The Fabulous Destiny of Rosendo y Mauricio, or, Between (Good) Sense and Making Sense

The Fabulous Destiny of Rosendo y Mauricio, or, Between (Good) Sense and Making Sense Claude Julien (bio) Je demande à un livre de créer en moi le besoin qu'il m'apporte. "I expect a book to create in me the desire it brings me." —Edmond Rostand "Age Would Be That Does"1 has proved to be an ideal self-contained short story to help unsuspecting students develop their awareness of the way a text and its readers interact. What follows here is far removed from usual scholarly pursuits. It consists in a report on a pedagogic game played with a willing (no grade was involved) group of French graduate students. The rules went thus: three students were handed a copy of the story with the author's name and publication date handwritten on it. Considering they were urged to strictly keep with what they had, we may call them "blind readers" compared to the second group of three more students, "informed readers" who were provided with minimal facts about the author and his background. To wit: an African-American professor of English literature, the author of six books of fiction up to 1990, also a painter of mostly abstract art. This group was also told the author lived in Southern California, east of Los Angeles, on a small ranch in a semi-arid section, was fond of outdoor life and enjoyed riding his mule (named Thelonious Monk) every day. This group agreed not to read any other of the author's fictions. The work plan called for the two groups to discuss the story as separate entities and prepare an oral report each. As was agreed, the blind readers' report was first heard when the class met for the following session. The informed readers bided their turn. Finally, the floor was opened to discussion and the teacher introduced a few leads. The ultimate purpose of the experiment was to develop the students' ability to weigh their own contributions to texts, especially, based on Maurice Couturier's La Figure de l'auteur, their coming to any story as a means to relate to an authorly "person" all readers carry in their minds. It is natural for readers to seek an objective relation with a shadow of their own creation in order to construct meaning from the commanding voice (authority derives from the same root as author), although authors rarely have any material, verifiable existence on the page. At the heart of this was Michel Foucault's "Qu'est-ce qu'un auteur?"2 in which he took issue with Roland Barthes's La Mort de l'Auteur that proclaimed the heyday of deconstructionism focusing exclusively on the printed words. Foucault argued for the inevitability of the [End Page 297] author's presence, not as a person fully in command of the creation process but as a "function" informing —slanting— the reading process. The blind readers involved in the experiment had no "authorly function" to go by. Similarly, the better to assess first-hand readerly contact, the informed readers got neither blurb nor book cover, nor picture of the author susceptible to channel their reading into a particular direction.3 "Age Would Be That Does" tells of two inseparable friends, Rosendo and Mauricio, who like to go hunting together in spite of their tired old eyes. Together means a lot: they share everything, from information about their dimly seen surroundings to a gun they hide in a shed in Rosendo's backyard, and a blue Datsun sedan, a hand-me-down from Mauricio's daughter. Hunting first means driving circuitous routes, following the inspiration of Mauricio's nearly sightless eyes, parking somewhere and walking into the woods. As the story opens, Rosendo kills his sister's dog, Grasa, that, at Mauricio's prompting, he has mistaken for a deer. Understandably uneasy, Rosendo goes home where his sister Maria tricks him into believing her visiting friend, Carlita, is the parish priest. At least the women think they fool him. Rosendo knows better but chooses to lie low on account of Grasa. The old man's queasiness is relieved when exciting news comes from the outside during supper time: in a dust-raising

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