Le tâtonnement dans Reader’s Block (1996) de David Markson

• Main Author: Mathieu Duplay
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Université Toulouse - Jean Jaurès 2013-06-01
• Series: Miranda: Revue Pluridisciplinaire du Monde Anglophone
• Subjects: reader’s block; subjectivity; writing; modernism; poverty; tragedy
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/miranda/3638

Reader’s Block narrates, among other things, the gradual disappearance of subjectivity: reduced to a shadow of itself, it barely subsists in a darkening world where writing is increasingly illegible for lack of light. Thus, the « reader’s block » punningly referred to in the title is less an expression of a hermeneutical crisis than the consequence of a physical impossibility, as the many allusions to blindness also suggest. This situation gives rise to a tragic form of experimentum linguæ; in turn, this is key to a Modernist aesthetics which promotes asceticism and the deliberate acceptance of an essential poverty understood, in the last analysis, as a form of liberation. In Reader’s Block, blindness and dispossession—including the loss of subjectivity and self—are what make it possible to embark on a groping quest for words, guided by an ethical and mystical awareness of language which privileges tactility at the expense of interiority, which is simultaneously denounced as an illusion.