What is extreme reading?

The Book Hold is for “extreme reading.” What’s that?

Let's start from this more basic question: What is reading? Of course, there is the simple definition, but the simple definition reveals in a way everything there is to say about reading. The simple definition of reading is that it is making sense of words on a page.

There are two relatively complex questions working their way under the surface of our ideas about reading. One is closer to the surface and it is a question about what we get out of reading. Suffice it to say, reading is either entertainment or something else. Another is a bit more below the surface, and it has to do with questions about the professionalization of reading. The basic outlook of The Book Hold, encompassed in the project of extreme reading, is twofold. First, extreme reading is serious—its purpose is not simply that of pleasure, and the sorts of things extreme reading is interested in are general formal or structural in nature. Second, extreme reading is reading that seeks to be free of certain institutional demands and expectations. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Reading is making sense of words on a page, words that have been put there by a writer. But this precedent operation is complex. The words that are there are there because the author has chosen them, that’s true, but their reasons for putting them there are complex. A trope is chosen owing to its familiarity (or unfamiliarity). A form or genre is chosen owing to its popularity (or obscurity). Tropes, forms, and genres all have their rules, which the author does or doesn’t observe. In short, the author is a sort of editor of cultural influence. Writing is a collage.

Of course, the author is also injecting herself into the work; she is a cause of it. This idea is so obvious it doesn’t need development. No authors, no books. (Of course, this point could be put this way, too: that one of the ‘cultural influences’ animating the work is the author’s own culturally inflected creativity.) These two ideas—that the book is the product of an author’s vision or intention, and that the book is a cultural artifact—correspond to different conceptions of reading, and to different justifications for a professional class of readers.

The intentionalist model

On one (now fairly antique) model, the work is the author’s actualization of their goal in creating it, and then understanding the work amounts to understanding what the author was attempting to do when writing it. This idea (which, again, is officially bogus) is so obviously the right one, it can be easy to miss the slam dunk of a criticism: We only need to know about someone’s intentions when they have failed to do what they have set out to do. In other words, if you think we need to know about authors’ intentions in creating literary works, you are committed to the idea that all literary works are failures. Either the work is a failure, and then knowing about intentions is useful, but the intentions could only, very specifically, be necessary to know if they managed not to be expressed in the work—so that knowing about their intentions would very specifically not tell us anything about the work (which was a failure), except by dint of subtraction (the intentions would tell us what the work is not)—or the work isn’t a failure, and then the work itself is what the author intended to create, and there is no need to look to their putative ‘intentions’, because they are all right there in the work.

But let us suppose, absurd as it is, that this model is in fact the right one for thinking about how to understand a text (a book, a novel—we’re not making fine distinctions here, or yet anyway). Figuring out a text would then mean figuring out an author’s intentions, but, even so, figuring out an author’s intentions is a dicey affair. You have to know an incredible lot about someone to be able to say what they intended to do, not to mention in doing something as complex as writing a book. And this is one justification for the professional reader. The professional reader is specially equipped with two sorts of competence: competence in figuring out intentions in general (the sort of research to do and how to do it), and competence in describing the intentions of an author (e.g., Breton) or specific group of authors (e.g., French surrealists) in particular.

In addition to casting doubt on the intentionalist model, one of Barthes’ thoughts in “The Death of the Author” is that the eradication of intentionalism ought to correspond to the emergence of a certain sort of reader. The idea is that, if works are something other than realizations of authors’ intentions, and clarifying these intentions and their relation to works requires professional interpreters, then abandoning intentionalism casts doubt not only on the authority of the author but on the authority of the literary-critical institution. I’m reminded of a wonderful pair of lines from Outkast’s “Elevators” that could be seen fittingly to describe the relation of author and critic:

I live by the beat like you live check to check.
If it don’t move your feet, then I don’t eat, so we like neck to neck

For Barthes, then, the death of the author coincided with the death of the critic, and the emergence of a new sort of reader.

Textualism and institutionalization

Of course, nothing like that happened at all, and reading has never been more professionalized than it is now. One of the ongoing, shrug-like-you-mean-it struggles of criticism is that, for every institution that gets deconstructed, the need for professionals . . . in institutions to do or just to know about the deconstruction grows by another few inches. And that is partly because, in the case of literature, the alternative(s) to intentionalism are not at all less but indeed much more complex. Instead of seeing works as realizations of an individual’s intentions, works become crosscurrents of tropes, forms, genres, and other cultural and linguistic norms. To make sense of that whole mess, you now need someone trained, not just in the comparatively simple art of biography, but in the exceedingly complex histories and theories of art, literature, and philosophy, and in the exceedingly complex task of directing those forces into the interpretation of a work.

