Michael Hardin
Playing the Reader: The Homoerotics of Self-Reflexive Fiction
New York: Peter Lang, 2000. Pp. 168. $43.95

Reviewed by Casie Hermansson

Michael Hardin looks at ways in which select metafictional works actively position their projected reader as male (as in Tristram Shandy's "Gentleman reader") and the homoeroticism that results through the ensuing game between the author and this constructed reader. Reading in "drag," that is, reading as the constructed, manipulated reader, is to participate in noncooperative games with the author. The author and the reader "cruise" one another, and the object is jouissance in the shared text. The game, however, is not to share but to dominate, to "come out on top," and this is what drives the tease.

This male reader is rarely in a position to win the author's games, however. Interpretive communities of readers and critics have shown their hand, and "if one knows the strategic mindset and approach of the interpretive community, then one can manipulate his/her reader into misreadings--in gaming terms, into losing" (10). Authors of these metafictional, ostensibly plural and coproductive, texts prescribe any possible reading of them by their very invitation or even instruction to read unconventionally: nonlinearly, for instance, or skipping parts of the novel. The male reader is seduced into believing he has some control, then manipulated and dominated. Noncooperative game theory, as Hardin outlines in the introduction, involves "playing outside the rules or standard expectations" (16): "roles of the reader and author more closely resemble those of combatants in war than cocreators," with the added element of eroticism.

Hardin expertly and wittily applies his argument to Tristram Shandy, Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller, Hopscotch by Julio Cortázar, and Dictionary of the Khazars and Landscape Painted with Tea by Milorad Pavic. Each chapter ably demonstrates first the novels' construction of the reader as male, then the game being played between author and this reader. The final chapter dealing with Carlos Fuentes's novel Christopher Unborn breaks with this pattern to focus more on the thematized male economy than on the game Fuentes plays with his reader, and does not seem fully integrated into Hardin's overall plan.

But Hardin's book begs an important question, not addressed until the brief conclusion and then only to beg further questions: what of the female readers of these novels? In several, Hardin notes the female reader is overtly alienated in the process of positioning the ideal reader as male. Sterne's "Madam reader" is rejected as "inept" (37); Miller "reduce[s] the female to zero" and thereby "effectively remove[s] the female reader from the novel by the second half" (65-66); the female reader of Hopscotch "wins" by exiting the text/labyrinth and not reading chapters designated for the male reader, and so on. But Hardin does not then address the female reader who reads in drag, reading as the male reader, as she must do in order to participate in the game of the novels. Is the female reader who masquerades as the "Gentleman reader" not already reading noncooperatively? Yet to win this game is to lose, since homoerotic jouissance can only be achieved by playing. So can the female reader "fake it"?

Hardin's conclusion belatedly raises the issue, seemingly only to chastise feminist proponents of resisting reading (uncooperative reading by another name, surely?) for not playing: "drag reading requires that the reader merely assume that space, not take on an ideology"; "to continually place oneself in a position of resistance deprives one of the pleasure that literature clearly provides" (130). Hardin admits that male readers are themselves masquerading, as they are not exactly the "Gentleman reader" either, but some readers must "drag" more than others to enjoy equal-opportunity jouissance.

Hardin's last paragraph begins: "And of course, women write metafiction too" (133). There is no reason, he adds, "why an argument cannot be constructed detailing an erotics of the text between female narrators and female readers" (133). None indeed, but the author isn't always the narrator. What of male narrators written by female authors? Might they cruise male readers too? The masquerades raised by Hardin's argument allow for more possibilities than Hardin's present scope, yet all must have a bearing on the game.