10.24053/ REAL-2021-0006 F abienne i Mlinger Against Reading� Discarding Adventure in Marlene NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! “not reading the text for meaning, but for something else” #1 something else “The concept is very interesting, but I found it difficult to read and to select passages for us to discuss in class”� You can sense a collective gasp of relief in the room when my student starts her presentation of Marlene NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! with this confession� 1 Other students have had a similar experience, as did I, their teacher� Even though we read Philip’s essay in the Notanda section of the book and thus understood what her poems were about and why she wrote them in this particular way, we struggled with actually reading the poems themselves� My contribution takes its inspiration from the discussions we had in class and from the discrepancy, or paradox, so aptly discerned by my student� There is a tension at work between understanding and reading, between pleasure, frustration, and even aversion� At the heart of this tension is a form of reading I learned to practice, with a zeal bordering on reverence, during my university career, namely close reading� For Suman Gupta, the “powerful convention of close reading” in English Studies is “conventional” because it “doesn’t need to be justified; it is accepted a priori” (13). My main argument in the following is that Zong! calls upon and questions this a priori character of close reading� I take these preliminary remarks as my point of departure because they resonate with the title of this volume and the relationship it posits between reading, pleasure, and adventure literature� It might seem odd to write about a collection of poems in this context since adventure fiction is commonly associated with the novel, and the novel is commonly associated with the pleasure 1 A short note on Setaey Adamu Boateng, who in library catalogues sometimes appears as co-author of the book. On the book’s cover, we find beneath the title and the name Marlene NourbeSe Philip the specification “as told to the author by Setaey Adamu Boateng”. The book’s inside jacket flap then identifies Setaey Adamu Boateng as “the voice of the ancestors revealing the submerged stories of all who were on board the Zong”� 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0006 120 F abienne i Mlinger 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0006 of reading� 2 It serves my purposes well that George Orwell once illustrated the bad reputation adventure fiction generally has when he referred to Rudyard Kipling’s work as “almost a shameful pleasure, like the taste for cheap sweets that some people secretly carry into middle life” (190)� Incidentally, Orwell is not talking about Kipling’s novels in his essay, but about Kipling’s poetry, criticizing that: […] most of Kipling’s verse is so horribly vulgar that it gives one the same sensation as one gets from watching a third-rate music-hall performer recite “The Pigtail of Wu Fang Fu” with the purple limelight on his face, and yet there is much of it that is capable of giving pleasure to people who know what poetry means� At his worst, and also his most vital, in poems like “Gunga Din” or “Danny Deever,” Kipling is almost a shameful pleasure, like the taste for cheap sweets that some people secretly carry into middle life� But even with his best passages one has the same sense of being seduced by something spurious, and yet unquestionably seduced� Unless one is merely a snob and a liar it is impossible to say that no one who cares for poetry could get any pleasure out of such lines as: For the wind is in the palm trees, and the temple bells they say, ‘Come you back, you British soldier, come you back to Mandalay! ’ (189-190) I want to highlight two aspects with regard to this passage� First, note the contorted construction of the last sentence, which buries an affirmative under a heap of allegations, negations and conditional clauses� Instead of saying “I enjoy reading Kipling’s poetry”, Orwell writes: “Unless one is merely a snob and a liar it is impossible to say that no one who cares for poetry could get any pleasure out of such lines as”� This is a performative, if maybe unconscious demonstration of his assertion that reading Kipling’s poetry is something no one, or, in any case, no intellectual on the left, would publicly admit to� Second, what makes reading Kipling allegedly shameful in this particular passage is not the ideology of his texts or the political standpoint of the author, both of which have been the main subject of Orwell’s essay up until this point� Reading Kipling is shameful because it is bad poetry or, as Orwell later calls it, “good bad poetry”� He does not specify why Kipling’s poems are bad and what exactly makes them so “horribly vulgar” and “spurious”� He considers it evident that they are so, and to prove it he simply cites them, trusting that they will speak for themselves, trusting the reader will have the 2 In any case, some of the seminal texts on pleasure and reading deal with prose, e� g� Peter Brooks’ Reading for the Plot (1984) or Roland Barthes’ Le Plaisir du Texte (1973), to name but two� Against Reading. Discarding Adventure in Marlene NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! 121 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0006 Against Reading� Discarding Adventure in Marlene NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! same reading experience as himself� He then goes on to give more examples of good bad poetry: There is a great deal of good bad poetry in English, all of it, I should say, subsequent to 1790� Examples of good bad poems - I am deliberately choosing diverse ones - are “The Bridge of Sighs”, “When all the world is young, lad”, “The Charge of the Light Brigade”, Bret Harte’s “Dickens in Camp”, “The Burial of Sir John Moore”, “Jenny Kissed Me”, “Keith of Ravelston”, “Casabianca”� All of these reek of sentimentality, and yet - not these particular poems, perhaps, but poems of this kind, are capable of giving true pleasure to people who can see clearly what is wrong with them� (Orwell 190) Again, two observations only� First, note the slight shift from “and yet […] giving pleasure to people who know what poetry means” in the previous excerpt to “and yet […] giving true pleasure to people who can see clearly what is wrong with them” in the paragraph cited above� I am interested in this shift; it intrigues me, maybe because it is unclear how you get from one to the other� In the first instance, pleasure is described as occurring in defiance of the reading subject, despite its (good) taste - still, there is some sort of pleasure (any pleasure), and you’d be a snob and a liar to say otherwise� In the second instance, pleasure, and true pleasure at that (as opposed to the one wrung from you by unfair means), results from an act of intellectual mastery: not only caring for poetry or knowing poetry but also - and more importantly - knowing right from wrong, good from bad� In other words, now the subject’s ability to produce an aesthetic judgment is pleasurable; the object of pleasure has shifted, possibly also pleasure itself� How do you get from a sensation experienced, it seems, almost instantaneously while reading (let us leave aside for a moment whether it is a positive or a negative feeling) to a sensation that results from an act of cognition? Are these two steps of the same process, called reading? Is the aesthetic judgment a sublimation of the “shameful pleasure”, a rationalization of being affected? Does the pleasure result from ‘getting it’, whereas beforehand you were being “seduced, unquestionably seduced”, carried away, you somehow ‘lost it’, lost yourself? Second remark: According to Orwell the good bad poems “reek of sentimentality”, which is a deadly sin in the eyes of the sophisticated modern reader, even worse than rhyming “say” with “-lay”� It might come as no surprise that the pejorative attributes of sentimentality are akin to those of adventure fiction. Sentimental and adventure fiction are siblings, born from what Peter Brooks (1984) has called the melodramatic imagination� Brooks conceptualizes melodrama not as a particular genre but as “a mode of heightened dram- 122 F abienne i Mlinger 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0006 atization inextricably bound up with the modern novel’s effort to signify” (ix)� According to him, melodrama is “a response to the loss of tragic vision” originating in the political and social upheavals at the turn of the nineteenth century, the French Revolution figuring as the exemplary reference point for the “liquidation of the traditional Sacred and its representative institutions (Church and Monarch)” (14)� The characteristics of melodrama - in which one can recognize characteristics of both sentimental and adventure literature - include: […] the indulgence of strong emotionalism; moral polarization and schematization; extreme states of being, situations, actions; overt villainy, persecution of the good and final reward of virtue; inflated and extravagant expression; dark plottings, suspense, breathtaking peripety� (11-12) At the end of his study, Brooks argues that a particular