Reader, Set Down Thy Pen
The Art of Reading: Finding Balance Between Pleasure and Purpose
In the essay “How I Read” for The New York Review of Books, Tim Parks gives advice on reading actively, pen in hand, searching for connections in the text, parsing metaphor and meaning:
I do believe reading is an active skill, an art even, certainly not a question of passive absorption.
His model for this type of reading happens to be one of my favorite writers:
Borges would often remark that he was first and foremost a professional reader, not a writer, and he meant the claim as a boast…
Borges’s work, more than most, encourages a willful intellectual play between reader and text. In the case of Labyrinths, for example, reading with pen in hand might very well be the best way to go.
However, I find Parks’s approach of reading any novel with a pen—to try to suss out author intent and underline words and passages that correspond with the “qualities or values that matter most to the author”—quite at odds with the artistry of writing and even more at odds with the pleasure of reading.
One writes in large part to bring the reader in to the experience of the text, and not only on an intellectual level.
As a novelist, I strive to close the theater door behind the reader as much as possible: to create an atmosphere so complete that the reader momentarily places the everyday occurrences of the real world in the background, so caught up is she in the “real world” within the novel. I don’t want a reader to think, “Oh, how clever,” because the moment that happens, he is thinking about the mechanics of the book, and is therefore ripped from the tenuous fictional dream.
If the reader is searching for clues to my intent as she reads, I have failed her in an important way (unless, of course, she is reading to learn how to write, intentionally going under the hood to understand the mechanics of the novel–a practice that writers do almost instinctively).
Parks, it seems, takes great pleasure in reading this way: more power to him. And he concedes that not everyone will enjoy reading this way—that, in fact, his method is more pertinent to “those who write, translate, or teach.” But I would suggest that all reading is “active reading,” in that the mere act of making sense of the letters on the page requires thought and attention. One can watch television without much thought or attention, allowing the mind to wander any which way, but it’s almost impossible to read without an active engagement with the words on the page. No matter how distracted you are by the cat or the sunshine or the kids or the mailman or the noise in the background, your mind doesn’t acknowledge letters as words and strings of words as sentences, and strings of sentences as greater units of meaning, without some degree of very conscious activity.
To suggest that “active reading” must entail a kind of detective game with the text ignores what is to me the dual purpose of any work of fiction: to entertain and to enlighten. The dual purposes need not be dueling purposes, but if I hope to do one more than the other, the desire to entertain will always win out. I do not mean a kind of vapid entertainment, but a rich, multi-layered experience in which the reader thinks deeply, feels deeply, and is frequently surprised.
We each find our own way into reading.
For the naturally analytical, that way may include a pen and even, perhaps, some sort of literary spreadsheet. When I was teaching at university, my books were never safe from zealous marking up, their pages smudgy with ink and sticky with miniature Post-its. I encouraged my students to read closely, to be aware of the choices the writer made and the cumulative effects of those choices.
When I left teaching behind, however, I found a happier way back into books. Although, as a writer, I can’t help but keep up a running monologue in my mind—along the lines of “What an artfully constructed sentence” or “I wish I could do that” or “He really should have left that bit out”—I am at my most content when the book is so good that it silences the monologue. Reading sessions these days more often involve a cup of coffee and a few coveted moments of solitude–just me and the book and the sublime pleasure of it, punctuated occasionally by the nagging thought, “Oh, I ought to write that down.”
Michelle Richmond is the author most recently of the novel Golden State and the story collection Hum. Read more about her books at michellerichmond.com.
