The mystique of reading

Reading has a je-ne-sais-quoi about it that always troubles the reasoning minds.

Source: Hippies Read Too

There is, of course, that insistent kind of reading, to which I often subscribe, which refuses to read the obvious. That, in itself, is an act of rebellion. It’s, if you trust me, a way of asserting a belief in the force of the almighty reader. But try as we might, strive as we might, the text is there with a reason. And that reason is to puzzle us. I don’t mean this in the sense of mystery novels, but in another, more general sense. I mean it in the sense of an encounter. All encounters which are not re-visitations (re-readings) are, of course, by definition, encounters with the unknown. Texts are no exception to the rule. Simply put, we never know what to expect. And that’s precisely what makes texts beautiful, worthy of our effort, interesting at all. Also – infuriatingly challenging. To someone who wants to swear that he/she has decoded the cultural means by which texts are formed and re-formed, i.e. written and read, this reality of the text that never clarifies its intentions is insufferable. The same applies to someone who is completely, unequivocally sworn to the idea of reader’s omnipotence. Their trust in that ability is a little too optimistic, a little too patronising.

But let us assume this was correct. Let us imagine a situation in which the reader, by some miraculous means, manages to get to the core of the game. Let us imagine that a text has been left with no place to hide, that we’ve nailed it, so to speak. So?

Cui bono?

There’s disappointment in revelation

Vilém Flusser said something to a similar effect about his technical images. He made the same supposition. He was in fact able to give good examples of this class of textual objects. When one watches tv, Flusser says, one is flabbergasted by the mystery of the medium. You’re familiar, I suppose, with the children’s puzzlement: how is it possible to reduce people and buildings to such a small size and, moreover, put them inside that box where they act as if they were real? It’s a valid puzzlement, is it not? Most will resolve this shock by suspending their disbelief. The classical solution of the deserter: flight, don’t fight. Pretend the danger didn’t exist. Act as if the difficulty has never been posed. It makes sense. Difficulty, as Yeats put it, wears you out. So why bother?

Source: Early Television Museum

But – adds Flusser – there’s another approach to the problem. It’s something akin to the attitude of the hero: he/she will hold the ground; he/she will fight, will face the difficulty, will get to the bottom of all this puzzlement. In the case of technical images, this is possible, if only at the end of some effort. All you need to know is the technicalities of image production. Once you’ve gained that knowledge you know that electric impulses replicate the images created in a studio and transport those replicas into your own tv set. You’ll know, now, that everything you’re watching is an illusion, that Plato was right, that you can point out with perfect precision the whole process of creation. No more mystique! You can, if everything comes to it, replicate the process, because you are enlightened.

But the bitter truth is this: enlightenment is disappointing. As in Jonathan Swift’s poem, once you remove the layers of makeup from a young lady’s face, you’re left with the horrible truth of her anatomy. And now you have to live with it! Now you have to be happy with the important discovery you’ve made! Congratulations!

The fog that protects signs

And this is only the materiality of texts that I’m talking about. I refuse to go into the metaphysical zone (may I call it that, simply to differentiate it from the material, ‘physical’ constituent: what with the pen and the paper, the computer keyboard and the printer, the videotext and the YouTube channel, and so on and so forth), for fear of not having a proper argument. I believe Flusser’s demonstration to be frightening enough to curtail any attempt at future arrogance on my part. Yes, I can exercise my free will, I can do violence to a text by making it mine (even if I hate the notion of taking-over – of colonising), but I need not be so outrageously arrogant as to ignore the many roads that lead to the text I’m reading into.

The body that reads

So let’s face again this assumption that one can read a text completely. Let’s face that with the evidence of – I don’t know – irony, double entendre, jokes, textual traps, hidden meanings, hermeticism. Etc. Etc. Plagues upon the lives of readers. Let’s do the facing, then let’s go back to the initial idea: the mystique of reading. And see what happens.

Source: Kurz Weil AI

I would define the mystique of reading by reference to that tickling sensation, to that tremor of the limbs, to that quickened heartbeat one experiences when encountering a passage that touches a nerve. Regarded from this perspective, reading is a seismic business. It causes real somatic reactions in a reading subject, palpable as all emotions. Put differently, reading relies on events to prosper. It needs to create those seismic movements just mentioned.

How boring would it be to go on perusing the surface of a flat desert where there’s no hope for an oasis? Very boring, indeed detrimental to all forms of reading. If there’s no projection of a reader’s expectations there’s no pleasure to be gained from a text. The page-turner argument is a perfect tool from this perspective.

In many cases, those sensations generated by a text are little more than a preamble to something that could be more important, more complex. But readers often reject the enlightenment that might reside in the decoding of a passage. They do this for various reasons. ‘We don’t have enough time’ is one of them. ‘We don’t have enough time to spoil our amazement’ is another one. Since reading marks a gap in the mundaneness of life, we might as well go with the wind, accept the chance of deserting.

This escapist theory doesn’t apply exclusively to literature. The reading of a philosophical text follows the same pattern. We read in order to see what happens next. How the argument develops, how the thought is turned into what it is. Since texts are defined by linear progression, there’s no way of avoiding this sense of expectation, this hope for what is to come. And as long as what-is-to-come exists, as long as this present absence titillates us, the possibility of reading’s mystique is unavoidable.

Dead ends

Reading appeals, I believe, precisely because it is such an interesting concoction of certainty and uncertainty. On the one hand the letters in front of my eyes. Always there, bright as daylight, sure as hell, immutable. On the other hand the invisible meaning. Somewhere else, always somewhere else, never on the page, never blinding my sight. The former engenders arrogance; the latter – humility. I mean humility in an almost religious sense. A reader is always a pious reader insofar as they accept the challenge of not challenging the text beyond the point of no return.

As in Flusser’s technical images, what would I gain if I managed to subject the text to my impulses? Nothing but a disappointment, no doubt. I would see the wires that connect the circuits, the strings that make the text stand together. And then what? Then nothing. Then a dead-end.

Mission accomplished followed by the despair of boredom.

