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| Henri Matisse, "The Inattentive Reader," 1919 (image from tate.org.uk). |
The silent reader motif in painting (sometimes depicted either as a female imbued with faint corporeal sensuality, or as an individual in serene isolation whose whole attention is absorbed by the text) appears to function as a cognitive or semiotic means to divide the visual field between what is seen and what is read. More importantly, though, is the rhetorical fusion it hides while demarcating the boundaries between the body of the text from the body of the reader via its detour into the erotic or the sensuous. Reading becomes for the beholder the enjoyment of rediscovering the body of the reader as distinct from the body of the text and the world. It is as if it were in the gesture or posture of holding the textual body that the sensuous energy of the reader's body is generated and invested with desire. Reading or the pleasure of the text arises in that scene where the desire for a body becomes its paramount object of focus.
To maintain this achievement at its highest notes, however, the reader's body must keep contact with the textual body. That tactile bridge represents the material hypostasis required in the generation of the physical in the world of the image. The loss of this tactile bond (the reader letting go of the text) dissolves the spell that maintains the eroticized lectural bond: the text being read becomes an inert object, and desire finds nothing to feed on but drab elements of the medium (here given to us by Matisse through the color choices, the posture and eye direction, and the sexless clothing). The shimmering light that held up the rapt attention on the readerly face or body dissolves simultaneously with the disappearance of the tactile connection with the textual body. The eye wanders away from the page and the text is left idle on the table, disrupting the symbiotic bond that conferred the simulacrum of lifelike energy to the readerly body as the ontological extension of the textual body.
The painterly contact between the model and the text--existing in principle as signs on the canvas and on the page--feeds both ends of their conceptual possibility, pushing us to vacillate between the two poles of the simulacrum, that is, between "essence" and "appearance," so that the semiotic discourse of perception that splices the sign between the physical and nonphysical can function in language as identifiable categories. They are, hence, not so much irreconcilable opposites as the medium in which reading and desire become functional metaphors of one another.
* The self-generation of textuality can be seen in the binary separation it enacts between itself and its referent. To exist as an object apart, it must name its other, thereby maintaining its status as a perceptible referentiable object. This primary ergonomic dichotomy can be seen via the deictic functions which orient the imaginary space of reading. Various reality effects depend on such markers which name the outsides of the text, while at the same time index the text "itself" as the site where such citation happens. More obvious self-references are locutions such as ''at the time of this writing.'' In general, the spaces and temporal dimensions it creates, its proleptic-analeptic axes, extend for the reader a plane of existence between what is read and what is mentioned. We can even look at narrative codes similar to what R Barthes listed in S/Z less as linguistic or literary "devices" than as ergonomic resting points or "landmarks" where both text and reader become locatable coordinates in the groundless space of representation.
There is much work to be done in the elucidation of this self-generative logic where textual and non-textual coordinates are set up by reading motions as projections of its own prosodic traces. This ergonomic notion dilutes the over-emphasis on structurality or literary form and answers the question what audience it would be a structurality for. Encoded in the design feature of textuality are the means by which the dichotomy text-nontext is made and kept perceptible. It is a border that can become thematized whenever a metafictive or metalingual tactic is set in motion. Like the mirror stage, a reader is drawn into the deictic network of the interminable play of coordinative reference where binary values exchange places in an irresolvable dialectic. This could be seen as the chiasmic spiral where desire and semiosis animate each other in an exchange logic without closure.
