Reading Styles

At a recent discussion group for two novels, we talked of how we read certain books — the method of reading, whether to read in small squibs or whether to let the text wash over one and read like the train of words before us, no getting off (and one of the novels had been one block of text, mostly). How did people used to read before today — and not even just in the 1800s, but even in the 1930s and 40s before television? It seems to me that the question about books that is most pertinent is, How does one read? Since how one reads is the entirety of the reading action itself — it’s the consumption (bad word) but also the artistic nexus, the flashing point and infinity of the aesthetic experience, as Merleau-Ponty stated:

When we confront a genuine [artwork] we know that a contact has been established with something, that something has been gained for men; and the work of art transmits an uninterrupted message. But the meaning of the work for the artist or for the public cannot be stated except by the work itself…

It’s no shock that another of the exemplars of this tussle between text and reader was Paul Valéry, who wrote an essay called “The Aesthetic Infinite”: “…what we called a ‘work of art’ is the result of an action whose finite aim is to call forth infinite developments in someone.” The how of this is like stepping into the portal, a journey beyond infinity, a la 2001’s flourishing finale. But to step back — one can read at half-attention or quarter-attention, less and more. Do we read on our phones? Do we read in bed? It’s all a matter of space and time — and more. Do we read with an open heart? Forget the mind — the heart will take us to many more corridors in the houses of fiction or the mazes of philosophy, the small studios of a poem. Reader response is one thing, but, as Roberto Piglia writes:

The value of reading does not depend on the book in itself but on the emotions associated with the act of reading…What is fixed in memory is not the content of memory but rather its form. I am not interested in what can obscure the image, I am interested only in the visual intensity that persists in time like a scar.

The how of this could be mapping our current cardiogram when we digest a line of Gertrude Stein’s “Melanctha”: “Jeff always loved now to be with Melanctha and yet he always hated to go to her. Somehow he was always afraid when he was to go to her, and yet he had made himself very certain that here he would not be a coward.” Marianne Moore said “style is a radiograph of the personality,” but isn’t reading also? The personality that digs under the surface, that can’t get enough and digs in secondary materials to get to the root of Milton or Proust or Joyce. Or the personality that scavenges, who comes into the scene to nip and bite at a few lines here and there and then fly away to some familiar hunting ground. Or the “I must finish” -type, who must do just that. There are so many ways and means.

When I think back on the three-year odyssey of reading Proust, what I remember as much as the feeling of Proust, the Moncrieffified-sentences, and the image I made of the writer Proust writing his multiple selves, was actually where I read long passages of this multi-book. That would be Rosendale, New York, in an Airbnb we went to every summer for three years. And specifically, the couch where I sat (with a large green pillow under to boost me higher for my inevitable lower back strains). But I also read other things there, like Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space. Mostly these encounters occurred in the morning from say 9:30 till 11 as the July sun would rise higher and higher, eventually touching this most shaded of the three houses on the property (at the northern end under large oaks), each right next to one another, aligned like a stage audience in a slight semi-circle. Ours usually sat in shade until the dawning of the nine o’clock hour. So, by ten, smelling the off-mold of my used copy of the three massive silver-toned volumes, I would be encircled by light as I beached myself on the prose of Proust, scenes where the grandmother perished and Marcel silently fulminated or when the Duchesse de Guermantes said to the dying Swann that she had to go and couldn’t talk about his imminent demise. I had these images in my head as I smelled the piercing scent of upstate grass and faced the heat of the day pushing into the front screen windows, where I had a viewpoint of the large property and parking areas for all the houses (kind of like I sat in a too-short shark tower), while experiencing maybe the greatest work of art in human history, ostensibly keeping an eye on the comings and goings of the others, but really holding a compact with my memories, my enlarging experiences of space and time, because I now just didn’t live for me and my family, I had the imprimatur of Proust to tussle with — it wouldn’t let me go — the stain held no matter washing, no matter weather.