Source: Screen Crave

That’s why the mystique of the text is so necessary; why it is so necessary that we stop where there’s still hope. Even if we’re not satisfied. Precisely because we’re not satisfied. Professional writers know exactly what I mean, because to them reading is no longer pleasure but something else. Not quite pain but certainly something else. A professional writer reads in order to rip the text apart, to see its entrails, to smell its guts, to watch the gore of its internal functions, and hereby to discover the ‘secrets’ of other writers. If there is pleasure in this insistence, it will fade the moment this reader asks the ordinary question, Now what? This question is inevitable in relation to any finite objects, because once an end has been reached continuation is craved.

But what a bliss that reading cannot produce finite understandings...

In defense of bad reading

I have a problem with the customary reproaches leveled against those who, it is said, don’t read seriously and in-depthly (apologies for the adverb but I couldn’t resist). Deep reading. Such an interesting concept! One that makes me think of diving rather than desk-bound perusal. But that’s just me.

Source: Contently

We want reading to be deep. That’s not all. We want all reading to be deep. All of it, page after page, book after book. We want our minds busy in an almost professional manner. Like academics, if you get my drift. Because academics – well, they know how to read well. Their reading is perfectly tuned. It can spot an intention, the hint of a meaning, no matter how small. The reading of an academic is able to tell you, on the spot, what the author truly wanted to say. You see how this kind of reading is x-ray-like. It can pierce through a book, it can see beyond the visible. Reading of this kind blooms like a flower that’s taking itself very, very seriously.

But there’s something to be said here, before we go mad with passion. A question. How many people do read a book with all these good intentions? Academics, students, scholars. Ok, all ticked. But who else?

Behind this question stands, obviously, the generalized concern I’ve noticed (and I’m sure I’m not the only one) with the perils of new technologies.

Hands-free reading

For a long time we complained, if I remember correctly, that not enough was being read. That books were waiting in vain to be picked up from their shelves by individuals too interested in watching tv or playing video games, or simply being couch-potatoes that fried slowly in the oil of their own apathy. Then something happened. (In the way technology comes about, it always seems as thought it has appeared out of the blue.) Tablets and smart phones came about, cloud storage and online databases, and now there’s more reading taking place than ever in the history of humanity. Are we satisfied, though? No. We’ve reformulated another complaint. Those who were not reading before are now reading incorrectly, inappropriately, irreverently even.

Source: Academic Sciences

The problem with this new complaint is primarily a strategic one. It belongs in the infrastructure of learning. How is one who wasn’t reading at all supposed to have learnt, by his/her own accord, to read like a pro? How? As we have agreed before, they’ve never had the tools to be Readers. Never. They never liked it, they never had that special chemistry within their souls, they never did what was necessary. Then why are we complaining about them? I’ll leave this question here (no need for an answer) because I’ve got another one at the ready. Haven’t we somehow forgotten that most readers read for a kind of pleasure that’s more akin to movie-watching and videogame-playing than to any highbrow objective? Take a look around. There are more readers at the beach, in a train or bus, on a bench in a park, in bathtubs and on toilet seats – than in the world’s libraries. Note: there’s nothing wrong with reading like that. What I mean to say is this: most readers do it because they want to relax. Reading like a pro is painful. It requires a pen or pencil in one hand, a library in the other (to find concordances, to draw parallels, to note down peculiarities of style and intertextual similarities). That’s why reading like a pro is usually limited to the pro.

The reader who seeks relaxation wants their hands free of any prosthetics. Hands-free reading is for fun. It is for giggling when a funny passage comes about, for the heartbeats to accelerate when suspense kicks in, for pallor to settle on one’s face when he/she comes across a horror scene.

One way of reading

The complaint against new readers comes from a minority group: the careful readers, the practitioners of close reading, the examiners for whom reading is not skimming but perusal, not browsing but inspection. This minority group forgets an essential aspect of the story they tell: they’re trained to read this way. They’ve spent hours and hours educating themselves, turning their attention from the easy bits or complicating the same to the point where they’re turned into something unrecognizable. These readers deal well with difficult texts because they’ve made those texts difficult. Self-flagellation is the favourite technique of the readers with busy hands. They don’t accept ease because, for some reason, ease comports the risk of stultification. It’s like looking at a horse that’s gone through expensive dressage and not seeing that the same animal is equally capable of pulling a cart.

Source: PsyBlog

With reading, though, the problem is that its high horses are taken for granted. There are rites of passage throughout school, various forms of taming and training, all meant to educate the reader, to make them sensitive to the finely tuned and the highly pitched. But what should happen with those who haven’t (for one reason or another) acquired the techniques that guarantee their acquisition of greatness? Those who have fallen through the cracks and yet still want to read a book the best they can? The best they can!

This is where my problem lies. In applying that one-size-fits-all adage that says, ‘a book can be read in a million ways.’ If that’s the case (and it must be!) then hands-free reading is also a form of reading. So let’s accept it. I don’t care that it doesn’t add value to the ontology of reading. I don’t care that it leaves the reader speechless at the end, incapable of articulating a thought, of formulating a cogent analysis. It’s a form or reading and that’s that.

A perversity

For those who want to reach depths, there’s room enough to develop their own passion. That’s because their reading is also one form of reading. It’s not the absolute form, it’s not the only one. The democracy of intellectual matters contains, like the democracy of politics, strong binary opposites: high and low, poor and rich, adventurous and timid.

What goes unacknowledged in this story is a simple fact of personal obligation: I must not impose my pleasure upon another subject. That would amount to tyranny. To perversity. I can draw attention to the fact that other options are likely to exist – that goes without saying. I can, if I am smarter, better equipped, luckier, I can point out the richness of the world of reading. But I must not talk about reading in terms of preferences. De gustibus et coloribus non est disputandum. I must not pull my nose in disgust when I hear another’s preferences. My likes cannot be another’s, unless by accident. If I belong in a community of interpreters (as Stanley Fish likes to put it), that belonging is the result of pure chance. It’s not unlike being born in a particular language.

Some texts reject me, so I write them

The most inspiring texts to me are not the ones that keep me immersed in them but the ones that refuse me, the ones that send me away.

