Coda: Singularity, University, Experience

The preceding chapters have explored three dimensions of the phrase “reading experiences”: they have tried to read experiences in their metaphysical and historical dimensions in the West; they have claimed that in the encounter with novels we read others’ experiences; and they have sought to show that reading makes experiences and thus reaches beyond decipherment and intellectual absorption. This exploration sought access to the openness and potentiality, the essential novelty of experience that dims and diminishes as we are asked to distinguish and judge.

In many Eastern cultures, but also in some Western contemplative traditions, this access is maintained through meditation techniques that encourage practitioners to detach from their experiences, particularly from the narrative form they have acquired, and to sever, even if only temporarily, the affective ties that make an experience “mine.” Other outcomes of one’s experience are possible, other views and reactions to events than those dictated by prejudice and habit. The therapeutic goal is to increase a personality’s amplitude, the tolerance not just for others’ struggles with their experiences but for one’s own.

Most meditation cultures have a rich record of oral or written examples that show practitioners how others have dealt with such experiences as duty, grief, desire, anger, anxiety, or sluggishness. For historical and philosophical reasons outlined in previous chapters, such a record of experiences is available in the Western tradition in the modern novel as it emerged in the seventeenth century. It does not matter, from this perspective, that these are “fictitious” experiences as long as they carry the characteristic attributes of temporal extension and the potential to develop otherwise.

The meditative work, undeclared though it may be, is accomplished in the reading, itself a temporally extended experience that follows a character’s experience from the removed, “meditative” distance afforded by the novel’s form and conventions. This reading has the freedom to entertain other possibilities of experience, be they the ones the characters make or the ones the reader would make in their its stead. It may not yet be critical reading, but in its reflectiveness it is also not submerged in emotion and affect, and it is probably what motivates most readers to read prose fiction.

The remarks in this coda reflect on how this experience can be integrated into the academic teaching of literature. There are, of course, other ways to discuss narrative literature; in the Anglo-American tradition, dedicated review journals give critics much greater liberty to situate their reading in personal experiences, even if these are most often other reading experiences. I have participated in book clubs with “lay readers” and enjoyed them tremendously; but clubs don’t typically keep a record of their conversations.

The principal question, however, is whether and why this dimension should be included in academic teaching in the first place. I see three reasons, which I list in the order of their importance to me. The first is the dramatic decline in enrollment in courses on literature, in any language, and the fall in the number of majors and minors who consider majoring in a literature department. It is true that enormous economic and social forces exert pressure against the study of any humanistic subject; but it also true that we as scholars and teachers of literature have not done the best job of convincing students and parents of the use value of our subject. In fact, the very idea of assigning utility to the study of literature offends some of its practitioners. They uphold the ideal of precision in reading to which students have to be lead, or of hermeneutic “truth’ that emanates from the works. Others argue that reading novels helps us gain knowledge, but to many students it is not clear what kind of knowledge that is and how it relates to the subjects they study in other classes, and to their lives. The inclusion of experience as a dimension of reading as well as a first approach to interpretation both answers the dreaded question of utility—gaining distance to one’s experiences is an extremely valuable social skill—and lowers the entrance threshold into the world of novels.

The second reason relates to the theme of the invisibility of experience that has come up repeatedly in previous sections: “I cannot experience your experience. You cannot experience my experience. We are both invisible men. All men are invisible to one another.” To R. D. Laing’s pithy analysis, the previous pages, prompted by the thought of Nāgārjuna, have added another dimension: we are invisible to ourselves. We rarely see our experiences as experiences, as possible steps outside the limits of our habitual actions and reactions. In this double invisibility we encounter the deepest level of diversity in the classroom—in our experiences we are not only different from one another but different from ourselves. Focusing on the experience of reading acknowledges these differences while urging us to bring our experiences to language so that we, and others, can reflect on them. In true empiricist fashion, we are ascending from difference to communication rather than descending from identity—“Let’s all share our individual experiences!”—to difference. The notion that in the previous pages has designated this ineradicable difference that we want to respect but bring into communication is singularity. The ideal of a classroom focused even only for a short span of time on the exchange of reading experiences is the ideal of a university of singularities, and it is one that the teaching of literature affords, with the added benefit that we can both do and reflect on this difficult work.

The third reason relates to William James’s observation that what we perceive as gaps in our experiences is in fact a lack of attention to conjunctions and disjunctions, to the experiences of “with, near, next, like, from, towards, against, because, through, for, my” (Pure Experience, 1161). Writers such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, William’s brother Henry James, even such austere stylists as Samuel Beckett have closed these gaps, brought experiences closer (dichter) together, found meaning in the particles. A look at the Nobel Prize winners in Literature of the last ten years or at the New Yorker’s list of best books of the year shows that contemporary novels continue this work with unabated energy and thus ensure the relevance and relative popularity of this once wayward genre.

It is this granularity of attention that characterizes (with other properties) poetic language. When we exhort students to be attentive to the singular in their accounts of their reading experiences, we urge them to come closer to, indeed to practice, poetic language. As scholars, we eschew (for the most part, but with notable exceptions) in our work any intimation of poetic expression so as not to collapse the critical distance; there is no reason why young readers should have to do the same. In my observation, as knowledge-focused teachers of literature we are losing the students who respond to experiences artistically to creative writing, art practice, and media studies; a shift toward greater freedom of expression in the classroom might bring them back (and only mildly disturb the students we have gained from philosophy during the theory years).

