Fragments of a personal history of reading
Like driving, or typing, or getting Mario to stomp Bowser, close and critical reading is unnatural, but also replicable.
Recently I encountered the idea, obvious in hindsight, that reading is a “fundamentally ‘unnatural’ act”. For most of human experience, most humans never developed the ability to decode written text of appreciable length. Our brains are clearly hardwired to understand and produce oral speech, but without a few accidents (paper, the printing press, mass education), reading could have remained arcane, with readers as sparse on the ground as clarinet players or surgeons.
I recall distinct steps on my own ladder of learning to read. Aged six(ish), I had a clear sense of my mother’s satisfaction when I ‘Read It Yourself’, as enjoined by the slim hardback Ladybugs. This was a mechanical beginning, matching letter forms to sounds to denotation. A little later came the book which hooked me forever. Once I knew that words could open up such novel axes of experience, I could never again go without. To this day I still think of Charlie Bucket’s search for a golden ticket – that triple-distilled shot of longing and delight – as one of the finest sequences ever written.
From early on, reading offered immersion, adventure, expansiveness – rich and sensational worlds. The particular magic of close reading and critical reading came later. Mostly I got to know it in classrooms populated by hybridised groups: students who had chosen to study English literature, who formed a minority in our ‘home’ classes, and were pooled together for this subject alone.
This had to do with the particular course combinations preferred by teenagers in my schools. All my school life it was telegraphed into me that English literature lacked intellectual and practical (here meaning marketplace) value. The subject was seen as arbitrary: unteachable and unlearnable, except by a peculiar handful with a “flair” for it, a description which carried a dismissive tinge of mysticism. It was an indulgence, not really part of a useful education.
I accepted this without resistance. But I thought it a very pleasurable indulgence. I reasoned that it was fine to sign over to pleasure a small proportion of my days, as long as I also ingested a healthy dose of hard science and mathematics. So, aged 14-18, my classmates were generally dedicated STEMivores; I was part of an odd rump who had swapped out a proper subject for literature. And I spent a few hours a week with groups cobbled together from assorted rumps in other classes.
It was poetry that first revealed itself susceptible to independent analysis. Ms T was a bit of an English teacher cliché, with her youth, candour and inattention to hierarchy. She taught from an anthology in a darkened room, marking up magnified lines on the overhead projector, linking individual letters, words and phrases to emotional effects and to themes. I watched her wield this chisel and then applied it myself, to Wordsworth’s ‘The Solitary Reaper’.
When I finished working my way through the poem, I had a small collection of observations (by no means profound) on vowel sounds and nature and memory and musicality. I sat back and regarded this result with great and simple satisfaction. I had consciously assembled and adjusted a contraptions of mirrors to tickle my mind with words, and watch the words doing the tickling, and watch the mind responding, and chronicle the relationship between these things. And I had deployed it onto a complete text, which I now understood better than I had before.
More classes – and some recreational experiments – showed that the mirror contraptions could in time, and with effort, be refined, refocused, expanded. They could zoom in on individual sounds and bits of punctuation; they could zoom out to exchanges of dialogue, characters, places, objects, events, norms. The different scales could be combined and cross-pollinated to reveal even more striking linkages.
Once I saw these things in a book, in myself, in myself reading the book, I could detect the same flavours and patterns and their kin pulsing elsewhere in other books. Books talked to one another across space and time, and I could tune into the conversation. And variations on these themes started to become visible to me in other forms of art, and in life: in life’s dialogue, its characters, its places, objects, events and norms. Life enlarged language and language enlarged life.
Books developed new dimensions of value, in how far and with what novelty they rewarded this probing. The techniques could even be directed at a text I had created myself, and be used to assess and iterate it. It was potentially infinite, this new source of interest and meaning, and it was now mine.
I may be in danger of suggesting the same kind of mysticism around literature and language that I wanted to reject. Let me be extra clear: this process of learning – like all learning, I contend – was largely a matter of conscious attention and repetitive effort. Like driving, or typing, or getting Mario to stomp Bowser, the abilities I developed are unnatural, but they are also replicable.
And here’s an interesting coda to the notion that literature classes have no market value. Today, reading and writing (which ultimately depends on reading), and in particular close reading and critical reading, are core to my employability. Understanding how texts are inflected, and how to shift those inflections for a desired effect, and how to ground different texts and their implications in a wider context – these are key to how I earn a salary. Of all the jumble of information, concepts, techniques and other miscellany crammed into my head in school, the thing that most resembles a skill which I sell daily is whatever it was that crystallised over Wordsworth. I work in communications, so this is likely to be truer of me than of most people; yet I can’t help but feel that, rather like numeracy and computer literacy and financial awareness, these abilities can boost most people’s participation in collaborative life more generally.
What moves me to write this is a question about the future of reading: about how many people, in years to come, will continue to invest conscious attention and repetitive effort into learning this unnatural act. About what kind of reading will be preserved, and how far it will be practiced throughout our societies. The texts that many of us engage with on a regular basis grow shorter and more fragmented, and our habits of engagement more fleeting and piecemeal. What will change in how we relate to one another, if literacy becomes a smaller and a shallower pool?
