Chapter 6 | The Experience of Reading

The perspective offered here—that the novel emerged from the strictures of theology and philosophy and harnessed the industrial epoch’s technical possibilities to become the dominant medium of experience until the advent of film in the early twentieth century—restores agency and hence experience and singularity to the novel itself. For a comprehensive understanding of experience, the three philosophers we have consulted agree that the distinction between a human subject that has the experience and an inert object that is experienced is only a provisional construct to establish order in a fluid, intermingled relation. Many traditional histories of the novel tacitly acknowledge this fluidity when they talk about the “rise” or “theory” of the novel, toggling between subjective and objective readings of this genitive. On closer inspection, however, most narratives of the rise of the genre presuppose essentialist theories of development—the emergence of realistic modes of representation, for example, or the mutual influence between author and market—in which novels are not agents but cases.

Novels since the middle of the nineteenth century are realistic in the sense that they enter as serialized products the spatial and temporal field of the readers’ experience—be this as successively released installments, as complete volumes, or both. Often, the publisher or the fame of the author creates a halo of expectation around them, further binding readers to “their” novel and author. By the time a novel reaches its readers, it has undergone a series of experiences itself. It has emerged from the author’s lived experience (and its multiple conditions) and met with the demands of the publisher, who in turn has adapted to pressures of the market and the limits of technical reproduction and distribution. The adoption of free indirect discourse in the middle of the nineteenth century, to mention a feature that I will discuss later, is the result of an experience the novel Madame Bovary made in 1857 with the author, the publisher, the reading public, the courts, and the politics of the Second Empire. Books do not simply have their fate; like animals, landscapes, or rooms, they are experiences, which in turn intersect with the experiences of a reading human.

This change in perspective allows us to see the difference between aesthetic categories, like originality, and the notion of singularity that the radical empiricism of Nāgārjuna, Nietzsche, and William James entails. Originality inserts a stopgap into the multitude of causes and allocates unprecedented firstness either to an author or to a work; it is modeled after the creative power of the Christian God and forces reading into the position of posthumous exegesis. Singularity acknowledges that every work is infinitely conditioned and therefore exceeds the horizon of author and reader—it is novel in the empirical sense of the word.

This intersection of the experience of the novel and the experience of the reader is the experience of reading. Like narrative fiction itself, reading is a social and technical experience that has undergone, and is at present undergoing, dramatic changes. We are implicitly aware of this historicity when we worry, for example, that our students lose the experience of immersive reading, and with it their ability to acquire the empathy that comes from identifying and suffering with a fictional character, from inhabiting another’s moral universe. It is this latter ability that is often mentioned when the question arises what it is that literary studies, in the most general sense, contribute to the undergraduate curriculum and to the pedagogical mission of colleges and universities. Reading literature, in particular literature not written in a reader’s language, broadens their moral horizon and, more recently, furthers their cognitive flexibility.

This line of arguing for the value of immersive, imaginative reading is of venerable provenance, reaching back to the moral sense of Scripture, especially in its Protestant incarnation, which in turn was co-conditioned by the emergence of the printing press. The printed page—uniform and stripped of visual distractions—focused attention on a vanishing point beyond the text, where identification with the story’s protagonist could play out within the reader’s imagination. In the theology of Protestant and Pietist Bible study, reading became a relation of “influence,” a channel through which the spirit could flow into the reader’s soul. In this imaginary immediacy of absorption, writing—the activity as well as its technological manifestation in print—notoriously disappeared from the purview of literary interpretation.

The disruptive success of novels in the latter half of the eighteenth century owed much to authors’ subtle exploitation of readers’ willingness to be “influenced.” The extreme emotional reactions of both male and female readers of Samuel Richardson (Clarissa, 1748) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Julie; or, The New Heloise, 1761) or male readers adopting Werther’s yellow-and-blue outfit after the first publication of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s The Sufferings of Young Werther (1774) illustrate how this biblical disposition migrated into the encounter with secular literature and overwhelmed the ironic distancing of the fictional editor. The epistolary novel, in particular, obliterated the distance between protagonist and readers, creating an intimacy so powerful that in the second edition of The Sufferings of Young Werther Goethe had to exhort his readers not to follow the model of the poor suicide.