strand of modern literature in the tradition of Gustave Flaubert establishes itself in opposition to the melodramatic mode by voluntarily de-dramatizing plot and action (198)� In a similar vein, Martin von Kopppenfels finds in Flaubert the professed intention to block or disable the affective disposition and identification of the reader (32)� Von Koppenfels retraces a tradition of anti-sentimental and anti-mimetic textual strategies throughout the twentieth century� This modern disdain for and discharge of sentimentality - and indirectly of adventure fiction - manifests itself in Orwell’s phrase “to reek of sentimentality”� The metaphor and the change of register from the edible (“like the taste for cheap sweets”) to the olfactory, from the pleasurable to the disgusting is curious, not to say symptomatic� 3 Other than rhetorically discrediting sentimentality, the metaphor is interesting because it conflates, to the point of being indistinguishable, sensation and judgment, or to be more precise: “disgust stands on the boundary between conscious patterns of conduct and unconscious impulses” (Menninghaus 2)� It is striking, then, that in the passage quoted above we move from a negative to a positive sensation, i� e� from disgust (“reek of”) to pleasure (“and yet true pleasure”)� Whereas before the (guilty) pleasure resulted from indulging in something that was too easy to have, you are now, by an act of cognition, 3 Having read Julia Kristevas Powers of Horror (1980) I cannot help but think of her notion of the abject� But one does not have to go through the depths and intricacies of psychoanalytic theory to establish a connection between sentimentality and femininity since it has been well established and analysed, particularly in its negative aspects, by literary scholars such as Claudia L� Johnson (1995) and Suzanne Clark (1991), to name two examples for the context of English literature� Against Reading. Discarding Adventure in Marlene NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! 123 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0006 overcoming an instantaneous feeling of revulsion, and this transformation occurs through the aesthetic judgment� 4 Finally, I would like to point out what probably needs no explication, namely the implicit and explicit snobbery in all of this� Elitism is implicit in Orwell’s allegation that only a “snob” and a “liar” would not admit to experiencing pleasure when reading Kipling (or good bad poetry in general) and in his casual display of literary knowledge when he evokes a wide range of poems only by their title� It becomes explicit later on in the essay when he observes that there “is no use pretending that in an age like our own, ‘good’ poetry can have any genuine popularity” and that poetry “is, and must be, the cult of a very few people”� He then goes on to recount the following anecdote: Some months back Churchill produced a great effect by quoting Clough’s ‘Endeavour’ [= good bad poetry according to Orwell] in one of his broadcast speeches� I listened to this speech among people who could certainly not be accused of caring for poetry, and I am convinced that the lapse into verse impressed them and did not embarrass them� But not even Churchill could have got away with it if he had quoted anything much better than this� (Orwell 191) Note the difference between the “intellectual” and the “ordinary man” (Orwell’s terms) which, among other things, manifests itself as a difference in being affected. Where the first one is embarrassed, the other is impressed - in any case, that is what Orwell assumes� Through the opposition between himself, the singular intellectual, and the group of ordinary men, the anecdote indirectly stages Orwell’s assertion that poetry - that is, good poetry - is the cult of the few, unpopular and not accessible to the masses� Interestingly enough, though, we have now moved from a scene of silent and, one can assume, solitary reading to a communal scene of reading, or rather hearing, of poetry� With this change of scene, the use of the poem itself changes: from an aesthetic object read for pleasure to an aesthetic object inserted into a political context to achieve a certain effect/ affect� The political dimension of Orwell’s essay (and Kipling’s poetry) returns through the back door, as it were� I will return to this in the last section of my contribution, but presently I turn to Zong! and the particular role adventure and reading play in it� 4 There is a connection between the “cheap sweets” of the previous excerpt and the disgust present in the second� Menninghaus notes that the standard eighteenth-century example of a disgusting taste is excessive sweetness (39)� Sweetness and sugar, in turn, can be linked to the colonial history of slavery and the slave trade as Sidney Mintz has shown in his seminal study Sweetness and Power (1986)� 124 F abienne i Mlinger 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0006 “not reading the text for meaning, but for something else” #2 adventure Marlene NourbSe Philip’s Zong! is a work about unreadability� The poems in the sections Os, Sal, Ventus, Ratio, Ferrum and Ebora are the opposite of an easy read, and with good cause: their ‘topic’ is the massacre of enslaved Africans aboard the slave ship Zong in 1781� The historical event behind the literary text is an adventure in the sense of a remarkable occurrence� However, it became so only after the fact, namely in 1783, when the Zong’s owners pursued compensation from the insurance company for the loss of their ‘cargo’� Thanks to the work of Ouladah Equiano and Granville Sharp, what could have vanished in the archive of the slave trade as an ‘ordinary’ case of marine insurance policy and law, became a “staple of abolitionist discourse on both sides of the Atlantic” (Baucom 31)� According to historian James Walvin, the affronted public reactions to the events aboard the Zong and the ensuing trial marked the beginning of a “change in British attitudes to the slave ships and everything they stood for” (104)� Walvin’s study takes as its starting point - and as its cover - the earliest artistic representation of the Zong massacre, J� M� W� Turner’s The Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On), first exhibited in 1840� The widespread criticism the painting elicited among its contemporaries denounced two things first and foremost: Turner’s use of colour and his choice of subject matter, “suggesting that drowning slaves was horrific and unsuitable for depiction in paint” (Walvin 7). Walvin also recounts that the painting deeply troubled its first owner, John Ruskin, who “never really found a suitable place for it in his home, hanging it in various rooms: in his bedroom, in the hall, and even propping it on his bed before he finally decided that he simply could not live with it” (8). The image of Ruskin trying to find an appropriate place for Turner’s painting is symptomatic insofar as it raises questions such as: how can we ‘enjoy’ such a work of art? How can we live with the dead and our own complicity in a system of violence? Furthermore, the contemporary discussions surrounding the painting already, albeit implicitly, address the question of whether or not the Zong massacre is a ‘proper’ or ‘suitable’ subject for artistic representation and what an appropriate or ‘good’ rendering of such a subject might be� Up until today, these are central ethic and aesthetic concerns accompanying representations of the Zong in art and literature alike� Marlene NourbeSe Philip’s choice to make the ‘event’ of the Zong unreadable is striking in this regard� By making the ‘event’ unreadable, she resists the Against Reading. Discarding Adventure in Marlene NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! 125 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0006 spectacular dimension of the horror that was by no means exceptional but, on the contrary, belonged to the typical and the everyday of the slave trade� We just have to look at the last section, Ebora, to understand that these poems are ‘about’ unreadability� With its fading font and superposed words, Ebora is the final chord of a carefully orchestrated decomposition. It opens with Zong! #1, a poem that splays single letters across the page which finally, after three lines, form a word: “www w a wa/ w a w a t/ er” (Philip 3)� The following poems in Os consist of complete words and their arrangement on the page re-establishes a seeming order and verticality� But this order collapses again in the following sections as words are once more mangled, spliced, and dispersed horizontally over the page� Their arrangement rarely produces intelligible sentences� The reader only catches a glimpse of meaning here, an idea of a story or a scene there� Reading becomes a challenge, or, as Laurie Lambert pointedly notes, “the scene of reading” is defamiliarised (120)� The poems call attention to the way we read in the most basic sense, i� e� reading as a movement of the eyes from left to right and from top to bottom (for someone alphabetized in the Roman alphabet)� Furthermore, reading becomes perceptible as a process through which we establish meaning and in this particular case: a sense of the past� By blocking this process, the reader is left