Jowialski: You’re sure you don’t know this tale?
Helena and Chamberlain: We know it.
Jowialski: So just listen.
A. Fredro

We only understand what we already know. H.G. Gadamer

1

1The most obvious point of departure for describing what we will call multiple or repeated reading is to sketch out—as a background—the phenomenon of single reading, taking into consideration both the end for which it is undertaken, and the effects that it leads to. It would certainly be improper to confuse the singularity of reading with the circumstance of being the first reading in the sense of the reader’s relation to a text. When one speaks of singleness, the fact is stressed that it is a matter of a reading that is sufficient in its singleness, one that basically requires no repetition. However, when one speaks of undertaking a reading for the first time, one is thinking of its primary quality, in other words, the phenomenon of its “freshness”, lack of dependence on preceding readings, which fact is usually a particular and valuable aspect of this form of engagement with a text. To speak very generally, within reading that is cognitive or scientific/scholarly, a singular reading takes place particularly where it is driven by a search for specific information, and where it stops once that information is found. That searching is not, in fact, a “live encounter” with a text, but only superficial contact with it (Onimus 1969, 7). It is, for example, the form of reading an article from an encyclopedia or a passage in a handbook, a reading that, in general, is limited to taking in certain new information, which is not submitted to further reflection, especially not to critical reflection.

2 The fundamental situations for multiple readings (in the sense, of not being primary or of being repeated) occur in those readings of a text that we can call very generally analyses or interpretation. Here repeated readings may fulfill the functions of verifying hypotheses adopted during a first reading (see Eco 1979, 245-246; Ray 1984, 135-137) whereby these verifications may result from having received previously unknown information connected with the text (like new experiments in the natural sciences), or from material that is derived from the very renewal of reading operations. The peculiar cognitive activity performed in relation to a text in multiple readings, and one that differs from verification procedures, has been often defined as “study”. Friedrich Schlegel characterised these thus: “Research and learning free from specific interest, unconstrained, not limited by any need, any purpose” (Schlegel 1967, 3).1 This characteristic of study, free from looking for information, but also free from intentions to verify anything, places it on the border of this kind of multiple reading that we are concerned with here, that is, in the vicinity of renewed literary reading. It must be stressed, however, that both with multiple reading of the “study” type and of the verification type, the text is not only a field for such reading activities that it would itself impose (also specially dictating repeated readings), but also a field for activities that stem only from the mechanisms of the interpreter’s work.

3 An interest in the receptive activities imposed by the text itself takes us to the area of readings of works of literature, readings that are of an esthetic-concretising nature, and that—in accordance with Roman Ingarden’s instructions—we will oppose to the scholarly reconstructions of these works (see Ingarden 1960, 416). With reference to this type of reading, the phenomenon of engaging with the text for the first time is a more important circumstance than the fact of an exclusively singular reading of it. This phenomenon may bring with it particular reception effects. In certain extreme cases, this may be, in relation to narrative texts, the effect of entering into an as yet unfinished world. Here the situation may be similar to that when one listens to a live radio broadcast, when the expectation of a further part is directed toward something that in fact does not yet exist (see Iser 1974, 138), and not toward what is prepared and may be accepted at the appropriate moment. In this manner, the first reading of a narrative text may be conducted in a way that is spontaneous or purposely naïve, that is, as if one were convinced that what is being presented is only now taking shape and could possibly take on different forms depending on the wishes of the sender or of the receiver of the text. This form of reception is particularly clear in the case of novels in serial instalments (see Iser 1970, 17-18), when the reader may think, and may in fact succumb to the delusion, that depending on various circumstances (for example, on his/her letter to the author) further instalments may shape themselves in varying ways.

4 A first reading, understood as an introduction to something that is currently in the process of formation, creates conditions for surrendering to illusion—and this is not in the sense of receiving a skillfully constructed mimesis, but in the sense of actual participation in a certain reality. However, also, without fulfilling this condition of authentic participation, an active participation in the presented occurrences is possible, one that is conscious of their fictionality, but which goes forward in a climate of emotional engagement, which is expressed in a feeling of fabular tension (suspense) and release.

5 As we know, there are many narrative works that are destined, above all, to a first reading, because only that first reading is able to summon up such an engagement. We can speak here of the analogy that emerges between creative élan and the élan of the first reading.2 In the case of lyric works, states of expectation, tension, and their discharge are answered by various states of surprise achieved by certain presented emotional connections or cognitive revelations.

6 The situations discussed here of the literary reception of “authentic”, on-going processes that arouse strong emotions connected with their very temporal structure, but also those situations of the reception of presented emotional states and of cognitive “discoveries”—these are unavoidably connected with the phenomenon of a reading that is defined here as first and originary, and they cannot, in principle, be realised outside such a reading. The “freshness” of a reading is an unrepeatable phenomenon.

7 Passing on to the matter of multiple literary readings, let us start by recalling a representative commentary on this issue.

8 In the “Afterword” to the Polish edition of Lord Jim from 1956, Jerzy Andrzejewski presents the history of his readings of this novel: from youthful reception, full of enthusiasm, through the disaffection felt during the Occupation, to a position full of understanding for the morale of Conrad’s protagonist, a position that the writer (Andrzejewski) adopted in the memorable year (1956) of the new edition of the novel (see Andrzejewski 1956, 459-475). Thus one could say that Andrzejewski’s text can be counted among those documents that are valuable for our purposes in this essay. It appears to be the case that to speak of multiple or repeatable readings means to join the main current of the esthetics of reception, which, above all, concerns itself with the multifaceted forms of contact with what a text announces and implements, and with what different receivers bring to the text in different times, those receivers having at their disposal varying so-called codes of reception. But also one and the same receiver who changes—just like Andrzejewski— his/her reception apparatus over the course of years.