I want to repeat a proviso that has been made numerous times in the preceding pages: I am not proposing a paradigm shift or a conversion; I do not advocate for a retreat from critical reading practices or from philological approaches. This would not only contradict all the work I myself have done, it would also invalidate the analysis here proposed—forays into the history of the novel, into the practices of reading, into the history of philosophy are not possible without relying on the methods of critical scholarship. My suggestions, therefore, are only asking to give the experiential level of reading a bit of space. Many colleagues begin their classes with a few minutes of mindfulness practice; fifteen minutes of conversation about the reading experience would follow nicely after that.

The most important tool in the experience of novel reading is the reading journal. From the outset, teacher and students should keep such a journal and make it available on a teaching platform, anonymously if they so wish. The prompts for these journals have to be precise enough to guide students away from generalities and from quick professions of taste or emotions. Where did you read? On what medium? At what intervals? Did you feel drawn into the story? If yes, by what means did the writer achieve that; if not, what prevented you from getting into it? At what point did you feel enough suspense that you wanted to know how the story developed? Did you feel bored? If yes, what kind of boredom did you feel—impatience with the way the characters acted, annoyance with the writer’s style, or with the story itself? Do you know what motivates the characters? Do the characters know? Where could they have gone in a different direction? Do the characters understand the other characters?

Students should be reminded that at this stage they should pay attention to, and try to name, without judging, the resistances the text offers them. You are reading this novel: generalities and summaries have no place here; you are reading this novel: pay attention to the process, to the change in your attitude to the work and to characters. Questions like these, tailored to the individual novel and its parts, urge readers to dissolve the solidity of representation into the potentiality of experience—to reflect on the multiple roads not taken by a character, or by the author.

At the time of this writing, AIs still acknowledge that they are not making experiences when they read. Like the apostles, they decipher what has been written and seek to make literal or even metaphorical sense of their testamentary reading. They read novels like everything else: as something to know, to categorize, to conceptualize, and to transmit. They do not read like Mary, with all her body, full of hope for a transformational experience. This makes the conversations about reading experiences as they are outlined in this essay immune to the cooptation by AIs, in particular if they are conducted synchronously.

At the same time, AI tools can free the space and time that once was reserved for the extraction, communication, and testing of knowledge and lead to deeper reflections on the nature of experience and its singularity. If we are prompting students to set aside their rush to judgement and to attend to the experience of reading, we should also encourage them to prompt an AI so that they can find the limits that separate the generality, the common place to which they sometimes gravitate, from the singularity of their own encounter with this book. Conversations with AIs, if conducted in a probing manner and with an open mind not afraid of being challenged by a nonsentient intelligence, can be extremely helpful in highlighting and shedding the artificial—Nāgārjuna would say the conventional—elements in our own ways of reading and judging literary texts. Feeding reading experiences into an AI, as I have done with the examples here published, and asking for editing help quickly brings us to the point where we are forced to reflect on what makes our reading experience a human experience—its situatedness, its rhythm, its halo of feelings—and what makes it a human experience. Students should be allowed to articulate their experience in media and formats other than the written journal entry. Videos, still images, even music—if they can be brought into the conversation, they should be part of the poetic responses. Self-grading or un-grading seem natural ways to assess experiences that are by definition incompatible.

It is difficult for us as teachers to imagine that students can learn without our physical presence. There is near-universal disapproval of MOOCs and other forms of remote learning, especially in the humanities, and the digital learning platforms that have evolved during and after the COVID-19 pandemic are seen as patches rather than as advances. And yet, for the purpose of bringing the experiential side of reading into focus for students, I have found digital platforms and remote forms of teaching enormously helpful, so long as they include some form of synchronous interaction. After all, the articulation of experiences is not first and foremost a collective activity; it needs time to develop, and on a fundamental level, these articulations cannot be right or wrong, they cannot be debated. If anything, they can be critiqued in the way art classes collectively critique students’ work. Moreover, digital interactions may ease the discomfort of students who are reluctant to speak in class, in particular about a topic that may seem private to them. The fact that these interactions can happen outside the classroom may alleviate the concerns of teachers who fear that the inclusion of experiential perspectives will consume too much of their teaching time.

For all of these modifications, the experiential study of literature needs the support of the institutions in which it is situated: departments need to acknowledge experience-based teaching, research in tenure files, and in annual evaluations; universities have to accommodate new formats of teaching and new modes of grading; professional organizations must adjust their standards of excellence so that experiential teaching and learning can find its proper place in the plethora of approaches.

One of the biggest difficulties in this endeavor is the lack of examples. How can one show students what an experiential record of reading actually looks and sounds like—how it differs from a confession, criticism, or emotional judgment? There are, as mentioned, reviews in dedicated journals or newspapers that eloquently discuss the experience of reading, but these are seasoned readers drawing from a lifetime of reading. The paucity of examples is largely a structural difficulty: there can be no examples for singular endeavors. This also means that originality or exhaustiveness cannot be their criteria; indeed, as is the case when someone tells us their dreams, there may be a certain dullness or incoherence about such accounts. Nonetheless, we hope to collect examples at the website thenovelexperience.org.

The teaching of literature has changed greatly in the last decade—there is much more interaction in the lecture hall and in the seminar room, various media are employed, and assignments are often highly imaginative. And yet I think it is fair to say that the emphasis in most formats is still on knowledge—knowing a text and its author, the historical circumstances of its emergence and its success, its representational techniques, the work of identity and positioning it performs, and its reception.

By integrating the dimension of experience into the teaching of literature, we create a richer, more inclusive, and more dynamic academic environment, we open our work up to the reading public at large, and we begin the dialogue with Artificial Intelligences that will come to us one way or another. This approach not only addresses pressing challenges, such as declining enrollment, but also nurtures deeper engagement, encouraging students to see reading as both a personal and communal act of discovery. In doing so, we reaffirm literature’s relevance as a field where the complexities of human experience are not just studied but lived.