'The task is merely to wake up': Thinking when reading part.2

 

Edwin Muir, a poet and essayist from the last century, wrote beautiful memoirs (‘The story and the fable’) evoking the remote Scottish island he was born on, and his subsequent move to England, and he has that line which is here appropriate:

‘The great sin is to let everything slip past in a sort of dream or stupor, aware neither of yourself nor of the world: the normal state of human life. The task is merely to wake up’.

 

In part 1 we started with the idea of ‘Thinking while reading’. A very common misconception here is to do with thinking as a conscious, active, almost physical effort, as in: I need to think about this, or I need to put my mind to it in a very conscious, self-conscious way.

It’s a misconception because reading is cumulative: each paragraph adds to the previous ones, builds on the previous ones, and takes on meaning in relation to the whole.

Your mind needs to be active but only in the sense of ‘open to everything’, and perhaps better: ‘Ready for anything’.

Or to put it another way: it’s not that you need to think when you read –  you need to be open-minded, you need to take it slow, eyes wide open, and you must try to find that sweet spot where your (semi)conscious reading intersects with your unconscious. Where everything you know, have heard of, have experienced, have seen, is there ready to be tapped into – not forcibly brought to the fore but not pushed all the way down the pit of forgetfulness either. Just right there, in the middle, ready to make what you read shine in the light of who you are and who you are not.

 

I do not deny that most people find this difficult, either because they think of literature in the three terms mentioned at the beginning of this post (in part 1), or because they never quite believe that meaning can come to them – they believe they must seek that meaning out, like a hunter.

So let’s quote Milan Kundera, from his absolutely wonderful little book ‘The art of the novel’ (1986):

‘Man desires a world where good and evil can be clearly distinguished. They can cope with the novel only by translating its language of relativity and ambiguity into their own dogmatic discourse. They require that someone be right: either Anna Karenina is the victim of a narrow-minded tyrant, or Karenin is the victim of an immoral woman (…)

This either/or encapsulates an inability to tolerate the essential relativity of things human, an inability to look squarely at the absence of the Supreme Judge.

This inability makes the novel’s wisdom (the wisdom of uncertainty) hard to accept and understand’.

Yet that uncertainty is what literature is – or should be – about, and the very first thing about literature that students should be made aware of.

 

Now, uncertainty can be a drag for many, notably because they want things resolved, clarified and certain: is that character a bad guy or a good guy? Was she right to do this, or was she wrong? Is this a symbol of love, or a symbol of friendship?

And you know how many people absolutely hate so-called ‘open endings’, where characters live on but you don’t know the answers.

Yet ask yourself: what do you mean by ‘Answers’?

Really what you mean is: the author didn’t tell you. The author kept that answer to themselves, and now you don’t know what to think, you don’t know what to do. Are you even allowed to venture an ending? And if you do, how do you know you’re right?

And here again you go back one step: you delegate the work to the author; you pass the thinking-buck back to the author. In other words, you wait for someone to tell you –  you ‘require that someone be right’, and you assume that the only one who can be right is the author.

The only possible way out of this is to accept that the reader co-constructs meaning, and that reading is a creative process – Borges said so many times, for example in this interview (with O. Ferrari): ‘Reading can be a creative act, no less creative than writing. As Emerson said, a book is one thing among things, a dead thing, until someone opens it’. YOU, the reader, give life to the book (and if you’re lucky, it will give some back to you as well). When Alan Bennett has his character say that ‘A book is a device to ignite the imagination’, it means that YOU must act on that burst of imagination – the ignition phase is the first one, but it must not be the last one. ‘The task is to wake up’.

And that’s where ‘Thinking’ comes back into the equation.