The Way to Read

[Nemonymous]

I have written here before about the way to look at paintings in a gallery or in an art book. You simply need to imagine in turn that each painting was hung on your bedroom wall for many years during the period when you were an impressionable child or youth. Obviously, you would have looked at it several times, lived with it (sometimes ignoring it, at other times staring at it mindlessly or with full attention); maybe you interpreted it in different ways over the years, found a meaning for you, and so forth.

You can reach the same ‘experience’ with a new painting in a few minutes by willing the 'bedroom wall' state upon yourself by imagination or by osmosis or by concentrated effort or by channelled empathy with another self – and the painting, I assure you, will become as special and as diverse as that painting on the bedroom wall of your past.


With music, especially classical music (new and old), the optimum way of listening, I maintain, is to imagine the vision of (or become in empathy with) a hand-puppet or marionette or mannequin (or all of these in different shapes and colours and 'personalities') moving ‘in tune’ with what you hear. You simply need to try this once and you will discover that the music becomes as special as that painting on your 'bedroom wall'. A figurative dance of soul with art.


The way to read is far more difficult. Are words objects, feelings, semantic fields, sounds, shapes, or are they syntactical constructs of all of those things, a synergy of magical touches upon the tender-spots along your mind’s unique spectrum, or simply do they represent a phenomenon that cannot be explained by any easy theory of how these words you read were formed and how they should be absorbed in that very process of reading?


Perhaps by only-connecting the 'bedroom wall' with the music-puppets, the art of reading becomes a music-accompanied silhouette or shadow show that will haunt you better than your best dreams do.



CODA
Death is a shadow that stays unmoving on the 'bedroom wall' like a fixed stain. But the moving shapes and shadows have never ceased moving for me. And never will.

[Nemonymous]

As indicated by the thread title, I'd be interested in any other theories on the art of reading etc.

[tartarusrussell]

Hi Des,

Your idea of looking at pictures and imagining what they would mean to you if they had been on your bedroom wall for years appeals to me, and it should work for all kinds of art. I'm in sympathy with the idea because it is similar to the way in which I used to look at old houses. When I first moved to the city (Sheffield) in the 1980s I used to wander around the suburbs (especially of a Sunday morning, very early) and imagine what different houses would mean to me if I had been brought up in them. I'd construct stories to account for the details I'd see.

For music I often close my eyes and conjure images and daydreams, which is a direct result of being an impressionable teenager when videos suddenly became popular. I'd imagine and direct videos in my head while listening to music. I assume everybody does this to a certain extent.

But reading, I think, is rather different. If you and I read the same couple of sentences then there is every chance that what we imagine visually will be quite different. But the author will direct the action and force us into very similar directions whether we like it or not. (There again, it is amazing how differently some people can interpret the same book.) Really good, engaging authors, of course, create characters and situations that continue off the page, even when the story is ended...

[Odalisque]

For people who don't know the way to read, this thread will be of very little use.

[Odalisque]

Quote Originally Posted by tartarusrussell

There again, it is amazing how differently some people can interpret the same book.

But sometimes the interpretation can't be justified by the text. I recall someone sounding off to me about Kafka's The Trial. He said something to the effect of: "Everyone assumes that Joseph K was innocent, but how do we know he isn't guilty?

My reply was:

Because Kafka tells us so in the first sentence: Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K because, without his doing anything wrong, he was arrested one fine morning.

[gveranon]

I sometimes feel suggestions of "body English" while listening to music, but these are usually just vague and fragmentary -- nothing like a marionette continuously moving. I'm afraid I would find it comical to try to imagine a marionette in this way. (Does the marionette start spazzing out when you're listening to Webern?) Aside from body English, music can also create a sense of environment -- spacious, constricted, or whatever. Also, I sometimes have intimations of visual images or patterns, an effect that was especially pronounced back in my chemical-dreaming days. Of course there can be emotional or conceptual associations, too. I don't try to use any of these other ways of thinking in order to appreciate music. I'm a very passive listener and just let the music suggest whatever it suggests -- or not, as the case may be.

I associate paintings (at least the ones that I tend to like the most) with silence -- a silence that seems almost palpable -- sometimes ominous, sometimes serene. I'm not sure why this is; it's probably because paintings are frozen images, so it seems appropriate that sound would stop, too. It's probably not an accident that some of my favorite painters produced works that are especially suggestive of silence: Chirico, Hopper, Monet, Mondrian. (Mondrian did do a painting called Broadway Boogie Woogie, but even prompted by the title I can only imagine silence.) And does anyone else imagine Munch's The Scream as being completely silent? To me this makes it even more horrific.