Source: Search Engine Land

It happens this way: I read and I read and there’s nothing out of ordinary about my reading. I peruse with the mind to the text, open to its charisma, expecting the pleasures, watching for clues. But the mind that reads this way is that of a stranger. What I mean to say is ridiculously simple, beyond obvious: that through this type of reading I remind myself that I am not the author but only a reader. A stranger, indeed: someone who comes from without and whose likelihood to settle within is minimal. But some texts are more than that. Some texts fill me with that curious sentiment that I am the one who’s written them; that my reading of them right now is the reading of some draft I am in the process of editing. In these situations, I can’t stop thinking beside the actual text, ignoring it as it were, heading towards a conclusion that’s not the text’s but mine.

Drafting

A draft, always a draft. Which means, in essence, that I perceive incompleteness, imperfection, room-for-improvement. I have this knack for visualizing alternatives. When I read these texts I feel the urge to imagine how I would write them otherwise. Not better, not worse. Just differently.

A draft requires careful reading, i.e. the placing of care into the text. It requires me to care enough about the text to attempt to imagine it different. And so what happens next is this: I can no longer read. That’s because the urge is now in me, the urge of inspiration (I might call it that, for once).

I can imagine a point where there’s no more room for perusal, where continuing to read is a dangerous business. Dangerous because it can cause confusion. If I am not careful enough at this point, if I don’t pay sufficient attention, I risk unconscious plagiarism – which is the worst form of all, because it takes away the pleasure that comes with the stealing of something truly valuable. I know this because I’m familiar with those moments when one can remember with embarrassing accuracy a paragraph, a sentence, a phrase, but not their origin. When that happens I feel utterly incapacitated. My mind wants to find that place where everything happened first, and that desire is so strong that I can no longer concentrate. And so a frantic search starts, one that often leads nowhere but to exhaustion.

It’s much easier to plagiarize, I think, when you know exactly what you’re plagiarizing. It’s much harder to do it when you just happen stupidly upon a fragment you didn’t even know was in your head.

Drifting

So in those moments I can no longer read. I need to put the text aside and start my own text. I need to write because something in the original text tells me with the urgency of catastrophes that if I miss this opportunity I miss everything. And ‘everything’ is an incredibly ample concept sometimes.

My own texts are very often caused by texts I’ve been reading, and whose reading must be interrupted. Those texts, in their splendor, send me away. Away to the computer, away to the piece of paper and the pen. But also away from their substance (the texts’ substance).

Source: Red State

When I have to stop reading because I need to write there is no way back. I can no longer see the original text. Its presence panics me. I don’t want to have anything to do with it. Not anymore. I turn my back to it. I obliterate it. The fact that it exists disappoints me. And this is the very same text that caused inspiration in the first place.

Incredible, the ways of writing.

Textual determinism

It’s in moments like these that I see the agency that resides in texts, their ability to stir me into action. Not the authors. They don’t awaken me to the same awareness. I very rarely feel the need to praise an author for an affect brought up by their text. Authors are not interesting. Not in themselves. An author must be an author of something. Of a text. So the text is more imperative, more interesting. It’s what exists, what needs to be dealt with. It’s what possesses the capacity to determine my actions. Textual determinism – I might call it that.

With other texts, which are more silent, less reproachful than the ones that make me write, I have a different kind of relationship. With them I don’t. I don’t start anything, I don’t change anything, I don’t make an effort. When I read these texts I make notes on the margins. Sometimes. At other times I make no notes at all. Not even mental notes. These texts don’t ask for anything. And because of their silence I remain silent too. What I want to say is that I forget these silent texts. I forget them even while I’m in the process of reading them.

But the texts that speak to me are incredibly empowering. The very nerve to get away from them is evidence to this empowerment.

A case study

Speaking of notes. I do the following when I take notes at lectures, conferences, public speeches. (I used to do it when I was a student and I’m still doing it. Every time). I start the way everybody starts. I write down the words I hear. I give the speaker my time and space and reincarnate their words onto the page, my page. At this point I am fully occupied by the speaker’s speech. To put it differently, I follow their text. I pay tribute to their gesture, and with it I confirm their authority over the text, over the clarity of that text. I would not dare thinking of altering anything. Like a good journalist who obeys the rules of his profession and protects his sources, I strive for exactitude. Everything for a faithful rendition. Everything for loyalty. But then, all of a sudden, something happens. Suddenly, the speech I am listening to ceases to be clear. It becomes blurred. It fades slowly, until it reaches inaudibility. And then, I cannot hear it at all. Why? Because at that point I am already being forced to generate my own text.

What I think happens at that point is simple, albeit brutal. I snatch the original idea. I literally steal it, the way thieves sneak into the houses of the unaware to dispossess them of valuables. And once that idea is in my possession I run away with it.

It’s the grab, the seizing of the opportunity to write, that estranges me from the speech that keeps going on in the room, unheard by me but still alive to others.

Source: Hearts and Minds

And then I write. First, things directly related to the speech. Then gradually relevance fades. It too goes away. And so the original text gives in, and in its place comes my own text, my own speech. I end up, of course, writing things completely unrelated to the original situation. But it’s now, after having encountered and then immediately divorced the original text, that I find the right energy to write. As if the echo of the original text were contaminating me.

What do you know, this too might be some kind of disease.

Of classics, after all

In a short essay from 1981 (“Why Read the Classics?”), Italo Calvino says this about books: “If I read the Odyssey I read Homer’s text, but I cannot forget all that the adventures of Ulysses have come to mean in the course of the centuries, and I cannot help wondering if these meanings were implicit in the text, or whether they are incrustations or distortions or explanations.”

Source: University of Oxford

Calvino clarifies a couple of things. 1. That the classics are classics not because they’re fixed but because they’re mutable. 2. That a classic text is not only what it is but also (or mostly) what it has been made to be. The latter being due to the fact that a classic is read by many generations. But the fact of their readability across time is caused by being always young and restless. Which goes back under clarification no. 1, as above.

This is just to re-articulate the point in the quote.

