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
52 Angelika Reichmann surprising perspective they determine. He verbalises this similarity in the following way: These glimpses of certain fixed objects, seen daily, yet always differently, through bedroom-windows, scullery-windows, privy windows, had, from his childhood, possessed a curious interest for him. It was as if he got from them a sort of runic handwriting, the 'little language' of Chance itself, commenting upon what was, and is, and is to come. (Powys 232, italics mine) The implication is that windows present writing, a sign that must be read. In this excerpt Wolf Solent associates his vision through the window with textuality in general, and implies that life is practically nothing else but trying to read the cryptogram it presents. In a dialogue with Christie he directly connects the image of the window as a frame with reading and daydreaming: Philosophy to you, and to me, too, isn't science at all! It's life winnowed and heightened. It's the essence of life caught on the wing. It's life framed... framed in room-windows. .. in carriage-windows. .. in mirrors. .. in our 'brown studies', when we look up from absorbing books. .. in waking dreams. .. (Powys 91, italics in the original) In this excerpt "framing" becomes a metaphor for contextualising or conceptualising and thus interpretation, while the means that make it possible are the "window" or "mirror" of a philosophical text —or literary text, for that matter. This "framed life", the narrative, seems actually to take the place of life itself for Wolf Solent, so much so, that he even "frames" the most elemental phenomena of nature into stories that he knows from the literary tradition. Everything is symbolic for him, for example "a great yellowish fragment of sky" becomes a centaur drinking from the fountain of a willow (Powys 151). Thus Wolf definitely seems to embody the neurotic reader —more exactly, the hysteric in the sense Barthes applies the term (63). Since the window as a frame in itself is most conspicuously a hole, Wolf Solent becomes a reader of gaps with all the postmodernist/poststructuralist implications of the word concerning the nature of language and of the human unconscious 1 6. Looking out of the window —or peeping in through windows, for that matter —becomes a metaphor for reading which highlights 1 6 Cf. Jacques Lacan, "The Insistence of the Letter in the Unconscious," The Structuralists From Marx to Lévy-Strauss, ed. Richard and Fernande DeGeorge (Garden City, New York, Anchor Books, Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1972), 287-324. Cf. also Joe Boulter, Postmodern Powys — New Essays on John Cowper Powys (Kidderminster: Crescent Moon, 2000). He uses "some of the analogies between Powys's themes and
