What is Reading? –Departure
Reading is an activity that takes place over time. Reading begins long before a person uses their eyes to scan a certain piece of text, and the reading act ends well after the eyes have come to rest. Location, environmental factors, and choice of reading material all influence the reading act. But of much greater significance than all of these variables is the prior knowledge and experience the reader brings to bear on the text. Wolfgang Iser says of reading, “[The] author and [the] reader are to share the game of the imagination, and indeed, the game will not work if the text sets out to be anything more than a set of governing rules.” While different theorists may quibble over the agency of the author versus the agency of the text versus the agency of the reader, Iser is absolutely correct when he imagines the reader’s interaction with the text as a game –an activity that involves give and take, strategy and intuition, and, surprisingly, success or failure.
Reading begins when a person decides to read. The reader prepares to read as their own idiosyncrasies and circumstances dictate. These preparations live on a spectrum that range from the intricately ritualized, preparing a candle lit bath for example, to the deceptively casual, sitting down and picking up a newspaper. But these steps, the intricate and the casual, mark an important step in the reading process.
Only once these steps are complete do the eyes begin to move, and science has taught much about the minutia that goes on here. When scanning texts the eyes stop for a least three milliseconds, these are called points of fixation. While at rest there are three distinct areas within the visual range. The sharpest is the foveal range. This extends about one degree from the center of the eye and includes approximately three characters worth of text. Next in line is the parafoveal range. This region extends two to ten degrees from the center of the eye and includes approximately seven characters of text. In brains who primarily speak and read languages that are organized left to right, this range skews to the right. On the outside of the visual range there is the peripheral area in which only shapes are visible. While brains perceive smooth motion, in reality the eye jumps from one fixation point to the next. When the eye is in motion perception is impossible. The jumps, or saccades, vary in length depending on familiarity with the text, lighting conditions, fatigue level of the reader, perceived levels of comprehension, and a myriad of other measurable factors. Readers make predictions as they read. If, when fixating, the text confirms their prediction the reader continues. If the prediction is not confirmed the reader retreats and reevaluates. The text comes to it’s natural end and the eyes come to rest. But reading continues until such time as the reader is done evaluating, considering, and thinking about the text. (Paulson)
Can Culler, Fetterly, de Certeau, and others fit into this notion of reading? –Initiation
It cannot be overstated that the human brain is not a computer. Computers work in a procedural fashion, one step after the other. Brains make multiple connections –hundreds of connections all the time at the same time. When readers scan a word: flower they connect this word to literal flowers, individual types of flowers, flowers as metaphors, experiences they’ve had with flowers and hundreds of other ideas and concepts that may or may not be relevant. A vast majority of these connections are quickly dismissed as superfluous but a select few remain and provide the building blocks of context and form that ultimately results in meaning for the reader.
To understand this process more precisely we must return to Immanuel Kant, his Critique of Pure Reason, and the broader question of how humans interact with and learn from their environment in general. “All our knowledge,” Kant says, “begins with experience…. But though all knowledge begins with experience it doesn’t follow that it arises out of experience.” I hear an echo in this statement –Though all meaning begins with the text it does not follow that meaning arises out of the text alone?
As humans interact with the world we are bombarded with an indeterminable amount of data. To make sense of this assaulting array of stuff, we filter the raw data as it comes to us. As Kant explains, the first filters we learn to apply are time and space. Not everything comes to us all at once. Not everything appears to occupy the same space. It seems so intuitively obvious, but these skills are learned. And as we grow into childhood and then into adulthood we learn to apply other filters. Kant calls these filters a priori ideas.
If I may paraphrase Kant’s now famous example, when we close our eyes our senses tell us the world has disappeared we do not panic however, because we have an a priori notion that the world has continuity –it will be there when our eyes open again.
Parents will verify that small children do not have this notion. So when we put our hands over our face while playing with a child, we have disappeared, possibly forever. When we remove our hands and say, “Peek-a-boo” we have magically returned. Hence the smiling and giggling.
So the mind constructs reality out of filtered pieces of data. The construction is neither perfect nor complete. Our preconscious mind selects bits of data based on their immediate utility, based on their Quality, and it is these and only these bits of data that create the world we interact with. We perceive a rock, for example. There are an infinite number of facts about this rock we could notice. Thousands of these facts are noted in our unconscious mind, connections are being made, but only the important facts break into our conscious reality. If we are contemplating a still rock in a sunny glen, then shape and color may rise in importance. If we are hunting a specific rock for a geological survey then cleavage patterns and texture matter more. If the rock is flying towards us at a rapid pace, then size, weight, and trajectory supercede all other concerns. The reality of the rock is created by the filters with bring to bear on object itself.
Now if we marry Kant’s a priori ideas to the fact that our brain is making hundreds upon hundreds of connections with every word we read, we can begin to see the place of our theorists in the reading process.
