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The Violence
of Reading
Literature and Philosophy
at the Threshold of Pain
Dominik Zechner
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The Violence of Reading
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Dominik Zechner
The Violence of
Reading
Literature and Philosophy at the Threshold of Pain
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Dedicated to the memory of Werner Hamacher
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Contents
1 Introduction: Allegories of Bleeding 1
2 Cry Me a Reader 35
3 The Promise of Oblivion 69
4 Transcendental Masochism 99
5 Sublime Sufferings129
6 Sticks and Stones159
Note on the Text193
Bibliography195
Index207
ix
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CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Allegories of Bleeding
“But look where sadly the poor wretch comes reading.”
—Shakespeare, Hamlet
Whenever I permit myself to meet new people, the question inevitably
posed to the “literature professor” is one that haunts me in my darkest
hours: “So what do you read for fun?” Much less innocent than it sounds,
the query is raised in defense of the textual pleasure principle, thinking it
an aberration that reading, the lovely pastime, should be degraded to the
pallid labor that secures someone’s livelihood rather than filling the lazy
hours of Sunday afternoons. Having been confronted with the dreaded
probe countless times, I must admit that I still don’t quite know what it
means, but in my mind the fabled act of reading for fun has something to
do with reading so it doesn’t hurt. Yet even if such a thing were possible,
I suppose I fail to grasp its allure. For would we read at all if it didn’t
threaten to intimidate, invade, and injure?
Already the assumption that reading proffers a glee of sorts signals its
proximity to negative affect, and if you don’t take my word for it, consider
Nietzsche’s thoughts on the matter. About his Zarathustra he once said
that the book can only really be known by those who have “at some time
been profoundly wounded and at some time profoundly delighted by
every word in it [den nicht jedes seiner Worte irgendwann einmal tief
1
D. Zechner, The Violence of Reading,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-53192-7_1
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2
D. ZECHNER
verwundet und irgendwann einmal tief entzückt hat].”1 The formulation
exposes reading to an iterative temporality that requires us not to read,
relish, and move on—but to read and return, read and re-read, which
already shifts the supposed “fun” of reading into the realm of repetition
compulsion and closer to the authority of death drive. In other words, you
can’t have the pleasure of the text without also signing up for its beyond.
The same words that delight you today may lacerate you tomorrow,
though the translation doesn’t quite cut it on that score: Nietzsche’s terminus of “Entzücken,” more an ecstatic rapture than a mere delight, originally meant as much as a sudden and violent withdrawal and expropriation.2
Stuck between a rock and a hard place, Nietzsche’s reader is not simply
caught between pleasure and pain but between two kinds of torment: if
reading’s delight is no delight at all but an event of sheer self-sacrifice that
violently rips the reader, totally entzückt, away from herself, I might instead
wish to be “profoundly wounded,” if in this state of injury I at least have
some sense of who I am. The abyss of the reader’s rapture might be the
reason Roland Barthes stopped short before titling his book “La jouissance du texte.”3 As long as we can speak of pleasure, things seem more or
less under control, but once the enjoyment of Entzücken breaks the dams
of “reading for fun,” the lovely pastime spirals into an event of gleeful
self-annihilation.
To the degree that the scene of reading provokes a multifaceted spectacle of torment—I discuss the exemplary status of the reading scene in
Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony” below—it is proffered as the paradigmatic
1
Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann and
R.J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1989), 22. See Zur Genealogie der Moral [KSA 5], eds.
Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Munich: dtv, 1999), 255.
2
“[R]apare, abstrahere, wegnehmen, dahinnehmen, entrücken, gewaltsam, plötzlich
wegreiszen” (“rapare, abstrahere, to remove, to take away, to shift away, to violently and
suddenly tear away”). “ENTZUCKEN, entzücken,” Deutsches Wörterbuch von Jacob Grimm
und Wilhelm Grimm, vol. 3, col. 672, accessed June 20, 2023, https://www.woerterbuchnetz.de/DWB?lemid=E05888; my translation.
3
According to Barthes, it is important discursively “to distinguish euphoria, fulfillment,
comfort (the feeling of repletion when culture penetrates freely), from shock, disturbance,
even loss, which are proper to ecstasy, to bliss [de la secousse, de l’ébranlement, de la perte,
propres à la jouissance].” Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New
York: Hill and Wang, 1975), 19. See Le plaisir du texte (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1973), 34.
The bone-rattling ébranlement of jouissance corresponds to the zucken (“to spasm,” “to
quiver”) of Nietzsche’s Entzücken: a textual quaking perhaps so difficult, if not impossible,
to put into words that Barthes had no choice but to seek refuge in the “comfort” of pleasure.
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1
INTRODUCTION: ALLEGORIES OF BLEEDING
3
site for an inquiry into the relation between language and pain. This relation has long been thought to belong to a representationalist paradigm
according to which language must always fall short of accurately conveying the experience of pain. Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain, a trailblazer
in this respect, argues that pain, as an event of experience, and language,
as a mode of communicating one’s experience to others, are mutually
exclusive. Only certain experiences can be shared with others, and pain is
not one of them, as “[w]hatever pain achieves, it achieves in part through
its unshareability, and it ensures this unshareability through its resistance
to language.”4 As a matter of fact, pain not only actively resists language,
it is effectively “language-destroying.”5 What is dissatisfying about this
argument is not so much the diagnosis of a total linguistic breakdown in
the state of pain—it’s the metaphysical assumption that pain forms an
exception within the array of human experiences, which, in general, should
easily be translatable into the forms of linguistic representation. Under
normal circumstances, linguistically filtered experience should, without
loss or trouble, effortlessly be shareable with others. A central motivation
behind The Violence of Reading is the thorough destabilization of this
assumption and the insistence not so much on an ontological but a philological difference between language and experience. The referential function of language, taken for granted in Scarry’s account, cannot be
depended on as a reliable source of information about subjective experience.6 Instead, it can be shown to signal a permanent rift between linguistic systems and phenomenal reality.
Scarry’s perspective reduces the purpose of language to representation
and communication. Pain renders it useless because in states of pain language encounters an irrepresentable event whose communicability to others is fundamentally in question. I entertain the suspicion that Scarry
implicitly articulates a truth about language as such that, however, only
becomes conspicuous when her argument is turned on its head. Instead of
marking the threshold where language’s communicative function collapses, pain renders explicit the fact that the communicative pretenses of
an instrumentalist understanding of language are always already in trouble. The communication of all experience meets linguistic resistance,
4
Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York and
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 4.
5
Ibid., 19f.
6
I further expound this problem in Chap. 5.
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4
D. ZECHNER
which is to say that pain is but an extreme expression of a linguistic failure
that permeates the entire landscape of human affectation. Language is
structurally unable to render shareable any kind of experience that was not
itself already linguistic in nature, for language—to use a Benjaminian quip
all too quickly—in the final analysis communicates only itself.7 Before we
can ask whether, how, and to what degree linguistic systems can be
recruited for the representation and communication of subjective pain
experiences, we are thus required to trace the very pain threshold proper
to language. Before we can ascertain the extent to which human vulnerability can be represented through linguistic means, the task given to philology lies in gauging the vulnerability of language itself.
Much groundwork in this direction has been laid in Ilit Ferber’s 2019
Language Pangs. Her study considers Herder’s treatise “On the Origin of
Language” and Heidegger’s reception of it, and develops an argument
that decidedly steps away from the logic posited in Scarry. Following
Herder, she locates in the moment of the pained outcry not the loss of
language but its very origin. In that the clamor of pain is inarticulate
according to the laws stipulated by grammar and logic, it shatters a humanist understanding of language and anticipates, instead, a concept of language that inherently depends on animalistic expressions. Growing from
this primordial clamor of being, language is not reducible to apophantic
speech, and does not carry a communicative function. As Ferber puts it, it
“has nothing to do with communication.”8 In this sense, pain is not something with which language must contend but something that constitutes
its original manifestation, which remains “undifferentiated from the
expression of pain.”9 Rather than tasking language with the secondary
mediation of pain, Ferber’s conception of Herder’s linguistic genealogy
understands language and pain simply to coincide at the point of linguistic
origin. Language does not open up the field for adequate or inadequate
representations of pain, whose content could be shared with others, precisely because language is the very agony that undergirds this field.
7
“All language communicates itself.” Walter Benjamin, “On Language as Such and the
Language of Man,” trans. Edmund Jephcott, Selected Writings, vol. 1: 1913–1926, eds.
Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University
Press, 2002), 62–74, 63.
8
Ilit Ferber, Language Pangs: On Pain and the Origin of Language (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2019), 16.
9
Ibid.
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1
INTRODUCTION: ALLEGORIES OF BLEEDING
5
Stripped of its representational, communicative, and predicative mandates,
language discloses itself as the pain of its own articulation.