Alterations

Since some of these classics require translations (having been written in a different language or in a time too distant to sustain comprehensibility), let’s briefly bring up translations. There are translations contemporary to the reader, as opposed to translations contemporary to the translator.

Consider the former (the latter will be made clear by contrast). Insofar as they don’t fall for the archaic fallacy according to which a text must sound the way it sounded to its original readers, these texts arrive at the meeting with us vested in the garb of novelty. They’re fresh and crispy, just off the production line, and aimed at a public that speaks the patois. These texts use the exact allusions that make a contemporary tick. Example: Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf isn’t impossible to read; it isn’t made difficult by impenetrable allusions. And that’s precisely because he made the poem sound intelligible to late-twentieth century readers.

“So. The Spear-Danes in days gone by
And the kings who ruled them had courage and greatness.
We have heard of those princes’ heroic campaigns.”

Classics in the language of us – is what Heaney’s Beowulf is in the first place. Not that we don’t need explanations every now and then. Far from it. With the passing of time, the world itself has changed and understanding the basics of fifth-century chieftainship or the dynamics of a narrative that mixes fact and fiction rather liberally is not, as they say, as easy as pie. But those explanations aren’t directions; they are illuminations. And what’s more, they don’t try to make the translator sound intelligent. They simply ease the reader’s way into a text that’s bound to be difficult.

Or do I wrongly understand the role of a translator?

Substitutes

But the classics pose yet another aspect: that the readers change their gears too, with or without a translator’s help. The transference of resonances depends, to a certain extent, on the idiosyncrasies of biological ages. Let’s call them generations, for lack of a better word. One of the most apparent distinctions is that between a text read in one’s youth and the same text read at maturity. The constant: the reader; he/she is the same. The variables: a) reading the text once in one’s tender years and once in the years of mature undertakings; b) reading the text once only, when one is young and presumably un-formed, wet behind the ears; c) reading the text once only, but at the age when wines are better sipped than drunk in quaffs. As we move through these categories we get to understand texts in different ways. The battle between generations may very well be just this: a disagreement over readings, an impossibility to sign a pact over the meanings of a text.

Source: Deviant Art

Let me quote some more from Calvino:

“In fact, reading in youth can be rather unfruitful, due to impatience, distraction, inexperience with the product’s ‘instructions for use,’ and inexperience in life itself. Books read then can be (possibly at one and the same time) formative, in the sense that they give a form to future experiences, providing models, terms of comparison, schemes for classification, scales of value, exemplars of beauty – all things that continue to operate even if a book read in one’s youth is almost or totally forgotten. If we reread the book at a mature age, we are likely to rediscover these constants, which by this time are part of our inner mechanisms, but whose origins we have long forgotten. A literary work can succeed in making us forget it as such, but it leaves its seed in us.”

It’s the wetness-behind-ears thing. How to get over it, how not to consider it inexperience that needs to be corrected, stupidity that requires to be schooled.

Educating the young in how a text must be read is like a joke that needs to be explained. If you didn’t get the point in the first place, you should be left to figure it out for yourself, and through this figuring out discover the pleasure that was there to be had in the first instance. Explain to someone how to read the joke and you’ve destroyed everything. The classics are, I think, in a similar situation. Let them be encountered at first hand, approached with the uncertainty and the scorn that come with the inevitable, irrefutable distance in time, in mores, in consciousnesses.

Don’t provide introductions, don’t go on with footnotes, don’t turn yourself into an academic reader unless you’re forced by the circumstances of your profession! These things kill a text. And to whose benefit? We peek into the indexes and appendices of books not because we’re stupid; it’s because the one who rendered them anew has made it necessary for us to do so. The mere presence of such apparatuses of understanding draws the readers towards them because the readers believe too much in the power of the printed text. Simple logic: why would an appendix be there if it didn’t mean to be considered?

Translators/editors of this kind try to educate us by placing inside the text clues of their own capabilities. They depart catastrophically from the text, by making us dependent on their skills rather than curious about the text’s qualifications. We read the translator’s curriculum vitae instead of perusing the actual text. We’re given crutches when nothing’s wrong with us, when we can navigate easily the seas that we have never sailed before.

Forgetting well

What one should get from Calvino’s words, therefore, is this realization that a classic text isn’t, as many are tempted to think, a guaranteed memory but precisely the opposite. A classic text is one that forces us to forget. To forget its letters, its words, its semantic juxtapositions. To remember it, however, by means that resemble the intricacies of DNA: a memory that stays in the depths of remembering.

Source: Synonym

A classic text is, therefore, anti-educational.

I grew up at a time and in a place where rote-learning was the only acceptable way. What I did learn from that was how to hate the texts I was supposed to love. Yes, I’ve learned those things. Yes, I still recite them when I find it relevant, because they’ve been fixed between my synapses and refuse, by some chemical miracles that take place in my brain, to let go of me. But that doesn’t mean I have enjoyed them the way they (my teachers) thought I was going to enjoy the incident of the encounter. This, in fact, was the central problem: that the meeting with those texts was not at all an encounter. It had been prepared, premeditated, pre-designed, or as they say about old DVDs they sell in DVD stores, pre-loved.

Calvino again:

“The classics are books that exert a peculiar influence, both when they refuse to be eradicated from the mind and when they conceal themselves in the folds of memory, camouflaging themselves as the collective or individual unconscious.”

It’s the influence that matters: an influence that matters. Not just any dictation will make one a good writer, a good reader. Calligraphy classes make you a good calligrapher, but not a good novelist. Rote-learning of a text makes you a good reciter but not a good reader. I’m on Calvino’s side even when he speaks of books that “refuse to be eradicated from the mind.” Provided we’re talking about something that’s been acquired, not given by force (as it were), like a gift pushed into our pockets while we’re screaming that no, we don’t want it.

Flaubert and a metaphor for reading

There is a sense of exploration in every gesture of reading. That’s because the author is there too, refusing to leave it all to the reader’s caprice, purposefully confusing things so as to provoke the instinct of discovery. But the readers aren’t all that brave, all that willing to expose themselves to the unknown. Note the customary reaction to new forms of writing, new genres, new authorial quips. They’re to be taken as the true measure of a reader’s resistance to novelty. Newness is accepted only if it has enough doses of familiarity in it. If it doesn’t, then most readers will wait for the dregs to settle and for taste to do its work of persuasion; only then will they embrace the once-novel, now anything but new but at least palatable, tasty.

