Ruined By Reading

by Lynne Sharon Schwartz

  To recognize desire is itself a reading of the body. Every twinge and throb, every quickening of the pulse and melting of the muscles is a message to be deciphered. As infants we read such messages instinctively, then quickly forget how. Learning to read words on the blackboard echoes that early, crucial reading of ourselves. It feels familiar, déjà vu. But because it starts with figuring out signs and giving proper answers, we mistake its nature for cerebral. On the contrary, true reading is sensuous: words, with their freight of connotation, speed through us unrestrained, suggesting unimagined possibilities, a future cut loose from settled expectations. And once the mind is set free by that dashing, dazzling act of reading, the recognizing of desire—unmasking the false and unearthing the true—can become instantaneous again, like not having to move your lips or sound out the words. The whole body, radiating from the heart, is attuned to sensation, waves us on or warns us off like a semaphore. We cannot always follow, but at least we are not deluded, at least there is clarity. We know how to read anew, to distinguish our own signs and meanings.

  Quite the opposite is reading to confirm what we already know, who we have resolved or consented to be. Yes, we nod, settling the brain into a stiff smugness, that’s pretty much what I thought I’d find. Naturally. We would find it anywhere, because we bring it with us. Readers with a particular agenda to support or advance—Marxists, Freudians, feminists, to name the strongest—are most susceptible, for reading this way clarifies and reinforces ideology. But everyone does it to some extent. My parents did it when reading The Trial, as I did when I urged it on them, for with my agenda at the time, value was conferred by being listed in a college catalogue. In this seductive mode we are not so much reading as rewriting. The book is not happening to us; we are happening to it. It is to a book’s greatest credit that it can withstand such repeated onslaughts and remain serenely intact, ready for the next assailant or, with luck, the next reader.

  That brand of reading has nurtured the popular critical distinction between text and subtext. When I hear books called texts I feel a pang, as if family treasures were being relegated to the distant airless safe-deposit box. Who ever curled up happily to spend the evening with a text? For that matter, what writer ever set out to write one? The critics would reply that the work becomes a text once it leaves the writer’s hands, but isn’t that a form of sophistry? Even the Supreme Court has acknowledged that the fate of a work of art and the uses to which it may be put belong in the control of the artist.

  No, the businesslike use of the word “texts” for stories or poems is undeniably punitive, dismissive. We address people more formally than usual when we feel disapproval or distaste; we take an aloof tone with irksome children. Just so coolly does Prince Hal cut Falstaff, and the audience winces.

  What is wrong with being unashamedly a novel or a poem? What offense could they have committed to so alienate the critics? Clearly the poor work of imagination has sunk to demimondaine status, someone we might relish visiting in private, like Swann with Odette, but cannot publicly acknowledge—although Swann, man of the heart as he is, not only acknowledged Odette eventually but married her, which in critical circles would be the equivalent of Jacques Derrida’s confessing he simply adored a certain novel, he couldn’t quite justify it but it touched his heart. This would be a little foolish and impractical, it could cause talk and snickers, yet it would open the door of a stifling room to some fresh air.

  I first heard the companion word, “subtext,” used around writing workshops. I was puzzled, but briefly; it is not an opaque word, not one you need to look up in the O.E.D. If there is a text, naturally there can be a subtext. A peculiar tendency of Western thought is that everything sooner or later is perceived in terms of surface and subsurface; we rarely trust that what we see is the real or the entire thing. Like paranoiacs, behind an innocuous surface we infer a threatening intent (seldom the other way around). We love tales of disrobing (Salomé), of unmasking, of mistaken identity. Of course many things are obscure and require penetration. I am not suggesting we stop at immediate impressions, merely that positing a hierarchy of surface and subsurface can complicate perception. What is hidden does not arise from a built-in perversity or coyness in the nature of things (or books). The veil may be in our eyes. In Eastern thought both the apparent and the obscure are immanent. Nothing is “wrong” or tricky with the way things present themselves. If we look keenly enough for long enough, it is all there.