Ferber wrote her study in the wake of an important essay by Werner
Hamacher, the last extensive study he worked on before he passed away in
2017. Published as “Other Pains” in the fall of the same year, this tour de
force elucidates moments in Pindar, Sophocles, Cicero, Seneca, Kant,
Hegel, and Valéry, demonstrating, in each instance, the reversible nature
of Scarry’s argument. Rather than causing the collapse of language, pain
propels the withdrawal of phenomenal experience while remaining firmly
situated in the linguistic field: “Pain, in short, […] is the extreme phenomenon of the withdrawal of all phenomenality.”10 If the state of pain leaves
us with an experience, this experience is no longer phenomenal but cast
linguistically: we experience the withdrawal of experience and thus the
sheer inexperiencability of experience itself, which, impossibly, turns out
to be the very experience of language. Pain’s ability to shatter language
targets solely the kind of language that says something about something
else—“apophantic, defining, predicative language”—but not language in
any general sense.11 Instead of putting up a resistance to language as such,
pain divests linguistic structures of their unreliable secondary functions
and discloses an occurrence of language unchained from the constraints
that subjugate its experience under the supremacy of phenomenal representation. The Violence of Reading inscribes itself in the genealogy that
Hamacher traces and submits that the scene of reading marks the decisive
point where linguistic and phenomenal experience undergo a mutual
unbinding.
*
*
*
Consider the contemporary scene of reading.
The Spring 2023 issue of The Paris Review includes a story by Daniel
Mason, titled “A Case Study.” This third-person narrative tells of the relationship between an unnamed man and his therapist, whom he meets at
the age of 24, a student halfway through medical school who experiences
a period of feeling emotionally unmoored and reeling. The treatment lasts
for two years and ends as the protagonist accepts a surgical residency
10
Werner Hamacher, “Other Pains,” trans. Ian Alexander Moore, Philosophy Today 61.4
(Fall 2017): 963–989, 969.
11
Ibid., 970.
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6
D. ZECHNER
position out of state. During the subsequent decade, he becomes a
respected cardiothoracic surgeon specializing in pediatric cases, marries
the girlfriend he met when finishing med school, and has two children
with her, a daughter and a son. Twelve years after seeing the therapist for
the last time, the latter calls him with a request: having already published
a number of books, including “some technical works, two books of poetry,
and three collections of case studies based on his patients’ lives,” the therapist now plans to add a fourth anthology of cases.12 And the purpose of the
call is to include the protagonist’s story, though in anonymized fashion—
“[o]nly you will know yourself.”13 A few days pass and a letter arrives in
the mail containing a quick formal explanation, a consent form, and the
chapter in which the therapist explores the patient’s psychic landscape.
The addressee obliges, signs the consent form, and mails it back to the
therapist—together with the chapter, because “he could not bring himself
to read it, not yet.”14 A year later the book containing his case is published.
The man buys a copy but does not read it. Another year passes and he
comes upon a different kind of text: an obituary, announcing the death of
the therapist. In it, the four volumes of case studies are extolled as “classics
of the genre.”15
In the years that follow, the protagonist keeps coming across the therapist’s book, whose presence slowly appears to morph into a kind of frightening doppelganger intent on disturbing the surgeon’s hard-won inner
peace. When visiting friends and neighbors, some of whom working in
mental health, he frequently happens upon the book:
Each time, the feeling was the same, the fear the same: that part of him was
now in the possession of another person who knew more about him than he
knew about himself. Many times, he told himself that the solution to his
discomfort was just to read the book. But with each passing year the stakes
grew higher and so he waited until he found himself avoiding certain houses,
Daniel Mason, “A Case Study,” The Paris Review 243 (Spring 2023): 183–194, 189.
Ibid.
14
Ibid., 191.
15
Ibid. The therapist’s passing stages Roland Barthes’s figure of the “death of the author”
in that, to the protagonist’s great chagrin, the text will now answer for itself as it has rid itself
of any authority that could speak on its behalf or revise it: “His fantasies […] had implied the
possibility that whatever the psychologist had thought of him could be amended. With the
psychologist’s death, the case study would be forever.” Ibid., 191. See Roland Barthes, “The
Death of the Author,” Image—Music—Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and
Wang, 1978), 142–148.
12
13
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INTRODUCTION: ALLEGORIES OF BLEEDING
7
just as, when he was a child, he’d avoided walking past a shelf that held a
book whose illustrations frightened him. It was absurd, he thought, but he
could not escape the sense that he was being followed by a threatening presence. And he came to suspect that the truer person, the real person, the
person in colors, lived in those pages, and would endure long after he
was gone.16
With the publication of the case study a certain fraying of the man’s selfimage has occurred. If the entire point of the protagonist’s relationship
with his therapist was to establish a stable and coherent sense of subjecthood, there now runs an ever-deepening crack through the scaffolding of
his sense of self. Having become a “case,” part of his self-image, and the
history that had shaped it, were now turned into writing: linguistic traces,
mediated through the authorship of another, that radically expose the
interior of his subjectivity to an audience of anonymous readers. Having
doubled into a multitude of written signs, he is unable to contain the dissemination of his self, but this is not the only disadvantage he faces: even
though his life proffers the study’s content, he remains reluctant to read it
and thereby refind himself. Thus arises the fear that other people, who
may come into the possession of the case study, could now understand and
know him better than he ever had. No longer in possession of himself, he
is transformed into the property of others.17
For all his resistance to reading, the assumption that others, the readers
who surround him and who so perniciously peruse the therapist’s book of
case studies, could “possess” him and thus “[know] more about him than
he knew about himself,” places enormous faith in the act of reading.
Undergirding this fantasy is the notion that in translating his individual
fate into the linguistic medium of the case study nothing was lost. In fact,
his innermost essence was now entirely laid bare and accessible to the
reader. The process of transcribing the treatment experience into a case
narrative did not distort anything but rendered a hitherto hidden truth
Mason, “A Case Study,” 192.
This aspect of Mason’s story sounds like the spoof of an anecdote Freud relates in Totem
and Taboo, where he tells of a patient who “had adopted a rule against writing her own name,
for fear that it might fall into the hands of someone who would then be in possession of a
portion of her personality.” Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XIII, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London:
Hogarth Press, 1958), 56. What Mason’s protagonist shares with Freud’s patient is the belief
that the experiential self can, without loss, transmigrate into linguistic signs.
16
17
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8
D. ZECHNER
finally attainable—and not just to himself, but to anyone who can read.
What turns out to be a flawed distortion is not the linguistic transcription
but the life it purportedly represents: if the inscription is perceived as a
“threatening presence,” that is so because it offers “the truer person, the
real person, the person in colors.” Life is the imperfect prehistory to its
linguistic representation. What the signifier achieves, at least in the mind
of Mason’s fearful protagonist, is the radical exposure of lived experience
for the lie that it is. The color of truth is found in writing, not in the phenomenon represented by the written word.
What makes things worse is that this “truer person,” who now “lived in
those pages,” cannot possibly perish. Not subject to lived experience, the
subject-become-signifier does not live at all, he instead “endures” in the
mode of linguistic survival. Having already survived its author, who passed
away a year after its publication, the case study is bound to survive its subject as well: living “in those pages, [it] would endure long after he was
gone.” Added to its heightened truth-value is therefore the signifier’s
oppressive persistence that reminds the protagonist of his own finitude: he
is going to be “gone” one day, but this language that translates and harbors his innermost secrets, even though it somehow forms “part” of him,
will remain. The disadvantage of mortality vis-à-vis the written traces not
only takes an ontological but also an epistemological toll: as long as he is
still alive, the ex-patient can entertain the fantasy of rectifying the image
presented in the case study, of speaking for himself and against whatever is
said in the pages the therapist produced. This fantasy of self-advocacy,
however, finds its limit in the patient’s death, thus ensuring the study’s
endurance “long after he was gone.”
The existence of the therapist’s book tears the protagonist asunder,
which creates a sense of resentment toward the author behind the case.
“Couldn’t [the therapist] have foreseen this complication,” the patient
asks himself, and continues: “The psychologist, to use the language of
surgery, had failed to close the wound completely.”18 The nature of the
wound in question remains ambiguous. While the man may well be referring to the original wound that had caused him to seek therapeutic treatment in the first place, the therapist is also to blame for the infliction of
another wound caused by the publication of the case study.19 Its image
Mason, “A Case Study,” 193.
To the extent that the protagonist experiences this original wound as “only a void”
inside of him, the two wounds are one and the same: the void of subjectivity that made it
necessary to seek out therapy in the first place also opens the space for the significant doppelganger that comes to haunt him through the existence of the case study. See Mason, “A
Case Study,” 183.
18
19
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INTRODUCTION: ALLEGORIES OF BLEEDING
9
pertains to the “language of surgery” as much as it bears on the kind of
surgery of which language itself is capable. For is it not the case that the
subject was divided from himself precisely through the surgical cuts of the
therapist’s pen strokes? The therapist’s penknife sliced away a discursive
representation from the life of his patient thus provoking a crisis of
identity.20 The wound that cannot close marks the precise spot where language departs from its phenomenal referent whose reality, henceforth, it is
bound to distort and misrepresent.
