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."