Reading: A cultural practice 9781526136954

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Reading

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Reading A cultural practice Vincent Quinn

Manchester University Press

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Copyright © Vincent Quinn 2020 The right of Vincent Quinn to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN  978 1 5261 3694 7  hardback First published 2020 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Cover image: Duncan Grant, Lytton Strachey. The Tate. Used with permission. Cover design: riverdesignbooks.com

Typeset in Sabon by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire

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In memoriam Alan Sinfield, 1941–2017

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Contents

List of illustrations page viii Acknowledgements ix 1 Reading, incorporated

1

2 The time and place of reading

27

3 The common reader

62

4 Close reading, citizenship, and education

92

5 Loose reading: Jane Austen in a post-truth age

127

6 Reading and technology

150

Envoi

184

Bibliography 194 Index 209

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Illustrations

1 Duncan Grant, Crime and Punishment. The Tate. Used with permission. page 35 2 Mary of Burgundy reading her book of hours. Cod. 1857, fol. 14v. The Austrian National Library. Used with permission. 41 3 Duncan Grant, Lytton Strachey. The Tate. Used with permission. 48

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Acknowledgements

When it comes to reading, there is no end to the people who might be thanked, right back to the authors whose work first compelled me to sit, when I was a child, with my nose in a book. Restricting myself to the sharpest of influences, I want to thank my late mother, Lena Quinn, for taking me as a matter of course to our local library; the staff at that library (now long gone) for providing a model service; Brian Quinn for talking to his youngest brother about the authors he was studying for A-level (especially Jane Austen and Federico García Lorca); my sister Katharine, whose school copy of Mansfield Park I purloined (and still possess); Monica Garvan and Peter Mullan for being marvellous English teachers; and Clare Brant, Jeri Johnson, Catherine La Farge, and the late Sue Manning for making the relationships between literature, history, and critical theory so vital and exciting. My work at the University of Sussex has allowed me to maintain and develop these preoccupations. As well as the undergraduates who have worked with me on literary theory, Romanticism, and the history of sexuality, I want to mention my doctoral and masters students from Sussex’s Centre for the Study of Sexual Dissidence, a body that represents many of the best things about the university to which I am attached. In preparing this book, I have consulted the electronic and material resources of the University of Sussex Library, the British Library, the Bodleian Library, and the Tate. I am grateful to everyone who helped me in these institutions, particularly the staff at the Tate stores who made it possible for me to examine Duncan Grant’s portraits of Lytton Strachey and Marjorie Strachey in detail. I also want to thank the Tate and the Austrian National Library for permission to reproduce works for which they hold the copyright. Chapter 5

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Acknowledgements

re-visits and re-frames research which I originally published in Textual Practice and Women: A Culture Review. I am grateful to the anonymous readers who commented on my manuscript for MUP: their advice and positive assessment of the book helped me bring it to completion. I also want to thank John Drakakis for his feedback on an earlier version of the project; although my work ultimately took another form, I remain grateful for his initial involvement. Numerous friends and colleagues have volunteered information, answered queries, or simply encouraged me. As well as my friends on various digital groups and social network sites, I would like to mention Feras Alkabani, Jeanette Blair, Richard Crane, Alistair Davies, Denise de Caires Narain, Louise Hudd, Bill McEvoy, David Marriott, Andy Medhurst, Juan Ramos, Joseph Ronan, Dimitris Savvidis, Lindsay Smith, Celine Surprenant, Pam Thurschwell, and Michèle Young. Shamira Meghani and Elena Gualtieri read early drafts of chapters 2 and 3 respectively; their perspectives on the material helped me focus the discussion. As well as commenting on more than one chapter Rachel Bowlby encouraged me to persevere with this project at a time when I might easily have let it go; I am very grateful for that decisive push in the right direction. During the time that I was writing this book, Carol Dyhouse was an invaluable cheerleader and role model; I can’t thank her enough for the laughter that we shared in difficult times, as well as for her brilliantly observant mind. Over the years, Vicky Lebeau has been extraordinarily generous in sharing friendship, ideas, food, and wine with me; I don’t have enough words to thank her, but I hope she knows how much I appreciate her support. I also want to thank Helen Barr for friendship, kindness, ribald jokes, and the sort of intelligence that seeks to make connections rather than to close down communication. I particularly want to thank Helen for demonstrating, in her writing and her conversation, that reading and language are forms of play. While I was writing this book, I was also my partner’s primary carer. As well as shifting my conception of reading, this experience shaped the circumstances in which I worked. I acknowledge these conditions because countless people labour invisibly in similar ways, and with less support than I received. This book might never have been finished were it not for help I received from professional care workers, as well as from my friends and family. Among the many people from this sector who made a difference, I especially want to mention Maxine Gully, Ashleigh Loftus, and Mark McManus. Finally, I want to thank Alan Sinfield for his decades-long commitment to teaching, writing, politics, mischief, and fun. Alan died when I was

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preparing the final draft of this work and it still feels impossible to think of him in the past tense, not least because he has contributed so much to these pages. He remains a keen example of how the academic humanities can create urgent, rigorous conversations that reach beyond the classroom. I would neither have started nor finished this book if he had not been a part of my life.