The violence that marks this scene of doubling is by no means reducible
to the therapist’s particular actions. It is one that pertains to the structure
of language itself according to which the referent is radically exploited and
expropriated by its linguistic representation. Language inflicts wounds
through its inevitable and irreversible departure from the subjects and
things it seeks to discursivize and represent. That this wound cannot close
is structurally necessary, though it nonetheless drives Mason’s protagonist
insane. He commits what I would like to call a referential fallacy by misconstruing the referent of the case study as the truth of his own phenomenal being. He thereby fails to acknowledge the abyssal chasm that
separates linguistic representation from all phenomenal and experiential
reality. The unbridgeability of this chasm induces a type of pain that is not
so much experienced as it experiences the withdrawal of experience: it’s
the pain of necessarily failing to reconcile phenomenon and linguistic representation. Another name for this discomfort would be the pain of reading. For what is unbearable to Mason’s protagonist is the thought that his
life, and its secrets, have become readable. Yet what he fails to acknowledge is that this readability is premised on the radical departure from its
original referent. Whatever referential subject one encounters while reading the case study, it will owe its existence to the labor carried out in
20
The relation between writing and cutting is probed more radically in a famous scene
from Poe’s “The Black Cat,” in which an intoxicated first-person narrator attacks the eponymous animal: “I took from my waistcoat-pocket a pen-knife, opened it, grasped the poor
beast by the throat, and deliberately cut one of its eyes from the socket! I blush, I burn, I
shudder, while I pen the damnable atrocity.” Edgar Allan Poe, “The Black Cat,” The Portable
Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Gerald Kennedy (New York: Penguin, 2006), 192–201, 194. A semantic doubling occurs that bears on the phrase “while I pen the damnable atrocity,” which
refers both to the intradiegetic act of animal cruelty, using a pen-knife, and the process of
penning the story titled “The Black Cat”—an ambiguity heightened by the passage’s sudden
shift into present tense.
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10
D. ZECHNER
reading and not to a presumed metaphysical tie between language and
phenomenon, grapheme and referent.
At the end of Mason’s short story, the protagonist discovers that his
daughter, now a college student visiting home over break, one night is
working on a paper for her psychology class. Her primary source happens
to be the therapist’s volume of case studies. She asks her father to read the
paper once she’s done, to which he agrees. After years of failure to read his
case, it is through the daughter’s filter, the mediation of the therapist
through another author—in other words, it is by channeling the other’s
discourse through the discourse of the other—that the scene of reading
finally becomes possible.21 He reads her essay in which she summarizes the
various cases, though he fails to “find” himself. Assuming that she must
have left him out, he goes to her room finally to pick up the book itself and
read it, after many years of hesitation and refusal. He reads through,
quickening in pace, though comes upon nothing and no one whom he
would intimately recognize. Struggling to find an explanation, he asks
himself: “Was he simply unrecognizable to himself? Or had the psychologist, true to his promise, hidden him in layers of anonymity? Or was it even
simpler: Had the older man, editing his final manuscript, decided to leave
him out?”22
These questions remain structurally undecidable. Whether or not his
case was effectively “left out” has no bearing on the fact that he is structurally barred from entering the discursive reality that only his doppelganger
can inhabit. Once his experience is translated into the medium of the case
study, the subjective referent thus established ceases to be him. Mason’s
story dramatizes the encounter between a phenomenon and its linguistic
referent: they fail to recognize each other, which is to say, they fail to recognize their unrecognizability. They fail not for lack of epistemic competence but due to a fundamental unrecognizability caused by the devastating
departure of language from experience. Rather than finding a “truer self”
in the pages of the case study, Mason’s character finds no self at all: all the
cases seem to refer to others whose reality does not coincide with his own.
The wound inflicted by the surgery knife of language is simultaneously the
21
Jacques Derrida discusses the tension between the “father of logos” and what he calls
“the filial inscription” in “Plato’s Pharmacy,” Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson
(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1981), 61–171, esp. 84–94. It is here that
Derrida also develops the proximity between writing and the proclamation of finitude whose
echo can be discerned in Mason’s story: “For it goes without saying that the god of writing
must also be the god of death.” Ibid., 91.
22
Mason, “A Case Study,” 194.
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INTRODUCTION: ALLEGORIES OF BLEEDING
11
wound of reading that disallows identification and relatability even if the
subject on the page tells my own story, exposing the innermost secrets of
my private existence. The signifier is always another, and the subject looking back at me from the cubicle of its linguistic outpost is never me.
Mason’s pediatric surgeon needs his daughter’s writing as a filter to enable
him to confront his inscribed doppelganger. That this development culminates in utter misrecognition should not deter us from taking seriously the
mediation through a familial relationship that determines this scene of
reading. We encounter a similar structure in another contemporary text,
Samuel D. Hunter’s play The Whale, which premiered in 2012 and was
adapted for the cinema by Darren Aronofsky in 2022. The play and its
adaptation revolve around the final weeks in the life of a morbidly obese
gay man, and Aronofsky has been criticized for turning his protagonist’s
suffering into a condescending spectacle. Roxanne Gay wrote in the New
York Times that “the onscreen portrayal of fatness bears little resemblance
to the lived experiences of fat people.”23 If the movie, as Gay maintains,
falls short on the level of accurately depicting someone’s lived experience,
this raises the question as to whether the accurate depiction of lived experience is the socio-aesthetic task of this (or any) artwork. Like Mason’s
protagonist, the criticism leveraged against The Whale puts immense trust
in the medial representability of reality: as though art, be it cinematic,
theatrical, or literary, could render life fully recognizable without accruing
notable distortions and without, in the process, incurring any epistemic or
ontological losses. A more charitable reading of the movie becomes possible if one lets go of the referential wager that bets on an achievable identity between phenomenal reality and aesthetic representation. It would
consider a notion of the artwork that, instead of tying itself to phenomenalism, structurally departs from its extra-cinematic points of reference in
order to produce a body whose aesthetic destiny can never coincide with
someone’s lived experience.24 What I would like to suggest, if through the
23
Roxanne Gay, “The Cruel Spectacle of ‘The Whale,’” The New York Times, accessed June
10, 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/10/opinion/the-whale-film.html.
24
In a recent piece for n+1, Olivia Kan-Sperling echoes this sentiment: “In today’s
Anglophone literature,” she deplores, “there are few fancy sentences, little that is ‘difficult,’
nothing to prevent the reader from mind-merging with the narrator, rather than appreciating
literature as the product of a foreign human consciousness mediated through an alien technology (writing).” Olivia Kan-Sperling, “Toward Pop Literature: A Polemic,” n+1, accessed
September 1, 2023, https://www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/toward-­
pop-­literature. In this sense, the purpose of art is neither to confirm nor to represent lived
experience, but to depart from it—and through this departure to offer another kind of—irre-
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D. ZECHNER
briefest of analyses, is that The Whale premises the production of such a
body on the act of reading.
As a matter of fact, two scenes of reading serve to frame Aronofsky’s
film as well as Hunter’s play. In the beginning, Charlie, the main character
weighing around six-hundred pounds, masturbates to gay porn when he
suddenly feels a sharp pain in his chest and struggles to breathe. He fails
to call for help and, in this moment of existential exigency, is surprised by
a Christian missionary who steps into his apartment. Shocked by what he
finds, the discombobulated missionary suggests calling an ambulance.
Charlie declines and instead pulls out some sheets of paper, hands them to
the stranger, as the following scene takes its course:
Charlie: Read this to me.
Elder Thomas: Wait, what?
Charlie: Read it to me, please.
Elder Thomas: I have to call you an ambulance! I don’t know what to do,
I’m just—.
Charlie: I don’t know what’s going to happen in the next five minutes.
Please, read it to me. PLEASE JUST READ IT TO ME.
Elder Thomas: OKAY! OKAY, I JUST—.
(Reading, quickly) “In the amazing book Moby Dick by the author Herman
Melville, the author recounts his story of being at sea. In the first part of his
book, the author, calling himself Ishmael, is in a small seaside town and he
is sharing a bed with a man named Queequeg—” (Stops)
What is this?! Why am I reading this?! I need to call someone!—.
Charlie (Pleading): PLEASE JUST READ IT. ANY OF IT.
Elder Thomas (Reading): “I was very saddened by this book, and I felt
many emotions for the characters. And I felt saddest of all when I read the
boring chapters that were only descriptions of whales, because I knew that
the author was just trying to save us from his own sad story, just for a little
while. This book made me think about my own life, and then it … It made
me feel …”
(Charlie’s breathing starts to become normal. He takes a few deep breaths,
calming himself down.)
Did that—help?
Charlie: Yes. Yes, it did.25
ducibly mediated—experience, whose aesthetic effect is one of estrangement rather than
relatability.
25
Samuel D. Hunter, The Whale (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2014), 12f.
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INTRODUCTION: ALLEGORIES OF BLEEDING
13
In the moment of maximum distress, Charlie issues an imperative: “Read
this to me.” For all the cruel optimism behind his diet, what he seeks to
ingest now is not food but language.26 He takes in the signifier which
miraculously causes his body to reconstitute itself. The act of reading—or
being read to—performs a gesture that ensures survival: for a while longer
Charlie may live, as though he were partaking in the very living-on that
marks the written word’s mode of persistence. Already in the beginning of
the movie, the notion that Charlie’s experience is the cinematic representation of the lived reality of obesity is therefore vehemently challenged
through the presentation of a body that is reanimated not by the use of
CPR but an introjection of linguistic signs. It’s a body pumped up on
language, kept alive through the spontaneous incantation of seemingly
misplaced words. Instead of insisting on a stable tie between phenomenal
reality and theatrical or cinematic representation, the scene insinuates the
production of a volatile body emerging as the referential effect of the language hurled at it.27 What we see is not a biological organism brought
back from the brink of death through medically certified procedures. We
witness signifiers acting upon another signifier as Charlie’s entire corporeality reconstitutes itself through an event of reading.
