Ways of Reading, Modes of Being

Ways of Reading, Modes of Being Marielle Macé (bio) Translated by Marlon Jones Reading in Life "I would go and rejoin life and frivolity in books . . . the young girl would fall in love with the explorer who had saved her life and it would all end in a marriage. From these books and magazines I derived my most personal fantasy-world."1 When the young Sartre raised an imaginary sword and dreamed of being a hero after reading the adventures of Pardaillan, his yielding to the sway of the narrative was not so very different from what we all do and make happen when we read and find ourselves powerfully drawn towards different possibilities and promises of existence. Similarly, if Proust's hero Marcel is constantly turning to books, working to cultivate their influence in his life, and harnessing his whole existential effort in his readings, this is not because his nature is other, it is not only in order to become a writer and separate himself from the patterns of common existence. Rather, for them and for us, works take their place in ordinary life, leaving their marks and exerting a lasting power. Literature does not stand on one side, and life on the other, in a brutal, noncommunicating stand-off that belies any possibility of believing in books, a stand-off that would make Sartre's fantastic urges (or the way Emma Bovary is swept away by literary examples) into a simple confusion between reality and fiction, an eschewing of action, a denigration of the real, and consequently, a weakening of the ability to live. We encounter, rather, forms intrinsic to life itself, impulses, images, and ways of being that circulate between subjects and works, revealing, activating, and affecting them. Reading is not a separate activity, functioning in competition with life, but one of the daily means by which we give our existence form, flavor, and even style. What does it mean to give style to our existence? It is not something reserved for artists, esthetes, or heroic lives, but the distinctive trait of human life: not in the sense that we should coat our existence with a veneer of elegance, but because our every act brings possible forms of life into play. In this way, the ordinary and extraordinary experience of literature forms part of individual adventures, in which everyone can End Page 213 reappropriate a relationship to oneself, one's language and possibilities. Literary styles offer themselves to the reader as genuine forms of life, engaging behaviors, methods, constructive powers, and existential values. "In Swallow Style" Opening a collection of poems by Francis Ponge, I read, for example, the title "In Swallow Style" and am suddenly captured by an exterior form, invited to follow its movement and try out, within myself, this style and this particular form of being. Each swallow indefatigably hurls itself at—constantly practises—a signature, of its own kind, on the sky. Steel pen, dipped in blue-black ink, you write yourself so fast! That you leave no mark... Except, in recollection, the memory of a fiery impetus, of a strange poem, With sudden changes of direction, hairpin turns, rapid wing-glides, accelerations, gear-shifts, the way a shark swims.2 This is neither a desirable fate, nor a program for life; it is the simple form of a flight: "Each swallow indefatigably hurls itself at—constantly practices—a signature, of its own kind, on the sky." The swoop of the poem conveys to the reader the law of the birds. The swallow actively forms a signature that I recognize: the lively signs, the blue-black commas it traces in flight. And this signature is not a mysterious code, placed in front of me in the static manner of a riddle, but the dynamic movement of the bird, its way of taking off, the very modality of its being, the style of this singular motion that the poem's phrases pursue, highlight, and qualify, and which thus energetically carries away my understanding and desire. I truly feel what it would represent, what it would mean "to be a swallow": a certain swiftness, a certain stridency, the violence of will and emphasis of...