Absolute Reading

In pondering the reinterpretation of the tradition in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, I will pause to consider a historical figure of reading that I will call “absolute” reading, because it frees itself from the text and, in so doing, absolves itself from its law. It involves a paradoxical relation to the book, to this garden of ordered signs, this body tattooed with graphemes. It is not, properly speaking, a “reading,” in the sense of an interpretation, but rather a practice of reading: a modus lectionis, a modo di leggere, as it was called, a way of reading, that shows how to circulate in a space of signs, and how to use that space, in the same way that during the same period “guides” were intended to instruct the traveler more than to describe the visited countries.1 Beginning at the end of the sixteenth century, hence late (as is frequently the case) and after many treatises had been dedicated for over a century to specifying its rules, protocols, and principles, that art of reading was called “spiritual reading,” lettione spirituale.2 The term deserves to be underlined right away because the “spirit” thus designates “that which speaks,” and it refers here to that which speaks in the text or that which lets itself be heard in the text, in sum to the orality of the text, or to the text insofar as “it speaks to” its reader and thus becomes for him or her the “fable” of an initiative and unknown voice.

The new term (“spiritual reading”) circumscribes a set of behaviors that gradually becomes distinct from the medieval tradition it comes from, the lectio divina, and that is characterized, in a first approximation, by being less interested in the nature, authority, or even meaning of the book than in its use. The “method” it isolates is part not of a “hermeneutics,” relating to meanings, but of a pragmatics, attentive to the operations of the reader. Such a shift moves from the “truths” that the text is assumed to contain to the activities by which its user constitutes (or “edifies”) himself qua speaking, desiring, and answering subject. Thus it profoundly modifies the relation to works received from the past, at the same time as it reveals, in a figure perhaps exotic, but technical, of modernity, a postulate of all reading activity: a voice of the text.

Taking as my corpus the voluminous dossier of treatises, guides, descriptions, etc., that belong to a mystic literature and that, from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century, define the rules or conduct specific to the “spiritual reading,” I would simply like to show, thanks to that history (perhaps less singular than it seems at first), what contribution it makes to a phenomenology or to a theory of reading, and how it posits in different terms the relation, apparently docile, that the reader has to books, those monuments assumed to be stable, like recumbent statues sculpted by a past.

1. The Book of the “Spirituals”: A Historical Framework

The mystic treatises of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries promote, as we will see, a detachment of the reader in relation to the book. This campaign (and it is one) seeks to autonomize the reading subject. It has a scandalous character, if we compare it to the ideology that the Aufklärung made the premise of pedagogy for nearly two centuries, and that holds the book itself, its content, to be the privileged agent of education. While during the eighteenth century the reader appears to be the result of the book, like the shadow it casts or its inscription in social history through the mediation of the school and the professor, the mystic conception aims to emancipate the reader-subject and to credit him with an existence of his own, detached from any subjugation or conformity to the book. The history of the readers cannot be reduced to that of their books.

Such a rupture is no less scandalous with respect to a medieval tradition that makes the cosmos the book of which all the others, including the Scriptures, are the more or less authorized revealers, and that considers all human beings to be readers called to make their lives conform to what has already been given to them to understand, by various means, of the fundamental book. Hence the “spiritual” reading of the modern mystics is inscribed within a greater whole in which the book receives a new status. As for the circumstances that brought about the transformation of the book, I will restrict myself to a few reminders. The crisis that took the theoretical form of Ockhamism definitively separates from all discourse the unfathomable Author of the world in which we are, and thus strips the concept “book” of its universal and ontological value. On the other hand, the beginnings, still disseminated and modest, of the “bourgeois” epopee replace the ontological and hierarchized Book with an instrumental book, the product of an operative writing and destined for the fabrication, accumulation, and diffusion of a kind of knowledge capable of ordering a world. An important corollary: Once detached from the cosmic order and from its Author, which in the past it was assumed to make readable, the book also ceases being the norm of experience; it acquires an operative value to the extent that it is conjoined with facts that are exterior to it. The one medieval Codex Naturae is divided into two figures, sometimes opposing each other, sometimes combinable, but henceforth irreducible—a bookish figure and an experimental one. From this point of view, the innumerable humanist declarations rejecting books in favor of observations3 attest to the movement to which the mystics also belong, in privileging “the experience,” but an experience whose terrain is the subject himself.

In its function within the network of hermits and other Christian groups designated in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as “illuminati,” “mystics,” or “spirituals,” the book presents a few characteristics of its own. A brief look at these will serve as a framework for the absolute reading.