To ascertain what exactly “reading” means within this scene is not
uncomplicated, however. For what the stranger reads out loud to the body
writhing in pain itself appears to be a reading—one that discusses Melville’s
1851 novel Moby Dick. What Charlie demands to be executed in the very
moment of his demise is thus not “simply” reading but reading to the
second degree: a reading of reading—the vertiginous self-reflexivity of
reading in whose vortex his distressed body somehow manages to regain a
semblance of composure and balance. In the course of the play, we learn
that the author of the life-saving essay is Charlie’s estranged daughter Ellie
26
Reading The Whale through Lauren Berlant’s concept of “cruel optimism” might open
another way out of the representationalist dilemma, especially if one is initially offended by
the alleged “cruelty” of Charlie’s on-screen depiction. Berlant would recognize in Charlie’s
disposition and behavior a “lateral agency” that propels what they would call his “slow
death.” See Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham and London: Duke University Press,
2011), esp. 95–119.
27
Werner Hamacher coined the term “somiosis” (a compound of “soma” and “semiosis”)
for this phenomenon: “While the genetic process of constituting signs is called ‘semiosis,’ the
process of a continuous embodiment—if it is even all that different from semiosis—could be
called ‘somiosis.’” Werner Hamacher, MASER: Bemerkungen im Hinblick auf Hinrich
Weidemanns Bilder (Berlin: Galerie Max Hetzler, 1998), 21; my translation.
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D. ZECHNER
who, after eight years of radio silence, suddenly returns to her father, an
instructor of online literature courses, to ask for help with her schoolwork.
Ellie’s attitude is marked by deep resentment toward her father, whom she
habitually derides for his self-destructive lifestyle. In The Whale as well as
in Mason’s text, the daughter is the one who deigns to read. In both texts,
reading becomes possible as a performance mediated through the field of
writing opened up by the protagonist’s offspring. The question as to
whether “raw” passages from Melville’s novel would have had an equally
calming effect on Charlie’s condition is subject to speculation; nevertheless, the scene suggests that it’s precisely Melville’s mediation through the
word of the daughter that does the trick.
A version of the above-cited reading scene recurs at the end of The
Whale. While Ellie and her father have a violent verbal altercation, Charlie’s
body suffers another collapse. As with the Christian missionary, he asks her
to read the Moby Dick essay out loud: “Read it to me. […] If you want to
help. Read it to me. You can help if you read it.”28 In disbelief at the
request, Ellie initially protests (“Fuck you!,” followed by a desperate, and
desperately soft, “Dad, please.”), but finally gives in and starts reading.29
What ensues is less the reconstitution of a body fit to live another day, as
in the first scene, than the production of an overwhelmed (and overwhelming) body that radically exceeds its capabilities.30 Bound to his
wheelchair, Charlie remains stationary for the most part of the play. To
demonstrate his wretchedness, Ellie one time demands that he get up and
walk toward her, but his body falters. Now, however, the final effect of an
enchanting scene of reading abruptly releases a body able to walk. Hunter’s
stage directions track this body’s impromptu aggregation:
(Reading) “In the amazing book Moby Dick by the author Herman Melville,
the author recounts his story of being at sea. In the first part of his book, the
author, calling himself Ishmael, is in a small seaside town and he is sharing a
bed with a man named Queequeg.”
(Charlie smiles at Ellie through the pain. He reaches up and takes the oxygen
tube out of his nose.) […]
Ibid., 98.
Ibid., 98f.
30
I borrow the formulation of an “overwhelmed body” produced by reading from Roland
Barthes whose theory of reading I explore further in Chap. 2. See Roland Barthes, “On
Reading,” The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang,
1986), 33–43, 39.
28
29
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INTRODUCTION: ALLEGORIES OF BLEEDING
15
(Charlie braces himself on his wheelchair.) […]
(Wheezing heavily, and with a huge amount of effort and pain, Charlie manages to stand up.) […]
(Charlie, staring at Ellie, manages to take one step forward. His breathing
becomes quicker. […]) […]
(Charlie takes another step. His breathing is more and more rapid.) […]
(Another step.) […]
(Charlie takes one last step toward Ellie. […])
(Charlie looks up. […] A sharp intake of breath. The lights snap to black.)
End of Play31
A sentimental appraisal of this scene would conceive it as the overcoming
of the emotional estrangement between father and child through the overexertion of the very body that has become the object of the child’s disdain.
What such a reading must bracket, however, is precisely the question of—
reading. It absolutely matters that the narrative, and thus also the figure of
Charlie, is framed by two scenes of reading that bear upon the ailing and
indisposed body. Once Ellie obliges and commences the oral delivery of
her eighth-grade essay on Melville, Charlie, writhing in his malaise, is able
to crack a smile. As the daughter reads on, he musters his strength to press
himself up out of the wheelchair to which heretofore he had been tethered. “Wheezing heavily, and with a huge amount of effort, he manages to
stand up,” and, his eyes on the reader, absorbing her fortifying apostrophe, he sets one foot in front of the other and advances his enormous
frame toward her. As he finally reaches her, a sudden gasp coincides with
an eclipse of the entire scene, marking the end of the play and possibly the
end of Charlie’s suffering.
An incantation like an anti-curse, Ellie’s apostrophe propels the dying
body out of its hopeless stationary being and endows it with the ability to
move. The reading scene produces the figure of Charlie as a poietic body
in the sense of the Greek ποίησις, which can be defined as the activity of
bringing something into being that did not exist before.32 Martin
Heidegger translates ποίησις as Her-vor-bringen or bringing-forth, and he
conceives it as the unity of the four Aristotelian causes of form, matter,
Hunter, The Whale, 99f.
Accordingly, the semantic field of ποίησις comprises acts of construction, manufacture,
composition, production, preparation, generation, and adoption. See Franco Montanari, The
Brill Dictionary of Ancient Greek, eds. Madeleine Goh and Chad Schroeder (Leiden and
Boston: Brill, 2015), 1695.
31
32
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16
D. ZECHNER
purpose, and effect.33 Bringing-forth, Heidegger maintains, occurs both
in nature (think the blossoming of a flower) as well as under the authority
of the human being (think arts or handicrafts), and it must be understood
as an event of “revealing” or “disconcealment,” which are his ways of
expressing ἀλήθεια, the Greek term for truth. In that it lets something
inexistent pass from its non-presence into appearance, ποίησις is the occurrence of truth as revealing. Rather than presenting Charlie’s body to us as
the mimetic representation of something we could encounter in phenomenal reality, the ending of The Whale stages an event of poietic revealing.
Its unfolding is incited by the enunciation of a Melville essay whose ostensibly banal contents take on a compelling performative force as the language invades Charlie’s ears to bring forth a body of sheer ecstasy: one
that does not only stand up out of the wheelchair but stands into its very
being (ek-stasis). Imbued with Ellie’s language, Charlie’s body becomes a
poietic figuration whose sudden existence knows no prior equivalent.
Capable of moving toward its addresser to embrace its salvation in death,
this body appears as the sheer effect of the innocent language it ingests.
I use the term “figuration” with an eye to Barthes’s Pleasure of the Text,
where an important distinction is made between the text as figure and as
representation. Pacing out what he calls “the site of textual pleasure,”
Barthes insists that the “relation of desire” is not mimetic but one of “production,” which is to say that the incitement of textual pleasure does not
rely on representational structures but on a dynamic that brings forth the
hitherto-unseen.34 The name he reserves for this dynamic is figuration,
that is, “the way in which the erotic body appears […] in the profile of the
text.”35 This can occur, for instance, when the author’s body makes itself
present in the text; or when an intradiegetic character provokes strong
effects of desirability. Beyond such relations with the text, however, it can
also transform the text itself: “a diagrammatic and not an imitative structure […] can reveal itself in the form of a body, split into fetish objects,
erotic sites. All these movements attest to a figure of the text, necessary to
the bliss of reading.”36 If we understand Charlie’s body in The Whale as
33
See Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” trans. William Lovitt
and David Farrell Krell, Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (San Francisco: HarperCollins,
1992), 311–341, esp. 317.
34
In this sense the relation of desire is poietic. Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, 55.
35
Ibid., 55f.
36
Ibid., 56. Barthes continues by stating that this argument holds even more true for “the
film,” which “will always be figurative […]—even if it represents nothing.”
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INTRODUCTION: ALLEGORIES OF BLEEDING
17
one of poietic desire and thus as figuration, it does not suffice merely to
view him as a character, that is, a mimetic entity recruited to serve various
narrative and representational functions. On the contrary, his ecstatic body
is the text-become-figure whose metamorphosis is performatively executed by Ellie’s spellbinding incantation.37 Her apostrophe constitutes a
desiring relation so powerful that the words of her Melville essay poietically bring forth an overwhelmed body of rapturous elation.38 The body
that progresses toward her, and into the darkness that concludes the story,
cannot be detached from the scene of reading that frames this offbeat
exercise; more than that, the scene of reading is the very condition of possibility for this body’s improbable and ephemeral existence.
In the case of both Mason and Hunter, the scene of reading is bound up
with a scene of filial inscription, and both times it’s the daughter’s writing
that gives rise to the bodily event—one of splitting and misrecognition in
Mason, one of ecstatic euphoria in The Whale. Both texts posit the body as
an entity open to the invasion of language, a body under linguistic duress.