to “not reading the text for meaning, but for something else” (Philip 193) - although what “else” we should be reading for is precisely the question� The impossibility of reading Zong! metonymically signifies the unreadability of the event itself, i� e� our inability to really know what happened aboard the Zong (or any slave ship, for that matter)� The course of events, as far as we are able to reconstruct them, is as follows: In September 1781, […] the Zong sailed from the West coast of Africa with 470 or 442 or 440 slaves, seventeen crew members, and their Captain, Luke Collingwood� The ship was owned by Messrs� Gregson, a father and son enterprise based in Liverpool […]� Instead of the customary six to nine weeks, the journey took four months or eighteen weeks� By November 27 th sixty or at least sixty Africans and seven crew members succumbed to a sickness that was ravaging the ship� Forty additional Africans could have thrown themselves overboard in response to the horrific site of seeing others of this “cargo” tossed into the sea� Collingwood, reasoning that the insurers would not compensate losses generated by sick cargo, devised a plan to throw live bodies overboard� He cited a lack of water to sustain them� This type of loss would be compensated under the insurance law […]� Though not a uniformly popular decision among the crew, they carried out Collingwood’s orders� On November 29 th , the crew heaved fifty four [sic! ] bodies into the water. On November 126 F abienne i Mlinger 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0006 30 th , they sent forty-two or forty-three overboard� On December 1 st , it rained� Or, it rained for the first two days of December. The crew replenished their supply of water with six casks, which gives evidence that continuing the massacre was not necessary� Nevertheless, Collingwood ordered on December 2 nd or 3 rd to throw twenty-six more bodies overboard� It is possible that either ten of these jumped of their own volition, or ten bodies in addition to the twenty-six took themselves into the water� By some accounts, one survived and crawled back on to the ship� Upon arrival, the ship contained 420 gallons of water� Of the 470 or 442 or 440 slaves, either 150, 133, 132, or 123 were thrown in the Atlantic. Forty or fifty may have jumped into the water to avoid being thrown or ordered to jump against their will� Thirty more were dead on arrival in Jamaica� When the insurers refused to pay out for the losses incurred on the Zong, the Gregsons appealed to the courts� (Fehskens 407) I chose Erin M� Fehskens summary because she deliberately highlights the uncertainties and inconsistencies of the various documents and accounts of the case� It is important to bear in mind that what is commonly called the ‘archive of the slave trade’ is a disparate and at times meagre convolute of documents; documents that can be difficult to read or even unreadable, faulty, or obscured - sometimes on purpose - by the various interests that permeate them� 5 According to Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1995), silences are inherent to history because the very mechanisms that make any historical recording possible also ensure that historical facts are not created equal. They reflect differential control of the means of historical production at the very first engraving that transforms an event into a fact� […] As Emile Benveniste reminds us, the census taker is always a censor - and not only because of a lucky play of etymology: he who counts heads always silences facts and voices� (48) The historical recordings of the slave trade, however, go beyond the silences inherent in the production of historical facts. Édouard Glissant describes the fundamental asymmetry permeating the archive of slavery and the slave trade: “The only written thing on slave ships was the account book listing the 5 I make a point of this because there is a tendency in the secondary literature on Zong! to take the evidence, availability and readability of the archive as a given, as if ‘the archive’ was a perfectly clear-cut, monolithic, undisputable entity, and to posit as its opposite the literary text (see for example Sharpe)� If you try to read a logbook or ledger of the time, you quickly realize that it can be hard to even decipher the handwriting, and thus to read it in the most basic sense of the word� Notwithstanding the violence and asymmetry of the archive of the slave trade, I would allow for a less clear-cut conception of it; a conception in the tradition of Michel Foucault, where the historical documents and what they record is not evident, straightforward, or unambiguous� Against Reading. Discarding Adventure in Marlene NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! 127 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0006 exchange value of slaves� Within the ship’s space, the cry of those deported was stifled, as it would be in the realm of Plantations. This confrontation still reverberates to this day” (5, footnote)� Aboard the slave ship, the account is not only a method for “counting heads” but also a form of dehumanizing violence� The account ledger does not record or document violence, it is itself violent: a transformation of human beings into cargo, into perishable goods, into exchange value� It is crucial to emphasize the importance of accounting and double entry bookkeeping which, far from being merely a cursory element of the slave trade, lie at the heart of its rise in the eighteenth century� Significantly, this aspect also brings us back to the notion of adventure. Because of the capital needed for outfitting a slave ship and the time it took to complete the vast triangular circuit, slave traders had to conduct much of their ‘business’ on credit� It is telling, in this respect, that the French term designating the credit for equipping a slave ship is pret à la grosse aventure, literally translated a ‘credit for the big adventure’� The “big adventure” designates the perilous journey of a ship across the Atlantic but also - and more importantly - resonates with the term venture: a high-risk enterprise, promising spectacular benefits but possibly also bearing spectacular losses. 6 The slave trade in the eighteenth century capitalizes adventure� The slave ship becomes an object of investment and speculation for which new methods of financing had to be devised, one of them being insurance policies. According to Ian Baucom, the determination of the participants in the slave trade to “credit the existence of imaginary values” (17) is vital to the functioning of the system as a whole: Central to that form of value was a reversal of the protocols of value creation proper to commodity capital� For, here, value does not follow but precedes exchange […] it exists not because a purchase has been made and goods exchanged but because two or more parties have agreed to believe in it� (ibid�) Regarding the case of the Zong, Baucom argues that value existed the moment the insurance contract was signed and the total value of the Zong - including its ‘cargo’, i. e. the slaves - had been fixed at 15,700 pounds (17). This capitalization of risk made the murder of 123, 132, 133 or 150 people aboard the Zong not only possible but, in the logic of the slave trade and its system of credit, rational: 7 6 The massacre on the Zong is a case in point that ‘loss’ was first and foremost a financial term, it is precisely not the loss of actual lives that is at issue in the legal case� 7 The Latin word ratio, which also figures in Zong! , designates not only reason but also calculation; it is a term designating proportions� 128 F abienne i Mlinger 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0006 It is […] at once obscene and vital to understand the full capital logic of the slave trade, to coming to terms with what it meant for this trade to have found a way to treat human beings not only as if they were a type of commodity but as a flexible, negotiable, transactable form of money. Absent this financial revolution in the business operations of the slave trade […], there would have been no incentive for Captain Luke Collingwood to do what he did, to confidently massacre 132 slaves aboard the Zong, secure in the conviction that in doing so he was not destroying his employer’s commodities but hastening their transformation into money� (15) French historian Olivier Pétré-Grenouilleau considers double entry book keeping and accounting as one of two central factors in the financial reorganization of the slave trade, the other being the rise of a “new kind of man”: [u]n nouveau type d’homme capable de maximiser l’efficacité du principe de la commandite (lequel ne se généralise guère avant les années 1720) et qui doit être capable de rassembler les investisseurs, de choisir un bâtiment approprié et un capitaine expérimenté, de procédér à l’armement du navire et d’assurer le suivi technique de l’expédition (réalisation du bénéfice par la vente des marchandises de retour, calcul et distribution des dividendes)� Cet homme, c’est l’armateur, […]� (64-65) [a] new kind of man able to maximize the effectiveness of limited liability capital (itself uncommon before the 1720s)� He needs to be able to assemble a group of investors, to choose an