"The realities of the world affected me as visions, and as
visions only, while the wild ideas of the land of dreams became, in
turn, not the material of my every-day existence, but in very deed
that existence utterly and solely in itself." (Poe 211)
With the advent of print, Walter Ong argues that thought became spatialized. Whereas members of an oral cultures constructed its linguistic structures upon the pragmatics of thought through techniques present in epic poetry such as the epithet and generic plot structures to remember long, convoluted narratives, the written word obliterated the need for such structures as one could always 'refer back to'. The focus became on the syntax rather than the plot. A different culture, thus, emerged wherein one developed "a distance from lived experience" (Ong 42) Poe's "Berenice" articulates this anxiety by highlighting how the ability to constantly refer 'back to' cultivates the attentive gaze. One becomes fixated on a single object, sometimes to the point of obsession. The decomposition of Berenice's body, here, becomes the metaphor for the attentive gaze's tendency to reduce its object into discrete parts- for the worse. In the case of Berenice, the narrator's love of the Idea of Berenice reduces her into a fragmentation of herself. Even though she 'lives' within his thoughts, she is dead, static, a zombie-esque creature outside time and space, trapped within the interiority of his thoughts.
Herein lies the paradox of the private life that developed with the advent of reading: one grows to think of oneself as a being outside reality, existing in fictions. One is constantly referencing fictional or thought processes to judge the significance of physical realities. Everything becomes a reference for another thing, and one develops a distance from life lived as one is engulfed in the mire of the self.
Paradoxically, this fragmentation of thought is tied in with an amplification of intensity: obsession with a singular thought-object becomes easy. The focalization of the attentive gaze is, as such, like a whirlpool, having the ability to trap one within the walls of the self as one moves increasingly deeper in a maze of references into a self that is essentially elusive.
The question then remains: What is left after the rampage of reading’s effect on the private mind? Does one become a phantom of oneself, eternally out-of-touch with realities of the here-and-now? Or, on the other end, do we become purely mental beings, capable of immortal, immaterial existence?
With the advent of print, Walter Ong argues that thought became spatialized. Whereas members of an oral cultures constructed its linguistic structures upon the pragmatics of thought through techniques present in epic poetry such as the epithet and generic plot structures to remember long, convoluted narratives, the written word obliterated the need for such structures as one could always 'refer back to'. The focus became on the syntax rather than the plot. A different culture, thus, emerged wherein one developed "a distance from lived experience" (Ong 42) Poe's "Berenice" articulates this anxiety by highlighting how the ability to constantly refer 'back to' cultivates the attentive gaze. One becomes fixated on a single object, sometimes to the point of obsession. The decomposition of Berenice's body, here, becomes the metaphor for the attentive gaze's tendency to reduce its object into discrete parts- for the worse. In the case of Berenice, the narrator's love of the Idea of Berenice reduces her into a fragmentation of herself. Even though she 'lives' within his thoughts, she is dead, static, a zombie-esque creature outside time and space, trapped within the interiority of his thoughts.
Herein lies the paradox of the private life that developed with the advent of reading: one grows to think of oneself as a being outside reality, existing in fictions. One is constantly referencing fictional or thought processes to judge the significance of physical realities. Everything becomes a reference for another thing, and one develops a distance from life lived as one is engulfed in the mire of the self.
Paradoxically, this fragmentation of thought is tied in with an amplification of intensity: obsession with a singular thought-object becomes easy. The focalization of the attentive gaze is, as such, like a whirlpool, having the ability to trap one within the walls of the self as one moves increasingly deeper in a maze of references into a self that is essentially elusive.
The question then remains: What is left after the rampage of reading’s effect on the private mind? Does one become a phantom of oneself, eternally out-of-touch with realities of the here-and-now? Or, on the other end, do we become purely mental beings, capable of immortal, immaterial existence?
