Notes Toward an Ethics of Reading
Echoing Parker Palmer’s ennobling assertion that “wholeness does not mean perfection: it means embracing brokenness as an integral part of life,” [George] Saunders observes: “At any given moment you’re failing to see the way things actually are.” -Maria Popova
You can never read the same book twice. This is kind of the inverse of Heraclitus’ famous dictum that you can never set foot in the same river twice, because really, the book sets foot in you.
A couple of years ago, as part of a chapter that I was working on for an edited collection, I had cause to return to a book that I’d first read twenty years earlier (Wayne Booth’s Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent). Even then, the book felt a little dated — it was written in the early 1970s and I was reading it in the mid 1990s. Prompted by the campus protests of the time, Booth addressed what he saw as the breakdown of communication between the students and those in charge of their schools. I was much closer in age, temperament, and ideology to the students that Booth was talking about and, as I often was at the time, more invested in demonstrating my own critical faculties than anything else.
Reading it nearly twenty years later was a much different experience, partly because of the passage of time, certainly. I had returned to the book on a hunch, the idea that something in that book might click with more recent discussions. The goal of the chapter that I was writing was to make the case that there was something resonant going on.
Resonance is an interesting goal to have as a reader. Here’s Wikipedia on resonance: “when a vibrating system or external force drives another system to oscillate with greater amplitude at a specific preferential frequency.” When I think about this in terms of reading, it means that two texts, while still different, have enough in common to enrich each other through juxtaposition. It’s not necessarily that they’re saying the same thing, but that there’s something about how they fit together.
I think there are resonances inside individual texts as well. I often tell my students, who are accustomed enough to reading for information, that they also need to read for the writers’ choices. Sometimes this is easy, as when you have two separate texts, or you allow twenty-odd years to pass between one reading of a book and another. It’s easy too when the text in question is short, because you can read it quickly, put it down, and pick it up an hour later.
It’s a little harder to read a text the first time through and to see it composed of many systems, including the ones that the writer didn’t choose. Reading for a writer’s choices requires you to think about the choices she’s made in the context of those she could have made (without necessarily holding her accountable for those she couldn’t have made (a particular challenge for reading older works)). Maybe that conceptual metaphor from the introduction resonated with the types of questions the writer raises a chapter later. Maybe a certain piece of evidence foreclosed on certain conclusions to the benefit of others.
I think it’s easy to misunderstand this kind of reading as somehow breaking the text, and on one level, I suppose it is. Analysis without synthesis, maybe. But if you can read a text as a network of possibilities, some of which have been activated and others which haven’t, there’s something in that process which makes you both a better reader and writer. It’s not a simple matter — it takes a lot of practice — but it’s worth it.
