ABSTRACT
What is reading? How should we read? These are questions that begin before Kindergarten and extend beyond all schooling. In recent years literary theoreticians have contributed to our understanding of reading by raising two other questions: who is the reader? and whose text does the reader read? On this occasion we shall be most concerned with the first of these two latter questions, that which asks about the nature of the reader, but it will be useful to approach that one by way of the other: whose text is read? Our best guide here-as in other cases-may prove to be a blind bard:
Menard (perhaps without wanting to) has enriched, by means of a new technique, the halting and rudimentary art of reading: this new technique is that of the deliberate anachronism and the erroneous attribution. This technique, whose applications are infinite, prompts us to go through the Odyssey as if it were posterior to the Aeneid and the book Le jardin du Centaure of Madame Henri Bachelier as if it were by Madame Henri Bachelier. This technique fills the most placid works with adventure.