The book increasingly replaces institutions, considered as being decadent or corrupt, or their official representatives, adjudged incapable, often by the very fact of their knowledge, of understanding the demand addressed to them by the “spirituals.” Scripture compensates for the inability of the ecclesiastical agents. The former is assumed to speak while the latter are mute or deaf. This new role involves not only the holy books but all books capable of supplying a language to love and its anxiety. John of the Cross, at the threshold of his treatises, declares that he writes because the “directors,” or representatives of the institution, “do not understand” the desirous appealing to them.4 His books take the place of the authorized voice that is lacking. Teresa of Avila seeks, in contemporaneous works of spirituality, what the clerics cannot tell her.5 For a great many others the same is true. The book takes the place of the lacking or decadent institution. It plays its role. It becomes itself the major institution, while, lucidly, the clerical organizations react, with more or less violence, against this diversion.

The nature of the book also changes, along with its role. In truth, it is no longer even the same book, even though we are dealing with a selfsame text. In the spiritual practice of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the book, in the form of the liturgical Bible, the monastic Rule, or an “authority” coming from the “Fathers,” is an organ of the institution, which oversees its interpretation, controls its circulation, and ultimately has the function of “author.” From the fifteenth century on, it frees itself from that allegiance, in virtue of a triple autonomy. First, its printed dissemination, which ensures the texts a longevity hitherto reserved for magisterial genealogies, makes a personal appropriation possible, and the networks of its commercialization, a book institution independent of the academic or clerical authorities, allow for new relations of individual authors with individual readers.6 Second, the progressive use of the vulgar tongues favors all the shifting ambiguities of daily speech, that “parlance” of love already defended by Dante7 and that, eluding the semantic preciseness of university or theological Latin, infiltrates everywhere with its possible plays of free interpretation. Third, with the growing diversification of literary genres, a literature termed “spiritual” proliferates, already resembling the novel by its narration of passions and extraordinary journeys in the lands of desire. This new book procures an insularity for its readers. It gives every individual story its own place. It is autobio-graphical by nature.

It is no less a book for all that, a space external to the perusing eye, a “theater” of the mind (what we call an “atlas” was then known as a “theater”) and also, as many of these authors say, a “mirror” opening up within the visible a scenography of the invisible, but, by contrast to the parchment, which is rare and forbidden, this theater is transportable, manipulable, and available for all sorts of intellectual or phantasmagorical operations. Everyone thus has a laboratory for experimentation, the possibilities and rules of which will be explicated by the “ways of reading.” To be sure, these spaces available for “productions” (that is, for the performances of actors, for all the movements of the subject on a different stage) are connected to the spaces that were already produced by an “art of memory” for the purpose of mental activities, but the imaginary theaters of old are henceforth characterized by a twofold difference that in turn transforms the ars memoriae itself.8 First, the inner place that imagination created for itself is objectified, transformed into the spatial and cartographical reality of the book. Second, this exteriorization of the terrain on which the combinatory activities are carried out increases the possibilities of invention; it facilitates more complex possibilities of signs, and, in particular it gives more flexibility to the relations between “ideas” and the places in which they were stored in memory to retrieve them. While the art of memory presupposed a fixed “locale” for each type of figure, the book transgresses that order of definite places; it mixes with virtuosity “locales” and “figures,” and it refers to the old taxonomy only in the form—alphabetical—of a final index locorum, a relic of the traditional practice. In this perspective as well, the theater of the book individualizes and multiplies the operations possible for readers.

Still, and here its institutional character becomes clearer, the book circumscribes a place in which there must be a word to be heard. In the chaotic and mendacious space of the world, it cuts out, marks, and makes present, like the temples or sacred stones of yore, a place in which we may expect meaning to speak. What matters, more than the statements it composes, is the fact that it is, or should be, a sign of enunciation, the sacrament of a word to be heard. As such, it is “spiritual” if, and only if, it is inscribed in the problematic of the “dialogue,” of the conversar or the oratio that constitutes the focal point of the mystic approach.9 Circulating within a landscape of corruption that obsesses all the spirituals, punctuating a Christian history conceived everywhere as having become decadent since its origins, it gives objective form to the expectation that the Spirit of the beginnings must still manifest itself today. It gives rise to that belief that somehow survives the slow attrition of an aging world in which things, and even authorities, fall silent one after another. It safeguards a hope. Mute though it is, like Rabelais’s “frozen words,”10 the book gives form and feature to the waiting that, in the uncertainty or silence of the cosmos, puts its faith in an unknown voice, capable of being that of the divine interlocutor and of the faithful in turn—the voice that speaks and that prompts one to speak a language in the process of disappearing. It supervenes, falling into your lap like a treasure to be opened: a space for voices to be recognized.

