Don’t put books in boxes: why immanent reading is awesome.
I am not alone.
I am not crazy.
There’s not something I’m missing.
This is a legitimate thought (and it’s okay to have it).
There have been a few occasions in my life where I’ve felt this way, in an intellectual context. The instance that I remember best is the first time it happened.
For a lot of my early childhood, I was a huge space fan — I loved learning about space, and nerding out about planets and stars and galaxies and black holes. But there was always one thing I didn’t understand about space — or rather, one thing that I didn’t understand about the way people talked about space:
Who are we to decide what counts as “life”?!?
Whenever you learn about space, you inevitably run into explanations of the possibilities of finding life on other planets. My teachers and the books I read and the other space-nerd friends I had would always go on and on about how there might be life here, or there couldn’t be life here, or what we would do if we found life, and so on and so on — but in these discussions, I would always be faced with this one lurking, fundamental confusion that I had, a question that I felt superseded their discussions (or even rendered them irrelevant), but that as a five-year-old I didn’t have the confidence or the vocabulary to voice.
How the heck do we even define life? Just as something that looks like us? Well obviously not, my internal devil’s advocate would say. We consider animals life, too. And plants. Okay, but why? Why do those things count as life, and not other things? And why do those things have to count as life? Just because we said so?
And an even more important question: what if life exists, but we just aren’t able to see it? As in, the way it exists isn’t something that fits into one of our five senses? In the same way that color exists, but how can you explain that to a blind person?
To me, it seemed like these questions took obvious priority over my kindergarten teacher’s lesson about how and when we might find life. How can we talk about finding life if we don’t even know what it is, or how to perceive it? But I was just a snotty five-year-old, and my English wasn’t very good yet, and after all how could the teacher be not just wrong about an answer, but fundamentally asking the wrong questions? I’ve always been naturally reverent of authority, to the point of obsequiousness (a trait for which I’ve been given grief by my friends, my teammates, and my journalism advisor, but which has nevertheless stuck with me since my pre-school Japanese education). So I kept my mouth shut, and assumed that I just didn’t get it.
That is, until I was in fourth grade, listening to an episode of the podcast HowStuffWorks, and the distinguished, academically accomplished interviewee said this:
“Yeah, for me, the question is really — what if there is life on other planets, but we just don’t have the sensory faculties to perceive it? What if it exists on some other spectrum of reality that we fundamentally can’t comprehend? And really, what even counts as life? What is the point of valuing the discovery of this vaguely defined thing, if really it’s just an arbitrary human construction?”
My jaw dropped. I’m pretty sure my eyes bugged out. Here was a thought that I had been having for some five years, a question that I had always thought my teachers should have answered, but that since they didn’t I just assumed must’ve been the fault of some gap in my own understanding, being asked on a legitimate intellectual podcast, by an accredited and respected authority on the topic. I was not wrong to be thinking this question! And there was a way to express it in words (I looked up the word arbitrary in the dictionary, and it was one of the most exciting and powerful words that nine-year-old nihilist me had ever learned)! I ran downstairs and told my mom.
This is the sense of vindication that I felt several weeks ago, when in my AP English class we read excerpts from Daniel Coffeen’s book Reading the Way of Things — specifically, when we talked about the idea of immanent vs. exemplary reading.
“In exemplary reading, we make sense of things as an instantiation of something else,” writes Coffeen. “This something can be a category such as a genre (The Maltese Falcon is classic noir), an idea (Blue Velvet is all about the Oedipal complex), ideology (Gone Girl is patriarchal), history (Cubism was radical for its time), biography (Picasso had trouble relations with the women in his life). In all cases, we make sense of what we’re experiencing through things that have come before and have stood the test of time. This painting, this book, is just a moment of that bigger thing.”
Coffeen’s explanation of exemplary reading is much longer than this, and all of it is rich and wonderful and worth reading. But to move on to the part that really got me:
“Immanent reading begins with the text — the text that is made of other texts, inevitably, and lets it guide,” says Coffeen. “Or, perhaps, it begins with the readers’ encounter with the text and goes from there. This means the reader does not look for a key or an answer to explain it; there is no secret waiting behind or hidden within the thing. This means no concept, no theory, no genre, no historical circumstances rear up and demand compliance. A thing goes as it goes. The immanent reader follows this way of going.”
