RB 8/29

I think I totally misread Macherey. I think what I've written below is probably totally wrong. (But oh well if I misread him. He's not going to teach me how to cure cancer.) ...

Fantasia wouldn’t exist without Bastian. Atreyu would never seek the Southern Oracle, Falkor would never get scratched behind his ear, and the Empress would remain nameless. Bastian reads them into existence. Otherwise, they would be confined to a book—consumed by the Nothing.

That’s why in A Theory of Literary Production Pierre Macherey places much of literary critique’s importance on the meaning in “the shadow,” the place where the reader writes him or herself into the space between the lines.

“He who wears the Auryn speaks for the Empress,” a dignitary at the Ivory Castle says when he gives Atreyu a charm-necklace. “It will guide and protect you.” The charm is composed of two snakes circularly-entwined; the same symbol is “worn” by the cover of The Neverending Story—the book in which Atreyu Ivory Castle resides, the book of which Bastian reads.

“We can see that meaning is in the relation between the implicit and the explicit,” Macherey writes. Meaning is when both Atreyu the warrior-child and Bastian the reader carry the snake charm, one around his neck, the other on his book. It is when Bastian cries because Atreyu’s horse Artax sinks into the Swamps of Sadness and dies. It is when Bastian is startled because a hill upon which Atreyu stands suddenly shifts, revealing itself to be Morla the Ancient One. Meaning is when two snakes entwine.

Machere proposes critiquing the snakes as a whole.