2. The “Moments” of Reading

This conception of the book is part of a “horizon of expectation.” It is possible to recapitulate my first point in appealing to that category, developed either by the Soviet formalists, in particular by Yury Tynyanov, as extended by the Rezeptionsästhetik of Hans Jauss,11 or, in a probably more fundamental phenomenological mode, by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, attentive to what he calls “perceptual faith,” an expectation that structures all perception.12 Indeed, the ideological definition of the book of the spirituals refers us to the social expectation that characterizes that milieu of readers. This first exploration does not suffice, however, to specify their reading. In connection with the situation in which the book is placed, and which precedes the activity of reading, we have still to inquire into the product of that activity: the meaning. This second exploration, focusing on the last stage of the process, will consider the effects of expectation on the understanding of the book and the discrepancies or alterations that a “resistance” of the text introduces into what its readers expect to find there. The interplay between the readers’ expectation and the resistance of the text forms what we call the “meaning.”

But this study itself examines only one partial aspect of reading. The book is no more reducible to its meaning than a statement is reducible to its content. Like the statement, it is embedded in a holistic manifold of practices, or “directions for use,” that give it quite other values than its semantic definition. These practices of the book, moreover, modalize the interest directed to its meaning, sometimes to exaggerate it or isolate it, sometimes to relativize or depreciate it. Today the object of a “pragmatics” and of an “ethnography of speech” or “of communication,”13 the sociocultural uses made of language constitute a mediation between the expectation of the reader (which concerns a history of mentalities) and the identification of a meaning (which comes under hermeneutics). They give rise to a third exploration, relative to a third function, differing from the two others, and involving the behaviors or intentional practices of the reader. These last were the basis of the distinction formerly established by Roland Barthes between reading for pleasure, reading for instruction, and reading for the purpose of writing:14 this classification was in reference to instructions for use. Borges already said that “one literature differs from another less by the text than by the way it is read.”15

Now this question is privileged by the spirituals, who are, moreover, conscious that this point, and not a problem of meaning, is what contrasts their way of reading with the theological or academic one. There is nothing surprising about this. From “the way of speaking”16 to the way of reading, their strategy consists in specifying which uses of language allow us to say, to confess, or to hear what escapes language, namely, the Other or God. In theory, this strategy has as a consequence the priority, sometimes obsessive, that the spirituals grant modalities (for example: can, should, know, believe). In practice, it consists in specifying the behaviors by which an “intention” can be expressed in instructions for use. This is what we find in the texts devoted to ways of reading, on the basis of the principle posited, already in the twelfth century, by a major work of the spiritual tradition, the Lettre aux frères du Mont-Dieu by Guillaume de Saint-Thierry: “Intentioni enim servit lectio” (reading is subservient to intention).17 This transgressive principle, which imposes the law of the reader/listener on the book/teacher, is in keeping with the ways of doing things that frame “the intention of the reader”18 in terms of operations. In order to present them, I could analyze the “Notice to the Reader” texts that open these works of spirituality by referring to the practices of their intended readers. With variations, they repeat and develop the “envoi” sent by one of them: “Amy, lecteur, utere et fruere.”19 Use this book and profit from it. These two words say the essential, which focuses on a use of the book. I will, instead, in order to describe this art, sketch out the ideal schema of a few essential “moments” as found in numerous documents that tell us the story of the relations of the reader with the book. These relations are not stable. They vary with the itinerary of the reading subject; they mark his progress and are transformed or reiterated in keeping with his comings and goings. I will retain only four figures: the positing of the beginning, the mutation of the book into a garden of affects, the fabrication of a speaking body thanks to a “mastication,” and the interruption that detaches from the text.

A beginning. The book acts as a threshold: a border is needed, so that there may be an other in relation to a quest on the part of the subject. Its first status is that of object. It marks an exteriority. It cuts an otherness out in the vast field of language in which there roams a desire that does not know itself. Essentially it is intended not to furnish knowledge, but to trace out, in an uncertain landscape that one supposes to be haunted by the divine and therefore assimilable to a dialogical (“religious”) language, the difference of an opaque, separate, being-there. Rather than being the statement of a signified, it is a signifier of the Other. The book is a distinct place that serves as the index designating the “want-to-say” of another.20 It creates division, an elementary structure and minimal condition for the initiation of a dialogical praxis: without difference, no relation.

Teresa of Avila relates that “when a book was lacking, her soul was in confusion and her thoughts in disorder”: the book is the placeholder of the other and creates distinction. It allows one to “busy oneself” (ocuparse mucho en leccíon) during the time of oracíon; in that respect, still according to Teresa, it is recreación: she says that when, for lack of imagination, she feels a “void,” a vacant scattered state, the book appears once more as an ob-ject in that undifferentiated space, casting the little stones of its words into it, as if already offering consonants for the confused vocalization of desire. Therefore she declares reading “necessary, even if one reads little.” It is a principle of articulation. “During those years,” she concludes, “except after communion”—a characteristic restriction, for the Eucharistic bread (or Host) also plays the role of ob-ject, it is the material signifier of the other—“I never dared to begin to pray without a book.”21 The “dialogue” does not begin without the book. Nicht ohne: the category of “not without” designates the way of beginning.