Source: Look and Learn

If I were to stick with the metaphor of exploration, I’d say the reader goes about reading with a machete in one hand, cutting through a jungle forever unknown to them, but in the other hand carrying a map, which helps them to go about in search of something that's already been there – not in the text but in the reader’s mind.

The great anticipation

Gadamer said once that we read seeking a meaning we've already sent forth, and which we're playing with like a cat with its mouse, postponing the fatal thrust. In our case: taking delight in prolongation, in procrastinating the obvious (the meaning we know it's there). We tease the text because we want to maximize the pleasure it is capable of producing. We want to make sure that the trip has been worth taking, that we haven’t travelled all the way to the end of a text for nothing.

But there's a trick to this inductive/deductive method that concerns reading. In the process, our assumptions nibble at our reserves of patience, weakening them as pages upon pages get turned. There are moments when the pressure of getting there, the anticipation of the moment of bliss, has consequences over our physiological selves. Our heartbeats accelerate, our pupils widen, our hands shake. No, I am not fantasizing. Most readers would be hard at ease to deny these bodily transformations; the somatics of reading demand that we progress through pages with our bodies wired to high-voltage apparatuses that translate words into anticipation and anticipation into pleasure. I’ll say only one word and I’ll refrain from going into details about it: orgasm.

Reading is, generally speaking, a way of satisfying an anticipation. The moment when we meet face to face with the meaning is all that matters. Suspense is caused precisely by this expectation, by this curiosity to see what’s on the verso. The curiosity to see if the next page is bringing us any closer to what we know is there, in the book, in the text.

The great satisfaction

A lot of writers aim towards satisfying this anticipation. Most of them do it unknowingly. Many see where they need to go in order to achieve the right effect. Few actually get there. Flaubert achieved it in Madame Bovary. The famous cab scene. There, the reader is trapped in their own anticipation. They take the bite (the promise of witnessing an erotic scene) and follow the cab, in fact following Flaubert. The characters (Léon and Emma) don't really matter. They are invisible and will stay invisible throughout. Only every now and then a hand appears (arousal!), pieces of paper fall out it (loss of self-control!), the cab goes on and on (yes, the act is what we're imagining: detailed, conspicuous, delicious, illicit). The urban landscape pops in too (not as a prop but as a container). What really is to be enjoyed there is the author's art. Flaubert teasing us. Flaubert wagging the carrot under our flared nostrils. All we do is partake in the game, anticipating his understanding of our anticipation, buying it from Monsieur Gustav Flaubert, the merchant specialized in products for readers' compulsions.

I like the sound of all those streets that mark the progression of the love-bearing cab. They create rhythm but more importantly, they create connections between sites, i.e. between texts:

“The cab was seen as Saint-Pol, at Lescure, at Mont Gargan, at La Rouge-Mare and Place du Gaillardbois; in the Rue Maladrerie, Rue Dinanderie, before Saint-Romain, Saint-Vivien, Saint-Maclou, Saint-Nicaise – in front of the Customs, at the ‘Vieille Tour,’ the ‘Trois Pipes,’ and the Monumental Cemetery.”

The vehicle (a moving object) links these places otherwise lost in the sole logic of urban development. It puts these sites in a new context: an amorous context, a context of textures and striations.

And the reader goes on, their eyes following the lines of the perambulatory text in the same way in which the inhabitants of Rouen follow the passing of the cab up and down the streets. Their eyes are amazed. They are engaged, curious, suspicious, scandalized, nosy, offended, apprehensive, desiring, flabbergasted, tolerant, contemplative, expectant, eager, impatient, excited, puzzled, concerned, intrusive, interested, analytical, investigative, rational, lucid, realistic, shrewd, prudent, wise. In other words, they are everything that a reader can be. They know what’s going on – of course they know, those citizens of Rouen, even though Flaubert tries to suggest otherwise. He does it for the sake of irony, of course, one of the many things he’s so good at:

“And on the harbor, in the midst of the drays and casks, and in the streets, at the corners, the good folk opened large wonderstricken eyes at this sight, so extraordinary in the provinces, a cab with drawn blinds, and which kept on coming into view, shut more closely than a tomb, and tossing about like a vessel.”

“The good folk,” the swift-eyed good folk of all provinces, stop their daily routines like a bunch of readers lined up to encounter the text that’s just arrived in town, freshly out of the writer’s hand, strolling the avenues of a book. I take this scene as a glorious metaphor for readership.

Source: Lecturas Sumergidas

Writing and reading: two cases of crass infidelity

If we agree that the reader, in his distant majesty, is an unwelcomed guest (since invitation can only be extended to someone you knew beforehand), what can we say about the writer? In this landscape where the-one-who-comes-after reigns supreme, what is left to be said about the one-who-comes-before?

The reader, we say, is the great infidel of the text. His/her beliefs, his/her predetermined acceptance or refusal of texts, are issues all writers have to deal with, whether they do so consciously or not.

Two ends of a spectrum

So the central point is this commitment to the text. The text, this in-between, this only thing that matters, this only point of junction between a reader who misbehaves and a writer who should not expect anything better! This is the crux of the matter. And every approach to the text, whether from the readers' quarters or the writers' camp, will have to be situated in such a way as to ratify one of the two forms of fidelity.

Now, as I've intimated, the reader is not exactly a follower of the text. Or rather, the text formed in the reader's mind is not necessarily in conformity to the primary text.

The author, of course, stands at the other end of the spectrum of infidelities. While the reader is given to an excess of self-affirmation, he/she is one whose excess is in preparation.

The writer's table is full, and the meals are hearty and exceptionally sweet. That's because, not unlike a handler of fly-traps, the author partakes in the game so as to set a trap for readers; to bring them to the text and keep them glued there for as long as possible.

