Since we were talking about "the activity of reading" (I put quotes not for irony but to emphasize the particularity of the activity), I want to write down some notes on something I just noticed about the way I read different texts--I mean, um, works? Books? Things-that-are-read? Anywho:
So I've been reading a lot of graphic novels lately. Now, the "graphic storytelling" medium is very synthetic and... for lack of a better word, strange. On a very basic level, there's the speech bubbles with the dialogue, and a picture demonstrating the action taking place. Then different panels show a certain progression. Now depending on how experimental/avant-garde the comic is, this rule may vary and get more complex (just as reading gets more complex with "House of Leaves"), but the basics are still the same. So the way the eye travels (traverses!) through the page depends on which element is given more emphasis--nevertheless, there is a constant back-and-forth, an oscillation between image and text. And because I've been reading graphic novels for so long, I've become used to this oscillation. It is part of the pleasure of reading a graphic novel, but now it's as if I've "crossed a threshold" so to speak. I "get" it. I "make it go." I see how dynamic the graphic storytelling text can be, the relationship between the reader and it, etc.
So if I read "through" them now, why am I writing about it? Why have I *noticed* it?
Today I picked up a book (a -non-graphic- novel) that my girlfriend gave me for valentine's day and, strangely enough, my eyes, as if by instinct, started navigating away from the words, the way they do when I read graphic stuff, as if expecting an image to emerge from the text of the novel. I caught myself doing this various times: the eyes detouring from the words to an image that wasn't there.
So reading is about developing conventions and in doing so creating certain expectations in the reading mind, expectations with which authors (!) play and which readers themselves play with. So here my eyes had the expectation of seeing an image when in fact they didn't need to look for an image. But what if there was one? How would my George Pelecanos novel read if it was made into image-word panels? In the same way, the weird e-poem that Tim Welsh presented to us played with our expectations as readers.
And there it was: different kinds of reading.
I don't know if this has anything to do with our discussion, but if it does, I just wanted to put this thought down somewhere. But as for you guys: what do you think? How does the "thingness" of a text--the formal conventions--affect the way it reaches us--or rather, the way we reach it?
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I've definitely experienced that same thing that you described in reading graphic novels and then switching back to non-graphic books, and I think that it would be really interesting if there was some sort of meaning to be extracted from looking for graphic text in word text. In elementary school, I was obsessed with creating codes/secret messages/secret languages, and I used to do things like circle every third word in a sentence in a book looking for a secret message in a book or creating a message for someone else to find. I like thinking that there's a way of looking at the text and learning from it that goes further (or that at least occurs differently) than just the obvious left-to-right one word after the next style of reading.
ReplyDeleteAlso, after reading a lot of graphic novels, I noticed that I started thinking more in images and less in words. Even my dreams have had more images and less dialogue lately. I've become less obsessed with how to perfectly express myself verbally and more interested in in how to create a portrait, a scene, or some sort of image that says everything that I want to say without the use of any words. When I look at a text, I try to give the text an opportunity to change how I look at all future texts and how I construct my own texts (works?).
I keep thinking about reading and the question I said in class: "what is the point?" I didn't mean to sound like a skeptic, but I did want to get at the bottom of the reason-to-read. Why do we read? Say that a text reveals to us the Fiction of everyday life. Now what? What is the value of metaphor? I struggle a lot with this question, because I feel sometimes I can get so caught up in books that I forget there's a life out there to be lived.
ReplyDeleteOn the one hand, Proust said "when we put down a book, even if it has a sad ending, we feel so happy." On the other, Walker Percy said "if there is any happiness to be found, it is not in books, either in reading them or writing them." of course he may have been being ironic when he said this, but the point stands: what is the point of books? Walker Percy had a wife, daughters--one of them who was deaf. Through the struggle of achieving communication with huis daughter, throguh his friendships with other writers, s relationship with his wife--in other words, through his relationships,he discovered something about love and human communication, , how those are what comprise what we call happiness in the end. And maybe that's why happiness is not to be found in books, but rather, in what books are supposed to serve. Which is? Well, I'll say that for me it's various things. It has to do with, first, the very basic pleasure of reading, of the effects reading has on me, as me and holly were saying before, the different ways one perceives thoughts as a result of reading, etc. Furthermore, it has to do with what one discovers when one reads. Languages, cultures, people...
Ok, so it may seem like I've gone way off-track. But this all has a point. Professor Biguenet said once to me that writing is the way we translate the world around us. And reading is a way of reading translations of life, and in our own interpretatiosns of works/texts/things we translate the works/texts/things themselves. So again there's this act of reaching out to something when one reads, even though reading is an introverted activity. There is the art of ... Understanding and knowledge.
And what's so fascinating is that there are so many ways to read! We've been taing in this post about books and graphic novels--but now with the digital stuff, theres so much ahead of us.
Sorry if I'm repeating what we've already said in class before. But it's cool to think about.
Well, I think we've stressed a lot in class about how medium affects both how we address books, like a paperback romance novel as opposed to an ancient Shakespeare folio, and how we, quite literally, read them. Tim Welsh demonstrated how people read, as in the way their eyes track across the page, when they read over Internet news articles.
ReplyDeleteI wonder too, in reference to Benjamin, how much collective criticism affects the way that we address books. I would never play with a Twilight novel in the same way that I would a Pynchon novel(though perhaps I should), which I'm sure is affected on some level by public perception of the scholarly quality of these two.
In address to the purpose of reading, what then is the purpose of any activity? We might reduce our actions to the basic level of survival, the gathering of Maslow's first level of needs, but we realize that the achievement of this goal is somehow even less important than that of happiness(or, more cynically, contentment). Who hasn't denied themselves food or sleep in moments of profound depression; only through the release, or at least suppression, of these feelings do we gain the ability to continue to struggle for survival. So, books become not just knowledge but an essential survival mechanism.(many other things can take this place[though not so interestingly in my opinion])