| Chapter 1: | What Happens? What Is to Be Done? A Paean to Bricolage |
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I will suggest that just as it would be unnecessarily confining to submit to the instruction of a machine, so there is no model of literary criticism nor of philosophic enquiry deserving of compliance. The position taken throughout this book is that interpretation of literary texts is best made as far as possible away from given parameters of any provenance. It follows that the “mind-set” of a particular critic or school of thought should not—not even at the first moment of enticement—be given undue credence. From this point of view, even a trusted affinity too long prolonged should be regarded sceptically.
2. Three Patterns of Reading
The first direction which these primary responses may take I will call a surface-to-depths pattern; the second, a discontinuities pattern; and the third, anassociational pattern, of reading. Each of these describes an orientation towards the work as a whole and a general conception of it which (rapidly) begins to be built up as an inevitable consequence simply of giving even superficial attention to a text.
The initial event of being struck by certain features and trying pre-conceptually to collate them seems to be a reflex of consciousness as automatic as registering an event entering the perceptual field.3 Later—even slightly later—judgement of such attempts seems to belong to a more consciously oriented stage, which is distinguished from the reflex and immediate precisely by its absence of automaticity.
This is to say that the response to a visual impulse and the perception of a text prior to the formulation of a settled idea of it are similar insofar as both are relatively speaking without consciously realised conceptual content. Initial responses, whether of a sense-datum or a pre-critical percept, involve a degree of immediacy in going out towards an item received in consciousness, which can become a flowing into or joining with the thing experienced; and this movement is essentially pre-conceptual.