This is more from S/Z: An Essay by Roland Barthes (1970):
… Rereading, an operation contrary to the commercial and ideological habits of our society, which would have us “throw away” the story once it has been consumed (“devoured”), so that we can then move on to another story, buy another book, and which is tolerated only in certain marginal categories of readers (children, and old people, and professors), rereading is here suggested at the outset, for it alone saves the text from repetition (those who fail to reread are obliged to read the same story everywhere), multiplies it in its variety and its plurality: rereading draws the text out of its internal chronology (“this happens before or after that”) and recaptures a mythic time (without before or after); it contests the claim which would have us believe that the first reading is a primary, naïve, phenomenal reading which we will only, afterwards, have to “explicate,” to intellectualize (as if there were a beginning of reading, as if everything were not already read: there is no first reading, even if the text is concerned to give us that illusion by several operations of suspense, artifices more spectacular than persuasive); rereading is no longer consumption, but play (that play which is the return of the different). If then, a deliberate contradiction in terms, we immediately reread the text, it is in order to obtain, as though under the effect of a drug (that of recommencement, of difference), not the real text, but a plural text: the same and new.
-Julie
My father once said to me, when I was knee high to a string bean, “If a book is worth finishing, it’s worth reading again”.
I’ve since decided that he was wise.
Comment by Felix — April 8, 2010 @ 8:25 am
… and again? Are we there yet?
I was thinking of this in terms of “reading” photographs. You knew that.
Now, if he had said, “If a string bean is worth finishing, it’s worth eating another” when you were knee high to a book, then I’m there.
Comment by unrealnature — April 8, 2010 @ 3:03 pm
Yes, I did know that … my apologies if I left too much out and became obscure. I was thininking of it in the same terms.
My parents were not visual people. He expressed in textual terms (as does Barthes) what I (like you) now choose to extend into the photographic.
It has always seemed to me that in that essay Barthes makes a false duality out of what is properly a cultural continuum. For his purposes, of course, he is right. And, in so far as it goes, the duality is true: rereading is at odds with the economics of book (or any cultural artefact) production: while I am looking again at your Equilateral or Red line, or watching my ninety third production of Hamlet, I am by definition not viewing new photography or drama. But the truth is that rereading (of text or image) is not necessarily either repetition or critical extension; it can be, and most often is, a reenjoyment, or a enrichment, or any number of other experiential aspects of “reading” as a routine cultural activity.
To extend my father’s comment: a photograph which is worth more than a cursory glance is worth returning to over and over again − not just as a critical experience but as in the normal course of its proper reading and as part of normal cultural literacy.
The interaction between mind and cultural artefact, if meaningful, is never momentary. It occurs and develops over time.
Comment by Felix — April 9, 2010 @ 5:27 am
JH> … and again?
Definitely
JH> Are we there yet?
Definitely not.
It goes like this…
(1) If a book is worth finishing, it’s worth reading again (axiom)
(2) A book we read again was clearly worth finishing so, on second reading, will finish it.
(3) By reference back to (1), if it is worth finishing on the second reading it is clearly worth reading aagain (ie, for a third time).
(4) Thus, if we accept that the axiom is true, a book which is worth reading n times is also worth reading (n+1) times. So, again assuming the axiom to be true, any book worth finishing is worth reading an infinite number of times.
This is what mathematicians call “proof by induction” :-)
Comment by Felix — April 9, 2010 @ 6:42 am