The rules of reading

You know how the way we read certain books and certain authors influences to a certain extent the way we understand them. I mean, we read books according to what they are supposed to be. It may not always be a critical process, but it’s nonetheless very conscious. On a rarefied level, there are, say, the Talmudic readings–dating from the fifth and sixth centuries BC in Babylonia and Palestine up till the standard scholarly edition of the Talmud was produced in the late 19th century–and the Kafka readings because Kafka is perhaps the only writer who has been read in so many ways by so many different people. For a while there (and I’m not alone in this sort of reading, I think), I thought “Metamorphosis” was an urban legend comedy and subsequently found it very funny–all those bugs, you see. Jorge Luis Borges read the story as a restatement of Zeno’s paradoxes. Vladimir Nabokov read it as an allegory on adolescent Angst. George Lukacs dismissed it as a trashy bourgeois novel. So on, so forth.

On a more basic level, we read books according to what the author or publisher or–that most discerning of personages–another reader says about them. Your elementary school teacher says “Pilgrim’s Progress” is a religious allegory so of course you read it expecting to be preached at and, if you’re snotty enough, likewise prepared to count and categorize sundry symbologies. “Noli Me Tangere” is supposed to be an exhaustive nationalistic manifesto so you come away from it thinking that Jose Rizal should be read simply because he’s such a patriot and you forget the fact–because it is non-existent to you–that he is also such a novelist. Someone recommends Richard Burton’s “The Anatomy of Melancholy” as a Christian catechistic text to you and you won’t sleep at all wondering what everloving crack they were on.

There are epistemological rules for reading and all of them are contained in this multiplicity. Readers create their readings and their readings create stories. There’s an interesting theory by Wolfgang Kayser as to how literary genres may have been derived from the three persons that exist in every known language: I, You, He/She/It. A not implausible extension of this theory is how readers invent genres to situate stories based on how these stories address them, based on what they think the author is addressing, based on what they think should be addressed, based on what they know is not addressed at all.

On the other hand, one might also say that books create their readers, and in the case of some books, there’s something almost fateful in this dialectic. Was it Borges who speculated about the existence of a perfect reader? The sort of reader who, upon first reading a book, immediately penetrates its core, for whom any notion of criticism is replaced by a mystical and perfect understanding of the book’s contents in a way that even the author cannot hope to intuit. It sounds slightly ridiculous, doesn’t it? You will have to breed–or invent–a perfect reader since I don’t believe the skill can be acquired even through the most rigorous of apprenticeships (going by the existence of literary critics). It’s a fun prospect, though. Imagine applying for tenure or a position as a literary reviewer armed with a certificate stating that you are genetically programmed to be a Perfect Reader (especially wired in the ways of postmodern theory).

Until such time that these literary messiahs decide to make their presence known, though, the most we can all aspire to is to be great–if flawed–readers. I was talking about James Joyce a few entries back and I think that “Ulysses” is one of those works with such a vocational quality, I mean in terms of challenging its readership. Reading “Ulysses” demands commitment, intelligence and an awful lot of energy. There are readers who disdain the novel because they either distrust Establishment opinion or because they have very set expectations of what a story should be, and “Ulysses” certainly violates a lot of norms in this respect. But that’s precisely where the challenge lies. Reading is a satisfactory activity, but it can also be–with an attentive and even unconventional level of commitment to a text– truly rewarding. “Ulysses” generated new forms and techniques of reading. I first read it when I was eleven or twelve and didn’t understand a word (I did also mention that our school had a very eccentric collection) and kept reading it since then. I can write an entire book about how I ‘learned’ to read the novel though I suppose there’s already an entire cottage industry of such books, which just goes to show.

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June 17, 2007 Written by: tin | Filed Under Latest, Miscellany

Comments

One Response to “The rules of reading”

SF Signal on June 27th, 2007 5:30 am

SF Tidbits for 6/27/07…

David Louis Edelman (Infoquake) lists Introductory Science Fiction Books for Literary Readers. At SciFi Wire, John Joseph Adams profiles Liz Williams, author of Precious Dragon. SFF World interviews Ian McDonald, author of Brasyl. Lou Anders has sold a…

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