appropriate structure and an experienced captain, to outfit the slave ship and to guarantee the technical proceedings of the expedition (redeeming the benefits by selling the commodities of the goods arriving from the colonies, calculation and repartition of the dividends)� That man is the slave trader� (my translation) In a similar vein but speaking from a more (ethically) critical stance, Baucom attests the emergence of a “new social person” in eighteenth-century Britain (64)� An accounting innovation was not, by itself, enough; the system of credit also required the ability of the participants “to read one another’s character, trustworthiness, and credibility” (ibid�)� In other words, what unites the participants of the slave trade is not only the common belief in imaginary values but also the belief in the credibility (in both senses of the word) of each other� 8 8 It is interesting to note, however, that the association within families (between father and son, brother and brother, or in-laws) was most common not only for financing, but also for organizing the voyage as a whole� Citing historian Hugh Thomas, Dalton and Leung point out that the slave trade was essentially “a thing of families” (5), because blood relation (or relation by marriage) could be trusted to endure� This was also the case for the Zong: among the group of six merchants who owned the ship, “the three Gregsons, William [the father], James, and John [his two sons], were undoubtedly the most influential party” (Baucom 39). Against Reading. Discarding Adventure in Marlene NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! 129 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0006 The sentimental paradigm (‘to read one another’s heart’) is not a coincidence� Here is Baucom again, this time paraphrasing Catherine Gallagher’s study Nobody’s Story (1994), to point out the connection between the speculative and the sentimental: “The man whose faculties have been engrossed by business, and whose heart never fluttered but at the rise and fall of stocks,” Johnson suggests in a Rambler essay, “wonders how the attentions can be seized or the affections agitated by a tale of love�” To which Gallagher responds: “Here the man of business and the feminine or feminized sentimental reader of love stories are juxtaposed in a way that reveals their abstract similarity: both hearts ‘flutter’ to a set of signs that, although not personally addressed to them, seize and agitate them, inviting or discouraging an investment for a defined term. […] As readers, they both speculate.” (64) Baucom stresses that the creation of “the speculative, commercial and sentimental subject” which Gallagher so pointedly captures, was part and parcel of the profound epistemological shift that made the capitalization of the slave trade possible to begin with (18)� He emphasizes the particular role of imagination and the rise of the novel as a pivotal element in “creating and training the imagination of the speculative subjects of finance capital” (Baucom 64). To this I merely want to add a particular focus on reading, present in both Baucom’s and Gallagher’s remarks, and, by doing so, return to the question of close reading in Zong! � “not reading the text for meaning, but for something else” #3 not reading My argument began with the premise that there is a particular kind of violence to the account ledger: it does not merely record violence; it is itself a form of violence� To this, I want to add another layer� The account ledger is violent precisely because the actual violence, the suffering, is so blatantly absent; the deaths and the lives - “the cry of those deported”, as Glissant puts it - reduced to a mere recording of numbers� There is a horror, to (mis) use Hannah Arendt’s term, in the banality of evil that permeates the account books of the slave trade� 9 9 I am aware that the comparison between the slave trade / slavery and the Holocaust is problematic� I explicitly do not want to compare them� Rather, my aim is to highlight the counterintuitive effect of the historical documents, an effect that results from the particular form they have� 130 F abienne i Mlinger 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0006 As such, they are unreadable but in a somewhat different way than one might assume� With regard to the particular form of the slave ship’s logbook, Baucom writes: The logbook of the Zong does not survive� Here then is an outline list of what was so numbingly typical taken from the log of the Ranger - a Liverpool slave ship […]� It is a long and repetitive list, one whose reiterative predictability both requests the eye not so much to read as to skim and one whose flattened pathos solicits the reader’s indulgence for horror banalized, horror catalogued� So I ask, do not skim, read: […] January 28 [1790]: The Ranger purchases its first slaves: one man and one woman. January 29: The captain sends the Gregson upcoast for fresh water� January 31: Christian Freeze, a crewman, is discovered embezzling rum from the Ranger’s cargo hold; he insults Mr� Woods (the second mate) and has his rum allowance suspended for eight days� February 4: One slave purchased: a man� February 5: The captain orders the crew to check and clean their guns; purchases one woman� February 7: One woman� February 9: One woman� February 13: Two women� February 14: Canoe sent upshore for water; one man and one woman� February 15: One man� February 17: First child purchased, a boy; the captain also buys a woman� February 19: The boatswain and several other crew members are caught embezzling rum by boring a hole into a puncheon of rum with a gimblet; they speak mutinous words to Mr� Woods, second mate� No record of punishment� February 20: Three men are purchased� February 21: The captain dismisses the boatswain from service, he departs the ship� February 24: One man, one woman� February 25: Thunder in the distance, lightning, distant appearance of a tornado� February 27: Loading water; one man and one woman� March 1: Two women, two more children, girls� March 4: One woman� March 5: Two men� March 6: One man� March 7: Crew engaged in drying the sails; one man� March 8: One woman� March 9: One man, one woman� March 10: The cooper is still working on anchors� Against Reading. Discarding Adventure in Marlene NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! 131 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0006 March 22: One man� March 12: The captain orders the slavehold cleaned; the crew spends the day “taking care” of the slaves� (11-12) What Baucom tries to point out by quoting extensively from the logbook is a certain effect of the form through which we, as present-day readers, access the history of the slave trade: the absolute exteriority of accounting, of counting “one woman, one man, one child, a boy” and its lack of subjectivity and (hi)story, of narrative, as it were� This inevitably produces boredom or at least an inclination, on the side of the reader, to skim and skip, to scan the page rather than reading it word by word� Because of that you have to consciously - as Baucom would have us by asking us not to skim but to read - imagine and remind yourself what you are actually ‘reading’ here, what all of this is ‘about’� “First child purchased, a boy”� We have to imagine the violence, the drama, the horrific details - a boy violently taken from his family, and at what age? We have to imagine what hides behind the euphemism “the crew spends the day ‘taking care’ of the slaves” and what it was actually like to find oneself in the hold of a slave ship� “Imagine two hundred human beings crammed into a space barely capable of containing a third of them” (5), writes Glissant: Imagine vomit, naked flesh, swarming lice, the dead slumped, the dying crouched. Imagine, if you can, the swirling red of mounting to the deck, the ramp they climbed, the black sun on the horizon, vertigo, this dizzying sky plastered to the waves� Over the course of more than two centuries, twenty, thirty million people deported� Worn down, in a debasement more eternal than apocalypse� But that is nothing yet� (5-6) Imagine, if you can, Glissant tells us, knowing very well we can’t� Yet he tries to invoke the slave ship by bringing together the abject (vomit, lice, the dead and the dying) and the poetic (swirling red of mounting, black sun on the horizon)� It is impossible to imagine the horrific reality of the slave trade because of the constitutive asymmetry of the archive� The voices of the African people sold as slaves were violently erased while the power to write, to kill, to profit lay firmly in the hands of the slave traders, most of them Europeans. Moreover, the question of representation today also raises an ethical dilemma since telling the story of the Zong runs the risk of making the lives and deaths of African people once more “consumable”; it runs the risk of exploiting and “reinforcing the spectacular character of black suffering” (Hartman, Scenes of Subjection 3): How can narrative embody life in words and at the same time respect what we cannot know? […] 132 F abienne i Mlinger 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0006 What are the protocols and limits that shape the narratives written as counter-history, an aspiration