Reading as Suture (Problems of Reception of the Fragmentary Text: Balzac and Claude Simon)

If reading is essentially a connecting activity, it is precisely the blanks and gaps in a text which reveal most about this activity. Far from being defects of the text, the gaps invite the participation of the reader and guarantee the interest and pleasure of reading. Although every text brings with it its gaps to be filled, the number and complexity of these gaps differ from one work to another. Balzac's La Muse du département offers a point of departure for an investigation of the reading process. An episode in the novel itself provides a model for the reconstruction of a story from the fragments of a text. An examination of the ways in which Balzac's characters piece together these fragments reveals the knowledge and skills needed in the reading process. The gaps in Balzac's own texts have a significantly different effect on the nineteenth-century reader than on the twentieth-century reader. In addition, the twentieth-century text, as we see in an examination of the writing of Claude Simon, produces fragments which necessitate still a different reading process.