  The paradigm of text and subtext suggests that while a book seems to be about such and such—how Pip encounters the great world and learns the vanity of ambition, how Emma Bovary is ruined by illusion, how Macbeth descends, act by act, from human to brute—beneath the story line is something else, probably undercutting the surface. All fully realized works are about exactly what they are about.

  “Text” and “subtext” are more fitting for analyzing dreams than writing. We accept that the dream images and events are not “really” what the dream is about, but the available detritus of the day, slyly adapted to shield the dream’s actual “meaning.” Writing is not dreaming. True, we must write about something. There must be events and images and furniture to occupy reader and writer while the elusive other thing—the idea, the book’s raison d’être—snakes its way along. But the beauty of a story, unlike a dream, is that the screen of events and furniture becomes primary. The original, embryonic idea, if there is one, adapts to fit their shape, rather than the reverse. So a novel is finally about the things of this world, a world of things.

  The poet Adam Zagajewski would go even farther, to claim that there is no elusive other thing, no embryonic idea, nothing but the cold transparency of poetry, nothing but the inner life seeking to express itself. “It uses cunning,” he writes in “The Untold Cynicism of Poetry.”

  It pretends that it is interested, oh yes, very interested in external reality… . War? Terrific. Suffering? Excellent… . Reality is simply indispensable; if it did not exist, one would have to invent it. Poetry attempts to cheat reality; it pretends that it takes reality’s worries seriously. It shakes its head knowingly.

  In the end, he finds reality “only a bottomless source of metaphors for poetry.” Zagajewski’s view is provocative. There is not a writer alive or dead who has not felt the profound carelessness he describes, and the exhilaration it brings. But along with the inner life, there is—there must be—the story itself, with its own inner life that occupies the vast spaces of our own. In a novel, that story infuses and penetrates the screen of reality until there is only the rich surface. Or if that sounds too frivolous, there is only wholeness, immanence.

  FOR purposeful, dutiful reading, the reading of “texts,” we apply a special sort of concentration, special because it is applied. Willed. Such reading may be pleasant, but it is pleasant work, the kind of work I can easily and dutifully do in the daylight hours. It goes fast because we are looking for something rather than allowing something to happen. When waiting for something to happen we never move fast, hardly move at all. Between the turning of the pages, eons pass. We drift suspended in the words, all stillness and expectancy. Concentration is effortless yielding, as I yielded while sitting on my bed under the casement windows that opened on the rows of tiny backyards, not noticing the fading of the light until the words got fuzzy on the page.

  I am still a slow reader, but when I read to be informed, the pages fly by. There is no need to adapt to the style (there often is no style to speak of), no need to wrap myself in it, to tune my ear to the timbre of another voice. For here is the essence of true reading: learning to live in another’s voice, to speak another’s language. Reading is escape—why not admit it?—but not from job or troubles. It is escape from the boundaries of our own voices and idioms.

  My reading is more restless and volatile than ever these days. I pick up something on a subject I care about, only to find myself yawning five minutes later. Or else at four in the morning I seek something dull to relieve insomnia—the fluctu
ations of the economy or the latest statistics on population growth—and contrary to all expectation I’m totally absorbed. What keeps me so wide awake is the ardor and animation of the writer’s mind at work, or better still, at play. Few subjects are inherently dull: language is where dullness or liveliness resides. Subject, it seems, is little more than a bridge to something more crucial. Which recalls Adam Zagajewski: if the writer, careless of subject, is simply seeking a means to express the inner life, the reader may be engaged in a parallel quest—not for an appealing subject but for the affinity of a congenial mind. Yet mind alone is not enough; it must move skillfully in a field of words.

  The good writer offers a new language, the silent language of the inner voice, the silver and the gold. He tries on lingos and accents as we all do in private, and invites us to the startling intimacy of hearing him talk to himself with abandon, camping it up, doing all the voices. For all its originality, Finnegan’s Wake makes flagrantly explicit what has always been a tacit strategy of fiction. It is not the use of a private language per se that distinguishes Joyce, but its rare lexicon and his refusal to translate.