It's harder to figure out all the things that go on in my head when I read. Different authors have different effects. Often with the authors I like the most, I don't fully appreciate their unique qualities at first. I gradually get a handle on what they're doing as I read more. But of course I won't read more unless I had at least some appreciation for what they were doing from the beginning. I'm not necessarily talking about difficult authors here. Any author that's worth reading, even if he or she writes very simply, seems to have a certain flavor and a certain mental topography that comes out in the writing. EDIT: I almost avoided falling into the Intentional Fallacy there! I'm afraid the Intentional Fallacy does have some pull on how I read. I probably only avoid it entirely -- trusting the tale and not the teller -- when I feel unsympathetic to what I imagine that the author imagines himself/herself to be doing.

[Nemonymous]

Quote Originally Posted by Odalisque

But sometimes the interpretation can't be justified by the text. I recall someone sounding off to me about Kafka's The Trial. He said something to the effect of: "Everyone assumes that Joseph K was innocent, but how do we know he isn't guilty? My reply was: Because Kafka tells us so in the first sentence: Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K because, without his doing anything wrong, he was arrested one fine morning.

Unless the author or narrator (or both) were being ironic...??

Regarding visualization of puppets with music, perhaps this only works well with certain forms of non-vocal Classical Music. It seems to work brilliantly, in the sense that I'm helping something-already-existing to emerge rather than forcing the visualisation by my own volition.

[alogos]

Hi Des:

I always found you to be one of my favorite posters on TLO, because if you will permit the compliment, I always found the questions you've asked particularly thought provoking. I haven't been to the forum in a while, or else I would have responded to this earlier, but first let me express my dismay that in a forum of so many literary types so few have responded fruitfully to this question.

expressing dismay now:

OK that said the way I read, is based on my personal experience as a kid. I grew up as a rather impoverished (by economic standards anyways) child in Mexico, and believe it or not I was not allowed as a child to read horror stories or watch scary movies. But I had a very deep attraction to horror, and to everything that lay just outside the cusp of the comprehensible, real or imagined.

The way I got my horror fill as a kid was by a talented uncle keeping the kids in thrall with a particular deft ghost story, or else by hearsay as someone told me just "how scary" the latest horror movie was, but not seeing the movie itself I had to imagine it all in myself.

Though not allowed read horror per-se, I was a precocious youth and an omnivorous reader as a kid, I particularly liked to tackle the biggest tomes I could find. Dickens, Hugo, Doestoevsky - all great writers that really trained my imagination for the love of explicit, excruciating detail. They were giant narratives that for better or worse I could "fall" into and loose myself for a while.

These two scenarios though seemingly unrelated seem to me the best approximations of understanding how it is that I, an amateur in the truest sense - a lover of stories, read.

On the one hand I see a book less like and object, and more like a conversation. And this conversation creates something. In my experience that something can be explained as one of two things, either it is a kind of virtual reality that fills up voluminously my mental space, or else it is - at it's best- an experience that draws me into the books or me out of myself such that the book becomes a window into a real world, or it makes the real world seem like a puppet show.

I've written before about the latter experience in the thread "fiction as religion" and I've tried to describe the experience at greater length there, whether I was successful or not I leave to others to decide. I hope no one takes my descriptions literally as I am merely trying to use imagery to convey a sense.

But I would like to use a little more imagery to explain the former sensation, and that is the image that Calvino uses in an interlude from Invisible Cities. That is of two men, Marco Polo and Kublai Khan, sitting across from one another having a conversation with neither one saying a word. In my minds eye I pictured all of the invisible cities being described appearing as thunderheads between them merely at the behest of words shared between friends.

Or to take a more a humorous and contemporary image the image of Homer and Mr. Burns locked in cabin fighting a war with imaginary armies. I hope that pop-cultural reference doesn't hurt my creditability because I find it both humorous and apt.

This is how I read, if that makes any sense.

When I pick up a book I am having a conversation, either with someone I may never physically meet or with someone who is already long dead, and we begin to "converse", and this "conversation" this thing that exist between us, the half-way point between what the writer describes and what the reader imagines, that is the essential experience of reading a story.

Why do I use this convoluted analogy?