It goes on. And it only gets better. It’s a struggle to stop myself from including it all, but as Pascal says, “I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter.” I have time to make this letter shorter, but there’s one last line I want to share:
“There is no privileged access and an immanent reading is never definitive (even if thoroughly persuasive).”
My fingers are trembling upon the keys. It’s beautiful. I could cry.
Let me explain why.
The reason I so viscerally love Coffeen’s distinction between exemplary reading and immanent reading is the same reason I loved that HowStuffWorks episode about space that I heard in the fourth grade. Because it vindicates me. Fundamentally.
Coffeen’s idea of immanent versus exemplary reading puts into words a frustration that I’ve felt but never been able to express about the way we read things in modern education.
For as long as I can remember, class reading has always been exemplary.
For one, our assignments and assessments are based on the same kinds of questions: How does this text illustrate this theme? When do you see this motif? How does this painting (because we read those, too) illustrate its painter’s struggle with this issue? How is this poem related to this poet’s divorce with his wife?
The thing that has always bothered me about these kinds of questions is because they are based on certain assumptions about the text or artwork in question. How does this text illustrate this theme? reads like this to me:
This text illustrates this theme. Tell me how.
Similarly, How is this poem related to this poet’s divorce with his wife? means:
This poet divorced with his wife. That’s important to the poem. Tell me how.
This unspoken subtext makes me feel less like I’m being asked something, and more like I’m being told something — and then ordered to accept and conform to that piece of information. Well, I’m not really being ordered to accept it. My acceptance is assumed. My acceptance is an implicit condition. After all, I’m just the student. I’m here to take notes and nod.
But that feels wrong to me. Are there no other ways to derive value or meaning from this text? To me, these questions constitute a tragedy of lost potential for exploration and learning — their unspoken assumption that the subject of the question is the thing that is important about the book, so get on with it and show me that you understand why, feels to me like a missed opportunity to ask: is it? What is important about this book? Why? And maybe my answer to that question will be the same as what my teacher has given me, but maybe it won’t be. And if I think something else is more important, or I find more meaning in a different aspect of the text, wouldn’t it be better and more interesting for me to explore that? Why am I being forced to conform to these leading, loaded questions?
That’s one of two main things that bothers me about the way that we read. There’s a second.
Throughout my experience with class readings in English classes, we’ve often preceded our actual reading of the book with something else — an exhaustive introductory/contextual unit that gives us such indispensable gems (I’m being sarcastic here) as the writer’s biography, the full history of the period that this book was written in, and the themes and motifs that are going to be important here so pay attention to them!
ARGHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!
I find these lessons insulting. To me, introducing a book in this way is a disservice to both the book and the reader. For one, it implies that this book requires the fulfillment of all these other, prerequisite tasks before it can be read, and that its meaning and value are contingent on these ancillary sources of information. This book needs to be put on a stepstool for us to see it properly. And for two (we always say “for one,” do we ever say “for two” ?), when we do these introductory units I feel like I’m being told that I am not capable of understanding this book unless I am given all of these other pieces of information as crutches beforehand. I want to ride a bike, but I’m being given permanent training wheels to do it with. Or even better, I want to ride a bike, so I’m being put on an electric bike that’s fixed to a predefined track like a train on a railway, and my only role is to press the go button and sit there as the bike takes me along a route that someone else has charted out for me.
Why? Why am I being told that this book can’t stand on its own? Why am I being told that I can’t stand on my own?
(As it turns out, Coffeen has an answer to this. It has to do with the authority of the expert in our education system. One more reason to read his book.)
In addition to feeling condescending, the pre-reading introductory unit also feels again like a huge loss of potential for new and diverse ideas and thus for learning, on the parts of both the teacher and the student. Making students look for “isms” in a work or telling us what it’s supposed to represent puts the work in a box, and it puts horse blinders around our eyes. It gives us one way to look at this work, and doesn’t give us the chance to see for ourselves what we think, and see what significance we draw from it.
It almost feels like a betrayal. I love reading books, but why should I bother to engage with a text if I’m expected to produce an answer along some prepackaged formula, and not encouraged to see what I think is important first?