And the question implicitly at stake both times gauges the degree to which
bodies can bear language—before they collapse, give in, divide themselves,
explode. While it may be tempting to ascribe a structural value of general
import to the familial relationship between father and daughter for the
violence of reading, it would be a mistake to perceive the parameters we
encounter in Mason and Hunter as normative. The poietic figuration of
the body brought forth by the scene of reading is not necessarily malecoded, as is shown in Han Kang’s text “The Middle Voice,” published by
The New Yorker in winter 2023. A teaser to the English translation of the
author’s 2011 novel 희랍어 시간 (Greek Lessons), the text tells of a woman
who, amidst a cascade of devastating events including the death of her
mother and the loss of custody over her son, experiences a sustained episode of aphasia as her ability verbally to express herself disappears. In
search of her displaced linguistic faculty, she enrolls in an elementary
37
In his adaptation, Aronofsky insists that also the reader’s body dissolves into textuality:
“This essay. Is amazing. This essay. Is you,” utters Brandon Fraser’s interpretation of Charlie.
The language of Ellie’s body becomes the body of her language—a structure similar to the
prosopopoeic doubling of bodies I discuss in Chap. 6. See The Whale, directed by Darren
Aronofsky (A24, 2022), 1:48:00–1:50:00.
38
The sense of elation is heightened in Aronofsky’s adaptation as, in the final moment,
Charlie’s body is seen to lift off the ground.
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18
D. ZECHNER
course in ancient Greek in the hopes that the foreignness of the language
will regrant her access to voice and speech.
Han’s text opens on a pivotal scene of reading whose bearing on the
body is incontrovertible, though what brings forth the body in this case is
not the boisterous incantation of a fetishized school essay but the dramatic
failure to enunciate. The classroom scene with which we are confronted is
structured by a topology of power-relations that divides the towering pedagogue instructing in front of the classroom from his attentive audience.
As the preferred means of instruction, a blackboard is used to render the
outlandish Greek script visible for enunciation exercises. The passive pupils
are activated through interpellations that draw their attention to the writing on the board. An imperative to read is pronounced: “O.K., read it
out.” While the teacher airs this directive with no evident ill faith, even
wearing “a smile,” the effects of the injunction on the woman’s physical
being are considerable.39 It’s as if the charge of reading provokes her body
to assemble itself:
The woman’s lips twitch. She moistens her lower lip with the top of her
tongue. In front of her chest, her hands are quietly restless. She opens her
mouth, and closes it again. She holds her breath, then exhales deeply. […]
The woman’s eyelids tremble. Like insects’ wings rubbing briskly together.
The woman closes her eyes, reopens them. […] Above that somber uniform,
which makes it seem as if she’s just come from a funeral, her face is thin and
drawn, like the elongated features of certain sculptures. […] Her eyes have
an intelligent look, but the constant spasming of her eyelids make this hard to
perceive. Her back and shoulders are permanently hunched over, as though
she is seeking refuge inside her black clothes, and her fingernails are clipped
severely.40
39
Han Kang, “The Middle Voice,” trans. Deborah Smith and Emily Yae Won, The
New Yorker (February 6, 2023), 50–58, 51. See also Han Kang, Greek Lessons, trans. Deborah
Smith and Emily Yae Won (London and New York: Hogarth, 2023). I would like to thank
Emily Trujillo and the Gingernut Collective for the exceptionally inspiring exchanges we
shared about this text. Emily also reminds me that the imperative to “read it out” is “infinitely more demanding” than The Whale’s “read it to me.” This demand is, in part, owed to
the absence of apostrophe: reading something “out” lacks a concrete addressee, its intransitive chant fills the world itself with language—an overwhelming task for Han’s protagonist.
40
Ibid., my emphases. The fact that the woman remains unnamed gives the scene an onus
of general import: it’s not just this particular woman in her dramatic singularity, but woman
as such who suffers the poietic advent of her body when language gives way.
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INTRODUCTION: ALLEGORIES OF BLEEDING
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If reading opens the field of the body’s poietic figuration, Han offers us an
entire inventory of body-parts that brings forth the strained object. Lips,
mouth, tongue, face, chest, hands, fingernails, eyes and eyelids, back and
shoulders, etc.: the injunction to read arrives with such force that an entire
corporeal assemblage announces its existence, substituting for the broken­up voice. And the body thus constituted is by no means passive or inert,
even if it carries the refinement of a sculpture: it breathes, trembles, rubs,
spasms, while nonetheless slouching in a struggle to contain its quaking
being. Reading is another name for the awareness that I have a body. The
imperative to read puts such pressure on the woman that her body makes
itself felt as though for the very first time. Once again, an overwhelmed
body is produced, convulsing with the tremors of a language inaccessible.
The aphasia of the woman’s muted voice is translated into the body’s
quivering contractions, unintelligibly expressing what, on the level of
communicative speech, remains inarticulable.
Further into the narrative, we learn that even when the woman could
still talk, “she’d always been soft-spoken,” which wasn’t simply due to a
limited vocal capacity but because “[s]he just didn’t like taking up space.”41
In this sense, the voice itself is no disembodied phantom but a concrete
extension of the very body responsible for its emanation. Speaking loudly,
then, means to occupy space, aggressively asserting one’s physical presence, though in a way that expands the body outside its identifiable visibility. Voices travel, and in traveling they carry their bodies beyond themselves.
The woman experiences this transgressive nature of speech as a source of
discomfort: “She had no wish to disseminate herself.”42 To the extent that
the voice disseminates the body in space, language is the fragmented matter of the body’s dissemination. Contracted into its muteness, the body’s
linguistic overflow is reduced to the repetitive movement of respiration:
“she holds her breath, then exhales deeply.” The incessant inhaling and
exhaling of breath constitute a last and inevitable excess of voice beyond
the body—and the ongoing in- and ex-, in- and ex-, in- and ex- of this
movement form their own kind of prefixal language, a type of pre-­
language, prefixing and prefiguring the language of communication, and
the multiplicity of human languages. The ancient Greek word for “breath”
41
Ibid., 53. For Derrida, dissemination amounts to the impossibility of being “pinned
down at any one point.” This impossibility is a central trait of writing—and thus of language.
See Derrida, Dissemination, 25.
42
Ibid.
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D. ZECHNER
is πνεύμα, which could also mean “soul,” a homophone to the place of this
narrative: Seoul, Korea.43 Between the two lungs of Seoul and soul, the
woman’s prefixal language breathes on, unable to speak, yet equally unable
to fall silent for good.
To the extent that breath as the language of the soul takes up space,
even the most preliminary language must be conceived as having or
extending a kind of body. Using language and directing language toward
others is not just a means of communication or address—prior to any discursive function it may take on, language is a way of stimulating the body.
It touches. At least, this is how Han’s protagonist understands the matter
as she develops an entire typology of tactile encounters: while a touch of
skin on skin signals an intimacy of almost vicious intensity (one of the
most violent moments in the narrative occurs when her teacher “grabs
hold of her arm from behind”), the woman considers the gaze to be the
least intrusive form of contact: “To her, there was no touch as instantaneous and intuitive as the gaze. It was close to being the only way of
touching without touch.”44 Speech remains lodged somewhere in between
these polarities: “Language, by comparison, is an infinitely more physical
way to touch [than looking]. It moves lungs and throat and tongue and
lips, it vibrates the air as it wings its way to the listener.”45 In this sense, it’s
not simply a touch among two bodies, but a double touch by which my
language touches me as it departs in order to touch the other upon its
arrival. Language is the other body between my body and the body of the
other. The body of my language touches me, and through the medium of
this body, I touch the other, my listener, my addressee.46 Language
becomes a permanent allegory of corporeal being in that it transgresses
and expands the body and, through expanding, touching the body of others, others it.
43
See Anthony Preus, Historical Dictionary of Ancient Greek Philosophy (Lanham, Toronto,
and Plymouth: Scarecrow, 2007), 212.
44
Han, “The Middle Voice,” 58, 53.
45
Ibid.
46
Jean-Luc Nancy concurs that prior to taking on any communicative, or even significative, function, language is a way of touching, of writing the touch along the limit of the body:
“if anything at all happens to writing, nothing happens to it but touch. More precisely: touching the body (or some singular body) with the incorporeality of ‘sense.’ And consequently, to
make the incorporeal touching, to make of meaning a touch.” Jean-Luc Nancy, Corpus, trans.
Richard A. Rand (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 11. I further explore the
perplexing relationship between language and (its) body in Chap. 6.
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INTRODUCTION: ALLEGORIES OF BLEEDING
21
The possibility of touch also discloses the body’s devastating vulnerability. In that it is open to touching and permanently exposed to the touch of
others, the body inhabits a primordial state of injury that no curing treatment could ever relieve. The interface between my body and the body of
my language is marked by a wound that exposes itself in the scene of reading. Upon jotting down a number of words, their shapes, outlined on the
piece of paper in front of her, strike Han’s protagonist as “pinned-down
bodies.”47 As she attempts to read the words back to herself in her own
voice, “[s]he would stop reading and swallow, her throat dry. Like those
times when she had to immediately press down on a cut to stop the bleeding, or, on the contrary, strain to squeeze out the blood to prevent bacteria from entering her bloodstream.”48 The touch has morphed into a more
violent maneuver, and words—language’s bodies—turn out to have sharp
enough edges to cause a bleeding laceration. It’s not clear whether the cut
is infectious, that is, whether language just rips the surface or also invades
the wound’s cavity. In any case, reading poses the risk of a linguistic bacterial infection. The scene of reading offers a body inherently vulnerable to,
and rendered vulnerable by, language.
