting that rather than being a passive activity, readers use these objects to nourish their most basic physical needs. Smith persistently rejects the notion of readers as disconnected from their material environment, foregrounding instead intimate bodily
encounters with books to emphasise their role in stimulating and nourishing readers’
imaginations.
21 Ibid., 132. The importance of oral discourse in allowing the reader to take on a more interactive role –
including further theoretical perspectives which support this idea - is expanded upon in my chapter on
‘The Dialogic Reader’.
22See, for example, Olive Fraser’s behaviour in Shire and Ash’s treatment of books in Like, both of which
The second perspective that has been useful is David Bleich’s essay ‘The Materiality of Reading’, which also suggests that the portrayal of reading as a disembodied activity