New Studies in the History of Reading

Reading is an act of appropriation. To read is to grasp—to encounter some external object and to incorporate it. Buying books is the pleasure that it is precisely because laying one’s hands on a text and placing it among one’s possessions crudely mimics the deeper acquisition that will be effected upon reading it: through reading, we enlarge our estate. Others need not be deprived by this possession, although our laying claim to a text may excite envy, as a pair of young brothers or a pair of old critics will readily demonstrate with a certain comic book or film. Moreover, every such instance of appropriation of course changes us, consisting as it does of bringing the self into contact with something that was foreign to it before but will never be so again, while obscuring or displacing some prior part of our character. This metaphor of reading as a process of appropriation is only one of several that commonly define our concept of the act. It may be distinguished from others, such the metaphor of reading as reception—a more passive process ranging from positive connotations (being taught or influenced) to negative (being controlled or corrupted). The metaphor of reading as travel is another that might be cited as basic, if paradoxical: the idea of “being transported,” of moving motionlessly into other “realms,” captures our opposite desires simultaneously to see new sights and to be at home. It is a more neutral trope, leaving indeterminate the question of whether one is changing or staying the same. To formulate reading as an act of claiming, an act of making something one’s own, is thus to choose from among several alternatives the model that emphasizes most the freedom of the reader, and it is a political choice, for it asserts the reader’s power. Two twentieth-century examples will suggest that this model has substance. Marcel Proust captured the chemistry of reading, its transformative combination of self and other, in his celebrated essay, “Sur la lecture.” The essay reflects his reading of John Ruskin and appeared as the preface to his 1906 translation of the latter’s Sesame and Lilies. In it he takes Ruskin to task for his use of the old trope of reading as an exalted “conversation” with the best minds of the past; instead, Proust immerses us into the bracing loneliness of his own reading experience. He likens reading to the childhood experience of mounting the stairs in his grandfather’s house in the stillness after lunch, and entering a bedroom filled with antique objects which he was for the most part forbidden or unable to use. He likens it to setting foot in a dreary, cold hotel across the square from the train station in a provincial town. Reading is this pleasure—feeling one’s imagination “plunged into the depths of the non-ego.” It is “that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude”: Only in solitude does the self completely let down its guard; only in reading do we open ourselves to being influenced by another while retaining the full power of private self-determination. Reading is this unique opportunity to mingle in a sovereign manner what we are with what we are not. A similar idea occurs in the work of the Canadian poet, Elaine M. Catley. In “Fall in the Foothills—A Phantasy,” from her 1927 chapbook, Ecstasy and Other Poems, she likens poetry to procreation, the essence of both being conception, or the process in which a new self arises from the conjoining of previously separate entities: The third-person narrative perspective, which governs the first five stanzas, changes …