9 However, in what follows, we are concerned with a substantially different matter. This refers not to those modifications in the receiver’s interpretative possibilities that arise as a result of his/her historical-biographical variability against a background of the emergence of new receptive competences that come from outside the text and are psychologically and sociologically motivated. The character of our reflections is distinct inasmuch as they concentrate on the simple circumstance of a repetition of readings and their accumulation. Thus they speak of what is born between a text and a reader in the course of an exclusively mutual contact, making an assumption that if the reader “has undergone change”, this is only within the framework of such contact. In other words, all openness of reading, all variability of its interpretative result, which emerge against a background of “cooperation” between text and receiver, are considered within the immanence of a specific closed and completed, sender-receiver circle. In connection with this, we would like to concentrate here on such narrative works the full reception of which is impossible or unlikely in a first reading because of their very construction, as a result of the presence in them of such elements that in such a reading may be not perceived or—because of the work’s different values—should not be perceived. If in this discussion, we find such categories useful as that of the different relations of the sending code and the receiving code, or the concept of different styles of reception, these will only constitute a specification of a general category, which, for us, is the automatic accumulation of readings, a category in the description of which the phenomenon of the differentiation of, for example, different styles of reading is of a secondary nature.

10 Bearing in mind the opposition we have sketched out of a first reading and a renewed reading, we will present here a description of the process of reading that seems highly useful in terms of viewing as a whole the issue of the literary reading of narrative works, which for this essay is of particular substance. The hypothesis underlying this description derives from the reflection initiated by Husserl on the phenomenology of all temporal processes (Husserl 1928, 388-392; See also Michalski 1988, 193-198). According to Husserl, a defined “now” (“pre-impression”, Urimpression) of consciousness constitutes a retention of previous “nows” of this consciousness. But if each of these passed “nows” was previously a protention of its previous states, then each “now” of consciousness is a retention in relation to subsequent retentions of this consciousness. To the extent of the movement of the “now” of consciousness, there is an increase of impressions, but also an unceasing modification of subsequent retentions. Husserl writes that each later retention is not just simply a constant modification grown out of a pre-impression, but rather a constant modification of all earlier constant modifications of that same point of commencement (Husserl 1928, 392-393). With regard to this, it is important that the phenomenon of retention cannot be reduced to conscious recall, but constitutes, as it were, an inevitable component of every “now” of consciousness. The consciousness of the future forms itself in parallel as a series of protentions that are superimposed on each other.

11 It is in reference to these reflections that Ingarden describes the concretising processes of reading literary works. In a parallel fashion, though in a different language, Jan Mukařovský and, many years later, Janusz Sławiński and Wolfgang Iser do the same (Ingarden 1976, 97-109; 137-142; Mukařovský 1966, 190-196; Sławiński 1974, 144-145; Iser 1976, 77-192). In these formulations, the observation is important that the reading of a text does not just consist of accepting successive semantic particles, but also, in connection with the constant change of the reader’s point of view and horizon—as new elements accumulate—it consists in the progressive transformation of elements that have already been assimilated. This transformation has a multi-phase course: it follows the path of building up layers of multi-levelled retentions. Going back somewhat into the past, every passage of a text finds itself under the pressure of what builds up and accumulates, and what, both in new configurations and in relativising ones, changes its meanings and its functions within the framework of the whole. Very frequently, the evaluation of individual figures and events in a novel is transformed—both in an absolute sense (for example, a moral sense) and in the sense of their function within the entirety of the work.3 However, in certain types of the contemporary novel, the very sequence of events shows itself to be particularly sensitive to reinterpretation. The image of these events may undergo radical changes in the course of reading. As the text grows, the conglomerations of protentions of every “now” change, in other words, expectations of subsequent instalments change, and also the expectations of future expectations. To put it generally, there is a ceaseless change in the contents of the bilateral horizon of every reading “now”. If, however, the horizon of backward glances and expectations changes, one can say that the rules of the work’s reception also change frequently. 4 Let us offer here the most classic of examples: the rules of reading the idyll are shown to be inadequate in the course of reading Adam Mickiewicz’s Pan Tadeusz, and the rules of the traditional historical novel let one down when reading successive parts of Teodor Parnicki’s Srebrne orły.

12 The reading mechanisms described here appear to possess a fundamental and universal character, as a result of which we suggest that the schematic outline presented here is appropriate for what we can call a first or a basic reading. We can also take it as a point of departure for describing multiple reading, and especially for describing the conditions in which multiple reading occurs. The phenomenon of life’s liberation in time from the mechanism that we have described here according to Husserl’s model is presented by Erich Auerbach in his reflections on Proust’s fiction.

Freed from its various earlier involvements, consciousness views its own past layers and their content in perspective; it keeps confronting them with one another, emancipating them from their exterior temporal continuity... (Auerbach 2003, 94)

13 This observation accords in general terms with the mechanisms of renewed reading. Its fundamental property is a manner of situating every read section in the entirety of a text that is different from the one employed in a first reading. In a first reading, such a section is grasped, above all, as an element that is expected only against the background of earlier phases of the text, after which it is subject to further transformations. However, at this point, later phases of the text still do not exist at all within the reader’s reception and cannot have any re-interpretative influence on the given section. In particular, they cannot work destructively on experiences of authenticity or on a variety of emotions connected with reception. However, in repeated readings, every passage is also referred to already known sequences, which already in some sense and in advance pass comment on such a passage, but as a result the passage is not subject to progressive reinterpretations as these sequences develop in the course of reading. A first reading is basically one that is subject to an algorithm, a systematised activity of a unidirectional transformation of the unknown into the known. However, further readings, which no longer possess this elementary property, and which are not based on a presupposition of the differentiation of a known and an unknown part of the text, these readings are not subject to systematised rules, and each of its phases is entangled in two-way relationships. Indeed, in relation to this, in repeated readings the presented world cannot be presented as incomplete and only in the process of being formed, which can, of course, be the case in a first reading. The basic features of repeated readings bring, however, the possibility of discovering in a text things that originally were imperceptible. Georges Poulet writes of this as follows:

The critical acquaintance with literature [...] is based [...] on an experience previously lived through, the importance of which is, nevertheless, difficult to perceive up to the moment of their repetition. (Poulet 1958, 20)

14 Understanding renewed reading in the manner presented above, and treating with a considerable measure of simplification the multiplicity of different consequences that open up before such reading, we would like to distinguish two fundamental focuses of readings of this sort.