Against the attraction of tropological “lay” reading that began in the late eighteenth century (though Miguel de Cervantes had diagnosed its pitfalls much earlier), academic literary scholarship and teaching bundled the remaining three senses into stages of interpretation that each still have prominent support and occasion methodological debate. The literal sense, we have seen, merged with the practices of classical philology and helped establish a science of “objective” editing, historical explanation, and, more recently, materialist speculation. Allegorical readings became the domain of scholars who investigate the anxiety of influence literary texts exert on each other, often across the entire continuum of the Western tradition. The last decades of the twentieth century saw the rise of readings that focused on allegorical relations within single works, relations that would subvert their claims to wholeness of meaning. Contemporary anagogical readings are those that situate literary works against the background of historical and political developments, most often against the logic and crises of late capitalism.

Despite their claims to perform “readings,” contemporary exegetes of secular literature rarely consider reading as an embodied experience. Research in the physiology, psychology, and sociology of reading seldom informs literary studies, where “reading” is taken as a synonym for performing critical and distanced analyses on literary texts. Even the formerly accepted task of interpretation—to attempt answers to the question of what a work of literature might mean for the reader, for the author, or for a community—from the impersonal perspective of such “readings” appears as too immersed in individuality and divination.

Yet it is in this pursuit of scientific objectivity that the metaphysical burden of reading comes to the fore: “reading” attempts to “save the phenomena” by converting materiality into ideality, by elevating an aggregate (of letters) into a unity (of meaning), into the totality of a “work,” even if critical readings often show that this totality is illusory. The Greek etymology conjoining reading, gathering, and reason, legein and logos, further strengthened this metaphysical bond.

When Christianity transitioned from an apocalyptic movement to a religion of the book, it developed exegetical strategies that, for thousands of years, provided readers with keys to the infinite riches of Scripture. But these strategies—codified in the quadruple sense of the Scriptures—were originally secular and had their origin in Alexandrine and Roman philology; they did not provide a theological account for the mystery of reading as the human encounter with the divine word. As reading Scripture became increasingly central to understanding God’s revelation, it merged with the growing devotion to the mystery of Incarnation—the Word made flesh.

The primal scene of Christian reading is depicted in the countless images of the Annunciation and replicated in modernity in the many depictions of absorbed (and therefore vulnerable) female readers. In most images since the early Renaissance, the Virgin Mary is shown seated alone, typically in an enclosed room or garden, reading a passage of the Old Testament that Christian iconology has identified as Isaiah 7:14: “Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: the virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel.” It is at this moment of absorption that the angel of the Annunciation swoops in—in early medieval versions often bearing a text of his own, the Ave that proclaims Mary as already full of the grace whose incarnation she will bring to term.

Without the angel’s intervention, Mary would have “known” what she was reading; she would have captured the literal sense of the passage in Isaiah but could not have understood its spiritual meaning—its typological relation to the yet-to-be-written New Testament, its meaning for her own life, and its meaning for the history of salvation, which takes such a dramatic turn with this announcement. In the language of Saint Paul, the letter was dead to her until the angel vivified it.

Mary’s full comprehension of her reading is a miracle—a transformation and transubstantiation of words read and spoken into the understanding of their meaning and the incarnation of this comprehension in the body of her son, Jesus. The scene of the Annunciation—conflated pictorially and calendrically with the act of Conception—aligns reading and conceiving; it gives us a glimpse of reading as an embodying and embodied experience, even if the Dogma goes to spectacular lengths to erase the ink spot, the macula, that would have betrayed the enjambment of body and spirit, of legein and logos.

There is, then, buried in this focal scene of Christianity the recognition that reading is a genuine embodied experience, and that in this embodiment it is open to a wholly novel, as yet incomprehensible future; it figures as miraculous the moment in which self and other touch and change before separating again into the stark dichotomies required by the metaphysics of the Word. William James describes and normalizes this miracle, this fusion and flux, as “pure experience”—a miracle to which we have become oblivious under the incessant pressure to separate, judge, and opine.

At the end of his life, the savior thus conceived also requires an act of reading and transubstantiation from his disciples. He is asking, however, for a reversal of incarnation, for the transformation of objects of the outer world into symbols of faith. The Institution of the Eucharist is the antitype to the Annunciation: declaring wine to be his blood and bread to be his body, Jesus asks his apostles to dis-incarnate objects, to read them into their memory and to hold fast to this transformation by repeating, by instantiating it. Whereas the angel asks Mary to believe in the future, Jesus asks the apostles to believe in the past and thus for their willingness to recognize things as signs, to interpret.