This, I know, is not a new worry. When I was growing up, the villain in the tale was television rather than social media. But I’m not sure this is (only) a case of me reaching curmudgeonly middle age and shaking my head at ‘kids these days’. The collective attention spans assumed by cultural products have changed perceptibly over time. Perhaps an extreme example is how little patience most contemporary readers would have for the style of fiction wildly popular among the Victorians; but even going back a few decades, there seems to me a palpable shift toward greater uniformity of (faster) pacing. Even in visual media, the average shot length of Hollywood films has plummeted. I don’t know what exactly any of this implies for, or about, the quality of our consciousness, introspection or communications with one another. But I’m not ready to confidently declare the answer is ‘nothing at all’.
I want to talk, too, about the great wave of enthusiasm – perhaps now crashing and receding? – for large language models like ChatGPT, and the notions of reading and writing embodied in the idea that everyone is a stochastic parrot. But let’s save that for another day, and give the last word here to A.S. Byatt.
Possession is by far the conventionally plottiest of Byatt’s novels, and the plot has a conventional enough climax – a dead-of-night showdown, gasps of revelation – but it is also a book about reading. And from that angle, the climax is a different one:
It is possible for a writer to make, or remake, at least, for a reader, the primary pleasures of eating, or drinking, or looking on, or sex. Novels have their obligatory tour-de-force, the green-flecked gold omelette aux fines herbes, melting into buttery formlessness and tasting of summer, or the creamy human haunch, firm and warm, curved back to reveal a hot hollow, a crisping hair or two, the glimpsed sex. They do not habitually elaborate on the equally intense pleasure of reading. There are obvious reasons for this, the most obvious being the regressive nature of the pleasure, a mise-en-abîme even, where words draw attention to the power and delight of words, and so on ad infinitum, thus making the imagination experience something papery and dry, narcissistic and yet disagreeably distanced, without the immediacy of sexual moisture or the scented garnet glow of good burgundy. And yet, nature’s such as Roland’s are at their most alert and heady when reading is violently yet steadily alive. (What an amazing word ‘heady’ is, en passant, suggesting both acute sensuous alertness and its opposite, the pleasure of the brain as opposed to the viscera – though each is implicated in the other, as we know very well, with both, when they are working.)
Think of this, as Roland thought of it, rereading ‘The Garden of Proserpina’ for perhaps the twelfth, or maybe even the twentieth time, a poem he ‘knew’ in the sense that he had already experienced all its words, in their order, and also out of order, in memory, in selective quotation or misquotation – in the sense also, that he could predict, at times even recite, those words which were next to come, or more remotely approaching, the place where his mind rested, like clawed bird feet on a twig. Think of this – that the writer wrote alone, and the reader read alone, and they were alone with each other. True, the writer may have been alone also with Spenser’s golden apples in the Fairie Queene, Proserpina’s garden, glistening bright among the place’s ashes and cinders, may have seen in his mind’s eye, apple of his eye, the golden fruit of the Primavera, may have seen Paradise Lost, in the garden where Eve recalled Pomona and Proserpina. He was alone when he wrote and he was not alone then, all these voices sang, the same words, golden apples, different words in different places, an Irish castle, an unseen cottage, elastic-walled and grey round blind eyes.
There are readings – of the same text – that are dutiful, readings that map and dissect, readings that hear a rustling of unheard sounds, that count grey little pronouns for pleasure or instruction, and for a time do not hear golden or apples. There are personal readings, that snatch for personal meanings, I am full of love, or disgust, or fear, I scan for love, or disgust, or fear. There are – believe it – impersonal readings – where the mind’s eye sees the lines move onwards and the mind’s ear hears them sing and sing.
Now and then there are readings which make the hairs on the neck, the non-existent pelt, stand on end and tremble, when every word burns and shines hard and clear and infinite and exact, like stones of fire, like points of stars in the dark – readings when the knowledge that we shall know the writing differently or better or satisfactorily, runs ahead of any capacity to say what we know, or how. In these readings, a sense that the text has appeared to be wholly new, never before seen, is followed, almost immediately, by the sense that it was always there, that we the readers, knew it was always there, and have always known it was as it was, though we have now for the first time recognised, become fully cognisant of, our knowledge.
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Roland read, or reread, The Golden Apples, as though the words were living creatures or stones of fire. He saw the tree, the fruit, the fountain, the woman, the grass, the serpent, single and multifarious in form. He heard Ash’s voice, certainly his voice, his own unmistakable voice, and he heard the language moving around, weaving its own pattern, beyond the reach of any single human, writer or reader. He heard Vico saying that the first men were poets and the first words were names that were also things, and he heard his own strange, necessary meaningless lists, made in Lincoln, and saw what they were. He saw too that Christabel was the Muse and Proserpina and that she was not, and this seemed to be so interesting and apt, once he had understood it, that he laughed aloud. Ash had started him on this quest and he had found the clue he had started with, and all was cast off, the letters, the letters, Vico, the apples, his list.