Most of the spirituals underline this point that the book maintains an essential relation to the void. But its position is characterized, in these beginnings, by the fact that it “occupies” an empty place; it maintains it, it marks it, without filling it. Teresa also points out that this book/object allows her at once to “go out” and to “stay.” It takes her “out” of the neutral of the undifferentiated (at times when “nothing comes out of her”) and it makes her “stay” there, in the desert of a solitude (at times when her spirit prompts her toward vagabondage and wandering). Organized in keeping with a mental physics of attention, or rather of admiration (that surprise without object—Betroffenheit or dazed perplexity), the book keeps a place more than it supplies a meaning. In the extreme case, it suffices to hold that index of otherness in one’s hand: “Often,” says Teresa, “I would open the book with no need for anything more.”22 Opened, but not read, it embodies what it does not interpret. In a word, like the institution it takes the place of, it constitutes the mute being-there of the twofold assumption on which a believing is based: there is otherness; there is meaning. But what “other,” and what meaning? It says nothing about that. Like a rock in a landscape, it is there, as a monument and not a document, a witness but not an interpreter of these assumptions.

In this role, it can be replaced by elements of the countryside: flowing water, flowers, etc., are inscribed in the landscape like the open page in visual surroundings; they “replace the book.”23 A century earlier, Suso, Jean Tauler, and many others counseled the worshiper to support or fix the prayer with those “natural” things, but, for them, the things in question signified the will of a Speaker. They were documents: a teaching. At the end of the sixteenth century, with Teresa, the book is no longer a variant of the great cosmic Book spoken by God; it becomes itself the referent. The flowers refer us to the open setting of the unread page. Like the book, they make up an alphabet of beautiful silent things that guarantee a reality without saying a truth.

The garden of affects. In insisting on a beginning that excludes curiosity and promises admiration, this art of reading prepares a second “moment” that consists no longer in setting the tone for the reading, but in indicating its matter, its stuff: affects. That the readers should change the book into a garden of affectivity—this is affirmed by a long tradition. Sapor et non scientia, as Saint Bonaventure said in the thirteenth century. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, Álvarez de Paz repeats: “Non notitiam, sed gustum et affectum,” and, at the end of the preceding century, Luis de Granada, a great collector of mystic literature, defines the way of practicing it in speaking of the “charm” and “pleasure” of reading.24 The gustus, sapor, inflammatio, etc. clearly express a “passionate” use of the book. Furthermore, the “savors,” “tastes,” “fervors,” that occur periodically in it presuppose a reading made of movements: emotion and motion are joined; the affectus implies and stimulates a motus. Hence lectio is considered to be an actio. This performance is carried out, it seems, only in order to exit itself. It is drawn out of itself now toward dialogue with the other (oratio), now toward the service of the other (opus),25 in the form of quasi-ecstatic and transitory expressions on the frontier of the activities toward which its dynamic tends. An operation of passage, it turns elsewhere, far from the book, what it puts in play in its garden.

Thus there is an essential ambivalence in this mobilization of affects in the enclosure of the open page. What it captures and represents comes from a very old pleasure. As Teresa of Avila testifies: “I always wish I had time for reading, and have always been fond of it.”26 Since the novels of chivalry that she devoured as an adolescent, unbeknownst to her father, or the “lives of the saints,” which are but a variant of them, she has read with “pleasure,” with “passion.”27 The works of spirituality will take over the same fictional function where the former leave off; they are poems revelatory of affects, just as poems awaken sleeping fairies. This reading resembles the dream, narrating desires day denies. Faithful to the biblical alliance of dream and spirit, Teresa calls the other life she seeks and discovers “dream”: “Life gives me the impression of a dream; nearly always I think I am dreaming what I see.”28 Thus lección and sueño come together. Reading originates, legitimizes, and nourishes dreams. It authorizes the temerity they express: “Take your desires for realities.” In the tradition of the monastic paradise (paradisus claustralis) and of the gardens of courtly love,29 the book becomes the covered walk of lovers, a “solitude” in which feelings are declared. It is situated between a dream that has written itself and a writing that one dreams, between the dream that has taken the objective form of a text and the dream that, like a phantom awakened by a passerby, invents other voyages. The Carmel as conceived of by Teresa will, moreover, be the reproduction of what she makes the book into, a place enclosed, in which lovers can walk freely and speak to the Beloved.