This paradigm, in which reading is conceived as an act of faith and interpretation as a work of commemoration, as the constant shuttling between symbolization and literalization, has weighed heavily on Western conceptions of reading. Secular and academic practices of literary interpretation have found it difficult to fully shed this weight. Reading is still seen—at least in the academic humanities—as an activity fundamentally different from other practices that help us navigate through life, like drawing, cycling, or cooking. When “lay” reading became exponentially more extensive in the nineteenth century, professional readers in the academy retained, even increased, their focus on the depth and meticulousness of their retroactive reading. The Marian dimension of hope and radical change through reading has been overwhelmed by the apostolic work of interpretating signs and symbols. Most importantly, reading remains enclosed in subjectivity.

A complementary legacy of our apostolic reading is the assumption that a text’s meaning is already “there,” independent of a reader’s engagement with it. This conviction is most strikingly institutionalized in the Catholic Church’s Index Librorum Prohibitorum, in the restricted-access collections in national libraries—the Enfer in the French National Library, the Private Case in the British Library—and in contemporary censorship indices from Florida to Alabama. At first glance, sequestering books may seem like a reasonable if antiquated and restrictive policy, but it bears reflecting upon its underlying assumption that a set of nonpictorial marks elicit the same mental reaction in all members of a language community. It is a vivid example of why Nāgārjuna insists on the reality of conventional truth; it shows how stable our conventions—the conventions that make up our languages, decency laws, social narratives, political arguments—are even though they lack any permanent, mind-independent essence.

James’s radical empiricism offers a pathway to liberate reading from its recognitive and subjective constraints, to rewild it into a genuine—open, mutual, nonconceptual—experience. He had determined—in his empirical work with patients as well as in his survey of religious experiences—that in their “pure,” inarticulate state, human experiences are infinitely variegated and infinitely connected. They are not isolated, separate, sequential events but continuously intermixed with subtler experiences that we, having only so much attention to allocate, suppress in the busy flow of day-to-day life. Though James does not himself make the connection, we can see in this infinite web of experiences an avatar of Nāgārjuna’s pratītyasamutpāda—the web of infinite conditions that relates phenomena to their proximate causes and empties them of substantial identity.

James articulates in Western terms the implications of thinking through the absolute priority of experience. First is the unseating of the preexisting, consciousness-endowed human subject that has the experience; second the attribution of experience to things typically regarded as inanimate or unconscious. What philosophy ambiguously designates as “subject” and “object” are, for James, just termini of a particular sequence of experiences—one is equipped with the means to mentally reflect on experiences, the other is slower and physical in its reactions. When a human subject claims sole ownership of its experiences, it dismisses the experiential potential of all other elements in the web of conditions. The epistemological, social, and ecological consequences of this degradation have often been chronicled.

Consider a hike in the foothills. A rationalist might describe it as the movement of human “thinking things” through a nonthinking, more or less inert landscape, undertaken for the—articulated or recoverable—purpose of exercising, contemplating, or doing research, at the end of which the humans can reflect on the activity and commit it to internal or externalized memory. In James’s experience-centered view, by contrast, the same event is the experience named “hiking” that connects human individuals in motion with an environment that is equally, albeit more slowly, in motion. The hikers have behind them a series of experiences that led them to the hike, and ahead of them experiences in which the hike will be a smaller or larger factor. But the landscape also has a long series of geological and botanical experiences behind it, and it, too, will carry the memory of its experience with the hikers and reflect on it by changing and adapting—for example, by trail erosion on a local, or by climate change on a global scale. Object and subject, passivity and activity, are only the most abstract, barren termini on a sliding scale of entanglement, not entities that are given before the experience commences or after it ends.

It is the same with reading. Rather than seeing it as the activity of a solitary subject who picks up an inert object—a book or a tablet—and transubstantiates its dead letters into thoughts and spiritual meaning, it can be more richly described as the intersection of two experiential lines: one is constituted by the experiences of the reader—by her personal history, her current state of mind, her motivation for picking up this particular book, the location where she is doing the reading, her hopes for the future, even her neuronal pathways, among other things; the other line is constituted by the experiences of the book—by its own emergence from the intersection of authorial intentions, genre conventions, and market pressures, by its inclusion into various streams of recommendations and canonizations, including college syllabi, and by the affordances of its layout, type, and size. The fulcrum of this intersection is the experience of the characters, in both senses of the genitive: the experiences the characters make and thus turn this book into a novel, and the experience the reader makes with the character, on which the next chapter will concentrate.