So, un-sunstruck on that couch I kept building on Piglia’s “scar,” laying strips of papier-mâché onto the hollowing-seeming statue of myself. The “scar” had already been outlined and pre-lubricated, though I continued applying layers — these were the emotions associated with reading, a kind of incredible shudder of memory forward and backward. And the form of the memories? Here was the crux, since it wasn’t fully the content of Proust but my rewriting him into my own language — for it to make sense to me no matter that the already translated sentences only survived in me as a mumbled jumbling of sorts. My “form” was to remember things all too romantic and, even if they weren’t, as close to romantic as possible. Proust wasn’t romantic but I tried to bend him that way, to fit some inner stream of sadness. But he has his own Pacific that was not only holding myriad parts and leagues, but also cresting to combine as generously as it could with my pond-sized one. I think a lot of this goes toward the old way of thinking of a Man of Letters. They walked through life with the weight of Shakespeare, Woolf, and Proust in their jagged footsteps. How can we daily face people without the formations of the memory of Shakespeare’s most tragic scenes in our consciousness? The end of King Lear: “Howl, howl, howl, howl…” and “Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.” Though we never talk about it — it is there in our speech, in our acts, in our cruelties and kindnesses. Some might think that only happens on the stage, but these words are our real life, even as they sit next to their boyfriend who is checking the score of the game on his phone while Lear is looking for breath on his dead daughter’s lips. But is this the way? Is anyone except a few people thinking of the great tragedies as they shuffle around to buy more food, more wine, and to urge intimacy on one another, though there may never be the chance or a kiss — or need of one? But here is the extent of the scar, if we don’t read to x-ray ourselves in the process are we doing something else in a way that brings what Geoffrey Hill might call a certain “monumentality and bidding” to our earth hours?

In recent years I have struggled with taking a few bits and leaving off as a reader. This might be due to composing more, but it also may be due to the anxiety over not getting to everything I want to get to — the anxiety of too much and too little influence. Is one-hundred pages of Musil enough? Surely not, but then what about Wordsworth’s The Prelude or Stein’s The Making of Americans? Perhaps the emotions of reading at the time are being transformed. The flotilla of the reversibility of the writer/reader meets the barge of Gerald Murnane, who summarized his “fictional” enterprise in A Million Windows: “We sense that true fiction is more likely to include what was overlooked or ignored or barely seen or felt at the time of its occurrence but comes continually to mind ten or twenty years afterwards not on account of its having long ago provoked passion or pain but because of its appearing to be part of a pattern of meaning that extends over much of a lifetime.” And this is also true of reading — what we can’t face or comprehend we take with us, discarding what we do. Why would King Lear and Gloucester treat their children in the way they do? This, or something similar (or disparate, like why Faulkner would describe the house at the beginning of Absalom, Absalom: “…the dim coffinsmelling gloom sweet and over-sweet with the twice-bloomed wisteria against the outer wall by the savage quiet September sun impacted distilled and hyperdistilled…”), stays with us for a lifetime. I yearn more for my emotions to crystalize with the text, as with Proust, as with Stevens, as with Christine Schutt. How we read seemingly keeps changing with age, with the digitizing time, but the emotions associated with reading can still send the same reckonings to us, as Keats had while reading Shakespeare. The feelings don’t change, but the way to the feelings does.

Wouldn’t it have been fair to say that we were talking about the form of our memory at the discussion group? How we read is one of our most intimate gestures and to tell someone of it is at least like removing a layer of clothing, but more so a layer from coverings of our persona, our heart. With no offense to the authors of the books in not spouting about content, weren’t we doing the ultimate literary expression? — we revealed how their books, somewhat divorced from content, made us feel about ourselves: “I wanted to read it in a certain way, but I found I couldn’t…I had to recalibrate…” or some such reaction. The emotions of reading and the form of its memory. Again, Merleau-Ponty’s “uninterrupted message” and Valery’s “aesthetic intimate” come up, as well as Moore’s “radiograph of the personality,” for reading. How one is reading is telling the story — a much more complex and intimate one, where the reader authorizes. This isn’t heresy.