Excessive Suspension of Disbelief: Raymond Jean's La Lectrice

Excessive Suspension of Disbelief: Raymond Jean's La Lectrice

When I begin a class in fiction or poetry, I always talk for a few minutes about the various

purposes of literature: escape, didactic, and interpretive. I tell my students that escape literature

is a wonderful way to forget our problems for a while (less dangerous than drugs, alcohol,

careless sex, or driving), but that escape literature can be harmful if one expects one's personal

life to be as exciting, successful, or romantic as that in escape fiction. As Meg Ryan's friend

says to her in Sleepless in Seattle, "You don't want to be in love. You want to be in love in a

movie." Thus my title, "Excessive Suspension...."

In The Literary Work of Art (1931, trans. 1965), Roman Ingarden analyses the layers of

meaning he beleves exist within a work of fiction. His theories were popularized by René Wellek

in Theory of Literature (Wellek and Warren). Ingarden identifies four strata.

The first is the sound stratum, which he defines as "the stratum of word sounds and phonetic

formations of various orders: the second is "the stratum of units of meaning of various orders and

phonetic formations of various orders"; the third includes objects represented in the "world" of

the novelist, which he defines as "the stratum of manifold schematized aspects and aspect

continua and series" (Literary Work of Art, 30); and the fourth includes the stratum of

represented objectivities and their vicissitudes" or the world as it "is seen from a particular

viewpoint." As Ingarden complains in his preface to his second edition, Wellek had erroneously

added a fifth layer, that of metaphysical qualities, which include "the tragic, the terrible, [and]

the holy." Ingarden argues th...

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...s read and view and how those fictions shape us. La

Lectrice is a testimony to the power a written text may have-that even a single reading

experience may permanently change a reader's life. But, most of all, La Lectrice is great fun.

But, as the policeman cautions the lectrice, "Reading is fine, but look where it leads. When you

read a book, anything can happen."

Works Cited

Ingarden, Roman. The Literary Work of Art. Trans. George G. Grabowicz. Evanston:

Northwestern UP, 1973. From Das literarisch Kunstwerk. Tübingen: Max Neimeyer

Vertag, 1965.

-----. The Cognition of Literary Work of Art. Trans. George G. Grabowicz. Evanston:

Northwestern UP, 198. From Von Erkennen des literarisch Kunstwerk. Tübingen: Max

Neimeyer Vertag, 1973.

Deville, Michel, dir. La Lectrice (film). Elefilm, 1988.

Jean [Kermer], Raymond, La Lectrice (novel). Editions J'ai lu, 1986.