If words themselves are bodies, they too are exposed in and to their
vulnerable frailty. Back in the classroom, Han has her protagonist copy the
Korean meaning of a couple of Greek verbs that the teacher has just written on the chalkboard: “She looks up at the pallid face of the Greek lecturer. At the chalk clutched in his hand, the letters of her mother tongue
like withered bloodstains, but white, distinct on the blackboard.”49
Prompting us to see the “gory” in the term “allegory,” this allegory of
reading, with which Han confronts her readers and her protagonist alike,
quickly turns into an allegory of bleeding, as the words themselves appear
to be cut and wounded bodies, leaving withered bloodstains on the board.
The signifier “blood” here serves an allegorical rather than a metaphorical
purpose because it reveals, on the one hand, that the encounter between
Han, “The Middle Voice,” 54.
Ibid. Samuel Beckett’s Endgame famously ends with the words “Old stancher! (Pause.)
You … remain,” as Hamm, the protagonist, covers his wounded face with a bloodstained
handkerchief. “To stanch” means to stop a wound from bleeding. If the play ends with the
application of a “stancher,” the dried-up wound is also, and perhaps even primarily, the
wound of language whose orifice brought gushing forth the words of the entire play, the
descending curtain but a parergonal doubling of Hamm’s bloody handkerchief. See Samuel
Beckett, Endgame: A Play in One Act (New York: Grove, 1958), 84.
49
Ibid.
47
48
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D. ZECHNER
the body and (the body of) language is one of radical exposure and
wounding, and, on the other, that the scene of reading cannot contain
itself: it must overflow its limits precisely to the extent that stages the,
potentially violent, confrontation of various bodies.50 A permanent hemorrhage, the scene of reading is allegorized in the blood that overflows the
bodies whose encounter mediates the sheer possibility of linguistic
exchange, and prior to any exchange, of linguistic touch. Reading always
also means to cut for sign, as an old expression puts it, scanning for stains
of blood on the tracks.51
*
*
*
These three contemporary instances demonstrate how the act of reading,
in its invasive nature, subjects the flesh to unbearable strain. As a matter of
fact, the corporeal trespass of reading is so fundamental that we can no
longer determine with certainty what constitutes a body. The bodies produced in and through these scenes of reading are not identical with themselves: they are manifold and fragmented, invasive and invaded,
transgressive and overwhelmed bodies. Each time anew, the scene of reading produces a body irreducible to the reader’s physicality, conjuring an
excessive body, pumped up on and overflowing with words, a body radically exposed to the other precisely through the wound of its language. Its
irredeemable state of injury—its reality as a divided, overflowing, infected
body—casts this body as a linguistic entity, a thing of language. And every
scene of reading inflicts the wound anew that exposes the body to the
language of the other—whether it takes the form of therapist’s discourse,
a daughter’s school project, Moby Dick, or the outlandish script of ancient
50
I further explore the trope of the “allegory of bleeding” in Chap. 2, and I observe its
transformation into an “allegory of breeding” in Chap. 4. The point of these various denominations for the scene of reading is precisely to show its uncontainability and non-identity
with itself: just like scene of reading produces a body that overflows itself in its incurable state
of injury, it relies on a kind of violence that cannot be controlled and instead keeps breeding
versions and variations of itself that multiply far beyond the reading scene’s ostensible
confines.
51
Another allegory of bleeding: “The first day they followed blood and they saw where the
thing had rested and where the wounds had stanched and the next day they followed the
dragmarks through the duff of a high forest floor and the day after they followed only the
faintest trace across a high stone mesa and then nothing. They cut for sign until dark.”
Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian; or, The Evening Redness in the West (New York: Random
House, 1985), 143.
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1
INTRODUCTION: ALLEGORIES OF BLEEDING
23
Greek. Cleaving open the body, exposing it to the language of the other—
that is, simply to language—the reading scene turns into an allegory of
bleeding.
Within the realm of modern literature, the scene of reading that constitutes the paradigm behind this structure was penned by Franz Kafka. The
story “In the Penal Colony,” first published in 1919, presents the reader
with a bizarre torture machine that passes judgment on the condemned.
Comprised of a “bed,” a “scriber,” and a “harrow,” the apparatus is
designed to combine indictment and punishment in such a way that, without supplying the culprit with any prior information regarding the allegations made against him, it tattoos onto his very skin the law that he
allegedly contravened: a sentence in both senses of a verdict and a linguistic structure. Strapped onto “the bed,” the condemned person lies facedown to receive the judgment as a lacerating inscription on his back.
Usually lasting twelve hours, this process is always consummated in the
death of the accused. Around the sixth hour, an event occurs that entails
the transformation of the tortured body into a hermeneutic organ, as the
culprit learns to decipher the judgment through his wounded skin.
Writes Kafka:
Understanding dawns even on the dumbest. It begins around the eyes.
From there it spreads. A sight that could seduce one [Ein Anblick, der einen
verführen könnte] to lie down alongside him under the harrow. Nothing
more actually happens, the man merely begins to decipher the script, he
purses his lips as if he were listening hard [der Mann fängt bloß an, die
Schrift zu entziffern, er spitzt den Mund, als horche er]. You’ve seen that it is
not easy to decipher the script with your eyes, but our man deciphers it with
his wounds. Certainly it’s a lot of work; it takes six hours before it’s done [zu
ihrer Vollendung]. But then the harrow skewers him through [spießt ihn …
vollständig auf] and tosses him into the pit, where he splashes down on the
bloody water and the cotton. With that, the judgment has been accomplished [Dann ist das Gericht zu Ende].52
Around the sixth hour, the scene of torture transforms itself into one of
reading, as the condemned person begins to understand what the wounds
52
Franz Kafka, “In the Penal Colony,” Kafka’s Selected Stories, ed. and trans. Stanley
Corngold (New York and London: Norton, 2007), 35–59, 45. See Franz Kafka, “In der
Strafkolonie,” Drucke zu Lebzeiten, eds. Wolf Kittler, Hans-Gerd Koch, and Gerhard
Neumann (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2002), 201–248, 219f.
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24
D. ZECHNER
inflicted on his back signify. The faculty of this understanding, however,
no longer belongs to the intellect. It extends through the prisoner’s bodily
features and permeates his corporeality as a unifying force, so much so that
the process only then reaches completion (“Vollendung”) when the body
can be disposed of in its entirety (“vollständig”). The physical extension of
understanding presents the body’s exterior as “seductive.” Yet what so
pleases the onlooker is precisely a process that begins “around the eyes,”
the very organ that allows for onlooking, which renders the visual dimension of this scene a mise-en-abîme of self-reflection. As the eye beholds
another eye, the object of the onlooker’s Anblick is nothing other than the
prisoner’s Blick itself, withdrawn into objectless eyeshot, existentially
focused on interpreting the wound of language. The collapse of the field
of vision into its own abyss is decisive, as it dislodges the act of reading
from the realm of visual perception and toward an experience that bears
on the entire body. Kafka annihilates the naïve idea that reading is reducible to the visual intake of written information. The apparatus to which his
scene of reading subjects the body in turn transforms the body, in its
entirety, into a reading device.
Reading is an act carried out by a complex body irreducible to one
particular sensory organ. As the place of reading moves out of sight and
toward the prisoner’s back, where it can’t be seen, this eclipse of vision
activates the other senses as “the man purses his lips as if he were listening
hard.”53 The sensual cross-over between orality and aurality serves less to
receive the information jabbed into the body but imitates the very instrument of torture. The part of the machine making direct contact with the
prisoner’s back, called “harrow,” is said to adjust “automatically so that it
just barely touches the body with the tips of its needles [daß sie nur knapp
53
For Derrida, writing and drawing are necessarily blind operations, because “at the instant
when the point [of the quill, pencil, or scalpel] at the point of the hand (of the body proper
in general) moves forward upon making contact with the surface, the inscription of the
inscribable is not seen.” Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other
Ruins, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago and London: The University
of Chicago Press, 1993), 45. The point, i.e., the tip, of the writing instrument—quill, pencil,
or scalpel—will always restrict the field of vision such that the event of writing occurs invisible
to itself and any pair of eyes attempting to perceive it. Yet inasmuch as it suspends the field
of vision, writing also bestows on its subject a different kind of insight: “the blind man can
be a seer, and he sometimes has the vocation of a visionary.” Ibid., 2. A kind of Blick beyond
what’s visible, a seeing that exceeds the capabilities of the eyes as a perceptual organ, is also
at play in the revelatory dawn of understanding that occurs, in Kafka’s story, “around the
sixth hour.”