1. A reading that is renewed as a way to discover the coherent whole of a text, or to “purify” it via appropriate decision-oriented procedures of emergent ambiguities (see Iser 1974, 31; Ray 1985, 35; 50). This process may often take place in the form of the “naturalization”5 of a work on the basis of perceiving various analogies in relation to other works, the meaning of which is recognised as unambiguous and the coherence of which is seen to be beyond doubt. In this way, an accumulation of successive readings (assuming the stability of extra-textual conditions) tends toward stabilization—or to homeostasis—of the literary perception of a work even when there is an uncovering of its polysemy, as long as that polysemy is clearly articulated.6 The result of such operations to make a text unequivocal and consistent may be to strengthen the illusionistic aspect of a work, an aspect that is often shaken in a situation in which a text is treated as ambiguous.7
2. A reading that is renewed as a form of engagement with a text, the feature of which form is obtaining access to the work’s semantic inexhaustibility, suspension of any decision as to the work’s meanings, and emphasis on its incoherence.8 With the form of this engagement are linked phenomena such as the dissemination of a text, that is, the discovery in it of an articulated semantic loosening/shaking, as a renunciation of establishing the validity of interpreted elements in favor of their equality or of giving preference to non-relevant components in relation to constructing the meaning of a whole.9 This may lead to the destruction of any possible illusionistic values of a work.

15 Such a conception of reading matches, to some degree, the views of the deconstructionists, who underline the fact that the results of each reading of a work are undermined by a subsequent reading (see de Man 1979, 245). The model of reading proposed by them favors attaining ambiguities as opposed to a tendency to render things unambiguous; it also proposes the discovery in renewed readings of the text’s “internal difference” (see Johnson 1980, 4). This is particularly expressed in the disqualification of so-called interpretative “paraphrases” that aim to reveal the integral nature of texts, an integral nature contained in their basic meanings. Equally highly valued is the discovery in readings of some marginal elements, ones that elude the “paraphrases” that simplify the meaning of texts.10

16 Despite the up-to-date status of the motivations for reading described above—in our discussion relating to multiple readings, we will concentrate, above all, on the first function, on matters concerning guaranteeing texts coherence and unambiguity (or the articulation of polysemy), guaranteeing their inclusion in known contexts, and also guaranteeing the maintenance of their illusory effect.

17 The basic aims of renewed readings sketched out thus can be seen particularly clearly in the material of certain types of novels. Indeed, it would be possible to consider, on one hand, a group of narrative works that merit the name of “novels of initiations”. On the other hand, one could consider the huge accumulation of novels that one can characterise as analytical narratives (see Weber 1975). In the former, a certain reality that is difficult to understand is revealed, a reality into which the narrator or protagonist enters (the best known examples here are The Magic Mountain and The Castle). In the latter, certain facts are analyzed, facts in which the narrator or subject of the novel does not directly participate, but which constitute for them an object of consideration or a riddle. In this category, the vast space of the detective novel, with its variants, belongs. In both types of novel (perhaps more in the second), it is possible to distinguish between the reality of the processes that are an object of experience and the very process of experience (see Weber 1975, 26). Indeed, that process of experience, of acquiring information about facts, is vital in such novels, something that is sometimes underlined often by the parallel nature of the two processes, which are distinct in terms of their cognitive value. One can cite here stories such as Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Purloined Letter”11 or Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s “The Judge and His Hangman”.

18 In The Magic Mountain, as a novel of initiation, the process of revealing not just the truth about Berghof, but the metaphysical meaning of the whole work, is in the first parts of the text conducted through allusions, which can only be interpreted in a repeated reading.12 Similarly, the process of decoding the truth in Poe’s and Dürrenmatt’s stories is legible only via two versions of it that supplement each other. The establishment of the mutual relation of these versions comes from a second reading that confronts them with each other. However, on the other hand, a repeated reading, supplementing the precision of the initiation into the secrets of The Magic Mountain, in reference to The Castle leads rather to the confirmation of the unyielding power of the secret, and a repeated following of the analytic narrative of a novel like G.K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday once more places the reader before a metaphysical riddle (see Caillois 1967, 207).

19 In order to consider the contrasts between a first reading of a text and later readings, it is, of course, important to realise that the very understanding of the process of reaching a certain truth requires—as the examples of many analytic narratives show (see Lasić 1976, 80-84)—more complex cognitive procedures than the concept of the content of that truth. Therefore, an important question is that of the relations of events presented in the narrative text as processual phenomena to the very processual manner itself of their presentation in readings. Characteristic for this phenomenon, which we can call here a first reading, is the creation of conditions for the processual presentation of the process that takes place in the world of the novel, that is, showing the passage of events from a stage of suspense, then to a stage of realization (or lack of fulfillment) and then to further stages that constitute echoes of that fact. However, one must accept that a processual presentation is possible—precisely in a first reading—not only of process, but also of what is not process, since it is a de-chronologised, chaotic series of events or a synchronic configuration.

20 However, within a second reading and within further readings, there may be an obliteration of the experience of the processual and of the situation of suspense that accompanies it. This non-processual nature of experience in a second reading applies both to the image of processes and non-processes. In particular, the non-processual quality of the emergence of the presented world in a second reading takes the form of the phenomenon of a synopsis of objects that were previously presented in a processual manner, and the emergence of structures perceptible against the background of that synopsis.