that isn’t a prophylactic against the risks posed by reiterating violent speech and depicting again rituals of torture? […] Why subject the dead to new dangers and to a second order of violence? (3-5) As a writer, Marlene NourbeSe Philips asks similar questions to those expressed by historian Saidiya Hartman� The poet condenses her ethical and artistic dilemma in the first sentence of the Notanda section: “There is no telling this story; it must be told” (Philip 189)� This paradoxical mantra, which echoes Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved, repeats itself throughout Notanda, an essay in which Philip recounts and accounts for the choices she made throughout the artistic process� 10 In the essay she quotes extensively from the diary she kept during the writing process� The central motif emerges, first, from a sense of uneasiness about novelistic representation: “I begin reading a novel about it [the Zong], but am uncomfortable: ‘A novel requires too much telling’, I write, ‘and this story must be told by not telling’” (Philip 190)� 11 Philip is well acquainted with the novel and, more particularly, the adventure novel and its colonial history, having previously, in her 1991 novel Looking for Livingstone, engaged with that tradition� 12 Thus, she now deliberately decides against the novel as an appropriate form for her rendering of the Zong case and then goes even further by deliberately fighting “the desire to impose meaning” (194). This resistance eventually leads to the material destruction of text: “the not-telling […] is in the fragmentation and mutilation of the text” (198)� Philip mutilates and fragments both her own writing and a historical document: the Gregson vs. Gilbert legal decision, which is reprinted as the final page of Zong! � The poet uses “the text of the legal decision as a word store” (this is the interesting concept my student was referring to), she fragments and cuts open the historical document, making it literally unreadable, and then recompiles, reshuffles, and redresses the pieces into poems that are themselves disordered and fragmented� The anagrammatic procedure mirrors the violence done to the African people, a violence that is among other things exerted in 10 Jenny Sharpe, among others, has noted the similarity to the ending of Toni Morrison’s novel: “‘this is not a story to pass on’, a double entendre suggesting both the transmission of a story and its withholding, a simultaneous remembering and forgetting” (466)� 11 Although Philip does not specify the title of the novel she has read, one might conjecture that it was Fred D’Aguiar’s Feeding the Ghosts (1997)� 12 Typical tropes of the colonial adventure narrative in the nineteenth century include “a journey in the quest of riches, an exotic setting, and (of course) a version of the demonic male” (Di Frances 3)� Against Reading. Discarding Adventure in Marlene NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! 133 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0006 and through language and writing� As Lee Jenkins aptly notes, Zong! “is not about the [historical] event but of it, in a material sense” (172)� Just as there is no telling the story and yet it must be told, there is no reading this story and yet we try to read, we try to make sense of it� We do so even more because of the fragmented and disorienting shape of the poems: The resulting abbreviated, disjunctive, almost non-sensical style of the poems demands a corresponding effort on the part of the reader to ‘make sense’ of an event that eludes understanding, perhaps permanently� […] In the discomfort and disturbance created by the poetic text, I am forced to make meaning from apparently disparate elements - in so doing I implicate myself� The risk - of contamination - lies in piecing together the story that cannot be told� And since we have to work to complete the events, we all become implicated in, if not contaminated by, this activity� (Philip 198) The activity in which we, as readers, implicate ourselves, is reading, or rather: the particular kind of activity that is close reading� I will return to this point in a moment� For now, I want to highlight the notion, reminiscent of Orwell’s essay, that the poetic text is doing something to its reader against their will� In Orwell’s mind, this textual force is expressed in the register of seduction (“being seduced, unquestionably seduced”), the language of seduction being one of the major topoi of reading in general and close reading in particular� 13 Philip’s description, however, is closer to the language of coercion� In her rendering, the text is not titillating; it is “disturbing” and “discomforting”, and the reader is thereby forced, implicated, and then potentially contaminated� Let us examine this metaphor of contamination more closely� Contamination is a term designating intertextuality: c� The blending of two or more stories, plots, or the like into one� d� Philology� The blending of forms, words, or phrases of similar meaning or use so as to produce a form, word, or phrase of a new type� e� Textual Criticism� A blending of manuscripts resulting in the occurrence in a manuscript or group of manuscripts of readings belonging to different lines of tradition� (“contamination, n�”) Zong! is thus contaminated by other texts: by the legal document, obviously, but also and most notably in its visual form by the account ledger� 14 The poem 13 For a critical overview of the relationship between close reading and the erotic, see Dieter� 14 For a detailed analysis of the intertextual relationship between Zong! and accounts / catalogues, see Fehskens� 134 F abienne i Mlinger 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0006 Zong #9 in the Os section, for example, graphically reproduces accounting columns (17)� Another example is the stream of names at the bottom of the pages in the same section. Philip calls them “ghostly footnotes floating below the text” (200) and inserts the (fictional) names as a reparative act, an answer to the defacing violence through which “African men, women, and children on board the Zong were stripped of all specifity [sic! ], including their names” (194)� Finally, there is a section at the end of Zong! entitled Manifest, which explicitly refers to a document of the same name listing the cargo, passengers, and crew of a ship� The Manifest in Zong! alludes to this document through its form as well, while at the same time inserting a displacement reminiscent of Jorge Luis Borges’ notorious Chinese Encyclopaedia: it lists, among other things, Body Parts, African Groups & Languages and Women Who Wait (185-186)� Erin Fehskens argues that the poetic structure of Zong! pivots around the double meaning of account, i� e� “narrative or recitation” on the one, “a method of reckoning or enumeration” (410) on the other hand� Bearing in mind the definition of contamination quoted above, one could say that the blending of form (account in the numeric sense) produces a modification of plot or story (account in the narrative sense) - even if “account” here might mean nothing more than the absence of a coherent narrative� Just like Zong! is a blending of different texts and forms, Philip conceptualizes the act of reading as a “piecing together of the story that cannot be told” (198)� Through this process the readers themselves are contaminated� The image of contamination here evokes an involuntary permeation of the subject where the border of subject/ object, self/ other but also the difference between self/ environment is at risk or at least blurred� The negative connotations of contamination surprisingly echo Orwell’s olfactory metaphor of reek, since contamination is closely associated with defilement, pollution, infection, and impurity (“contamination, n�”)� To conceptualize the process of reading Zong! in those negative terms can be explained by its ‘topic’� By reading Zong! we are implicated in a history of violence, a history of human beings treated as objects, a system that made the lives of Black people disposable - a system, finally, which our present is still very much part of. How does this contamination happen? I suggest that it happens not by reading about the Zong and the history of the slave trade since the poems give us so little in the way of narration, facts, or historical context� Rather, we are contaminated by the act of reading itself and particularly by ‘close’ reading the poems, in every sense of the term: carefully reading them, paying close attention to details, by slowly reading, lingering and pausing� It is through this process that we ultimately establish a certain ‘meaning’ and extrapolate a sense of the text as a whole (even if it is Against Reading. Discarding Adventure in Marlene NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! 