PLOY VS. PLOT: THE NEVER-SHIFTING PARADIGM OF UNIVERSAL LITERATURE

A revised and expanded version of this essay will eventually serve as the introduction to the third and final volume of a project entitled The Séance of Re-reading that draws its inspiration from Vladimir Nabokov’s admonition in his essay Good Readers and Good Writers that “One cannot read a book; one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader.” Brief videos related to this ongoing project are available on a YouTube Channel of that name, and the PDFs of volumes one and two – Ritual Unbound: Reading Sacrifice in Modernist Fiction and The Séance of Reading: Uncanny Designs in Modernist Writing – are available free of charge on the internet. Each volume of this project offers – as an alternative both to close and to distant readings -- a series of re-readings of literary masterpieces in which the time-bound elements that attracted our attention upon a first reading – plot, character, setting, etc. – recede into the background, thus relinquishing the foreground to an abundance of timeless patterns that may have initially escaped our attention. Ritual Unbound, inspired by René Girard’s Violence and The Sacred, conjures the return of archaic scapegoating rituals; The Séance of Reading, drawing upon Mircea Eliade’s Commentaires sur la légende du maître Manole, shifts attention from scapegoating to building rituals; and Bypassing The Plot: The Bilateral Ploy of Writing (currently underway) borrows Marcel Jousse’s coinage of the term “bilatéralisme” in his L’Anthropologie du geste in order to stage the uncanny emergence of covert patterns modelled on the bilateral symmetry of the human body. Both of the epigraphs that I have chosen for this essay prepare the way for a shift from reading to re-reading: The Igbo proverb encourages us to be on the lookout for places where – putting aside our initial question of “What happens next?” – we find answers to the question “What stands next to it?” that may not even have occurred to us upon our first reading. Likewise, Socrates’ warning in Plato’s Philebus implies that, as compelling as we may find the story we have read, its permanence is ultimately guaranteed by the symmetry that emerges in its midst. (Nabokov, 1980, p. 3; Cousineau, 2004, 2023b)