21 The distinction of the processes presented and of the processual as a method of presentation leads to the following distinctions with regard to types of reading:

1. The presented processes, which in the first reading are rendered in a processual manner, in the second reading become processes, but they are rendered in a non-processual manner.
2. Presented non-processes (so, thus, for example, de-chronologised configurations) given in a processual manner in a first reading, in the second reading become processes, but they are rendered in a non-processual manner.
3. Presented processes, rendered in a first reading in a processual manner, in a second reading become non-processes given in a non-processual manner.
4. Presented non-processes, rendered in a first reading in a processual manner, become in a second reading non-processes rendered in a non-processual manner.

22 The first case involves a reading situation situated within the fundamental stereotype of the reception of a novel, while the second reading leaves the processes their appropriate character, and destroys only the processual manner of their presentation, operating in a synchronising fashion. A large grouping of novels is in this situation; they are not subject to substantial changes in the light of further readings.13

23 All analysis of multiple reading is possible as a consideration, on one hand, of its aims and results, and, on the other, of texts that are in a particular way predestined to such reading, and, indeed, it is on that specific character of some texts that emphasis will be placed here. It is not so much a matter of treating a disposition toward multiple reading as a procedure serving to solve certain difficulties in the psychology of reception, as of seeing this disposition as an equivalent of the structure of a text. So let us indicate appropriate examples of these types of text, the cognition of which by means of the type of reading described here as fundamental, that is single reading, leads to ambiguity or semantic disorientation and to a feeling of textual incoherence, in connection with which, in the reception of these texts, a departure is proposed from a pure reading processual, and also frequently a change in the quality of what is perceived. Thus, a transformation of the process rendered in the first reading into non-process or vice-versa the transformation of a non-processual configuration, offered in a first reading, into a processual one. Thus, it is a matter of narrative texts in relation to which the stereotypical scheme of reading is neither important nor sufficient, and texts that provoke multiple readings.

2

24In an interview, Stanisław Lem once said: “There exists a certain highest level of intricacy and complication in human intellectual systems that are not simply of empirical origin” (Bereś 1984, 32).

25 This view, if we ignore for the moment issues connected with the unlimited complexity of descriptions of the world of nature, mainly refers to complications belonging to the worlds of philosophical or doctrinal thought. The complication of such systems, if some use is to be made of them, is regulated, above all, by the laws of the capacity of memory. Similar issues are addressed, for example, in Noam Chomsky’s reflection when he speaks of the limited possibility of piling up quoted utterances inscribed one within the other (see Chomsky 1960; Ruwet 1968, 95). The creators of narrative texts, in fact, manage to evade this type of limitation in a manner that disturbs textual coherence, and does so in different directions. Here are a few simple literary conventions that lead to the disorientation of the receiver of a narrative text. In a Baroque novel like Astrée by Honoré d’Urfé, as one knows, the phenomenon occurs of the multiplication of the adventures of one of the characters or the branching of the cycle of adventures by an unceasing addition of new characters. In various mythologies and mythological poems, there is an abundance of names of characters who are described in a very limited fashion, which leads as a result of this passion for naming to disorientation within the crowd of characters or to the construction of complicated genealogical trees. This convention is not, in fact, unknown in the twentieth-century family novel. A factor leading to the destruction of a reading—this time of a purely linear reading—is also the digressiveness that chops the text into parts, the connections among which are sometimes hard to find. And finally—the procedure of multiplying narrative levels in novels like Manuscrit trouvé à Saragosse by Jan Potocki (The Manuscript Found in Saragosse), all the harder to tame because in it narrative dependencies interweave with fabular connections (see Bartoszyński 1991, 11-28).

26 This example, however, invites reflection. In one of the utterances of the commentator on events—the porte parole of the author—we find an interest in the curious situation of a reader who does not know who relates, who listens, and whose fortunes are the object of the utterances. Thus, the situation of renewed readings here is complex: on one hand, they eliminate incoherences in the text and disorientation in the readers; on the other hand, they may contribute to a certain delight in those textual complications. There is no doubt that readerly disorientation is here—and this is so in other cases too—a specific value, that illinx, that situation of dumbfoundedness that Roger Caillois considers one of the forms of play (see Caillois 1958). One can, therefore, say that in disorienting texts, ones that certainly provoke a second reading as one that will bring order and hierarchy, there also lies an element of appreciating the values of feeling ill-informed and of having one’s expectations unfulfilled.

27 A provoked or proposed multiple reading of the exceptionally variegated group of texts discussed here is characterised by the fact that such reading is, above all, linked with complications of a syntactical-coherence type, with the plurality or kind of the links among the elements of these texts. Other stimuli to renewed reading come from certain extreme semantic properties, from the need to travel a path from ambiguity (or multiplicity of meaning) toward unification, or also a path from a lack of ambiguity revealed at the end of the text to an understanding of the previously existing ambiguity. To explain the first example, let us consider texts that combine in parallel fashion differing, incompatible, or contradictory versions of certain events, for example, different courses of a biography. To limit ourselves to particularly clear examples, let us mention here An Ordinary Life by Karel Čapek or Autour de Mortin by Robert Pinget. As we knowh, these are series of versions of biographies that are contradictory as a result of interpretative diversity (mainly in the first case), or as a result of the obvious incompatibility of the facts presented. The complicated contradictions among recounted events, information about characters, and interpretations of the same situations constitute an obvious provocation perhaps not so much to a renewed reading, as much as to confrontational procedures that demand a non-linear reading. In the case of a short novel like Pinget’s, a careful immersion in the text could lead to something like a table collating the agreements and the discrepancies of individual versions—on the model of what an editor does in relation to the manuscripts or editions of one particular text. The result of such operations is not so much the possibility of providing a single meaning to what is semantically incoherent, as the possibility of bringing order to polysemy, and even constructing on top of it some meaning of a higher degree.