How do Culler, Fetterly, de Certeau, and others fit into the scientific notion of reading? –Return
Culler, Fetterly, de Certeau and all the others are the filters readers use when they engage in game of reading.
Reading begins. Even before the eyes move the mind prepares the necessary filters based on every variable imaginable. The eyes move and with each fixation connections, like storms of lightening, are being made. Connections to literal meaning. Connections to metaphorical meaning. Connections to theory. Connections to hundreds of available facts. The eyes rest and training (assuming the reader has been trained) comes to the fore. The tiny, small facts that may have been overlooked, the trampled flower, the alliteration, the obscure intertextual reference, take on greater importance. The meaning of the text is constructed, as incompletely and imperfectly as the rock, within the mind of the reader. The act of reading is complete –until such time as the mind of the reader, with or without the eyes of the reader, returns to the text.
Culler claims reading should be done with a thorough and finely nuanced understanding of literary convention. Convention is the filter. If a reader fails to do this, then they will misunderstand the true meaning of the text.
Fetterly claims reading should be done with a significant amount of energy being applied to resisting the male mind that has been implanted within us all. Feminism is the filter. If a reader fails to do this, then they will continue to be subjected by the hegemonic male patriarchy.
de Certeau claims reading privileges the consumer as opposed to the producer and whatever meaning readers pull out of a text by whatever means is valid and important. His filter is the ever changing, but omnipresent, cultural memory of the reader. Failure to acknowledge this fact, won’t change the fact (at least for de Certeau) and it would be a mistake for anyone interested understanding reading, writing, and the power dynamic of our culture to overlook this fact.
The list could go on. And does. In the minds of readers everywhere.
Each of the theorists I’ve highlighted acknowledges this. They do not argue against existence of other filters. Instead they argue for the utility of their own filter.
Jonathan Culler from Structuralist Poetics:
If other conventions were operative [a text’s] range of potential meanings would be different…. It is only too clear that knowledge of a language and certain experience of the world do not suffice to make someone a perceptive and competent reader…. And so structuralism can lead to a mode of interpretation based on poetics itself, where work is read against the conventions of discourse and where one’s interpretation is an account of the ways in which the world complies with or undermines our procedures for making sense of things.
Judith Fetterly from On The Politics of Literature:
When only one reality is encouraged, legitimized, and transmitted… we have the conditions necessary for the confusion of consciousness in which impalpability flourishes. The purpose here [in her book] is to bring subjectivity to bear on the old universality. Consciousness is Power. Clearly, then, the first act of the feminist critic must be to become a resisting rather than an assenting reader and by this refusal to assent, to begin the process of exorcizing the male mind that has been implanted in us.
Michel de Certeau from Reading as Poaching:
Cultural memory alone makes possible and gradually enriches the strategies of semantic questioning
whose expectation the deciphering of a written text refines, clarifies or corrects. Reading is made possible by oral communication which helps construct meaning that [the text] only shapes. The reader invents in texts something different from what producers intended. We should try to rediscover the movements of this reading.
It is utility that is the key. The facts that break into our conscious mind are the facts that are most useful, most relevant, or most important to us in the moment. As readers with agency any one of us can sit down with a text a read it as a resistant reader, or a conventional reader, or a poaching reader. And then we can return to the same text in a different mode and learn something new. Indeed, just as the secret to all life is encoded in a single cell, a single text can never be exhausted. Its implications and means far outstrip the ability of both the reader and author alike to fully comprehend.
Consequences –Redeparture
I have seen concern expressed that if we allow multiple correct and valid readings then must allow the validity of all readings. If we take away the ground of ‘the correct’ then, as Culler says, “There would be little point to discussing and arguing about literary works.” But the move away from the ground of ‘the correct’ is not a move towards groundlessness. It is a move towards the ground of utility. The reading that is best is the reading that is most useful. Utility, Quality, how valuable is this information, how important is it to me, is the thread that underlies the entire human condition. But the implications of this understanding will have to wait for another paper.
Bibliography
Culler, Jonathan. Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of Literature. Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1975.
de Certeau, Michel. “Reading As Poaching.” The History of Reading. Ed. Rosalind Crone Shatquat Towheed, Katie Hulsey. New York: Routledge, 2011.
Fetterley, Judith. “On the Politics of Literature.” The History of Reading. Ed. Rosalind Crone Shatquat Towheed, Katie Hulsey. New York: Routledge, 2011.
Iser, Wolfgang. The Act of Reading a Theory of Aesthetic Response. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Kant, Immanuel. Critique Of Pure Reason. Translation Paul Guyer and Allen Wood. New York: Cambridge University Pr., 1998.
Paulson, Eric J. and Goodman, Kenneth. “Influential Studies in Eye-Movement Research” www.readingonline.org/research/eyemove.html