| Chapter 1: | What Happens? What Is to Be Done? A Paean to Bricolage |
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A Discontinuities Reading of “Little Red-Cap”: Recapitulation of Characteristics of a Discontinuities Reading
The reader reading in this manner will tend to receive the text as composed of features interrupted by gaps. The bridging of these gaps takes place largely at surface or syntagm level and remains there. The connecting elements are implied in the text as given, but require a kind of topographical realisation by the reader to complete them. The sense is of things separated from other things which require connections to be made between them before the meanings implicit in the separated elements are completed.
The reader in this mode will be responding to areas of incomplete knowledge or bizarre juxtapositions in the story which disturb its smooth flow and his smooth progress through it (i.e., along the story line). He must contrive an explanation for these areas of disturbance so as to regain control of the story as a whole.
The reader taking the story in a discontinuities manner will perhaps take the following actions:
- 1. In some versions of the story, there is a gap between the grandmother’s liking a “sweet” little girl and her distress at not knowing what to give her. Can Little Red-Cap really be as nice as she appears to be if the thought of displeasing her by a gift which might be offered to her causes such distress?
- 2. The reader may see something unexplained in the mother being more concerned about Little Red-Cap’s breaking the glass she gives her than the possibility that Little Red-Cap might injure herself.
- 3. The reader may find something to be explained in the fact that Little Red-Cap promises to obey her mother but does not. Does the story suggest a connection between disobedience and destruction? If so, is this connection ‘covered’ by the moral ending, or does not something sinister remain, a punishment much in excess of Little Red-Cap’s crime? (Disobedience of authority leads to being eaten by wolves?) Is this something ‘taken care of’ by the moral at story’s end?