So here’s what we should do instead.
When I first read this part of Coffeen’s book, my initial reaction was more or less along the lines of: Yes! Finally! There is someone who has had this same thought, and who has given us this awesome way to label these things: immanent and exemplary reading. Okay, now let’s throw out exemplary reading, and do all immanent reading! Woohoo! The revolution has begun!
Several seconds later, my inner skeptic caught up to me. As did my English teacher. Now, to be clear, this was my personal and immediate interpretation of and reaction to reading Coffeen — it’s not what he says in his writing, which is much more nuanced and balanced than my rash instinctual response. But again, that was just my first reaction. What my inner voice and my English teacher then pointed out was that there is still a place for exemplary reading. And, after thinking about it for a while, I think I’ve found it.
No text or art (yes, texts can be art, but this is just to use the common/loose sense of the word to distinguish between written versus other media for expression) exists in a vacuum. Everything is a product of its time. Which means, inevitably there are always some influences from outside a work that affect how the work is written or painted or drawn.
These influences can be implicit, like how a writer’s portrayal of men and women is inevitably influenced by their era’s accepted assumptions about the (in)equality of the sexes. Or they can be explicit, such as when a satirist criticizes a very specific event or thing that is relevant to them in their time, or when a poet refers to a spouse or ex-spouse in a love poem or writes the poem in their memory.
In either case, understanding these influences is an important step in having a fuller and richer understanding of the work. In some cases, it is an essential step to even having a basic comprehension of the work. For example, this political cartoon:
would be difficult to understand without knowing what the National Rifle Association is or having some basic knowledge over modern debates about gun ownership and gun control.
So yes, exemplary reading is valuable and important. But so is immanent reading, for reasons previously discussed. How, then, do we fit the two together, to reap the maximum benefits of both?
The answer is simple. Do immanent reading first, and exemplary reading after.
After all, you can only read something for the first time once. And immanent reading is predicated upon first impressions. Immanent reading is reading a text without referring to outside information and seeing what meaning you can find in the text and the text alone.
To do that best, you don’t want to have a lengthy lesson on the history around a book’s publication or the author’s biography or the most famous interpretations of the work — because that information will inevitably distort your perception of the work, and unconsciously influence what you look for and what you look at.
Instead, you want to just dive straight in and read the book. Let it speak to you directly and without distraction or interruption. See what questions you come up with, and what patterns you notice, and what themes you think are important.
Then, after (and only after) you’ve gone through all of your own thoughts and ideas can you go see what other people have thought about this book, and what historical or personal circumstances might have influenced the author, and all of those other exemplary reading techniques. And now, what’s wonderful is that all of this outside information, rather than limiting your perspective before you start reading, expands and adds to your perspective, which you’ve already established on your own.
What’s great about this process is that it allows you to forge your own personal relationship with the text. Rather than your experience of a text being fit into a mold given to you and thousands of other students by some standardized curriculum, you get to experience the book in your own, unique, intimate manner, and what the curriculum does is offer you additional tools to enrich your understanding and your experience.
And even if the conclusions that you come to on your own when reading the book are the same as the prevailing conclusions that other people have come to about the book, you have reached them in a much more powerful way. Rather than your experience confirming something your teacher has told you, something your teacher has told you is confirming something you experienced for yourself.
For example, imagine being told that Edgar Allan Poe had frequent traumatic experiences with women throughout his life, including multiple women he loved dying untimely deaths and a fiance marrying someone else. If you then read “The Raven,” it would be an easy and rather uninteresting conclusion for you to say yep, that had a pretty strong effect on him, because this poem is a guy being tortured by thoughts of his lover. Is that it?
By contrast, if you first read “The Raven,” without any context or preface or introduction, you might wonder, why is this guy so haunted by this woman? And if you then go and do your exemplary reading, referencing Poe’s biography, you come to a satisfying aha! moment — that makes so much sense now!
In either case, you will come away with the same knowledge. But in the latter, your experience is much stronger and more fun and interesting — because you arrived at those conclusions yourself.
So teachers, please. Put the context lesson on hold, until after we read. Give me a chance to experience the book for myself. Give us (the book and I) a chance to have a conversation on our own terms, in our own way. I promise, I will learn so much more, and be so much happier.