But this reading constructs the fiction of a text. By the novel into which it metamorphoses, if it expresses or liberates the real movements of desire, it produces only an imaginary book or objects, a fugitive language constituting nothing appropriable, neither discursive knowledge nor positivity. In going beyond the text, it runs toward the nothing of what it represents. It is an exercise of absence. To take things from a different angle, it may equally be said that since the affect refers us back to the speaking subject, this exercise overvalues utterance, the act of saying (oneself), and devalues the said, the semantic content. It excavates, in language, that “empty place” that is, for Émile Benveniste,30 the “I” of the speaker. Hence, if we do not identify the “spiritual” life with that set of imagery (an illusion against which the mystic authors constantly put their readers on guard), this art of reading tends paradoxically toward something other than the book and other than the reader; it makes the place it institutes untenable. By the very representation of his affects, the reader loses himself in something other than himself. Such is the ambivalence of an expression produced only to sink away in the silence of contemplation or the silence of service, two forms of access to the reality of the other. Reading makes the book a passing thing (it fades away) and a passage (it transports), in short, a metaphor of the subject.

The fabrication of a speaking body. To opinions recommending a reading that is “slow” (that should not read too much, or too quickly, or too many different authors), “interrupted” (segmented by a hundred and one ways of addressing the feelings it awakens to the interlocutors), and “elevated” (detached from the information furnished by the text),31 and thus considering the book as a “ferryman” or a shifter, there must be added apparently contrary opinions suggesting a “mastication” of the book. “Take and eat”: on this traditional theme, a whole series of counsels are developed for “swallowing,” then “ruminating,” “chewing over,” and “digesting” the text. An eating orality replaces a saying one. It has as its model the ruminatio of the cow, an alchemy internal to an immobile body, a work performed on itself by that animal, meditating like a Buddha on the grass. Thus, not to go back too far, the rule given in the twelfth century by Guillaume de Saint-Thierry: “Of daily reading, each day something (aliquid) must have gone into the belly of the memory to be more surely digested, then brought up to be more frequently ruminated.”32 The words enter into a physiological machinery, owing to “sympathies” that today might receive a psychoanalytic legitimization. Until the seventeenth century, that reading remains an affair of the mouth and the stomach. Surin requests that bookish “nourishment” be “solid” and well “prepared” for the “necessities” of the “stomach.”33 These are not just images. Eating the book can cause illness, portliness, or fitness. Not only that, but the swallowed text irritates or soothes the taste buds and mucous membranes of a spirit that haunts the grottos of the body. It visits, “restores,” or wounds an internal sensoriality.

My purpose is not to restore to this digestive reading its medical or chemical setting,34 but only to stress, first, the relation of the text to the body, and second (to use a term from these authors), what “profit” their readers derive from it. Indeed, these are two essential aspects of mastication.

The first concerns the fabrication of a body by some language. To be more precise, fragments of the body are transformed by bursts of language as if lead were changed to gold in those places where the body is “stricken” by a “word.” This experience would probably bear comparison with what much evidence indicates today, from the phenomena of hysterization to the varieties of structuration of the body by societal systems, namely, that the body is modeled along the lines of cultural and linguistic codes; it is itself made up of heraldry (or pages) historicized by bits of “ruminated” phrases. It is marked by textual citations as if it had an inner skin on which words were tattooed. There are, in the course of this reading, textual sequels: “intestinal” pains or distention, instances of sudden warmth in the head, heart palpitations, the outpouring of tears. The Way of a Pilgrim will restate it once more in the nineteenth century: “What are you crying about?” . . . “she would answer, ‘It touches me so, that beautiful writing in the Bible.’”35 What, then, is this “something” (aliquid) of the language that is able to “strike” a part of the body and to metamorphose it into a relic of the other, an erotic sign, a spoken and speaking memorial? Let us ask psychoanalysts—or lovers.

Basically, “profit” designates that “touch” itself, the corporeal response to a textual feature. “A few things penetrated [by us] are of more profit than many [merely] grazed,” writes Surin on the subject of those “few books” that one must “espouse” and “familiarize oneself” with.36 The intensity of the response is measured by the depth of a penetration. To analyze this “profit,” we must return to Valentin Voloshinov: “to understand is to respond”; “the sign exists only in interaction.”37 But the interaction here is played out between the body and the text; it is “symbolic” fiction (or fabrication), having the structure of the echo, for the local physical alteration belongs neither to the reader/subject nor to the book read, neither to the body nor to the mind; it is neither the one nor the other, but between them, like a pain of love. Letting happen what he does not know of his stricken body, the reader could say with Marguerite Duras: “I cry for no reason that I can explain. It’s as though I were shot through with grief. Someone has to cry, it is as if it were me.”38 These anonymous tears present a form of the aedificatoria lectio,39 which “edifies” or produces the fragment of a new body responding to an unknown.