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1
INTRODUCTION: ALLEGORIES OF BLEEDING
25
mit den Spitzen den Körper berührt].”54 If the condemned man purses his
lips (“den Mund spitzen”) as if he were listening, this moment of oto-oral
concentration transforms his face into an image of one of the needles
(“Spitzen”) pricking the judgment into his skin. Kafka’s phrasing is also a
pun on the German idiom “die Ohren spitzen” (“to perk up one’s ears”),
used to describe a state of heightened awareness.55 That the lips are pursed
(“gespitzt”) as if they were ears suggests that the attentiveness required for
reading turns the senses collectively into the point (“Spitze”) of the writing quill whose trace the act of reading seeks to decipher. When describing
the colony’s heyday, the officer responsible for the apparatus reports of
executions whose audience was so riveted that they “stood on tiptoe”
(“standen auf den Fußspitzen”): another instance expressing the pinnacle
(“Spitze”) of awareness as the sharpening (“spitzen”) of the perceiver’s
entire body.56
As the gaze becomes impotent, the prisoner’s body reconfigures itself
into one of the very spikes performing the lethal inscription onto the
tabula rasa of his back. Becoming needle, he sharpens a kind of corporeal
attentiveness that will eventually allow him to decipher what stands
imprinted in and as the wounds on his body. Kafka speaks of “wundbeschriebenen Stellen” (“places where the wounds have been inscribed”).57
The text that is subject to this reading process is written in gashes, and
reading becomes a way of tending to the wound whose perhaps unclosable
opening connects the body of the reader with the body of language. In the
wake of Kafka, Paul Celan coined the term “wundlesen” (“wound-­
reading”) for this practice, which prompted Derrida to state that “the
wound or its scar […] is held by some thread to reading.”58 The image
evoked by this formulation discloses the double nature of the needle that
stitches its way through the scene of reading: while the stylus pierces and
pricks the body in order to leave the readable trace, the needle also leads a
Kafka, “In the Penal Colony,” 42. See “In der Strafkolonie,” 214.
He deploys this exact phrase later in the story (see “In der Strafkolonie,” 229).
56
Kafka, “In the Penal Colony,” 48. See “In der Strafkolonie,” 225.
57
Kafka, “In der Strafkolonie,” 218. See “In the Penal Colony,” 44. This word choice
amounts to another pun as “wundschreiben” constitutes a neologism modeled on the common verb “wundreiben” for “to gall,” as in “to create a sore on the skin.”
58
See Jacques Derrida, “Shibboleth: For Paul Celan,” Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics
of Paul Celan, eds. Thomas Dutoit and Outi Pasanen (Fordham University Press: New York,
2005), 1–64, 53f, where the referenced Celan poem is cited as well. I return to these texts in
Chap. 6.
54
55
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26
D. ZECHNER
thread through the wound’s points of suture. A wound within a wound,
the point of suture connects, with an invisible string, the written wound to
the event of reading. Reading threads the needle that both inflicts and
sutures the wound of language.
Displacing the field of vision onto the oto-orality of a mouth-become-­
ear that purses its Spitze in an effort to reach a state of utmost attentiveness, Kafka’s reading scene subordinates the assemblage of perceptual
senses to the sense of touch as the skin becomes the privileged site of
reading. According to this dermatological hermeneutics, the sharpened
senses point themselves, needlelike, toward the skin’s canvas. Another
name for this process aggregating the focus (“Zuspitzen”) of awareness
would be “gathering” (“Sammeln”), which is the etymological meaning
of the German verb lesen (“to read”).59 It is this etymological thread that
spurred both Martin Heidegger and Walter Benjamin to put the term
“Sammlung” at the center of their respective theories of reading.
In a short aphorism from 1954, Heidegger poses the question, “Was
heißt Lesen?” The question could be translated as “What is called reading?” but that would miss an ambivalence in the German verb heißen,
which is indeed used to identify a name, but it can also issue an imperative:
“jemanden etwas zu tun heißen” means as much as “to tell somebody to
do something.” Heidegger’s question thus also asks what it is that prompts
us to read. What summons us to the scene of reading and what exactly are
we asked to do when we are called upon to read? “That which bears and
guides in reading,” Heidegger answers, “is the gathering” (“die
Sammlung”).60 And he asks:
Whereupon does it gather? Upon that which is written, upon that which is
said in writing. Authentic reading [Das eigentliche Lesen] is the gathering
upon that which, without our knowledge, has already laid claim to our
essence [ohne unser Wissen einst schon unser Wesen in Anspruch genommen],
may we thereby correspond to it or fail [entsprechen oder versagen].61
59
“[J]etzt nur noch in der bedeutung lesen, in der ältern sprache auch sammeln bezeichnend” (“now only in the meaning of reading, in the older language also meaning to gather”).
“LESEN, verb.,” Deutsches Wörterbuch von Jacob Grimm und Wilhelm Grimm, vol. 12, col.
788, accessed June 17, 2023, https://www.woerterbuchnetz.de/DWB?lemid=L04895; my
translation.
60
Martin Heidegger, “Was heißt Lesen?” Gesamtausgabe, vol. 13: Aus der Erfahrung des
Denkens (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 2002), 111; my translation.
61
Ibid.; my translation.
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INTRODUCTION: ALLEGORIES OF BLEEDING
27
The moment of supreme self-concentration that happens to Kafka’s prisoner around the sixth hour of the torture process, as the needled body
itself becomes needle, gathering itself toward the writing that’s pricked
into his skin as the privileged organ of reception and perception, Heidegger
endows with an ontological justification. Kafka literalizes a process that
happens in all reading—because all reading, according to Heidegger,
gathers us toward what is said in writing. This gathering toward the written trace, however, is but an existential aftereffect of something he terms
“authentic reading,” which he understands to gather us toward that which
claims the essence of our very being. Heidegger’s lexicon in this passage
causes the translator to despair as not only the punning shift between
“Wesen” and “Wissen” (“essence” and “knowledge”), but also the semantic proximity between the words “Anspruch,” “entsprechen,” and “versagen” (“claim,” “to correspond,” “to fail”) remain obscured in English. A
rendition closer to their literal substance would emphasize the verbal
address in Anspruch (literally “speaking-at”), the speaking in ent-sprechen,
and the failed saying of ver-sagen. In that Heidegger underscores the linguistic nature of these conceptual moments, their constellation finds its
vanishing point in the titular verb heißen. If reading calls us into a gathering toward that which, as Anspruch, has already called us, then our
response to the call of reading is but a response to a response, as reading’s
imperative answers to a primordial apostrophe that is always already given.
Reading gathers us toward that which calls us to gather ourselves in
reading.
The relationship between Heidegger’s thinking and that of Walter
Benjamin is suspended precisely between the poles of entsprechen and versagen, as their shared interest in certain topoi, especially to the extent that
they concern questions of language, is often marked by a profound failure
to correspond. Benjamin’s lecture “Unpacking My Library” precedes
Heidegger’s by twenty years, yet the concept around which it revolves is
also “Sammlung.” In Benjamin’s case, however, what this term denotes is
no ontological gathering but the rather ontic activity of book collecting.
It may be a glaring misnomer to call Benjamin’s theory of collection one
of reading since he adamantly posits “the non-reading of books” as the
collector’s core trait.62 Fetishizing the object in its empirical quality, the
figure of the collector is less interested in its content than the trajectory
62
Walter Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library: A Talk about Book Collecting,” trans. Harry
Zohn, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1969), 59–67, 62.
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28
D. ZECHNER
that culminated in its integration into the collection. The term Benjamin
reserves for this trajectory is “Schicksal” (“fate” or “destiny”), another
type of calling whose purpose is manifest in the very existence of the collector: “the most important fate [das wichtigste Schicksal] of a copy is its
encounter with [the collector], with his own collection.”63 If the collector
is only a collector to the extent that he encounters copies to be incorporated into his collection, another name for his very existence would be
Schicksal. The collector’s being is the book’s destiny, whose realization
constitutes less an encounter than an existential jolt, a collision
(“Zusammenstoß”), as Benjamin phrases it in the original.64
The practice of non-reading ensconces the fulfillment of this destiny,
which is to say, the book, once integrated, as in collected, is no longer
subject to reading. Refraining from consumption, the collector adores and
preserves the object’s external qualities. This structure does not render the
collector illiterate, however: in order to incorporate the book, he must be
able to decipher its trajectory, expertly decoding dates (of publication, edition, acquisition, disposal, etc.), place names, formats, previous owners,
bindings, and the like. The collector as a self-declared non-reader outs
himself as an expert reader of the traces that will have brought the book to
him, thus fulfilling its, and his own, destiny. By another name he is a
hunter cutting for sign. Benjamin’s theory of “Sammlung” is one of reading in that it demonstrates that even the deliberate abdication of reading
must take permanent recourse to various reading practices. Perhaps part of
the violence of reading resides in the oppressive weight of its absolute
nature that turns even the staunchest refusal to read into an act of readerly
perusal. There is no outside to reading.
*
*
*
Following Benjamin, the order of a collection is conditioned upon an
act that essentially disorganizes. Benjamin premises the discourse on
63
Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library,” 61. See Walter Benjamin, “Ich packe meine
Bibliothek aus: Eine Rede über das Sammeln,” Gesammelte Schriften, vol. IV.1, ed. Tillman
Rexroth (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972), 388–396, 389. For a recent revaluation of
Benjamin’s theory within the context of modernist collection practices, see Annie Pfeifer, To
the Collector Belong the Spoils: Modernism and the Art of Appropriation (Ithaca and London:
Cornell University Press, 2023).
64
Benjamin, “Ich packe meine Bibliothek aus,” 389.
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INTRODUCTION: ALLEGORIES OF BLEEDING
29
“Sammlung” upon the eponymous gesture of “unpacking,” thus suggesting a dialectic of order and disorder whose import is absent from
Heidegger’s aphorism.65 Collections, one might surmise, are more easily
prone to disarray, rupture, and loss than the gathering of essence, though
it may well be the case that Heidegger simply refused to see the precarious
collection-character of all essential gathering. The term “unpacking” plays
a double function within Benjamin’s argument, on the one hand referring
to the literal act of unpacking books from boxes, while, on the other, it
denotes the meta-linguistic gesture of unpacking the problem of collection (as in “there’s a lot to unpack in this concept”). An appropriate alternative title for Benjamin’s lecture would thus be Unpacking “Unpacking,”
as it discursively seeks to unpack the very gesture of unpacking, thereby
laying the groundwork for a theory of “Sammlung.”
