Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2004. Vol. 4. Eger Journal of English Studies. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 30)

ANGELIKA REICHMANN Reading Wolf Solent Reading

Eger Journal of English Studies IV (2004) 45-55 Reading Wolf Solent Reading

1 Angelika Reichmann "My own life on earth has resembled Solent's in being dominated by Books." (Powys, "Preface" 11) Reading. Reading cheap stories and pornography. Reading the scandalous history of Dorset. Reading the story of the dead father in the landscape of his homeland. Reading the metaphor of the Name of the Esther

2

. Reading

—and rewriting

—classics of the carnivalesque tradition

3 in European literature. To a great extent, John Cowper Powys's Wolf Solent is about reading as such and its representation plays the most significant role in the novel because it draws attention to a problematic aspect of narration by highlighting "the division in [Wolf Solent's] narrative consciousness" (Nordius 6). Though third person narration is used in the novel, the story is told exclusively from one point of view, that of the main character and "[ojutside this consciousness '[tjhere is no author's voice with knowledge of objective truth. There is no final authority"

' (C. A. Coates quoted in Nordius 46). What the reader receives is the story in Wolf Solent's reading(s) and thus the identity of this first

—and ultimate

—reader is a major determining factor in producing readings of Wolf Solent. And here a vicious circle is apparently closed: the text is generated by 1 The present study is a section of a much longer analysis of the carnivalesque in Wolf Solent, which contains a separate chapter on the theoretical background of my reading. For this reason this paper contains only references to critical writings, but does not enlarge on their relationship. It is a section of my PhD dissertation and has been completed with the assistance of the Eötvös Scholarship supplemented by a grant from the Hungarian Ministry of Education (OM). 2 Cf. Füzesséry Éva, "Lacan és az 'apa neve'," Thalassa 4 (1993/2): 45-61 and Anthony Wilden, "Lacan and the Discourse of the Other," Jacques Lacan, The Language of the Self — The Function of Language in Psychoanalysis (Baltimore and London, The John Hopkins University Press, 1981), 157-312. o Cf. Mihail Bahtyin, Frangois Rabelais művészete, a középkor és a reneszánsz népi kultúrája, trans. Könczöl Csaba (Budapest, Európa Könyvkiadó, 1982) and BaxTHH, M. M. ÍIpoŐAeMbi noamuKU JlocmoeecKozo. Coőpanue coveneuuu. Vol. 6. (MocKBa: PyccKne cJioBapM, 2002), 5-300.