ON READING

READING IS PERCEPTION AS TRANSLATION. The inert signs of an alphabet become living meanings in the mind. It is all very strange when you think about it, and perhaps not surprising that written language came late in our evolutionary history, long after speech. Literacy, like all learned activities, appears to alter our brain organization. Studies have shown that literate people process phonemes differently from illiterate people. Their knowledge of an alphabet seems to strengthen their ability to understand speech as a series of discrete segments. Before my daughter learned to read, she once asked me a question I found hard to answer. She pointed at a blank space between two words on the page of a book we were reading and said, “Mommy, what does the nothing mean?” Articulating the significance of that emptiness did not come easily. My illiterate three-year-old did not understand the sequencing and divisions that are inherent to language, ones that are more apparent on the page than in speech.

There are any number of theories about how reading works, none of which is complete because not enough is known about the neurophysiology of interpreting signs, but it is safe to say that reading is a particular human experience of collaboration with the words of another person, the writer, and that books are literally animated by the people who read them because reading is an embodied act. The text of Madame Bovary may be fixed forever in French, but the text is dead and meaningless until it is absorbed by a living, breathing human being.

The act of reading takes place in human time; in the time of the body, and it partakes of the body’s rhythms, of heartbeat and breath, of the movement of our eyes, and of our fingers that turn the pages, but we do not pay particular attention to any of this. When I read, I engage my capacity for inner speech. I assume the written words of the writer who, for the time being, becomes my own internal narrator, the voice in my head. This new voice has its own rhythms and pauses that I sense and adopt as I read. The text is both outside me and inside me. If I am reading critically, my own words will intervene. I will ask, doubt, and wonder, but I cannot occupy both positions at once. I am either reading the book or pausing to reflect on it. Reading is intersubjective—the writer is absent, but his words become part of my inner dialogue.

It happens that I find myself half-reading. My eyes follow the sentences on the page and I take in the words, but my thoughts are elsewhere, and I realize that I have read two pages but haven’t understood them. Sometimes I speed-read abstracts of science papers, zooming through the text to glean whether I want to read the whole article. I read poems slowly, allowing the music of the words to reverberate inside me. Sometimes I read a sentence by a philosopher again and again because I do not grasp its meaning. I recognize each word in the sentence, but how they all fit together requires all of my concentration and repeated reading. Various texts call for different strategies, all of which have become automatic.

I have vivid memories of some books that last in my consciousness. Novels often take pictorial form in my recollection; I see Emma Bovary running down a grassy hill on her way to the chemist’s shop, her cheeks flushed, her hair loosened by the wind. The grass, the cheeks, the hair, the wind are not in the text. I provided them. Philosophy usually does not stay with me in pictures, but in words, although I have formed images for Kierkegaard, for example, because he is a philosopher-novelist, a thinker-storyteller. I see Victor Eremita, the pseudonymous editor of Either/Or, with his hatchet as he smashes the piece of furniture in which two manuscripts have been hidden. Other books have vanished almost entirely from my conscious mind. I recall reading Danilo Kis’s A Tomb for Boris Davidovich and liking it very much, but I cannot bring back a single aspect of the story.1 Where did it go? Could an association prompt it back to mind? I clearly recall the title, the author, and my feeling—admiration for the book—but that is all that has remained.

And yet, explicit memories, however dim, are only part of memory. There are implicit memories, too, which can’t be retrieved on demand but are nevertheless part of our ongoing knowledge of the world. A simple example is reading itself—a learned skill I do, but I can’t remember how I do it. The rigors of long ago, puzzling over letters and sounding out words, have disappeared as conscious processes. Another example of subliminal recollection is looking for a particular passage in a book. I take the volume off the shelf, often without any sense of where the passage is among the many hundreds of pages. I certainly have no number in my mind, but once I have the object in hand, I am able to go directly to the paragraph I want. My fingers seem to remember. This is a proprioceptive ability. Proprioception is our motor-sensory capacity to orient ourselves in space—our ability to negotiate our way into chairs, dodge obstacles, pick up cups, and remember unconsciously where the crucial passage is to be found.

Cognitive scientists often talk about encoding, storage, and retrieval in relation to memory. These are computer metaphors that only approximate the actual experience of remembering and, I would argue, distort it as well. There are no warehouses in our brains where material is stored and waits to be retrieved in original form. Memories aren’t photographs or documentary films. They shift over time, are creatively and actively perceived, and this applies to the books we remember as well. They dim in time and may mutate. Others seem to imprint themselves deeply. Books, of course, are made only of words, but they may be recalled in images, feelings, or in other words. And sometimes we remember without knowing we remember. This insight is hardly new. In The Passions of the Soul (1649), Descartes claimed that a terrible episode in childhood could live on in a person despite his amnesia for the event.2 In his Monadology (1714), Leibniz developed an idea of unconscious or insensible perceptions that we aren’t aware of but which can nevertheless influence us.3 In the nineteenth and into the early twentieth century, William Carpenter, Pierre Janet, William James, and Sigmund Freud all investigated unconscious memories, although memories of reading did not figure in their contemplations.