135 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0006 a fragmented one)� We piece together disparate elements in an effort to know or to understand, in order to “complete the events”, as Philip would have it� 15 The activity of reading implicates us because herein lies the connection - our connection - to the speculative and sentimental reader of the eighteenth century� 16 “Someone whose heart flutters at a set of signs” is, after all, a rather accurate description of a literary scholar� Coming back to Gallagher’s observation of the abstract similarity between the man of business and the feminine or feminized sentimental reader, I merely want to add that the man of business - in this case: the slave trader - is also a close reader� He is the “type of man” whose heart not only “flutters at a set of signs” but who also pays attention to the minutiae of accounts, both in the narrative and in the numerical sense, and brings them together for the ‘benefit’ of his enterprise. 17 “Do not skim, read” - Ian Baucom’s request or challenge resonates with what Philip is willing us to do as readers of Zong! : to pause and pay attention, to imagine what cannot be imagined, what lies beyond the bare, dispersed words� Laurie Lambert argues that Philip’s poems thereby urge us to practice “a reparative reading”, a reading that changes our perception of the known or quotidian aspects of slavery and [estranges] us from familiar words, letters, and other fragments on the page� This reparative reading practice is itself a way of creating new kinds of knowledge about slavery� […] They [readers] become aware of how language plays a part in society’s collective compression of black life […], [and this] awareness helps to create a more self-reflective experience of reading colonial archives and Philip’s poetry� (120) 18 15 Fehskens’ analysis of the literary form of the epic catalogue is once more relevant in this regard� She points out the ambivalent relationship between the whole and its parts inherent to cataloguing and the form of the catalogue in the epic tradition: “[T]he totalizing efforts of listing assumes that identifying a collection of parts will help us to know their sum, but in separating out that whole into such pieces and parts, the list reveals a structural instability in the totality - that the whole and its parts are not necessarily co-extensive” (419)� 16 M� NourbeSe Philip herself calls upon the sentimental tradition in Zong! since one of “the strongest voices” in the poems, “who appears to be a white, male, and European” (204), expresses itself through the epistolary form� 17 As Dalton and Leung observe, an important aspect of the “managerial qualities” of slave ship owners “was an accumulation of knowledge […] about slave markets throughout the Atlantic� Owners maintained correspondence with a network of contacts throughout the markets in order to stay up to date on the details about current prices, shipments, and other relevant information for the success of their own slave voyage” (6)� 18 Contrary to what people familiar with Queer Theory might assume, Lambert takes the term reparative reading not from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (2003), but from anthropologist Deborah A� Thomas� “While in dialogue with reparations debates that have 136 F abienne i Mlinger 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0006 Yet, there is an ambivalence in this process� This is the case because reading itself is, as I have argued, the activity that implicates us and “repairs” (in Lambert’s sense of the word)� Reading is in this sense a phármakon: poison and remedy at the same time� Furthermore, Philip’s poems run the risk of producing the converse effect, i� e� that instead of close reading, we skim and skip� Take for example the names at the bottom of the pages in Os� One might start to read them one by one, registering each name, wondering about their linguistic and regional origin, who the people ‘behind’ those names were, etc� But after a couple of pages, after realizing that this is - to quote Baucom out of context - “a long and repetitive list”, one begins to not really pay (close) attention to them anymore, just as it was hard to actually read, one by one, the enumeration of “one woman, one man, one child, a boy”� Considering that the poems - or at least some sections in Zong! - intertextually reproduce the form of the account ledger, one might argue that this is a calculated risk� At the beginning of Notanda, Philip (herself a lawyer by training) describes how she turns to studying legal texts while working on Zong! , admitting that “the boredom that comes with reading case after case is familiar and, strangely, refreshing, a diversion of going somewhere I do not wish to go” (190)� Maybe, then, the poetic text - purposely or not - offers us such a “diversion” by allowing us not to go where we do not wish to go? Maybe, then, the form functions as a shield, allowing us not to read the text for meaning but for form and poetic structure? Maybe the poetic text wants to put us in the shoes of the “man of business” whose heart flutters at a set of signs but who is not affected by the absence of voices, of cries, of lives brutally extinguished and lost? I want to revisit once more the metaphor of contamination and thereby return to some of my initial observations� Contamination has a close semantic and etymologic connection with contagion� To imagine the process of reading through this metaphor is all the more interesting because it has a complement on the side of the author and the narrator, namely immunity� Martin von Koppenfels considers immunity a constitutively modern trope and a phancirculated in studies of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and recent political discourse, this concept of reparations is not concerned with the payment of monies or debt relief� Instead it is invested in the production of new knowledge� This knowledge works toward the dismantling of oppressive systems of thought while drawing attention to previously ignored or marginalized perspectives� Reparations in this context is also focused on structures of healing that have been produced within harmed communities for and by themselves” (Lambert 109)� I can imagine that Sedgwick’s analysis of paranoid and reparative reading might be of value in this context, but this is obviously the topic of a different essay� Against Reading. Discarding Adventure in Marlene NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! 137 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0006 tasm of authorship, with Gustave Flaubert as its godfather� The heart of what von Koppenfels calls immunity are the textual strategies destined to avoid or attenuate affectivity, some of which I have already mentioned� In spite of the fact that we are dealing with a collection of poems here, there is a parallel between the anti-mimetic and the anti-narrative ambition of Zong! and this modern aesthetic tradition� 19 It seems to me, finally, that the anti-mimetic strategies of the poems run the risk of not affecting the reader or maybe affecting them only by way of bewilderment or boredom� And yet there is also the converse desire in Zong! , a desire to affect the reader and to “dramatize”, in Saidiya Hartman’s words, “the production of nothing” (“Venus in Two Acts” 4)� Glissant pointedly noted that there is a “confrontation” reverberating to this day between the written records of the account ledger and the stifled “cry of those deported”. It is, among other things, a confrontation between the scriptural and the oral, and Zong! stages this tension on many levels� At the end of her essay, Philip makes explicit what might not need explication, i� e� the connection (in the English language) between song and Zong(! ): “with the exception of one letter the two words are identical; if said quickly enough they sound the same” (207)� She then adds: “Why the exclamation mark after Zong! ? Zong! is chant! Shout! And ululation! Zong! is moan! Mutter! Howl! And shriek! Zong! is ‘pure utterance’� Zong! is Song! And Song is what has kept the soul of the African intact when they ‘want(ed) water … sustenance … preservation’” (ibid�)� Coming back to the example of the names printed at the bottom page of the poems in Os, it is revealing to listen to M� NourbeSe Philip read from Zong! � 20 I was curious to know whether, or how, she would read those names - after all, footnotes are usually not part of the ‘actual’ text but a margin and, like the exclamation mark, eminently scriptural, something that is easy to see but difficult to speak. 