In a similar manner, this discussion of Benjamin has laid the groundwork for an unpacking of my own library, at least to the extent to which it
is reflected in the chapters gathered in this book. The Violence of Reading
is written in such a way that each chapter develops a stand-alone argument
that can be separated from the rest of the book without substantial losses.
In combination, however, the chapters form an arc that steadily intensifies
the pressure that my argument applies to questions concerning representation and representability. It ranges from an appraisal of the scene of reading, its allegorical function, and masochistic implications in literary and
philosophical discourses to an exposition of the representability of pain in
language, and culminates in a discussion of suicide in and through contemporary lyric. At play throughout is an attack on naïve notions of referentiality that relegate literary language to a tool that offers us reliable
information about phenomenal reality and subjective experience.
The programmatic Chap. 2 delivers the contours of an alternative reading theory that ventures beyond the simple pleasures of the text, delving
65
“Thus there is in the life of a collector a dialectical tension between the poles of disorder
and order” (“So ist das Dasein des Sammlers dialektisch gespannt zwischen den Polen der
Unordnung und der Ordnung”). See Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library,” 60; “Ich packe
meine Bibliothek aus,” 389. The term “Dasein,” in this formulation, indicates another avenue toward Heidegger, and it raises the question whether and in what way the activity of
collecting belongs to Heidegger’s analysis of Besorgen (“to procure,” “take care of,” “manage,” usually translated as “[to] concern [oneself with]”) as developed in Being and Time (a
text that hardly mentions the word “sammeln” and with which Benjamin was already familiar
when he wrote his lecture on collecting).
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30
D. ZECHNER
into the discreet violence that underpins every textual encounter. Framing
the chapter, the theories of reading developed by Roland Barthes and
Maurice Blanchot testify to the violent onslaught of reading whose scars
the reader’s body is made to bear. A necessary affliction of mind and body
rather than a leisurely pursuit, the act of reading causes its subject to sob
hot tears, as evidenced by two moments in Proust and Nietzsche on which
the chapter dwells at length. Paradigmatic for de Man’s understanding of
reading’s allegory, Proust’s Recherche instructs us that the reading scene is
determined by a violent tension, staging a quarrel in which literal and figurative meanings fight one another with the blind power of stupidity.
Nietzsche, in turn, said of the poem “To Pain” by Lou Andreas-Salomé
that he could never read it without weeping, thus doubling the pain
addressed in the poem into the very pain of reading it. While becoming
explicit in Nietzsche, this pain covertly pulses through the workings of all
conceivable reading scenes. The chapter ends with a discussion of Elfriede
Jelinek’s The Piano Teacher where a letter is inserted as the uncircumventable barrier between two desiring bodies whose emergence is induced by
the violence of reading.
Jelinek’s arrangement quite painfully makes obvious that masochists
and sadists read differently. Or rather, she makes clear that one of them
reads while the other prefers not to. Pressing forth in the quest to unravel
the intricacies of textual encounters laced with sadistic and masochistic
undertones, Chap. 3 seizes a pivotal insight from Gilles Deleuze whose
study on Leopold von Sacher-Masoch beckons us to view masochism as a
linguistic endeavor that comes with its own reading list and idiosyncratic
rhetoric. Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs conceives masochism as the corporeal enactment of a specific rhetorical regime. The explication of this
regime, however, yields the somewhat startling insight that the rhetoric of
masochism revolves around the promise of forgetfulness. When Wanda,
Masoch’s dominatrix, holds out the prospect of setting free her sex slave,
she requires him to promise to forget everything he had to endure—a
rather unconventional request as oblivion appears antagonistic to the very
notion of upholding a promise. If it is to be kept, one surmises the promise to rely on unwavering memory, sheltered from the onslaught of forgetfulness. My chapter embarks on a closer examination of the purported
mutual exclusivity between promising and forgetting, thus unearthing, at
the very heart of every promise, the enigmatic presence of a promise of
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INTRODUCTION: ALLEGORIES OF BLEEDING
31
oblivion. Through careful readings of Masoch, Nietzsche, and Kafka, the
promise of oblivion emerges as an indispensable condition for all acts of
promising: what initially appears irreconcilably opposite discloses an essential entanglement. Oblivion must be pledged for the promise to thrive.
Putting in conversation Martin Heidegger and Maurice Blanchot, a climactic maneuver unveils the very fabric of language as inherently promissory, which is to say, infused with a propensity for oblivion.
The explication of masochistic violence in the works of Jelinek and
Sacher-Masoch sets the stage for a detailed case study at the heart of The
Violence of Reading. Having passed through masochism as reading practice and rhetorical regime, an analysis of Robert Musil’s inaugural novel,
The Confusions of Young Törless, installs it as a transcendental principle of
practical reason. The torment inflicted upon the hapless pupil Basini in
Musil’s boarding school narrative has attracted scholars interested in
Musil’s understanding of violence. Rüdiger Campe’s astute analysis identifies in the “sadisms” directed at Basini a resurgence of the primordial violence that conditions the very fabric of the institution that encases the
narrative. Other commentators see a masochism at work in the introverted
Törleß whose empathy opposes the sadistic spectacle. Howsoever one
seeks to determine the violence underpinning the novel’s intradiegetic
intersubjective relations, my argument insists that one is bound to fall
short of an understanding of its violence as long as the violence of reading
and its way of saturating the text are not taken into account. Inspired by
his mathematics teacher, Törleß one day embarks on perusing Immanuel
Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason, yet the scene of reading quickly deteriorates into a harrowing ordeal: suffocated amidst the text’s convoluted
labyrinth, Törleß makes no headway at all and breaks into a sweat while
feeling lobotomized by Kant’s bony old fingers. The engagement with
Kant’s words becomes a masochistic rite of sorts—an allegory of reading
serving as the textual conduit for the brute violence reigning supreme
within the novel’s tapestry. Chapter 4 follows Törleß in reading Kant and
discovers, in the very structure of practical reason, a kind of pain that lacks
an empirical referent: it is the pain administered by the moral law as it
shuts down sensuality for the sake of reason itself. The masochism thus
posited no longer occurs as the mortal desire among confused pupils, but
as the transcendental masochism of morality itself.
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D. ZECHNER
The relevance of pure intelligibility for an understanding of masochism
puts into question the capacities of phenomenal experience. Chapter 5
pursues this question as the violence it explores is no longer subject to
representation. If we seek linguistically to represent states of injury, the
vulnerability of the linguistic medium itself tends to remain ignored.
Probing this vulnerability introduces the possibility of a kind of pain inherent to the very fabric of language itself: torments not confined to the
realm of subjective experience and intersubjective encounter but unfurling
solely as linguistic events. The discourse surrounding the representability
of pain and suffering in language tends to fixate on an insurmountable
contrast between the experience of pain and the medium of its representation. Elaine Scarry’s take, as discussed above, is paradigmatic in this regard
and contends that pain’s relentless grip mercilessly obliterates language,
crippling its referential function, thereby rending asunder its inherent representational prowess. My argument veers away from the clutch of this
representationalist perspective and foregrounds the occurrence of a kind
of pain that eludes representation precisely because it permeates its very
structure. Birthed through the unraveling of representation, this pain is
intertwined with the texture of a language that no longer serves to depict
phenomenal reality. The parameters of this “linguistic pain” become acute
in the encounter with the sublime, for instance, and the way in which it
shuts down subjective experience and its representational faculties. Thus,
a pain is unleashed that is no longer felt, its phenomenal content registered
nowhere but in the collapsing structure of representation itself. I demonstrate this movement through an examination of de Man’s engagement
with Kant, building up to a series of close readings that passes through
Kafka, Claude Lanzmann, and Georg Trakl.
The diagnosis of a fundamental disconnect between phenomenal experience and the linguistic medium of representation renders precarious the
relationship between language and history. This hazardous instability
affects the figure of the author in a peculiar way as authorship is but
another name for the suture connecting the shape of a life with the body
of a text. To what extent is the written word determined by the life of its
author, and what empowers it to elude, exceed, and survive this life? The
interface that connects the two types of corporeality—one textual, one
phenomenal-historical—is the wound of language itself, caused by the
inevitable departure of the word from its designated phenomenon. If the
death of its author truncates a textual corpus, can we ascribe to the written
word a similar power to mangle? The last lines of Ingeborg Bachmann’s
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INTRODUCTION: ALLEGORIES OF BLEEDING
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story “The Thirtieth Year” lead one to doubt this hypothesis, reassuring
us that the act of reading has not broken our bones. Not all bodies remain
unscathed by the mayhem of language, however, and Chap. 6 amasses a
body count that involves, beyond Bachmann, the casualties of Peter
Szondi, Paul Celan, and John Berryman. About Berryman’s suicide, the
indie band Okkervil River wrote a requiem whose anacoluthic and prosopopoeic verve I subject to lengthy analysis. In each of these cases, an invisible string—made of the words some poem said—connects, and
disconnects, the phenomenal with the textual body, lining, as in Kafka’s
reading scene, the very wound of language.
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