“…it seems that reading is the concrete act in which the destiny of the text is fulfilled” (164). Isn’t that the most beautiful phrase you’ve ever heard? Well, at least one of the most beautiful phrases? At least one of the most beautiful things you’ve ever heard at 2 o’clock in the morning? All facetiousness aside, though, I really am enamored with that phrase. It seems like everything that we have been reading, discussing, and writing about culminates here, brought together in this idea of text and reading as inevitable serendipity. And blissfully, there is no “one” reading that is the only reading capable of fulfilling destiny, no one Arthur required to extract the meaning.

So maybe I’m making it out to be a little more fairy tale-ish than it really is, but in looking for differences in Ricouer and the other texts we’ve been reading, this fantasy element just seems to be popping out at me. I’ve thought of fantasy as literature, able to be dumped in some properly classifiable genre-drawer, but literature as fantasy is a bit more problematic (groan…maybe I shouldn’t use that word….) But in the end, maybe it is literature as fantasy. Ricouer opens this possibility a bit more with, “The eclipse of the circumstantial world by the quasi-world of texts can be so complete that, in a civilization of writing, the world itself is no longer what can be shown in speaking but is reduced to a kind of ‘aura’ which written works unfold…This world can be called ‘imaginary’, in the sense that it is represented by writing in lieu of the world presented by speech; but this imaginary world is itself a creation of literature” (149). This imaginary world is further strengthened by what Ricouer says of the book on page 146, stating, “Rather, the book divides the act of writing and the act of reading into two sides, between which there is no communication. The reader is absent from the act of writing; the writer is absent from the act of reading. The text thus produces a double eclipse of the reader and the writer.” And all that is left is the creation of a world….

~Cassie