Interruption. In inscribing itself in the body, reading leaves the text. It escapes. The truth is that this moment of detachment begins to form from the beginning: “With your eyes fixed on the book,” says Juan de Avila, “do not attach your heart to it.”40 A diffuse attention maintains a horizon of the absolute. It cannot be held within the textual enclosure; it considers the pages of the book as places of transit that must be abandoned one after another. No house is its own: it is not here, not there. The book is a residence that must be left behind: “It is good to interrupt reading.”41 This universal counsel is an invitation to interrupt the text with dialogue and invocation: Lectionem interrumpat oratio, repeats J. Álvarez de Paz.42 The use of the book, daily and regular, is interrupted by periodic separations that forbid identification with the text. This rupture is the only thing that will allow access to a “never spoken” word, perhaps like Don Juan, who continually breaks up with women to seek The Woman who will ultimately have the face of his death. This practice articulates a work of mourning. A commentator will go so far as to say: “The best book is the one that disappears the most.”43The text stands under the law of the not too much. It rapidly becomes exorbitant, obscene. The reader is claustrophobic; he suffers from an excess of book presence and from being enclosed by meaning. He needs exits. He flees by his way of cutting, the way oral speech oddly leaves the sentence once begun in suspense, the way it comes to a halt, turns away, passes on to other musical patterns—captive, one might say, to a voice that is the hinterland of language. A true reading, according to Tony Duvert, is “discovered from the first utterance of strangeness”: this “readability obscures the work because it gives up the socially prewritten communicable for the never spoken language of a never said reality—the body, the object, the nonmeaning.”44

This pared-down text is related to a great number of excerpta: manuscripts collating excerpts, they assemble, in the form of personal notebooks, bits of texts read, “extracts” and quotations that represent not a summary or the gist of the book but the parts that have “touched” or “smitten,” and that one retains in leaving it—a few words, as if from a song from one’s childhood, debris relating to the history of the reading subject and not to the positivity of a thinking or information, signifiers analogous to those Freud would exhume in the course of an analysis and to which he gives the beautiful name Stückchen Wahrheit—a little fragment of truth.45 But what truth, and whose? These ruins of texts are gathered there, in these collations of enigmas that make up, added to one another, at once scattered and gathered together, the visible linguistic magma through which the invisible location of that which speaks is indicated. With respect to the books themselves, those ruins tell the story of a desertification of the countryside left behind by the mystics. They form the tableau of an impoverishment, or rather of a disorientation due to a willed insecurity in the form of a fragility toward the other. Like a last subway ticket in the pocket of the emigrant, all that is left of a library is a line or two from a poem. And if the worshiper does not fetishize this last word (by a reversal that remains always possible), he ends up forgetting it. He is at sea.

An apparently opposite practice is possible. The fragment “adapts” to an increasing diversity of situations. It is the same, and yet it serves very different intentions. Hence it is emptied of its own content. It ceases being objectifiable, taking on the position of subject. Speaking of the Scripture, which has “several faces” and which “each person can adapt as suits him,” a text that is mobile like cloth, Francisco de Osuna compares it to the “people in certain paintings,” who “always seem to look at the observer, wherever he stands.”46 The radiance of the text is the look that follows the passersby/readers and changes them into looked-at beings. Thus the broken statue alluded to by Rilke, “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” headless and meaningless, becomes this “candelabrum set before his gaze which is pushed back and hid, restrained and shining”; so that

. . . there is no place

that does not see you. You must change your life.47

Similarly, the textual debris, the ruins of the text and of meaning, no longer says anything true or false; it “signifies” as one makes a sign to leave or come forward; it issues a “summons” to “your life” to appear before it, it judges you. It changes into a word that says nothing and is no longer anything, of the Other, than his look.

The Tomb of a Voice

After having considered the expectation and the practices of reading, we must turn to the meaning to which they give rise. But, precisely owing to these ways of reading, it now becomes a question of something other than meaning. The medieval circuit went from the interpretation given by the master (the lectio) to the inner assimilation of the message by the listener (the meditatio), and from this last to the response addressed by the faithful to the founding Verb (the oratio). It recognized a “reading” at each stage that the creative Word went through in its descent, first through the Book of the World, then through a magisterial and scriptural instruction, down to the listeners/readers called by it to conform to its Law. During the period I am speaking of, that chain broke, even though each of the links remained organized by its prior belonging to the great dogmatic story of the divine locution. The book no longer “speaks,” nor does the master. Meditation functions on an automatizing of the understanding and produces fields of knowledge. Thus the word passes through all those corporeal sounds whose speaker is no longer known.

Of this breakup of the theological story I shall, to conclude, retain only its major consequence, because, besides the fact that it is the focal point of the “spiritual” or “mystic” reading, it also became the prerequisite of a “modern” reading: the exegesis that scrutinized the meaning of the statements (or “mysteries”) emitted by a bona fide Speaker was replaced—as if assuming a backup position with respect to that exegesis and concerning its premise—by a questioning directed at the enunciation itself. The essential problem is no longer what the divine messages are saying, but whether there still is a saying, and if so, where and how? The question has shifted from an elucidation of the meaning to the search for a voice. The new status of the book and the privilege granted to the way of reading are decisive symptoms of this shift—the book ceases to be a “master” and becomes the instrument of a quest, and the way of reading replaces obedience to an instruction with a way of loosening or breaking the book, like a tombstone, to hear the voice it is assumed to contain.

