The Text Is the Reader’s Fate

Last time I described the use of the first person in a monument to Phrasikleia. The first-person narration adds yet a further dimension to the life force of the statue. The ancient Greek visitor would have read the inscription aloud because silent reading had not been invented yet. (Silent reading became widespread only in the early Christian centuries as a means of private devotion.) Throughout classical antiquity, people voiced the text in order to read it, and they often did so in the company of others. We can imagine a visitor standing in front of Phrasikleia’s monument as though meeting her for the first time. He sounds out the syllables to discover what they mean. The speech would seem spontaneous, of the moment.

The reader would thus voice the role of the statue, re-enacting its words as though he were an actor in a kind of miniature play who steps forward and delivers his line. In this way, the first-person inscription offers a mechanism for reviving Phrasikleia temporarily in the reader. The reader lends her a mouth, a tongue, a throat, lungs. Indeed, a whole body belongs once again to Phrasikleia. The reader becomes Phrasikleia. “I” is not a character who happens to narrate the story. We ourselves become the character and inhabit the story. It becomes our self at least for the moment.

The self of the statue and inscription does not substitute for Phrasikleia’s identity. It’s not a matter of resemblance even if we may assume that the statue looks like the human Phrasikleia did. Most visitors would never have seen the living Phrasikleia, so the soul or force of the monument that they feel consists of something else beside the echo of the living girl it might have evoked for her family and friends.

Indeed, they too never really knew Phrasikleia either, except as a self, that is, through the image or images she projected of herself. As in a dream, all selves exist on the plane of image, regardless of whether they are “real” (the girl) or “fake” (the statue). The viewer or reader experiences them the same way, and only subsequently do we attribute the self to life or art and assign different values to it.

The self comes from an act of linguistic creation. The Greeks and Romans imagined fate as an utterance. The gods observe humans and their actions dispassionately. At the critical moment, when the future of an individual hangs in the balance, the gods announce what will happen to him. The decree marks his character eternally. Hector will forever be known as the Trojan hero who was slain by Achilles and dragged around the walls of Troy behind a chariot. The gods made Hector’s fate manifest by pronouncing it. The act of speaking this fate equals the fate itself.

The word “fate” originally meant simply “that which has been said.” What had seemed unclear and indeterminate to humans one moment becomes clear and fixed the next, after the gods speak. We readers fashion our own fates through a similar act of pronunciation. An undifferentiated stream of words flows swiftly before our eyes and through our minds. At some point, like Creeley’s student, we cease to be passive observers and become the protagonist of our own dreams. We pick out a passage that strikes us. We start to hear rhythms in the text. We create something new out of them. That is who we are. That is our fate.

Readers Animate the Text

Reading involves a rapport with the text that we seldom acknowledge. We typically think of the text as giving us something—a meaning. But we supply the text with something as well—animation. The poet Robert Creeley describes teaching poetry to a student “who in truth could perceive no demonstrable difference between a cluster of words called poem and a cluster of words called prose.”

She felt the typographical form of the poem was all that apparently defined it—and that of course was a very arbitrary gimmick, to her mind. I tried everything, “Mary had a little lamb,” tum te tum, clapped my hands with the beat, pulled out the vowels à la Yeats, probably even sang. Still it stayed flat and arbitrary. She felt the beat and texture of the sound was imposed by the will of the reader and was not initial in the words themselves. All the usual critical terms were of course useless, far too abstract. Finally I truly despaired of gaining more than her sympathy and patience. Then one day, we were reading Edward Marshall’s “Leave the Word Alone,” and for some immaculate and utterly unanticipated “reason” she got it, she heard all the play of rhythms and sounds bringing that extraordinary statement of primary humanness into such a density of feeling and song.[i]

I have no idea whether “the play of rhythms and sounds” that she heard in the poem was the same as the one Creeley heard or the one Marshall had engineered. That is like asking whether the yellow paint on a wall looks the same to you as it does to me. The point is, she developed a deeper connection with the text than her rational mind admitted. Something had switched on inside her. She felt possibilities that hadn’t existed previously for her. She intuited an organic pattern in the language which the printed words alone did not denote. This intuition transformed the text from a mere message into a deeply moving experience, comparable to what Creeley and Marshall felt. She met the poet finally on equal terms.

When we read to ourselves, we reach down into our minds to the level of spontaneous creativity with language. There language possesses numinous energy. We hear the voices of gods as we re-enact in our head the text on the page. Divine personas project through the words as they play out in our mind. These personas seem larger, more sharply cut than the literal meaning of the sentences would indicate. Each narrative voice, each character sounds as the archetype of itself. We don’t consciously inflate its language with god-like qualities; it emerges spontaneously from deeper in our soul. This divine energy fascinates us and compels our attention.

[i] Robert Creeley, “Was That a Real Poem or Did You Just Make It up Yourself?” in Was That a Real Poem and Other Essays, ed. Donald Allen (Bolinas, California: Four Seasons Foundation, 1979), pp. 107-8.