I recently reread George Eliot’s Middlemarch. I had read it three times before, but many years had passed since my last encounter with the book. I had not forgotten the broad sweep of the novel or its characters, but I could not have reproduced each one of the multiple plots in detail. And yet, the act of reading the book again triggered specific memories of what would come later in the same text. Rereading became a form of anticipatory memory, of remembering what I had forgotten before I reached the next passage. This suggests, of course, that reacquaintance unearths what has been buried. The implicit becomes explicit. Cognitive scientists have a term called “repetition priming.” They don’t give their subjects eight-hundred-page novels but various verbal tasks, and then much later quiz them on a list of words, for example, and others not previously seen. It is clear that even without any conscious awareness of their earlier exposure to the words, participants in the studies have unconscious recall and perform better than if they had not been primed.

But no reading experience, even of an identical text, is the same. I discovered ironies in Middlemarch I had not fully appreciated before, no doubt the product of my advancing age, which has been paralleled by the internal accumulation of more and more books that have altered my thoughts and created a broader context for my reading. The text is the same, but I am not. And this is crucial. Books are either unleashed or occluded by the reader. We bring our life stories, our prejudices, our grudges, our expectations, and our limitations with us to books. I did not understand Kafka’s humor when I first read him as a teenager. I had to get older to laugh at “The Metamorphosis.” Anxiety can also block access to books. The first time I tried to read Joyce’s Ulysses at eighteen, I worried so much about my ignorance that I couldn’t get through it. A couple of years later, I told myself to relax, to take in what I could, and the novel has become a vivid jumble of visual, sensory, and emotional memories that are dear to me.

Some readers read a book and wish it had been another, one closer to their own lives and concerns. Writers have the fortune (and sometimes misfortune) to encounter their readers, either in person or through reviews and academic articles. A reviewer of one of my books, The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves (which is about the ambiguities of diagnosis and how illnesses are framed in various disciplines) was annoyed because I did not address the sufferings of those who care for sick people. This particular subject was so entirely outside the book’s argument, I couldn’t help wondering if there wasn’t some personal reason for the reviewer’s irritation: she wanted a book about caretakers, not about the people stricken by an illness. Sometimes books get scrambled in memory. Not long ago, a friend of mine told me she had reread Catch-22, expectantly waiting for her favorite scene. It never came. Her guess was that two books had mingled in her mind. And the beloved passage? To what novel did that belong? She couldn’t remember.

Openness to a book is vital, and openness is simply a willingness to be changed by what we read. This is not as easy as it sounds. Many people read to solidify their own views. They read only in their own fields. They believe they know what a book is before they have opened it or they have rules they imagine should be followed and react with dismay if their predictions are dashed. To some degree, this is the nature of perception itself. Repetitive experience creates expectation, which shapes how we perceive the world, books included. In recent years a lot of work has been done on something called “change blindness.”4 Most of these experiments involve visual scenes in which large numbers of people fail to notice significant changes. For example, in a film: after a cut, two cowboys switch heads. Buñuel’s That Obscure Object of Desire makes use of this form of ingrained expectation: two very different-looking actresses play the same role, but many viewers failed to notice for quite some time that one woman was not the other.

Reading has its own forms of change blindness. We necessarily come to books of a particular literary genre—detective fiction, romance novels, memoirs, and autobiography—with prejudgments about what the work will be. And if we don’t pay attention, we may miss essential departures from the form and fail to recognize what is there. Similarly, ideas of greatness or badges of honor, such as prizes attached to a book, predispose readers to think well of what they are reading. As a high school student I remember reading and disliking Archibald MacLeish’s poetry. I remember thinking that something was wrong with me because the man had won every literary prize it was possible to win in America. I now believe my early opinion was right. I also no longer feel alone. MacLeish’s star has plummeted.

It also happens, however, that I recognize a writer’s intelligence or her fluid and elegant style, but I am left feeling very little else. Such books seem to evaporate almost immediately after I have read them. Experiences of powerful emotions linger in the mind; experiences of tepid ones don’t. Great books, it seems to me, are distinguished by an urgency in the telling, a need that one can feel viscerally. Reading is not a purely cognitive act of deciphering signs; it is taking in a dance of meanings that has resonance far beyond the merely intellectual. Dostoyevsky is important to me, and I can place him in Russian intellectual history. I can talk about his biography, his ideas, his epilepsy, but that is not why I feel so close to his works. My intimacy is a product of my reading experiences. Every time I remember Crime and Punishment, I relive my feelings of pity, horror, despair, and redemption. The novel is alive in me.

But books may also return from thought’s underground into the daylight without our knowing where they have come from. I know that when I write the books I have read are implicated in what I am composing. Even novels I have forgotten may come to play a role in the unconscious generation of my own texts. Exactly how books are carried inside us after we have read them is not well understood and varies from person to person. Most of us are not savants. Except for poems or passages we have actively memorized, the books we read are not fixed in recollection as complete texts that we can turn to as we would a volume on the shelf. Books are made between the words and spaces left by the writer on the page and the reader who reinvents them through her own embodied reality, for better and for worse. The more I read, the more I change. The more varied my reading, the more able I am to perceive the world from myriad perspectives. I am inhabited by the voices of others, many of them long dead. The dead speak, and they speak in shouts and whispers and in the music of their poetry and prose. Reading is creative listening that alters the reader. Books are remembered consciously in pictures and words, but they are also present in the strange, shifting rooms of our unconsciousness. Others, which for some reason have no power to rearrange our lives, are often forgotten entirely. The ones that stay with us, however, become us, part of the mysterious workings of the human mind that translates little symbols on a page into a lived reality.

2011