Well it may be a little overwrought but I am a guy who likes to take what he likes best of any given philosophy or world view and discard the rest. This way I keep what I think are the best insights and am not trapped by ideological confines of any specific school of thought.

This interpretation of the reading experience allows me to keep the best ideas of classical literary theory, for example the relevance of how the author influences the work, while allowing me to keep the experimental insight that post-modernism allows in fiction. The story is the conversation that exists independently in the ether, but it also permits me to admit that some writers are better conversationalist than others. Also it allows me to permit the various shades that the individual will bring to the story (such as that frustrating interpretation of The Trial), since the reader is the other half of the conversation and can do whatever the hell they want with the text. But it also lets me study the text or conversation "objectively" because although in some sense lifeless without either writer or reader, it also in another sense exist independently and I can talk about it purely on its terms - with total disregard for writer and reader.

Also i can fit in what I like about Chomsky's Cartesian Linguistics, but that's another story.

(PS: this is my third long post of the day so forgive me any glaring typos)

	TLO THOMAS LIGOTTI ONLINE

[Russell Nash]

Quote Originally Posted by Nemonymous

The way to read is far more difficult. Are words objects, feelings, semantic fields, sounds, shapes, or are they syntactical constructs of all of those things, a synergy of magical touches upon the tender-spots along your mind’s unique spectrum, or simply do they represent a phenomenon that cannot be explained by any easy theory of how these words you read were formed and how they should be absorbed in that very process of reading?

Quote Originally Posted by Nemonymous

As indicated by the thread title, I'd be interested in any other theories on the art of reading etc.

Des, if you can read something, it means that something was written first. Therefore, a theory of reading would be subordinated to a theory of writing, that came first. I think that to answer your question without answering why one reads first, makes the question incomplete. When I started to write I asked myself this question: Why should anyone read me? The question is one of Zeno's paradoxes: Achilles and the tortoise. Let me explain. Why should anyone read me? I would answer: before reading me you should read this book, but before reading this book you should first read this other book, but before reading this other book you should definitely read this other book first, and so on. Achilles (the reader) will never catch up with the tortoise (a book) because he will always have another book to read first, not reading any of them at the end. The question I always ask myself when I see a new book is: Why should I read this book? ...being in the world, millions of excellent books already.

So,

Quote Originally Posted by Nemonymous

Are words objects, feelings, semantic fields, sounds, shapes, or are they syntactical constructs of all of those things, a synergy of magical touches upon the tender-spots along your mind’s unique spectrum, or simply do they represent a phenomenon that cannot be explained by any easy theory of how these words you read were formed and how they should be absorbed in that very process of reading?

It probably has nothing to do with what you asked but your question brought to my mind the following part of the film "Old Gringo",

"Most beautiful poem ever written..." - YouTube

Words are objects, feelings, semantic fields, sounds, shapes, syntactical constructs of all of those things, a synergy of magical touches upon the tender-spots along your mind’s unique spectrum and they also represent a phenomenon that cannot be explained by any easy theory of how these words you read were formed and how they should be absorbed in that very process of reading. You answered your own question.

A software can write words, but I'm not sure if a software can write beauty. And I read to find beauty in words, and I hope something of what I wrote has at least a small percentage of this beauty I'm looking for. If not, I failed. Money comes and goes; popularity, the same; but beauty lasts.

[sundog]

Quote Originally Posted by Odalisque

Quote Originally Posted by tartarusrussell There again, it is amazing how differently some people can interpret the same book. But sometimes the interpretation can't be justified by the text. I recall someone sounding off to me about Kafka's The Trial. He said something to the effect of: "Everyone assumes that Joseph K was innocent, but how do we know he isn't guilty? My reply was: Because Kafka tells us so in the first sentence: Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K because, without his doing anything wrong, he was arrested one fine morning.

Wow. Is the English translation of 'Der Proceß' really that bad? The opening sentence goes: Jemand mußte Josef K. verleumdet haben, denn ohne daß er etwas Böses getan hätte, wurde er eines Morgens verhaftet. ... 'Hätte' is a subjunctive form of 'haben' and in this case it obviously signifies a supposition. Josef K. presumes he is innocent of any wrongdoing, and furthermore he presumes that someone must have been telling lies about him. Outwardly, of course, this presumption of his takes on the form of insistence upon his innocence before the court. This schisma is the whole crux of the novel.
The English translation of that famous opening line can also be taken to express a supposition; in the original German it is just abundantly clear that it is so. Happy re-reading!