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ends—but is our curiosity and desire satisfied? Of course not. The vagina remains hidden within the girl’s body, shaded by her pubic hair, and even if she were to spread her legs before us [at this point several ladies in the audience noisily departed] it would still not satisfy the curiosity and desire set in motion by the stripping. Staring into that orifice we find that we have somehow overshot the goal of our quest, gone beyond pleasure in contemplated beauty; gazing into the womb we are returned to the mystery of our own origins. Just so in reading. The attempt to peer into the very core of a text, to possess once and for all its meaning, is vain—it is only ourselves that we find I here, not the work itself. Freud said that obsessive reading (and I suppose that most of us in this room must be regarded as compulsive readers)—that obsessive reading is the displaced expression of a desire to see the mother’s genitals [here a young man in the audience fainted and was carried out] but the point of the remark, which may not have been entirely appreciated by Freud himself, lies precisely in the concept of displacement. To read is to surrender oneself to an endless displacement of curiosity and desire from one sentence to another, From one action to another, from one level of the text to another. The text unveils itself before us, but never allows itself to be possessed; and instead of striving to possess it we should take pleasure in its teasing.”
    Morris Zapp went on to illustrate his thesis with a number of passages from classic English and American literature. When he sat down, there was scattered and uneven applause.
    “The floor is now open for discussion,” said Rupert Sutcliffe, surveying the audience apprehensively over the rims of his glasses. “Are there any questions or comments?”
    There was a long silence. Then Philip Swallow stood up. “I have listened to your paper with great interest, Morris,” he said. “Great interest. Your mind has lost none of its sharpness since we first met. But I am sorry to see that in the intervening years you have succumbed to the virus of structuralism.”
    “I wouldn’t call myself a structuralist,” Morris Zapp interrupted, “A poststructuralist, perhaps.”
    Philip Swallow made a gesture implying impatience with such subtle distinctions. “I refer to that fundamental scepticism about the possibility of achieving certainty about anything, which I associate with the mischievous influence of Continental theorizing. There was a time when reading was a comparatively simple matter, something you learned to do in primary school. Now it seems to be some kind of arcane mystery, into which only a small élite have been initiated. I have been reading books for their meaning all my life—or at least that is what I have always thought I was doing. Apparently I was mistaken.”
    “You weren’t mistaken about what you were trying to do,” said Morris Zapp, relighting his cigar, “you were mistaken in trying to do it.”
    “I have just one question,” said Philip Swallow. “It is this: what, with the greatest respect, is the point of our discussing your paper if, according to your own theory, we should not be discussing what you actually said at all, but discussing some imperfect memory or subjective interpretation of what you said?”
    “There is no point,” said Morris Zapp blithely. “If by point you mean the hope of arriving at some certain truth. But when did you ever discover that in a question-and-discussion session? Be honest, have you ever been to a lecture or seminar at the end of which you could have found two people present who could agree on the simplest précis of what had been said?”
    “Then what in God’s name is the point of it all?” cried Philip Swallow, throwing his hands into the air.
    “The point, of course, is to uphold the institution of academic literary studies. We maintain our position in society by publicly performing a certain