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

Reading Wolf Solent Reading 53 its inherently paradoxical nature, since the window, which is both a border and a frame, simultaneously encloses and opens up space. Thus the identification of Wolf Solent's 'mythology' as a case of infantile regression to dayckeaming in the Freudian paradigm instead of leading to an ultimate closure of the text so characteristic of psychoanalytic literary criticism applied to fictional characters.

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7 actually reveals that Wolf Solent can as easily be the subject of a "more formalist" psychoanalytic criticism outlined by Peter Brooks

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8 It reads the returns of the text itself, in the given case the instances of reading itself, which turn out to be attempts to reconstruct the "false constructions" of the textual conscious for the fundamental gap in the text, Wolf Solent's identity itself as a narrative consciousness, the supposed "master" of the text (Brooks, "The idea of.

.." 11-12). This is the point where the text recoils on itself: Wolf Solent, in his obsessively repeated attempts to read the missing chapter of his own unconscious, actually acts out the archetypal situation of the reader who both tries to master the text by analysing it and becomes mastered by the text as the analysand (Brooks, "The idea of.

.." 11-12). These instances reveal reading itself as transgression, a basically carnivalesque element. Just like the screen memory of Wolf's 'mythology', reading is exposed as an autoerotic activity

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9 in the scenes of acquiring forbidden knowledge by gaining (perverse) sexual pleasure from reading pornography, of substituting the fulfilment of desire with reading and thereby sublimating it, of Wolf's voyeurism and finally of his Narcissistic obsession with his own images in actual and symbolic windows and mirrors. By the end of the novel Wolf Solent's constant readings and rereadings of himself dissolve the closed narrative of his 'mythology': his mythic image as a fighter in a cosmic battle against evil proves to be incompatible with his other parallel readings of his identity, which turn out to be unavoidably carnivalesque. Of course, only the exchange of one "false construction" with another can take place. However, since it consists in continuous reading, which leaves room for ambiguities and can cope with the constantly shifting nature of signifier with the help of self-ironic laughter, it results in Wolf's symbolic rebirth after the seemingly techniques and the themes and techniques of postmodernist theorists as the basis for interpretation of some of Powys's novels" to "interpret him in the context of postmodernist theory" and claims that the most important connecting element between postmodernist theorists and Powys is that they "are all, in a loose sense, pluralists" (5). 17 Cf. Peter Brooks, "The idea of a psychoanalytic literary criticism". Ibid., cf. Peter Brooks, Psychoanalysis and Storytelling. 1

9 Cf. Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text and Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1979).