  Imagine Whitman’s contemporaries first coming upon his poems. Surely the biggest shock would have been how he handled the first person pronoun, giving it the place of honor as well as a magnetism that draws every other word into its orbit. It is a syntactical shock, jolting the sense of order and placement. In Proust the shape of a sentence—tenses and clauses intricately braided—prefigures the entire structure of past and present interpenetrating, supporting each other. From Faulkner to Gertrude Stein to Virginia Woolf, the writers who claim our attention do so by voice and idiom, which are the audible manifestations of the mind. This is how it sounds inside, they declare. Listen, hear the shape with me. There is good reason for the addictive cravings of readers: the only new thing under the sun is the sound of another voice. Hearing it truly, we know what Shunryu Suzuki, in Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, calls “not just ordinary language, but language in its wider sense.” This language is hardly interference but—to return to the much put-upon Mr. Cha—a way of keeping the mind free.

  By the same token, it is the abdication of voice that makes some authors irredeemably dull, regardless of clever plots or exotic settings. Dull writers use a generalized, undistinguished language, not an inner language in the making. Some have lost faith in language altogether and use as little as they can get away with. (Why are they writing? To illustrate the failure of language?) Ben Jonson said, “Speak, that I may know thee.” But dull writers refuse to speak. Someone or something is speaking through them, maybe a newspaper or television voice, or maybe our very own voices, as the writers infer us to be. They hope to give us to ourselves, to mirror their times—but mimicking is not mirroring.

  Speak, that I may know thee, we implore those who address us publicly, from television news anchors to political candidates. But none will oblige. Do they find it unseemly or scary or inconvenient, or what? Do they use prefab phrases to their children, their friends, their lovers? Have any of them, lately, spoken a sentence bearing the shape of the thought that inspired it? Or do they no longer think? This is Orwell territory, and in fact the prophesy of “Politics and the English Language” has come true in our political discourse. It became grotesquely apparent during the Watergate episode, and since then the words emanating from Washington fulfill it every day. Hardly any elected officials can or will reveal a genuine voice, and those who try hardest to be all things to all people are the most pathetic. In their staggering feats of self-erasure, they are a warning to writers who try to mirror their times. Such writers may end by becoming invisible; the mirror they hold up will be blank.

  When I began, I thought reading would transform my life, or at least teach me how to live it. It does teach something, many things, but not what I naively expected. In the thick of experience, snatches of bookish wisdom do not serve. If no girl was ever ruined by a book, none was ever saved by one either. (Even less useful is looking to fictional characters. The best of them travel in confusion and come to a bad end: this is what makes their lives worth inventing. It is we, the readers, who have the counseling role. Do this, do that, we tell them. Don’t forget to mail that letter, don’t get on that plane. Divorce him, marry her, look over your shoulder for heaven’s sake. But to no avail.)

  So what has been the point? Not to amass knowledge, since I forget the contents of books. Certainly not to pass the time, or “kill” it, as some say. (Time will kill us.) For killing is jumping the gun, so to speak. We “kill” time to leap over its body to a future event, if only dinner. But after dinner we find, like Macbeth, that we must kill some more, till the next event. Plainly the events are just a more dramatic means of killing. What we are waiting for, killing time to arrive at, is death, the only event that can release us from the burden of living time. Killing time is to living what Evelyn Wood’s speed-reading is to reading, sprinting as opposed to leisurely walking, where you can appreciate the scenery. The goal is to get it over with, to no longer have to do it. (Speed-reading is not actually reading at all but eye exercises.)