21 During her readings, Philip reads the names one by one, carefully and slowly and with emphasis, making the footnotes not only an integral part of the poems but a sort of epitaph that closes and seals every single one of them� It is only when listening to her reading that I realised what had not occurred to me before, namely, that those names function as prosopopeia, as the fiction 19 Among the most famous and canonical modern intertexts of Zong! are avant-garde poems such as Stéphane Mallarmés Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hazard (1897) and the work of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets from the 1960s and 1970s� 20 There are numerous recordings of her reading Zong! available online� 21 The exclamation mark in Zong! is a visual mark of orality, something we might perceive or think of as belonging to spoken language, but which it is in fact a constitutive part of the written language� 138 F abienne i Mlinger 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0006 of an apostrophe to an absent, deceased or voiceless entity - with all the ambivalent, abysmal undertones such an apostrophe to the absent, deceased or voiceless might have in this case� And so, where the eye might start to wander, her voice insists� She thus appropriates, one might say, a form that is by definition devoid of affect (the legal document; the account ledger) and attempts to charge it with affect� Most of the secondary literature is unanimous on the poem’s effect: “The disembodied sounds and voices a reader sees and hears [in Zong! ] constitute a more visceral form of memory than history or storytelling” (470), to quote just one example, an essay by Jenny Sharpe� I am not sure if this is really the case� Judging from my (silent) reading experience of Zong! , I cannot say that “the words that do not conform to the grammar of language” and the “sounds” present in Zong! “evoke an intuitive response rather than thought and contemplation” (ibid�)� It is at this point of uncertainty that I want to come back to the question of pleasure with which I began my contribution� “not reading the text for meaning, but for something else” #4 not reading / pleasure Philip’s description of the effect Zong! has (or should have) on the reader - “the discomfort and disturbance created by the poetic text” (198) - echoes Roland Barthes’s conception of pleasure in his seminal The Pleasure of the Text (1973)� At the end of my essay, I want to recapitulate its central aspects, particularly the two kinds of pleasure he conceives, not only because of the parallel to Notanda but also because it ties back to my initial observations and questions� Barthes begins by describing a sensation that results from “the corporeal striptease of narrative suspense” (Pleasure 10): the entire excitation takes refuge in the hope of seeing the sexual organ (schoolboy’s dream) or in knowing the end of the story (novelistic satisfaction)� Paradoxically (since it is mass-consumed), this is a far more intellectual pleasure than the other: an Oedipal pleasure (to denude, to know, to learn the origin and the end) […]� (ibid�) In Barthes’ categorization, reading adventure literature - and popular literature in general, as his remark “mass-consumed” suggests - falls under the category of oedipal pleasure: the reader’s desire for the end is satisfied or, rather, too easily satisfied. The implicit notion is that the reading of such texts is straightforward and fast; the image Barthes uses is “like a priest gulping down his Mass” (11)� Barthes’s image of ingurgitation is reminiscent of Orwell’s metaphor of “cheap sweets”, and the latent eroticism in Orwell (“being Against Reading. Discarding Adventure in Marlene NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! 139 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0006 seduced, unquestionably seduced”) is all too explicit in Barthes� In the latter, however, the reader seems to be doing something to the text and not the other way around; reading appears as a form of denuding; it is not the text seducing the reader against their will� It is also surprising - or paradox, to use his own term - that Barthes categorizes this kind of pleasure as intellectual, i� e� as a desire to know (the end, the solution, the revelation, etc�)� (Note again the elitism: the paradox being that a pleasure of the masses should be qualified as intellectual�) Whereas for Orwell, pleasure was linked to knowledge through the aesthetic judgment (“giving true pleasure to people who can see clearly what is wrong with them” (190)), Barthes explicitly turns to pleasure to avoid “critique”: “If I agree to judge a text according to pleasure, I cannot go on to say: this one is good, that bad” (Pleasure 13)� (Again, a note on elitism: One might rightfully question this apparent withholding of judgment of a text’s aesthetic quality since all of Barthes’s examples are from canonical authors, and thus he implicitly ascribes to a certain literary standard�) Contrary to what one would assume, Barthes’s categorization of two pleasures is not contained by the dividing lines of high and lowbrow� With regard to canonical nineteenth-century novels, he writes: Yet the most classical narrative (a novel by Zola or Balzac or Dickens or Tolstoy) bears within it a sort of diluted tmesis: 22 we do not read everything with the same intensity of reading; a rhythm is established, casual, unconcerned with the integrity of the text; our very avidity for knowledge impels us to skim or to skip certain passages (anticipated as “boring”) in order to get more quickly to the warmer parts of the anecdote (which are always its articulations: whatever furthers the solution of the riddle, the revelation of fate): we boldly skip (no one is watching) descriptions, explanations, analyses, conversation; in doing so, we resemble a spectator in a nightclub who climbs onto the stage and speeds up the dancer’s striptease, tearing off her clothing, but in the same order, that is: on the one hand respecting and on the other hastening the episodes of the ritual (like a priest gulping down his Mass)� Tmesis, source or figure of pleasure, here confronts two prosaic edges with one another; it sets what is useful to a knowledge of the secret against what is useless to such knowledge; […] it does not occur at the level of the structure of languages but only at the moment of their consumption; the author cannot predict tmesis: he cannot choose to write what will not be read� And yet, it is the very rhythm of what is read and 22 “Tmesis” is a rhetoric figure that refers to the “separation of the elements of a compound word by the interposition of another word or words” (“tmesis, n�”)� (Footnote not in the original text�) 140 F abienne i Mlinger 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0006 what is not read that creates the pleasure of great narratives: has anyone ever read Proust, Balzac, War and Peace, word for word? (Pleasure 10-11, italics in original) I quote this passage at length because it ties back with the observations made so far, both with regard to Orwell and with regard to Zong! � First, Barthes here paints an image of the process of reading - his reading process, really - in which he airily admits skimming the great classic for the “warmer parts”� The “warmer parts of the anecdote” (in French they are even burning: “lieux brûlants” (Plaisir 21)) are not necessarily of an erotic nature but rather the central moments in the unfolding of the plot� Contrary to Orwell’s remarks, there is no shame or guilt in this pleasure� It is also interesting to register the parallel metaphor of the reader turned spectator� 23 For Barthes, however, the reader/ spectator assumes an active role; they are even breaking the fourth wall between stage and auditorium in order to hasten disclosure and revelation whereas Orwell’s reader/ spectator hides in the shadow of the purple limelight� It is striking that by using tmesis as a figure of pleasure, Barthes conceptualizes reading as a disfigurement or fragmentation of the text, something that the author cannot anticipate or control� Unconcerned with its integrity (and the intentions of the author, one might add), the reader cuts through the text, albeit respecting the linearity of the narrative (“tearing off her clothing, but in the same order”, italics in original)� This process is a form of close reading, at least to some extent, insofar as the reader selects key passages or scenes, something literary scholars are of course very familiar with� To this kind of ‘cherry-picking’ reading method, Barthes opposes another kind of text, a text that demands a different kind of reading and produces a different kind of pleasure: Whence two systems of reading: one goes straight to the articulations of the anecdote, it considers the extent of the text, ignores the play of language […]; the other reading skips nothing; it weighs, it sticks to the text, […] it is not (logical) extension that captivates it, the winnowing out of truths, but the layering of significance; as in the children’s game of topping hands, the excitement comes not from a progressive haste but from a kind of vertical din (the verticality of language and of its destruction) […]� Read slowly, read all of a novel by Zola, and the book will drop from your hands; read fast, in snatches, some modern text, and it becomes opaque, inaccessible to your pleasure: you want something to happen and nothing does, for what happens to the language does not happen to the discourse […]� (Pleasure 12-13, italics in original) 23 The image in Orwell’s essay is “watching a third-rate music-hall performer recite ‘The Pigtail of Wu Fang Fu’ with the purple limelight on his face” (189-190)� Against Reading. Discarding Adventure in Marlene NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! 