28 This type of second reading is visible in the case of works the concluding phase of which constitutes an element that elucidates and explains the riddles of the fabula, and also offers some truth—one that frequently transcends the requirements of explication. Such is, for example, the psychological or para-psychological truth that comes with the end of Malwina: czyli domyślność serca, or the truth concerning the evolution of medieval philosophy or Christian culture generally that we find at the end of Eco’s The Name of the Rose. These hypotheses demand their verification in the course of a second repeated and their recognition in the convolutions of the presented events. In a paradoxical fashion, a reader is inclined to a renewed reading not just by a solution that throws new light on the course of events, but also the zero conclusion, the one that explains nothing, as in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym by Poe.

29 With reference to all these cases, the obvious analogy suggests itself with a renewal of reading caused by a perception of a context unnoticed or pushed to the side in a first reading. Assuredly, there exist situations of revelation via a noticed intertextual relation, and of the need to undertake a second reading against that background. Among these is the new interpretation of Orzeszkowa’s Cham, which is undertaken in the context of Madame Bovary (see Głowiński 1992). Here, however, we are not concerned with readings that are richer thanks to new stimuli, but with readings of texts for a second time sub specie connections that are known a priori—such as the relations of Joyce’s Ulysses and The Odyssey—and which one would want to follow irrespective of the dynamics of presented events.

30 It is important in the cited examples that a repeated reading does not transform the processual-fabular character of the presented events; it does not give them a new order. It only allows one to look at them in a non-processual manner, to see in their content connections that are initially difficult to perceive among characters (Astrea), narrators (Le Manuscrit trouvé à Saragosse), the features of one character (An Ordinary Life, Autour de Mortin), and also meanings that are “para-processual”— that is, perceptible only on condition that one transgresses the norms of a basic reading (Malwina, The Name of the Rose). In this way, a second reading ceases to be only a process in the sense that we have adopted, and, thus, a procedure subject to a specific algorithm. It also becomes the construction of systems that are a hierarchy of narrative subjects, a genealogical tree of characters, a fabular dendrite, or a table of the variabilities of reader judgments on the subject of the protagonist of texts.

31 The described provocations or inducements to renew a reading mainly aim to attain or recover the orientation of the reader in the syntactic complications of the text. On the other hand, however, they also aim to rebuild or verify the semantic values of the complications. In the examples that we will now consider, it is not just a matter of the correction or verification of what the first reading brought, but of creating a new quality of the created world to the framing of which the first reading was only a preparation. And here the previously discussed distinctions seem useful between the first reading and further readings, the distinctions relating to the processes presented in texts, and at the same time relating to the matter of the processual nature of their understanding. Here we are thinking, first, of the many cases of de-chronologisation of presented events in narrative works—of operations that destroy their processual character. This procedure, important for the novelistic retrospective, is often linked—as we know—with a tendency to demonstrate the manner of the presence of past events in memory, but is also linked with the function of curious and epiphanic moments, in which there takes place a condensed uncovering of the strata of the past. Events shown in a processual fashion are presented here, however, as non-processes, as mosaics of event-driven moments.

32 If, for example, in Marlowe’s account in Lord Jim, the reader is unable, in a certain phase, to understand the meaning of the conduct and situation of the officers who abandon the “Patma”, this circumstance deprives a whole series of individual events of the character of processes, and only seeing of this passage in the context of the occurrences that follow later can build this processual quality here.14 But this processual quality can only be reconstructed in a non-processual reading, one that makes it possible to see the text synoptically. And for this, a second reading of the text is necessary.

33 An analogical relation of a first and second reading is seen in Michel Butor’s La Modification, in which the entirety of the novel’s events is passed through the filter of an act of recollection lasting one whole night, and is subjected to temporal dislocations that are sometimes difficult to grasp. This means that in a first reading of the novel, what is not process, but rather only a chaotic mosaic, develops in a processual manner. However, in a second reading the reader is able to reconstruct a new quality out of this mosaic, a quality that constitutes a processual configuration. This is not, indeed, rendered in a processual fashion, and it can only be seen in synchrony. In this respect, we can include Butor’s novel in the second of the categories of narrative works, if we divide them (as we did previously) with regard to the relation of the first reading to further readings. However, because the final emphasis of the novel brings about a fundamental change in the meaning of the represented events, a new reading requires not just a chronological ordering of those events, but also looking at the individual phases of the work in the light of this newly emerged meaning.

34 This case of the emergence in a second reading of a new quality, which is the opposite of that in a reading of La Modification, is a result of the fact that in place of novelistic process, a new, non-processual configuration may be seen in a holistic overview of the text, after recognising the various relation that occur in it. It happens thus, after a synchronization of what in the first reading was presented as process, through placing a series of novel events within, as it were, a synoptic purview, within the framework—let us use here Butor’s and Ingarden’s terminology—of “living memory”.

35 Certain suggestions for taking in a text with one glance can be seen is several joking pointers on the part of a narrator, advising the reader to run off to later installments of the text (even giving page numbers), such as can be met with in Tristram Shandy or in Clemens Brentano’s novel Godwi. Otherwise, this kind of suggestion (which proceeds from an intention to facilitate orientation within the compositional entanglements of the text) is made by the detailed lists of things, which are characteristic of Baroque and sentimental novels, or authorial summaries, such as Faulkner provides in Absalom, Absalom!