Now, one thing, curiously, that both the antique intentionalist and the contemporary textualist have in common is the idea—which makes perfectly good sense—that readers complete a work. The intentionalists think you have to know Tchaikovsky was a closeted homosexual to really ‘get’ his music. The textualists think you have to know how Mahler makes use of folk songs to really ‘get’ his symphonies. In either case, whatever the arguments are for professionalization, the reader (or the listener) is responsible for putting the work together. The work does not compose itself. Like a symphony, a book, aside from being a physical object, is an assemblage of meanings—a mess, a collage—that get more sensibly brought together or unified by a reader.

In a certain sense, all of that was the long way back to the simple definition of reading: Reading is making sense of words on a page. Of course, one consequence of this—which anyone who has come across an abandoned, muddied book or receipt or text of any sort will be aware of—is that books in and of themselves, that is, as physical objects, are not obviously meaningful. If anything, from the most strictly objective stance possible (consider a book in a language foreign to you, for example), they are ciphers, codes; they conceal meaning in the cloak of language. Looks like an illustration of ants marching in neat rows—but actually it’s a story of war, and loss, and love, and . . . .

But, in any event, I think one critical idea to be aware of, which justifies the longer tour, is that our ways of understanding ‘making sense of’ have the potential to imply different sorts of professional readers, and (here’s the problem with that) professional readers make reading less, not more, possible. If I don’t ‘get’ a work unless I’ve combed through decades of the authors’ letters, and ‘gotten’ a thousand other works like the one I’m trying to make sense of, and boned up on the latest relevant theories, there’s a healthy chance, a really good chance, that I’m never going to ‘get’ it. If ‘getting it’ is reading, professionals are killing reading. Death of the author? More like death of the reader.

The other side to all this says: Meh, fuck it, I’m just going to read what I like. In other words, the rejection of professionalism seems to require a certain kind of literary hedonism, and it’s the sort of hedonism that dominates the literary industry (that is, an institution of a whole other sort than an academic one). Books are so good you can’t put them down; they’re compulsive, even guilty reads. You’re going to like it so much you’ll feel bad. Books are shoes, cars, amusement park rides, it doesn’t matter: Money in, pleasure out. You don’t have to worry whether you’re ‘getting’ books because ‘getting’ them is the dopamine hit. This then shapes the book-critical industry in certain corresponding ways. (Review: Dopamine hit yes.) And, obviously, it shapes the kinds of books that get written and published.

Extreme reading

Of course, rejecting professionalism doesn’t have to require any of this at all. It is possible to read a book and take its meaning to be something other than the pleasure you get from it. That, in any event, is one of the main ideas of what The Book Hold calls “extreme reading.” Extreme reading rejects the choice between professionalization or pleasure.

Extreme reading, like all reading, consists in the constitution of meaning, that is, in making sense of words on a page. But extreme reading differs from other forms of reading in that it is committed to the interpretive enterprise, that is, the task of making sense of words on a page without that ‘sense’ being reducible to the dopamine hit (read this, skip that), and always with an eye to what is or might be theoretically of interest. One of the essential precepts of extreme reading is that there are no authorities on reading. However, that shouldn’t be taken to imply that anything goes. What ‘goes’, in the relevant sense, is what makes sense of a work.

Along these lines, it’s worth bearing in mind that criticism is something that is written and that is read, too. Extreme reading, in the form of written criticism, has as its orienting principle the idea that it should making reading more interesting. An essay on Bleak House should make reading Bleak House more interesting, should attempt to spell out what is theoretically compelling about it in a way that makes the reading more theoretically compelling. The ‘test’ here has only to do with the text at hand: A successful interpretation offers a hand in reading; a hand in bringing together the threads of the work in a meaningful and unitary way; a hand in making sense of words on a page.

Like all writing, however, criticism is drama, and succesful criticism is successful drama. Drama, to put it very simply, involves the surprise of immanence: an acorn becomes an oak tree; the quiet, unassuming employee is a money-launderer and sex addict. Extreme reading seeks to reveal immanence in this way: The detective novel is a romance; the war novel is a novel of manners; the narrator is a fascist. The purpose is not to discover anything like “actual” meaning, or even to reject the possibility of discovering such a thing, but to adopt an attitude of disregard toward it. The purpose of extreme reading is, simply, to stretch the work as much as possible to make it more interesting, more worth reading.

That’s the goal of what I’m doing here with The Book Hold. It’s something I try to do in my classes as a philosophy professor, but in the literary arena I’m an amateur. I’m not selling Officially Sanctioned Interpretations™ here, and, from the professional perspective, I’m sure I’m probably botching the job in many ways. I’m also not pushing recommendations in the usual sense. I’m trying to make books interesting in another way, and in a way that manages both to be theoretically rich but also immune to the sort of professionalizing that erodes the significance of the reader’s immediate encounter with the text.