That the book is no longer the master is declared by all the spiritual authors, thus taking up a position in the debate that, on the topic of reading, continues to ask: Who is the master? Indeed, Augustin Baker, in his Sancta Sophia, reduces books, those “masters,” to being no more than “servants.”48 Modern contemplation abandons them, contrary to the faithfulness maintained in this respect by a whole medieval monastic tradition.49 To “celestial philosophy” they furnish only “an alphabet,”50 itself transitory, white stones dispersed where there is no real traceable pathway. Finally, the book is only the fragment, or the index or metaphor of a mystic “Book” whose hidden figures form a litany in the Pro theologia mystica clavis of Sandaeus, “Liber Dei,” “Liber experientiae,” “Liber vitae,” “Liber mortis”51—and whose utopian definition is the unhoped-for coincidence between a living word and an order of meaning.

This does not mean that the deterioration and/or mythification of the book works toward an individualization of the reader. If this reversal does indeed take place in the course of modernity,52 it remains foreign to the perspective of the spirituals, attentive to the loss and possible reunion with the Voice presupposed not so long ago by the theological understanding of the world. They do not introduce an individual-master using a book-instrument; they articulate the desire of the Voice capable of founding the subject qua respondent. Relative to the uncertainty of the subject as well as of the book, their way of reading pins all its hopes entirely on the postulate that there is a saying that is more essential than the text, and that ultimately only a voice can make us believe in the text. In devaluing the book/object, they return to what is presupposed by all human practice of the book and to what it cannot forget, namely, that one way or another it “speaks.” Beyond the threshold of the word introduced by the automatization of the book, they expect, they work (in a way that is in turn disappointed and fulfilled) toward the emergence of the voice from the tomb.

That there is no reading without the quest for a voice—this has become the paradox of a modern practice of the book, since, as has been said about E. T. A. Hoffmann, “that voice that the written text continually makes heard, at the same time continually eludes all its [the text’s] attempts to grasp it.”53 The question that haunts and organizes the way of reading of the “spirituals” thus survives to this day, in various still recognizable guises. May it suffice to mention the form it takes under the name, equally obsessive, of “the oeuvre” and its relation to the book. “The book is there, then, but the work is still hidden. It is absent, perhaps radically so; in any case it is concealed, obfuscated by the evident presence of the book, behind which it awaits the liberating decision, the ‘Lazare, veni foras.’”54 The story of the ghost told by the absolute reading probably gives reading its mythic narrative. In any case, it illustrates in ways of doing things, an interrogation that effectively concerns, apropos of the voice or the work buried in the book, the possibility of that performative: Lazarus, come forth.

1. Abundant literature since Jehan de Cuchermoys, Petit traité du Voyage de Hierusalem (Paris, 1530?); Henry Castela, Le Guide et adresse pour ceux qui veulent faire le S. Voiage de Hierusalem (Paris, 1604); Yves Dugué, Brief Discours de la manière de voyager (Bourges, 1638); François Du Soucy, L’Art de voyager utilement (Paris, 1650); S. Sorbière, De l’utilité des grands voyages (Paris, 1660); etc. See N. Doiron, “De la manière de voyager,” Dérives (Montreal) 41 (1984): 3–16.

2. The term seems to appear for the first time in Bartolomeo Ricci, Instruttione di meditare [1600], 2nd ed. (Rome, 1602), 216–20; Latin trans., G. Busée (Mainz, 1605), 185–91. See Hermann Josef Sieben, “De la lectio divina à la lecture spirituelle,” Dictionnaire de spiritualité, vol. 9 (Paris, 1976), col. 494.

3. See for example Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (New York: Cambridge, 1979), 453–88, on this dichotomy (“books versus Nature”) among the humanists, whose intellectual impact, however, as the author rightly emphasizes, is contingent on their activity as writers, and as public ones, too.

4. John of the Cross, La Subida del Monte Carmelo, prologue, etc.

5. Teresa of Avila, Libro de la vida, 4, etc.

6. See Eisenstein, Printing Press as an Agent of Change, 3–42.

7. Dante, De vulgari eloquentia.

8. Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory (Chicago, 1960), 1–128.

9. See Certeau, Mystic Fable, 1: 157–205.

10. François Rabelais, Quart livre, chaps. 55–56. See, among numerous other studies, Michel Jeanneret, “Les Paroles dégelées,” Littérature 17 (1975): 14–30.

11. Hans Robert Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. Timothy Bahti (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 14ff.; Tzvetan Todorov, Théorie de la littérature. Textes des formalistes russes (Paris, 1965).

12. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge, 1962), 330ff.

13. Particularly since John J. Gumperz and Dell Hymes, eds., Directions in Sociolinguistics: The Ethnography of Communication (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1972).

14. Roland Barthes, “Sur la lecture,” Le français aujourd’hui 32 (January 1976): 11–18.

15. Gérard Genette, Figures (Paris, 1966), 123ff.

16. See Certeau, Mystic Fable, vol. 1, chap. 4, “Manners of Speaking.”

17. Guillaume de Saint-Thierry, Lettre aux frères du Mont-Dieu (Lettre d’or), ed. J. Déchanet (Paris: Sources chrétiennes, 1975), 240–41, §124.

18. Ibid.

19.Instructions spirituelles aux bonnes âmes (Paris: Jacques de Laize-de-Bresche, 1674), notice to the reader, unpaginated.

20. Throughout this volume, the French term vouloir-dire (sometimes unhyphenated), will be translated as “want-to-say.”

21.Libro de la vida, chap. 4.

22. Ibid.

23. Ibid., chap. 9.

24. See the texts cited by Sieben, “De la lectio divina à la lecture spirituelle,” cols. 487–96.

25. See for example J. Álvarez de la Paz, De exterminatione mali et promotione boni libri quinque (Mainz, 1614), book 3, part 5, section 2, 2 (“De lectione spirituali”), cols. 1173–76.

26. Teresa of Avila, Primera Relación [1560], 7, in Obras completas (Madrid: BAC, 1954), 2: 505–6.

27.Libro de la vida, chaps. 1, 2, 4, 6, 8, etc.

28. Ibid., chap. 40.

29. See Terry Comito, The Idea of the Garden in the Renaissance (New Brunswick, NJ, 1978), chaps. 2–4.

30. Émile Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics, trans. Mary E. Meek (Coral Gables: University of Miami Press, 1971), 217–30.

31. See J. Álvarez de Paz, De vita spirituali (Mainz, 1614), book 2, part 4, 31, col. 379.

32. Guillaume de Saint-Thierry, Lettre aux frères du Mont-Dieu, 240, §122.

33. Jean-Joseph Surin, Catéchisme spirituel, IV, 2 (MS of Bordeaux, 1654).

34. See for example Allen G. Debus, The Chemical Philosophy, 2 vols. (New York, 1977).

35.The Way of a Pilgrim, translated from Russian by R. M. French (Pasadena: Hope, 1989), 66.

36. Jean-Joseph Surin, Guide spirituel, ed. Michel de Certeau (Paris, 1963), IV, 3, p. 183.

37. Louis Guespin, Introduction, Langages 74, “Dialogue et interaction verbale” (1984): 7.

38. Marguerite Duras, The Vice-Consul, trans. Eileen Ellenbogen (New York: Pantheon Books, 1987), 158 (trans. modified).

39. An expression from Speculum inclusorum, written at the end of the fifteenth century by a disciple of Richard Rolle.

40. Juan de Avila, Audi filia, trans. J. Cherprenet (Paris, 1954), 2: 195.

41. Ibid.

42. J. Álvarez de Paz, De exterminatione mali et promotione boni, col. 1175: a classic, often repeated expression, dating back at least to Guillaume de Saint-Thierry, Lettre aux frères du Mont-Dieu, §123.

43. Gaston Brillet, “La Bible et la lecture spirituelle,” La Vie spirituelle 73 (1945): 498.

44. Tony Duvert, “La Lecture introuvable,” Minuit 1 (November 1972): 11.

45. Sigmund Freud, Der Mann Moses, in Gesammelte Werke (London, 1950), 16: 239.

46. Quoted by Fidèle De Ros, Un Maître de sainte Thérèse, le P. François d’Osuna (Paris, 1936), 396.

47. Rainer Maria Rilke, From Rilke: Selected Poems, trans. C. F. MacIntyre (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957), 92.

48. Dom Augustin Baker, La Sainte Sapience (translation of Sancta Sophia [Douai, 1657]) (Paris, 1953), 1: 68.

49. See Jean Leclercq, L’Amour des lettres et le désir de Dieu (Paris, 1957).

50. Luis de Granada, Œuvres complètes, ed. J.-F. Bareille, vol. 2 (Paris, 1863), 143–44.

51. Maximilianus Sandaeus, Pro Theologia mystica clavis (Cologne, 1640), 263–64.

52. See Pierre Kuentz, “Le tête à texte,” Esprit (December 1974): 946–62.

53. Claude Rabant, Délire et théorie (Paris, 1978), 99.

54. Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), 194–96; my quotation is from p. 195 [“Lazare, veni foras”: John 11: 44].

The Mystic Fable

Volume Two

The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

Michel de Certeau