Recent research in the history of the book as the medium of modernity reinforces this shift away from understanding reading as a one-sided activity. Through design, type, title, chapter length, format, price, and seasonal book fairs, novels in the eighteenth century lured ever more readers into their world; when serialization became the standard for success in the nineteenth century, this reciprocity of reading and being read reached new heights—the famous cliffhanger at the end of an installment, the insertion of characters that “polled well,” the tailoring of narratives to the time and attention spans of railway travelers, the reviews and book clubs that debated novels during their print run, and the spectacular obscenity trials in the 1850s. All of these developments testify to a reciprocal flow of energy between book and reader that belies the idea that reading is a silent, secluded, immersive theater of the mind.

Experimental physiology of the mid-nineteenth century, with which James was intimately familiar, found that reading eyes jump in saccades, in rapid, jerky movements backward and forward that knit together the text rather than scan it in one continuous motion. There is no physiological equivalent to the focused intent to understand and the gradual decipherment of meaning as which reading is so often conceived. The eye in its forward movement seems to fight the resistance of print and grammar by advancing and retreating, incorporating new information by comparing it to what is already known. Everybody who has had the misfortune of having to learn German knows how in a long sentence the eye desperately lurches to the end to find the verb that gives meaning to what comes before. At this microscopic range—the eye apparently makes these jumps five times per second—reading exhibits the same characteristics as all experiences: a constant, ungrounded back-and-forth between activity and passivity, between what only later we call reader and book, subject and object.

In its deep entanglement with its “object,” reading is an experience not essentially different from other forms of experiences. If we seek to analyze it with a focus on scientifically quantifiable knowledge, we can investigate the subjective terminus and go back all the way to the neurological and optical processes that transform light contrast—black type on white paper—into words, sentences, and narratives. Alternatively, we can concentrate on the objective terminus and look at the book, its history, its kinematics, its design. Just as there is no single point in the growth of an embryo where we say, “Now it is a human being,” there is no point in the relation between reader and book where the transubstantiation from letter into spirit palpably occurs. The closer we look at it, the “purer” the experience of reading becomes—pure in James’s sense that under attentive inspection our experiences dissolve into preconceptual “droplets” of experience that contain their conventional termini (in this case reader and text) in an undifferentiated state of potential.

Reading is a paradigmatic case for the artificial problems that dualistic theological, cognitive, and epistemological approaches to experience generate. So long as we think of reading solely as divination, as decoding, or as a cultural technique, we presuppose the very duality that we later fail to overcome. We strip an experience of its temporal and incremental unfolding, of its back-and-forth of reading on and reflecting back and instead seek to capture it with atemporal concepts. “Causality” then reemerges as the construct that must link two distinct poles or phases of what is one experience. Since by definition we can neither observe nor deduce causality, we grasp at higher-order, transcendental guarantees that give coherence to our explanations. Once embarked on this road of causal explanations, we divide the temporal continuity of an experience into near-spatial packages of before and after that we must relate again by concepts or categories. Yet as James has pointed out, causality is only the most abstract end point of a multitude of relations that precede or coexist with it, such as simultaneity and time interval, space adjacency, resistance, similarity, and reciprocity.

We should not fear a gap in our understanding of the world if we resist the reduction of experiences like reading to abstract causal chains with determinate beginning and end points. Of course, as clinicians or educators we may want to understand why some people have greater difficulties reading than others, or why some media are more conducive to immersive reading than others, and for such purposes we may want to resort to the causal reasoning of the physical and historical sciences. But if this causal chain cannot be stretched across the entire expanse of the reading experience, so be it. We are constantly involved in experiences that are, though intimate and manifest, causally inexplicable. Think of being in love.

Bringing James’s radical empiricism to bear on the history and practice of reading frees it from the enclosure in subjectivity and aligns it with other experiences. This normalization of reading at the same time sheds a light back on experience: in its temporal unfolding, its proceeding in jumps back and forth, experience has the form of reading, a fact we acknowledge in such locutions as “reading a situation” or “reading a room.”

It is in this congruity of reading and experiencing that the true value of speaking and writing about reading literature within and outside of academia lies. If reading is a paradigmatic case of experiencing, then getting students and readers to attend to this experience, getting them to articulate and reflect on it, has a propaedeutic function for a more compassionate attitude to their own experiences as well as toward those of others.