Source: Amy Wilson

In order for this feast to be acceptable the writer is required to set the table well before the encounter. The best dishes are, of course, those prepared so as to please the palate of virtual party-comers. The writer, as a chef, knowing full well that this is the case, will have to adapt their recipes so as to come as close as it gets to the dietary requirements of their paying customers, the readers.

There are secret ingredients, of course: things thrown into the pot to make the dish sweeter. Some of them are visible (and therefore easy to imitate), while others depend on downright guesswork. But the truth is one: they will have to feature on the plate. The writer will have to handle them properly, or else they’re lost in the footnotes of one’s reading list.

Generous or not: the writer’s choice

Quantities may differ, yes. At the end of the day writing is not the obstinate application of an identical recipe, since (among other things) we are not all eaters of French fries. Just by way of an example…

But if we take popularity as a measuring rod, it wouldn't be hard, would it, to recognize that the most appreciated texts are those most peppered with ingredients dear to the readers' palates. The more generous an author is in this department, the more they will reap the harvest of success. And let's not talk here about big names and pretend they have acquired their reputation by the shear value of their work. We know it's not like that. We know that popularity has to have taken place at some point along the way. Otherwise no Shakespeare would have ever shown up.

Proof? Yes. Who, outside of academic circles, has the vaguest memory of Thomas Kyd or Thomas Nashe? Would you know how to spell their names if you only heard them mentioned somewhere? Who finds it relevant to mention the names of those who collaborated with Big Will for the writing of some of his plays?

Source: WFPL News

But this may be beside the point. I was talking about writers who give generously to their readers. Parsimonious authors, on the contrary, are poorly read by others. Those who spend little time getting ready for the encounter with the reader won't fare too well; geniuses or not. As pointed out by Roland Barthes, who saw in the reader an anti-hero of misbehavior, in texts capable of generating pleasure the author is required to pay tribute to the reader's capacity to pay back in reading currency:

“The text you write must prove to me that it desires me.”

Now, don't think of the author as a slave who labors all day long to satisfy the appetite of a gourmand whose only business is to throw interminable tantrums. The author also has a life of their own, where the reader has no access. But the evidence is heavily one-sided. As Alberto Manguel says, just to set the record straight:

“Readers are bullies in schoolyards and in locker-rooms as much as in government offices and prisons.”

So there.

A tale of two egotists

The author is always on the ready for the coming of the reader, which is a premediated coming, an effort to lure. So saying that he's taken by surprise by the arrival of the boor who peruses their text is utter nonsense. The author does everything in his/her power to assure that the text is read, that there are readers to partake in the pleasure of this perusal. In other words, writers do all they can to make sure they are appreciated. Sounds narcissistic? It is. Because yes, when all chips are down the author will be minding their own game. Stuff the reader! They can do their own dance all they want; I'll have my own. This is what the thinking mind of the writer thinks. Although, perhaps, not too many will admit to it.

Thinking this way is not only honorable, it is also a very practical way of putting the problem. Because way down, in the remotest recesses of their consciousness, writers know that this is their only real chance, their only true shot. If they want to achieve immortality they need to impregnate their readers with it. So readers is what they need: delivering bodies, pregnant souls, wombs that hold the offspring of their otherwise-invisible talents.

Every writer must learn this truth of their dependence on reading, and they do so very early in their career. Hence the notion of implied audience. At the same time, readers grow accustomed to their special status as soon as they figure out their ways of reading a rebours. Hence the notion of reading as a creative gesture.

Source: Huffington Post

So you can see how terribly selfish both readers and writers are. They perform their acts while their minds fall back upon their own interest. Forever and ever. As a consequence, the success of any writing venture depends on how the two egotists merge to agree first and foremost on the relation that emerges between them at a given time. The merging point is where the parties meet and greet or meet and growl. Whatever the effect of the encounter, what becomes of real importance is the negotiation of this very slippery relationship that emerged at an uncalled-for moment, in the form of an uncalled-for address.

Let’s not love reading more than it deserves

As the reader approaches a text from a perspective that's independent from that of the author, it wouldn't take much to label him/her as an individual who is simply running their own interests to the detriment of the author. Although this statement is too harsh and certainly reductive, it is not overly-exaggerated either. By virtue of their own nature, the reader plays this comedy of errors where misreading is a crucial trick, the core of the very feat of text production.

Source: BBC

But the reader is not only a schemer. He doesn't only exist to ruin the author's dinner party with their ill manners and irreverent antics. The reader is also a skimmer.

Reading on the surface

Readers don't read whole texts; they don't peruse entire literatures, don't ingest shelves upon shelves of books. Look at what’s achieved after a lifetime of reading, multiply it by ten, and you’re still only beginning to see the extent of one’s volume insofar as this illustrious business of reading is concerned.
If anything, a reader's effort is not quantifiable in numbers of pages read a day, a week, a month, a lifetime. The worth of this effort is measured in the extent (some would say "depth," but I find the word somewhat eroded) of one's understanding. Because there's no point in reading if the text remains unread. What’s more, not-understanding is also part of the equation; and when comprehension yields negative results, quantity turns sour.
So let’s not think in terms of numbers.
Let’s not turn this activity into an event of mythical proportions that no reader should be associated with. As an activity of the intellect, reading depends on the brain and on the mind's capacity to retain information. That, in itself, is enough to put us on a track of relativization insofar as the cultural myth of the encyclopedic mind is concerned. While it may be reassuring to think that humankind has this ability injected into the members of its species to keep intact all the information ever encountered, the possibility of that to take place is null. Of course, there are individuals whose minds are great containers, who, like heroes of Olympus, can boast thousands of pages given to memory, millions of words recited without the faintest hiccup. But that doesn't prove a iota about the species. The great majority of us are still within the natural limits of the average mind, struggling with phone numbers, let alone difficult passages from Shakespeare or the German Idealists.
In fact, the very idea of an encyclopedia is proof of the fact that storage doesn't take place inside a reader's mind but outside it. It’s in the book that everything can be found; it’s for the sake of the book’s capacity to preserve texts that the writing of it was done in the first place. Insofar as there is a dictionary, one will never have to fall prey to any passion for definitions. Insofar as there is a cookbook, nobody should learn by rote the list of ingredients and cooking methods. Learning by rote is only a personal feat, and it should stay that way, whereas cooking a fine meal depends on how you can transform the recipe (always theoretical text, always a reference point) into a palpable dish.

