1 - Encounter with Disobedience

Summary

This Reader's Adventure

The creativity of the reader grows as the institution that controlled it declines.

—Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life

The Reader, Post Roland Barthes and Others, is no longer quiescent, that obedient, passive creature subject to the explicit and implicit tyrannies of the text and its author, the text and its narrator(s). I shall be more essayist than theorist, the kind of transgression which has no place in a scholarly monograph, a kind of disobedience, blurring the boundaries between orthodoxy or convention and imaginative or creative license, that errant “I,” that restless traveler, that ambulant, writerly voice.

In 1995 in early December, when the academic and school year was slowing down in its bright, warm Australian way with the promise of liberty voiced in the staccato sweep of sprinklers elongating summer days and nights and the shrill antiphonal music of cicadas and crickets, all those still mornings holding their breath and warm night air of long evenings sighing heavy with the fragrance of some giant cream magnolia somewhere, the small pale stars of native daphne already scattering across footpaths and nature strips browning, I found myself sitting at the end of one afternoon, tired and empty after a long stint of work, on a hard, cedar cathedral pew in Melbourne.

The place was packed — some sixteen hundred people, and six hundred pairs of small black school shoes clattering across the narthex, through the rood screen and up the tesselated floor of the nave aisle, the sound rising into the clerestory as small figures took their places in the crossing. A giant navy and white insect with a thousand eyes and one voice — modern children, ancient words. A rumor of words echoed up into the empty air. The child reading from the elevated pulpit was about eleven, her blonde hair a golden nimbus under the arc light, her diction precise and clear, neither mannered nor nervous.