36 This feature of several novels will be demonstrated here via the example of a traditional novel, that is The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann. We are encouraged to do so by the author’s frequently quoted foreword to the work. Here we read:

Once one has got to the end of the Magic Mountain, I counsel a second reading […]. The novel was always for me a symphony, a contrapuntal work, a tissue of themes in which ideas play the role of musical motifs. […] The musical-intellectual complex of connections that this novel constitutes, can only be grasped appropriately and savored when one knows its themes and is able to interpret the symbolic allusions of the text, reaching not just backward but forward too. (Mann 1960, 610)

37 This last formulation speaks of the need to see in the text of The Magic Mountain two-way links between individual phases—with the previous and subsequent phases.15 This task can, of course, only be accomplished in a renewed reading, as a result of which Mann’s very demand to interpret the text’s symbolic allusions in a two-way manner, is the equivalent of the principle of repeating a reading. The musicological allusions in the foreword quoted above make us suspect that the demanded reading of The Magic Mountain would consist in inscribing the work, for example, within the framework of sonata form. One can say that there are two themes in the novel: illness and love, initiated by the introduction of Hans Castorp and Clawdia Chauchat, and later undergoing multiple transformations. It may be that the last chapter of volume 1, entitled “Walpurgisnacht”, would be a reprise linking both themes. Volume 2 basically operates with the same themes, if somewhat modified—the opposition of corporeality and spirituality—but the instrumentation has been changed: in place of the erotic contact of Hans and Clawdia, there appear the intellectualising discussions between Settembrini and Naphtha. Irrespective of the possibility of recognising sonata form in Mann’s novel, one can see in it leitmotifs such as the recurring rituals of life in Berghof, the motif of Hippe, and, above all, descriptions of successive deaths: Joachim, Peeperkorn, and Naphtha. It is clear that all the “musical” relations sketched out here (and, in fact, in the novel there are many more) are only perceptible on a second reading, one that makes possible the two-way references of elements of the text. To put it in a general way, it makes possible a free movement over the entirety of the text in order to seek out—by trial and error—the correct dependencies. An effect may be to obtain in the material of developing events, given in a processual manner, the “tissue of themes in which ideas play the role of musical motifs” 16 in their place, which becomes synoptically present in living memory. Thus, in so far as a first reading of The Magic Mountain presents a certain process in a processual fashion (as in the majority of traditional novels), so a second reading spreads out for the reader a certain non-process, a certain “tissue of ideas”. This makes it possible to count Mann’s novels within the third category of narrative works, distinguished because of the relation of their first reading to further readings.

38 The situations discussed, in which a multiple reading becomes necessary or desirable, are relatively straightforward, since they are the equivalents of certain defined structures. Such as: the compilation in one work of variants with contradictory semantics; the introduction (usually at the end) of elements that demand a decisive reinterpretation of the whole; the interweaving into the text of a network of relations that are difficult to grasp at a first encounter. We have tried to show each of these phenomena individually, by using specific material. The real configurations and relations that appear in newer fiction connect those situations demanding multiple readings that have been isolated here, adding more conditions that we have not yet discussed.

39 Let us consider here Wilhelm Mach’s Góry nad Czarnym Morzem [Mountains above the Black Sea] as a novel the multiple reading of which results from especially varied causes and brings specific results. Góry nad Czarnym Morzem is a novel in which a series of events presented as of the present complexly interweave with a series of events that are given in retrospect. In both series—but especially in the latter—there occurs as a result a far-reaching shattering of the coherence of elements of the text. Above all, however, there is a shattering of a natural or assumed sequence of events, and there is a tendency both to a multiple repetition (although one that contains contradictions) of specific information, and also to offering incomplete, allusive information, contained, for example, in obscure, context-bound expression.

40 In relation to this novel, it is difficult to speak of any purposeful hierarchical organisation of the presented elements, or of a clear marking of the borders of its world. The information offered en passant turns out in the course of the text to be important, but the figures and the events to which so much attention is paid, and which seem to relate to the novel’s central concerns, lead up blind alleys, bring about peripheral and unimportant branching of the action. The relation between the central subject of the work and its presented narrator comes about in the course of the text and is subject to constant modifications. One can say that in this retrospective novel, a double indeterminacy is dominant. It is—in contrast to, for example, the crime novel—a text in which the questions marking out its fabular course are not initially defined, but are formulated gradually, by way of anticipation. On the other hand, Góry nad Czarnym Morzem is an attempt to reconstruct a world, in the construction of which a many-sided indeterminacy is a proper inscribed. It is an indeterminacy that makes it impossible precisely to designate either the circle of figures who are important in the fabula, or the set of most important novel events and their actual course, or even the narrating subject. Mach’s text sets out to present itself as an exceptional novel. While the average novel—not just a traditional one—attempts to present some universe with the various relations appropriate to it, to this end performing conventionalised omissions, simplifications, and imbuing with meaning the material of a world that is endlessly complex and devoid of meaning—while this is so, Góry nad Czarnym Morzem eschews this kind of “impossible” task and subjects such tasks to metafictional criticism.17

41 Nevertheless, a novel so constructed and proposing so few solutions provokes further readings, and that for multiple reasons. These readings should lead to achieving almost everything within the text: defining the personal borders of the presented world and of the hierarchy of validity that is proper to it, the elimination of unimportant persons and episodes, and ascribing meaning to elements often not duly appreciated in the first reading. This is connected with the chronological ordering of passages in the text and with choosing out of different versions of events given in retrospect, the variant that is most credible and most coherent in relation to others. It is connected finally with seeking out the principle that directs the choice—within the potentially alien world in the novel—of that sequence of events in particular. However, none of these tasks can be accomplished fully. The fact is here that further readings must come down to ceaseless, non-linear circling about the text with the aim of correcting the validity of various of its elements, of comparing various versions, of attempting to eliminate marginal components of the action. This is an activity depending, to a large measure, on the two-way nature of interpretation, and particularly on looking at passages that were initially not appreciated—or were initially overappreciated—with regard to the entirety of the text. The thorough-going performance of such operations could lead to the elimination in the text of all processual tensions and to grasping the text in living memory as a non-synchronised configuration. But because of the ambiguity of the work, such actions lead only to becoming aware of the work as a series of parallel versions, a series moreover that does not create a clear, disjunctive polysemy, but rather a semantic dissemination.