Reading for the network

The evidence that someone's an effective and efficient reader is not in how much they can reproduce (venturing to premise that one can only reproduce something one has read). What is truly important here is the ability to create connections between the bits read at various points in time. A truly great readerly mind is a systemic mind; a mind given to the creation and maintenance of networks of texts.
When one reads, one enjoys the rediscovery of precedents. But those precedents are not present as monoliths. On the contrary, it is bits and pieces that one retains from something one has carefully perused. This means that reading is the successive addition of texts to texts. Reading depends on reading. To be able to read, one must have already read. Not the same text, but some (never all) texts that make up the present text's environment: its textuality. Hence the familiar conclusion that every text is intertext; that no text is ever isolated, simply because its reader is not isolated either.
So the pleasure of the reader is, indeed, acquired from being able to connect. Being able to say "I've seen this before" gives more satisfaction than the discovery of something entirely new. Not to mention the fact that complete newness is not enjoyable; it works against our instincts of conservation and against the basic need for comfort we acquire from treading pathways trodden by others – or even by ourselves, in earlier instantiations of our lives as readers.
This is when our capacity to memorize is most gratified: when, out of the nebulous hodge-podge of accumulated experience, where nothing stands out unless it is intentionally brought into the foreground, we pick out this particular episode, this particular fraction of a text, which we had thought forever lost, never preserved.
The anxiety of reading is to be found when, at the end of a novel, for instance, sometimes even the names of the protagonists are not immediately retrievable. This is also the moment when the reader experiences doubt of their own intellectual capacity. But this is a wrongly perceived problem, an anxiety with no justification, because nobody reads a text with the express intention of turning it into the cells of their own blood.

Source: Burak Arikam

Not even the most fundamentalist readers of a text can imagine a world where no other text is possible. The whole of life would stand to prove them wrong. The fact that fundamentalists insist on the importance of a single text ("Sola Scriptura," a dictum so utopian it must hurt) proves, to my mind, a deeply seated anxiety in relation to the alternative texts that compete for one's attention along with the text considered fundamental. Indeed, the struggle to read one text alone is a struggle to eliminate all other texts from the epicenter of one's experience; and that is a very unnatural striving, one with little chances of success.
It is more natural and perhaps more realistic to think of writing as a process of interactivity. The way present texts interact with earlier texts when I keep my mind and eye on a particular page is the only valid proof there is that I am a reader, one who never allows the present text to obliterate the texts that are not immediately present but which have effectively seeped into my intellectual capacity to read – to recognize a text when I see one.

The reader, my guest

Addressed in the second person, the reader is always a guest. But a guest who is given the freedom to mess up with the dishes and to turn tables upside-down.

A reader who behaves well is not a happy situation. A reader who respects the author too much and has perfect table manners every time he sits at the author's feast is an epigone, an imitator. He does everything for the author but nothing for the text. And in this equation that we're interested in it's the text that matters, because it's in the text that the author's survival can be hoped for. But it is also in the text that the author is at his most fragile. It's in the text that the author is most exposed. That is why readers find it so easy to impose themselves upon a text. Every reading is a different reading, as the saying goes.

So again, one needs to be rude to be a good reader. In fact, let's face it: the reader is a parasite. He or she feeds on the body of a text and the carcass of an author who has worked hard to produce that text. So we should know from the very beginning that nothing in the order of politeness can be expected from such a boor, from such a scavenger.

But the parasite, this one and only guest at the feast of an author who's given his all, is, funnily enough, the author's only ally. The reader, in his impoliteness, doesn't treat the text as a non-entity. That would be the job of a non-reader, if I’m allowed this simple thought. The text perused by the one who reads it is very much present in the reader's body. The body of work that makes up his or her ecosystem is a body that accumulates reading experiences. A reader is made up of all the texts they have read. Like Giuseppe Arcimboldo's bust of the Librarian, which is a conglomerate of carefully ordered books, the reader too is an atlas of texts. This means that every text is taken carefully. It is read with the intention of enlarging the collection. Of course, as in all collections, some pieces will be valued more, some will be valued less. But none of them will be disregarded. Not even those that have been disrespected, abused, desecrated, murdered. Those more than the highly valued ones, because in order for one to have high regard for an object one needs to have a perfect understanding of the objects of a lesser value. In order to parade with my estimation of haute cuisine I need to know what living on instant noodles is like. Otherwise I would have no point of reference. And so, when I happen upon a sample of haute cuisine I have no idea what miracle I have just encountered. The biblical saying "Do not throw your pearls to pigs" has its origins precisely in this phenomenon.

Source: Colour Music

So it's in the estimation of the marginal that we are to understand the strength of the essence.

The parasite, as an outsider, has this ability to articulate for the body everything that the body has been taking for granted. That's why the speaker of a foreign language can see the shortcomings of the new language, as well as its creative potential, more so than a native speaker of the same. The former comes to the new language as a parasite. He/she attempts to learn the language not by showing respect to it but by defiling it. They learn this language by doing violence to it. But it is in this violence that the language finds the way of moving on, of evolving into something it was not when approached by the native speaker (who is, in the strictest of senses, an epigone, a mere imitator). It is with the Barbarian, therefore, that the hidden potentials of language become apparent, because the Barbarian has no reason to pay homage to something that’s not his/her own. Derrida says this:

“When you introduce something into language, you have to do it in a refined manner, by respecting through disrespect its secret law. That's what might be called unfaithful fidelity: when I do violence to the French language, I do so with the refined respect of what I believe to be an injunction of this language, in its life and in its evolution.”

The Barbarian who comes to the new language with the intention to spouse it does so with a clearly preconceived intention of being unfaithful.
The same happens to reading in general (if only for the fact that learning a new language is a way of reading). Reading makes room for the text to expand, to grow to a proportion never intended by the author.

Writing to address the reader

I want to talk a little about the relationship between writing and rhetoric, because the two are tied in a bundle often taught together in schools and which, therefore, makes them impossible to separate.

