If a book is never read, does it exist?

Last week’s readings were, for me, very enjoyable. Probably because I was able to understand them coherently but also because I agree in the arguments presented. Sartre spoke of the simultaneous connection between the author and the reader and how the two share an on-going pact, or agreement, between the text and that this union is an active one. The reader feels what the characters feel, go through the same angst and complications that they do and are resolved when their characters triumph. Similar to Saussure and the structuralists, Heidegger spoke of the importance in language not as a device to convey poetry or prose but as the epicenter to our being. With that said in regards to the novel, it is what gives birth to the author. Its language creates the relationship between author and reader but also casts a shadow on the author. With the emergence of the reader comes the death of the author in Barthes view. Whence the reader becomes the controller of the text, investing time and emotions into the text then the author becomes irrelevant. For it is the reader who determines the outcome of the text, the author is merely a dictator, a scribe jotting down thoughts. So, like the age old question of the falling tree in the forest; if a book is never read, does it exist?

Oedipus who?

For Freud, the human race is a bunch of egocentric maniacs who wish to kill their fathers and live happily ever after in bed with their mothers. But the genius of our species is our ability to cover these conspiracies up within our mind, before creating a dystopian reality fit for an Anthony Burgess novel. Our mind, consisting of the main conscience and the subconscious is where we filter these primal urges to fit the face of societal norms. But to the coke snorting psychoanalyst, our subconscious was more influential than we’ve previously thought. Arguing the whole idea of ‘I think therefore I exist’ Freud contested that this wasn’t necessarily so, that ‘human reason is not master in its house’. He firmly believed that our subconscious was the driver of the car; that even though we may not in reality be stabbing our fathers and bedding our mothers we seek in our relationships and in other aspects of our lives what our subconscious really desires. We marry the woman with qualities like our mother or we date men who make us feel safe like our father; all in perfect accord of the super ego’s approval. But whether we live in total light of our ego or id, we’ll all be spending the rest of our days trying to replace the phallus and having nightmares of castration.

I know you are, because I'm not.

It is hard for one imagine a life without language. Our interaction through complex language is what distinguishes us from the rest of the animal kingdom, but what is language? And do we speak, even when we don’t? Even in our thoughts there is a sort of discourse going on between the consciences’s and even in the unspoken lies an undercurrent of language. But what is that language? Saussure spoke of language as “a system of interdependent terms in which the value of each term results solely from the simultaneous presence of the others” (857). Plainly put, language is a system of binaries. We distinguish a word, an object, from its counterpart, its immediate opposite. We wouldn’t know black without white, a dog without a cat or happiness without some form of pain to separate the feelings. But language is more than that also. It is a system of signs, all arbitrary in which we use myriad of images to place the word with the object. A dog isn’t only a dog. It is man’s best friend, it’s faithful, all loving. The one image of the word or of the creature conveys many different ideas which we connect with that one arbitrary image. If this isn’t confusing enough, Saussure also contended that since we know of something by knowing more clearly what it is not than the whole existence of that one idea exists solely in the basis of everything that exists without it. So, I guess the real saying is; I know you are because I’m not.

Work Cited
De Saussure, Ferdinand. "Course in General Linguistics." The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. New York: W. W. Norton &, 2010. Print.