42 With reference to the categorization of narrative works, made in terms of the relation of the first reading to subsequent readings, one would have to class Góry nad czarnym Morzem to the fourth group. Although in the first reading of Mach’s novel, we are dealing with a chaos of information that is received in a processual manner but that is in fact non-processual, the situation that is appropriate to further readings (non-processual ones) consists in the fact that this original non-processual quality of the world of the novel is not transformed into process, and is presented as a non-processual series of optional configurations. This kind of synoptic vision as a result of renewed readings certainly contrasts with the effects of repeated readings of Butor’s La Modification.

43 The results of renewed readings of Mach’s book, which from the point of view of looking for coherence and explicitness may be classed as interpretative failures, seem in exchange for that to offer completely different reading effects. Such readings, which place the reader in a situation to feel the text’s incoherence, in a situation of suspension among the reader’s differing—often difficult to separate—semantic interpretations, and inclining the reader at once to attempt to eliminate unnecessary structural elements and, thus, to achieve a hierarchical ordering of the world of the novel—such readings may lead paradoxically to focusing attention on those very elements. This is a case in which the tendency interpretatively to grasp the text’s entire contents, especially clearly causes the reader to concentrate on the margins of the text, which make this task difficult. One can, therefore, certainly say that a renewed reading of Góry nad Czarnym Morzem leads to paths that are close to those of the advocates of deconstructive interpretation. This situation fits in with the general concept of the work as one that withdraws from such novelistic conventions as hierarchically organising the presented world, limiting it, and making it meaningful.

3

44In our discussion of the issue of repeated reading, we have been interested, above all, in its conditioning by texts of a certain type—texts that provoke such reading. Let us now reverse the proportions of the conditions for renewing reading and let us concern ourselves with reading that is repeated not because of specific features of a text, but as a result of certain dispositions to do with reception—above all, those that demand semantic coherence and integration in literary texts. The positions of which I speak here are, fundamentally, of two sorts.

45The first is the conviction that the very acts of multiple readings of a text allow one better to know it, since cognition of the text—like all cognition—is governed by laws of probability: the more often we shoot arrows at the target, the better the chance that we will hit the bull’s eye, that we will reach the important and central meaning and the one that is worth fixing. This motivation for multiple reading is linked with the psychological thesis that says that only contact with the text that is free from the processual tensions belonging to a first reading, that is, in other words contact that is emotionally levelled out, makes it actually possible to know a work. And the chance of this type of contact with the object increases along with renewed reading. If, however, that object is marked with particular cognitive or moral values, then that monotone engagement with it becomes a form of contemplation, to which boredom or surfeit are alien. It is then, indeed, when persistent contemplation of a particular model may result in the realiaation of values that are analogical in relation to those that that model represents or suggests. It is not without due reason that in respect of the Bible—if one is to grasp its moral instruction—assidua et continuo lectio is recommended (Łempicki 1966, 388).

46The second position that conditions and prefers multiple readings is based on the assumption that repeated contact with a text enhances the pleasures that one can call aesthetic pleasures. These results would follow—we are referring here to the reflections of Michel Dufrenne—from increasing the distance toward the world of the text, which ceases to be, as in a first reading, a world made present and becomes a presented world (see Dufrenne 1987, 323-324). In the place of an intense but transient illusion, as a result of abandoning ambiguity, which a renewal of reading is to bring, there is supposed to appear an illusion that is less imposing of itself, but more stable.

47The preference, both on cognitive-moral and on aesthetic grounds, for multiple readings over single readings may well constitute (to use M. Głowiński’s terminology) a specific style of reception. It would, however, be hard to add it to Głowiński’s list of those styles. It would be more appropriate to link it with the so-called mythical or aesthetic style (see Głowiński 1977, 127-132). The mythological receiver is usually inclined to seek for his/her truth in multiple contemplation of sanctified texts; the estheticising reader, however, strengthens his/her experience by renewing acts of perception.

48Separate attention must be devoted to the values, especially aesthetic ones, that result from reading that is multiple but that conditions the destruction of the explicitness and lack of ambiguity of a work and brings about the overthrow of its coherence, and, as a result, draws the attention of the receiver away from the central elements of the text to peripheral components. The source of fascination then becomes phenomena such as the openness of the text, its own particular mutability and flickering instability, phenomena such as the manner in which it inspires the reader to overcome points of resistance/recalcitrance, which he/she experiences, moving through the fields of a text that do not surrender to a unifying interpretation, as difficulties in choosing between different interpretations of the text. An illustration of the phenomenon of multiple readings that do not lead to any effective orderings of the work in question is offered here by my reflections on Góry nad Czarnym Morzem. If the multiplication of reading of texts, leading to a sense of the openness of those works, brings with it unease and the necessity of a particular kind of effort, then this is in its results diametrically different from that multiplication of readings that bestows on the reader experiences that are little differentiated from each other, but that bring with them the peace of contemplation.

49The custom of valorising multiple reading, irrespective of whether it is to lead to integration and contemplation or to destruction and unease, constitutes a certain cultural formation. On one hand, it is connected with the classical directive urging the literary imitation of a few but outstanding examples, to which one must constantly return. On the other, it is connected with traditional philology, the task of which its nineteenth-century codifier August Böckh defined as “knowing the known”.18 This tradition is certainly referred to by various modern formations, including the school of close reading. This style of multiple reading can be linked in an obvious way with the existence of an established canon of fundamental texts—either in a sacred-doctrinal sense or in an esthetic one. Thus, this style of reading can be also called a classicising one. If one looks for a cultural formation that is in opposition to a culture of multiple readings, the idea irresistibly presents itself of a culture of single readings, the object of which would be texts diametrically different from those in a canon of classics. These texts would not possess values that conditioned multiple immersion in them, but would fascinate by their innovative qualities, and their ability to arouse emotions.