The rhetorical aspect of writing consists, of course, of its intention to persuade. To persuade, i.e. to change the state of someone's mind. Where someone should be understood as a generic addressee: an individual, a mass, a culture, the whole world of writing and reading.

The address

There is, in persuasion, an unpronounced resistance to utterance. The addressee doesn't want or doesn't expect to be addressed. The address takes place in a call-for-attention that is in itself uncalled-for.

Source: Rock Surfers

So writing comes about as a duty to formulate a truth in such a way as to render this resistance inoperational. If you know how to write down a demand, it will grab your reader even if he/she was utterly uninterested in what you wanted to say in the first place. This would be, in rough terms, the primary principle of rhetoric.

There is this anecdote in Amélie Nothomb's Life Form, where the protagonist tells the story of how she learnt the art of addressing audiences.

“Already at the age of six I was forced by my parents to write one letter a week to my maternal grandfather, a stranger who lived in Belgium. My brother and my older sisters were subjugated to the same regime. Each of us had to fill an entire letter-sized page addressed to this gentleman. He answered with one page per child. ‘Tell him what happened at school,’ my mother would suggest. ‘He won’t be interested,’ I retorted. ‘That depends on how you tell it,’ she explained.”

The grandfather is, obviously, a character in the background, someone who's not here and now – a distant audience of the kind all forms of writing must take into account when they play the game of persuasion. But what is of utmost importance in Nothomb's allegory is the problem of the address itself. Note that the grandfather has never asked for those letters. Even if he had (the novel doesn't show this to have been the case), the situation wouldn't change, because what is certain is that the demand to address him (the demand formulated for the author of letters) comes from elsewhere. It is the mother who operates as the one who calls for writing. This demand is an external demand, something called-for by the present rhetorical situation, in which the grandfather represents the invisible, mute, unknown reader.

And so, in the first place, the writer is moved by puzzlement. The writer doesn't know what stands before her. The writer is taken by surprise by this demand for an address that is uncalled-for.

Behind this puzzlement is the reality of the fact that the writing act comes about not only without knowing its invisible-but-present audience, but that it also comes about as an addressed unpreceded by a call. Most of the books of the world have been written as the world had no need for them. In order for a need to become apparent, one has to be aware of that which is desired; one has to know it. I desire that which I do not have, but which I can see present in the world: unattainable by me, and therefore desirable, but desirable because already-seen. So a text that doesn't exist in the first place cannot be wanted. Lists of books-to-read work precisely because those books exist and the would-be reader knows of their existence.

The desire of persuasion

With persuasive writing, the desire is that of convincing an audience that appears to the writer as a nebulous presence: something we are sure exists out there, but which we cannot immediately associate with our own writing act.

Source: Pick1

In other words, the fact that there is an audience doesn't mean that this audience is my audience. To make this audience mine I need, first and foremost, to come forward with a request to have its attention. Ladies and gentlemen is that kind of formulation. Neither the ladies nor the gentlemen are known to me, the utterer. They are just common nouns – known to exist but not bound to listen to my utterance or to read my argument. Writing comes to address precisely this lack of connection between me and my audience. It is through writing that the connection is written: formulated the way all uncertainties are formulated, by means of a call into a rhetorical void. Everything that follows will be fairly easy to perform once the audience is here, with me, walking along, nodding, turning their eyes towards the elevation whence I pronounce my address.

Offerings

Because the reader is unknown and must be brought to the table, he/she needs to be offered something. The address of writing is, in essence, an offering to the reader. I need to give something away in order to gain my audience. I need to tickle the indifferent spirit of my audience in order to make it aware of my presence. That's why the beginnings of all written texts need to be renunciations of the author's essential hermeticism, his/her unavoidable reference to a self that is not translatable, not understandable without mediation. To put it otherwise, by writing I make concessions to my reader by facilitating their understanding of me (and my text); i.e. I cannot remain sufficient to myself. My writing marks a rupture in my self.

In this respect, all texts are rhetorical, even those that don't purport to be exercises in persuasion. A shopping list is the visible form of the desire present in me but invisible to the exterior. A shopping list is an interesting exercise is writing, because it takes its very author as its audience. Of course, the purpose of the writing act (because purpose stands on an equal footing with the address) is to store information that is threatened by the plague of forgetting. But at the same time it is (and the shopping list shows it without a shade of doubt) a way of pointing out to the self that the items written on the list are truly desired.

Once I see potatoes on my shopping list I can swear I need potatoes.

Saying it well

Things may be more complicated when it comes to literary productions, or the highly-elaborated productions in the department of rhetoric and persuasion. But in essence they are similar to the situation described by the shopping list. The author puts forth a call for recognition that the reader needs to read accordingly. If the reader fails to read, the text has two options: it will either be horribly misread and therefore killed, or it will be read differently, and therefore brought to life. But in both instances, the separation from the writer is immediately apparent. After the address, anything is likely to happen.

Source: MC's Whispers

This is why eloquence is so important. Eloquence, or well-saying, is the means by which utterances are formulated so as to make sure they hit their target. The target, i.e. the audience. Eloquence is the long-exercised aim in a game of archery in which the arrows are always shot in the dark.

Knowing-your-audience, the desideratum of all rhetorical situations, is therefore nothing but a red herring. There's no such thing as knowing your audience. Simply because your audience isn't there for you to see, and neither is it there unchanged, set in stone, like a fruit waiting to be picked. Audience is not even something to be named in the singular. Audience is multiplicity: it evolves constantly, sometimes exactly while it is being addressed. Not only that, but the text itself can be approached by audiences never considered by the writing subject. What's more, some of these audiences do not approach my text in its totality but only for the parts that serve their present interest or curiosity.

Faced with these perfectly volatile conditions, writers are forced to return upon the address as the only real chance of making a move. Their ability to call for attention is the only weapon to be used in this battle of the spirits. Their act is not a statement of power but an invitation. They do not conquer, but offer to sacrifice. And this offer to sacrifice happens, oddly enough, when nobody is requesting it. Isn't writing quite something, then!