  The underside of killing time is rushing about, going and doing in order to feel that each moment is actively, assertively “lived”—merely another bout with mortality. Reading is an activity of the moment too; having read is no more palpable than yesterday’s feast. But unlike classic activities of the moment, dance or sports or sex—movement through phases—in reading, the body is still. Indeed what reading teaches, first and foremost, is how to sit still for long periods and confront time head-on. The dynamism is all inside, an exalted, spiritual exercise so utterly engaging that we forget time and mortality along with all of life’s lesser woes, and simply bask in the everlasting present. So I see, finally, why it hardly matters whether I remember the contents of the book. Mere information is nothing compared to this silent flurry. The mind comes into its own, delighting in its litheness and power; it pirouettes, leaps for the ball, embraces and trembles. Outwardly we are languid. We have made the preparations Calvino advises in the opening pages of If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler:

  Find the most comfortable position: seated, stretched out, curled up, or lying flat… . Stretch your legs, go ahead and put your feet on a cushion, on two cushions, on the arms of the sofa, on the wings of the chair, on the coffee table, on the desk, on the piano, on the globe. Take your shoes off first… . Adjust the light so you won’t strain your eyes. Do it now, because once you’re absorbed in reading there will be no budging you… . Try to foresee now everything that might make you interrupt your reading. Cigarettes within reach, if you smoke, and the ashtray. Anything else? Do you have to pee? All right, you know best.

  We gaze at marks on a page, put there by a machine, recognizable as words. Each one denotes something discrete but we do not, cannot, read them as such, except in the first days of learning how. They offer themselves in groups with wholes greater than the sum of the parts. As in human groups, the individual members behave in relation to their companions: each word presents aspects of itself suited to the ambiance, amplifying some connotations and muting others. Their respective rankings must change too. A word will be key here, play a supporting role there, and in each successive appearance will be weightier and more richly nuanced. All this we register faster than the speed of the light illuminating our page, hardly aware of noting the valence, assessing the role and position, of each word as it flies by, granting it its place in the assemblage.

  Still more remarkable, these inky marks generate emotion, even give the illusion of containing emotion, while it is we who contribute the emotion. Yet it was there in advance too, in the writer. What a feat of transmission: the emotive powers of the book, with no local habitation, pass safely from writer to reader, unmangled by printing and binding and shipping, renewed and available whenever we open it.

  Semioticists have unraveled these miracles in detail; even to call them miracles sounds ingenuous. After all, most aesthetic experience res
ts on transference through an inanimate medium. What is painting but oils smeared on canvas, or chamber music but bows drawn across strings? Reading is not the same, though. There is no sense organ that words fit like a glove, as pictures fit the eye or music the ear. Intricate neural transactions take place before words find their elusive target, before the wraith we call the “writer” finds the reader.

  For dwelling in the book, however remote in time and space, is this imaginary being, this missing link whom no reader has ever glimpsed. Yes, from the visits of Dickens and Wilde to today’s performances, readers flock to see writers, to meet the person who has given them pleasure; perhaps the consumers of telephone sex also yearn to meet the purveyors. But they are sure to be disappointed. The writer “in person” is no more the voice behind the book than the employee who murmurs salacious tidbits is inclined to stir us in actual life. Like the owner of the telephone voice, the writer is born of our fantasies. Reading her book, we fashion her image, which has a sort of existence, but never in the flesh of the person bearing her name.

  Since the book, too, doesn’t possess an independent or sensory existence but must be opened and fathomed, we enjoy the heady power of being necessary to its life. The real book is the prince hidden inside the frog. We open it, and our eyes give the kiss of regeneration. This power is what intoxicates. The thinking of others does not interfere with our own free thinking, but meshes with it in a splendid rite of recovery.

  If we make books happen, they make us happen as well. Reading teaches receptivity, Keats’s negative capability. It teaches us to receive, in stillness and attentiveness, a voice possessed temporarily, on loan. The speaker lends herself and we do the same, a mutual and ephemeral exchange, like love. Yet unlike love, reading is a pure activity. It will gain us nothing but enchantment of the heart. And as we grow accustomed to receiving books in stillness and attentiveness, so we can grow to receive the world, also possessed temporarily, also enchanting the heart.