50Referring to the description of first—and at the same time single— readings given above, it is worth making an important contrast concerning reading customs. A culture of single readings promises its readers something that Dufrenne calls “joy”, and something that in the reception of narrative works is linked to mechanisms that create the powerful emotions offered by fabular tensions and their relief. However, a culture of repeated readings woos with the offer of supplying less intense experiences, but ones that bring longer-lasting satisfaction (see Dufrenne 1987; Barthes 1973, 12). The type of impressions favored by a culture of single readings means that its principles are not distant from the reading customs of the mass receiver.19

51The conclusion of this discussion goes back to its point of departure, in which we indicated that multiple reading—as we understand it—is not a phenomenon from the field of modification of the tools of reception, but is based on the very fact of repetition and accumulation.

52For several reasons, this property of repeated reading brings up a set of issues related to it, a set of issues that constitutes a point of departure for hermeneutic interpretation.

53First, hermeneutics annuls not just the principle of the pure cognitive subject, but also the idea that the original contact with a text is something crucial and special in its cognition. Let us quote Hans-Georg Gadamer: “our sensitive-spiritual existence is an aesthetic resonance chamber that resonates with the voices that are constantly reaching us” (Gadamer 1977, 8). Therefore we are—on the principle of the fundamental community of the world and the cognitive subject—always to some degree conversant with the text we gain cognition of, a text that unavoidably participates in the universe of texts. And this being conversant, which is a matter of course, means that Gadamer can insist that “texts are fundamentally present only in a return to them” (Gadamer 1984, 46). It is this re-presentation that a repeated reading brings, constituting a cognition of the already known. One can also add here Poulet’s assertion that “to read is to read afresh” (Poulet 1967, 20).20

54Second, the hermeneutist does not aim at a reconstruction either of the meaning of the text in the creator’s intention, or of that meaning of the text that is connected with the moment of its emergence. The hermeneutist is only interested in the meaning that is related to the moment of reception and to the receiver. The hermeneutist, thus, rejects the original and, as it were, natural connections of the text. In the situation of a repeated reading, there emerges a related trait. A repeated reading performs an entanglement of the text with a basic—and, to a large degree, demanded by psychological and historical conditions—progressive reception, a processual one, unconscious, and historical of the structure of the entirety of a work. In place of respecting such a manner of reception, the multiple reader imposes his/her own conditions, dictated by the situation of the receiver that already “knows”. Thus, one can certainly say that multiple reading constitutes something like a representation in the field of the individual reception of a text of what for hermeneutics is a basic and general matter. It is the dependency of reception on historical conditions, especially, however, the treatment of the reader as a receiver rooted and oriented within the universe of texts.

Notes

• 1 Schlegel contrasts the concept of “study-oriented” reading with the phenomenon of reading that is looking for information.
• 2 This is an idea of Paul Valéry’s, which is discussed by J.L. Gallay (1978, 371-372).
• 3 In the book by Iser that I have mentioned, detailed analyses of such transformations are presented, transformations that readers’ evaluations undergo in relation to the protagonists of classic English novels, for example, Tom Jones (196-200) and Vanity Fair (188-189). This issue has been analyzed with respect to Conrad’s novels by Guerard (1958, 133-134).
• 4 On the subject of the process-based transformation of rules of reception, see Eco (1979, 10) and Ray (1985, 134).
• 5 I am alluding here to the chapter “Convention and Naturalisation” from Culler (1975).
• 6 Derrida establishes an opposition between “controlled polysemy” and “dissemination” as “endless implication”. See Nycz (1986, 114).
• 7 E.H. Gombrich emphasises the opposition of illusion and ambiguity (Gombrich 1973, 23-28; 296-303).
• 8 Nycz (1986, 115-116) writes on the semantic inexhaustibility of the text and its “nierozstrzygalniki” (“undecidabilities”, a Derridean concept).
• 9 The issue of freedom of choice of interpreted elements of a text is considered by Burzyńska (1985, 388-391).
• 10 Paul de Man deals with this issue (de Man 1978). See also Nycz (1986, 126).
• 11 See the analysis of this story in Grajewski (1980, 29-50).
• 12 A consideration of the path of the “initiation” into the “special world” of The Magic Mountain can be found in Enders (1965).
• 13 Guerard (1958, 130) distinguishes novels that are insensitive to renewed reading (David Copperfield) and ones that are sensitive to this (Absalom, Absalom). This second type of novel includes the work of Proust, since in a letter to Lucien Daudet (quoted in Błoński 1965, 19) he writes: “one cannot foresee a novel based on a first volume, the meaning of which only appears in comparison with the next”.
• 14 This situation is discussed by Guerard (1958, 135-140).
• 15 On the thematic links in the Magic Mountain, see Egri (1975, 164-166).
• 16 The perspectives of Ewa Wiegandt (1980, 106-109) are useful in an analysis of musicality in The Magic Mountain. See also Žmegač (1959).
• 17 The majority of reflections of this kind are to be found in the extract of Góry nad Czarnym Morzem (1961) dedicated to Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz and Jerzy Andrzejewski entitled “Xander” (72-75).
• 18 See Böckh’s writing in Encyklopädische und methodologische philologische Wissenschaft on the tasks of philology: “To know the already known, to present it in a clear manner, and what does not appear as a whole to add it to a whole” (Böckh 1886, 14).
• 19 Barthes expresses this opinion (1970, 22-23), when he describes, in parallel, types of multiple readers.
• 20 In an analogical fashion, Barthes declares that “there is no first reading” and demands “reading the text as if it had already been read” (Barthes 1970, 22-23).