141 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0006 Just as you cannot read Zola or Proust word by word and slowly because it would bore you, it is impossible to read a modern text with the cherry-picking method outlined above� In what Barthes calls “the text of pleasure” (Pleasure 21), the reading process appears a gradual, if hastened, unfolding of the narrative and its “truths” (in French: “effeuillement des vérités” (Plaisir 23))� In opposition to this, the modern text must be read slowly and without skipping so much as a word because it is a vertical “layering of significance”, as Barthes would have it: nothing ‘happens’ but language itself; the form becomes the subject of representation� The French phrase here is “feuilleté de la signifiance” (ibid.), which is striking not only because it ties back to the “effeuillement des vérités” by a play on words but also because feuilleté is a cake made of puff paste layers� The culinary metaphor of sweetness returns, but the delicate pastry of the feuilleté is obviously the opposite of Orwell’s “cheap sweets”� A text like this cannot be “devoured” or “gobbled down”, you have “to graze, to browse scrupulously, to rediscover - in order to read today’s writers - the leisure of bygone readings: to be aristocratic readers” (Pleasure 13, italics in original)� Considering this rich culinary image, it is somewhat curious to discover how Barthes further characterizes what he calls texts of bliss (“jouissance” in French). It is this passage, finally, that evokes Philip’s description of the reading process in Notanda: Text of bliss: the text that imposes a state of loss, the text that discomforts (perhaps to the point of a certain boredom), unsettles the reader’s historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, the consistency of his tastes, values, memories, brings to a crisis his relation with language� (Pleasure 14) Barthes now understands pleasure as a fundamental unsettling of the subject through the text and / or the reading experience; the subject itself is at peril� This is a conception that makes sense if you have read Jacques Lacan but might seem odd to almost everyone else� And so one might wonder at the paradoxical notion of pleasure at work in this passage: loss, discomfort, boredom, unsettledness and crisis� It is counterintuitive to associate these experiences or emotions with pleasure as we commonly understand it, i� e� “a sensation induced by the experience or anticipation of what is felt to be good or desirable; a feeling of happy satisfaction or enjoyment; delight, gratification” (“pleasure, n�”)� What manifests itself, albeit indirectly, in this particular kind of pleasure is a disruption that could be qualified as political: the unsettling of “the reader’s historical, cultural, psychological assumptions” can be understood as a moment of revelation of the ideological status quo� Politics, one might say, manifests itself through the aesthetic form, through language itself� 142 F abienne i Mlinger 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0006 Both in Orwell and Barthes pleasure is thus intrinsically ambivalent, albeit for different reasons: pleasure appears as a sensation including negative and positive affects� Whereas in Orwell, the pleasure resulted from an act of intellectual mastery (i� e� knowing good from bad poetry) that transformed disgust into pleasure, in Barthes, pleasure (or at least a certain kind of pleasure) results from an unsettling of everything the reader knows, including their taste (and thus their ability to produce an aesthetic judgment at all)� Let us now turn to Zong! in order to understand how Barthes’ two forms of reading (and) pleasure might unfold here� I suggest that M� NourbeSe Philip’s work as a whole plays with both types of reading as outlined by Barthes� It is striking in this respect - and rarely analysed or questioned in the critical literature - that Zong! encompasses more than just the poems in the sections Os, Sal, Ventus, Ratio, Ferrum and Ebora� Most notably, what is rarely commented upon is why Philip chose to include her essay in the work itself, which, due to the layout of the title, must be understood as another section of Zong! , just like Os or Ebora� This is an ambivalent gesture since she explicates much of what the poems ‘do’ or are supposed to ‘do’ and what relationship they have to the historical document and the historical event� Consequently, most of the interpretations and readings are already anticipated in her essay; there is little one can say about the poems that has not been said or at least hinted at by Philip herself� At the very end of Zong! , the author thus appears herself as a close reader� Moreover, in this essay Philip tells us about the massacre aboard the Zong and recounts at least some of its historical context, particularly the ethically problematic aspects of dealing with the archive of the slave trade. She finally also includes the historic document itself (the legal decision) at the end of Zong! � To rephrase the verdict quoted above by Jenny Sharpe, the disembodied sounds, the words not conforming to grammar or narrative - in short: the poems in Zong! - rely on history and storytelling� To put it differently: The relationship between essay and poems can be understood as supplementary in the Derridean sense� While allegedly of second nature, a ‘belated’ testimony to the ‘actual’ writing process and the artistic oeuvre, Notanda might just as well replace what it is supposed to complement and comment on: the poems� So much so that, when I read Philip’s essay, I do not have to go through the process of painstakingly piecing together the “disparate elements”� Or, to put it with Barthes: in my desire to know the end, I might easily skip to the Notanda section, situated at the end of the book, and know the ‘whole’ story� (Maybe not the whole story, but the basic course of events and the reasons why Philip chose ‘not to tell’ the story in her particular way�) Indeed, one can imagine that those of us who are not “aristocratic readers” (as Barthes would have Against Reading. Discarding Adventure in Marlene NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! 143 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0006 it), who are not part of the few who “care for poetry” (according to Orwell), would skip to the end of the book or worse: not bother reading Zong! at all� Unlike a certain strand of modern poetry, such as the notoriously hermetic and self-reflexive Un coup de dés by Stéphane Mallarmé, in the case of Zong! the desire to resist meaning and ‘not tell’ the story conflicts with a desire of not having the reader miss the point� There is, in other words, something eminently political, and not just aesthetic, at stake here� This is why there seems to be a fear present in Zong! , a fear of reducing, as it were, the ‘story’ - and, most importantly, the death and lives and bodies of the African people enslaved - to a “feuilleté de la significance”, in Barthes’s sense. The dilemma manifests itself right at the beginning of Zong! � The Os section opens with an epigraph taken from a Wallace Stevens poem: “The sea was not a mask” (Philip 2)� This epigraph evokes the “verticality of language and of its destruction” (Barthes, Pleasure 12) and at the same time points towards the limits of signification: the sea is not a symbol or a metaphor, it is the place where the lives of 123, 132, 133 or 150 African people were brutally ended� Tyrone Williams makes a pertinent point with regard to this, noting in his review of Zong! that “documentary is the preferred mode for many poetries of witness, presumably because reportage seems less ‘artificial’ than imaginative re-creation” (786)� Williams’s observation is telling because it highlights, on the one hand, Philip’s uncommon approach towards the Zong case� At the same time, “the documentary” is not completely absent from Zong! ; it ultimately finds its way into the work in Notanda and in the reprint of the legal document� On the other hand, Williams’s observation suggests that an ‘artificial’ re-creation such as Zong! is (more) in need of justification. In light of this, another meaning of ‘account’ can be discerned as an implicit motif of Notanda, namely, ‘account’ in the sense of ‘being accountable’� The essay is in this sense also an “answering for conduct” (“account, n�”)� At the end of my contribution, I briefly want to return to the question of pleasure and reading� Both Barthes and Orwell conceptualize the reading process and the pleasure of reading as a solitary, silent rumination on / of the text as a purely aesthetic object� The image of the ‘artistocratic reader’ is set up against the background of ‘the masses’, allegedly incapable of experiencing ‘true’ pleasure (Orwell) or ‘bliss’ (Barthes)� In contrast to this, I believe that Zong! is a work that cannot be understood, cannot be ‘enjoyed’, in this kind of solitary reading� It is a work that does not want to be read only by the “few” people that “care for poetry”� It calls for community in manifold ways� It calls for a loud, communal reading� It wants to be heard (in both senses of the word)� Indeed, this is what struck me when hearing the poems read by the author but also, obviously, when I discussed Zong! with my students: It is 144 F abienne i Mlinger 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0006 through the act of coming together, when we try to make sense of the ‘unsettling’ experience of the silent reading together, that we “complete the story” and become aware of our own implication in it� Works Cited “account, n�” Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford UP , 2020, www�oed�com/ view/ Entry/ 1194� Accessed 17 Dec� 2020� Barthes, Roland� Le Plaisir du Texte. 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