Those of you who read "Jean-Christophe"
Care to chat about it?
 
Perhaps the most disconcerting and unexpected depiction of
reading that I found are the stories which argue that reading is
often a way readers avoid willed action.  Prominent in the texts
that depict reading are stories that argue reading as a way of
distracting readers from social problems, such as Stephen Minot's
"Reading the News--Keeping Informed" and Romain Roland's "Jean
Christophe."   Minot, for example, portrays a group of very well
educated readers whose debates about contemporary social problems
are informed by their reading in Time, Newsweek, the New York
Times and the Manchester Gaurdian, Overseas Edition.  Yet,
Minot's readers can not enlist themselves in the social problems
that inform their insomnia because they are compelled to seek
further information and debate.  In "Jean Christophe,"
a reader of romance novels reads as a distraction from the
compelling death knell of the trains carrying Jews to Nazi death
camps.  Roland's reader is concerned that she will not get to
finish the book before the trains take her away like the others.
Her female camp guard assures her,  "If you're not around to lend
it to me, I'll look for it in the library . . . But I'm sure
you'll finish it. It's not that long."  In both cases, as in the
other depictions of reading that substitutes for
human agency, it is the overdetermining signification of desire
that displaces willed conduct.  As Giles Deleuze and Felix
Guattari argue, "The one vocation of the sign is to produce
desire, engineering it in every direction."  In this sense, as in
these texts, desire created by reading substitutes a cynical
imagination for the body's consciousness of its ideological
status, its "relation to real conditions of existence."
        This argument does not take up the anti-humanist
position in the last decade's debate about agency and
powerlessness, but does complicate our perception of reading's
ability to ethically motivate willed action.  The narratives that
depict reading include many in which signification is depicted as
installing a lack where there had been " plenty."