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Reading, incorporated

‘Gracious child, how you gobble.’ A young girl stands before a bearded man, a book in her hands. She has climbed three storeys to the smoke-filled room. It’s where the old man works­­– ­­he works at reading. And the girl wants to do the same. In the pause that follows, she stares at the ash on her father’s sleeves. She cannot see his mouth: his beard rubs it out. The gap between the two of them expands until she fancies that she can hear her mother ordering dinner, her sister sketching on the floor below. Meanwhile London is growing all around them. Beyond the cul-de-sac in which they live, horses pull omnibuses, their excrement steaming in the middle of the road. The girl is nine years old and she wants another book. She is nine years old and it will soon be the twentieth century. Cut to 1914. The girl is now thirty-two. Like her father, she has become a reader and a writer. Her first novel is about to be published. But she is getting sicker and sicker. Tongues and mouths revolt her. She will not eat. A doctor recommends force-feeding. It’s as if she were a suffragette. The war is going badly­– ­for everyone. In lucid moments the woman recalls her father and her mother. The way her mother used to tell her to remove the crumbs of food from her father’s beard. The way her father lent her books from his library. Time passes. The doctors know nothing. Her only hope is rest. Against the expectation of her husband and her family, the woman’s condition improves. Her husband makes a pact with her. She must eat her meals and drink a full glass of milk every day. She must live quietly. She must recognise that he means her no harm. Soon she begins another novel. Its plot feels

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compromised. Perhaps it, too, is part of her rest cure. Then one day­– ­in one fraction of a second­– s­ he glimpses a new way of writing. Suddenly her page is full of words and she has put them there herself. She flushes with excitement and a touch of fear. Her husband enters. She conceals her emotion. She takes up her tired novel. She writes a quiet page. And she drinks her glass of milk.1 ‘Gracious child, how you gobble’ (Woolf 1978: 27). Leslie Stephen’s words to his daughter, the future Virginia Woolf, are crammed with implication. Books as food, reading as sustenance. But reading, also, as a form of bad manners. The OED tells us that to gobble is ‘to swallow hurriedly in large mouthfuls, especially in a noisy fashion’. The related word ‘gob’ means ‘a lump […] of food, especially of raw, coarse, or fat meat’; it can also mean the mouth, or a mass of saliva. Gobbling implies greed; it’s incompatible with savouring fine cuisine. But gobbling also springs from hunger. It indicates a more visceral need than the pleasures of the table or the prescriptions of a doctor. Virginia Woolf’s medicinal glass of milk is dreary because it’s undesired; it’s like a set text that fails to excite the appetite. However, the books that she fed upon as a child­– ­and that she turned against during her periods of madness­– ­are another matter. Like Oliver Twist asking for more food, she is seeking primal nourishment when she stands before her father with her hands held out for yet another volume from his book-lined study. Words and food go back a long way together: think of the Garden of Eden. When Adam and Eve eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge they learn the meaning of good and evil; it is, among other things, a fall into linguistic understanding. This may be one reason why so many writers link reading, language, and food. At the end of the sixteenth century, Francis Bacon comments that ‘Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested: that is, some books are only to be read in parts; others to be read, but not curiously [carefully]; and some few to be read wholly and with diligence and attention’ (Bacon 1985: 209–10). This­– ­from Bacon’s essay ‘Of Studies’ (1597)­– ­imagines the most attentive form of reading as an oral exploration followed by ingestion; the book and its reader become one. A hundred and fifty years later, Tom Jones (1749) begins with an ‘Introduction to the Work, or Bill of Fare to the Feast’, in which Henry Fielding remarks that if you go to someone’s house for dinner you have to be polite even if the food is ‘utterly disagreeable’. However, ‘Men who pay for what they eat’ in a public house will be forthright in their condemnation ‘if every Thing is not agreeable to their Taste’. To

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Reading, incorporated 3

head off such unpleasantness, Fielding provides a menu ‘which all Persons may peruse at their first Entrance’ so that they can either stay and enjoy ‘what is provided for them’ or else depart to an inn ‘better accommodated to their Taste’. The sole provision of Fielding’s public house is ‘HUMAN NATURE’, a dish which he says is ‘as difficult to be met with in Authors, as the Bayonne Ham or Bologna Sausage is to be found in the Shops’ (Fielding 1973: 25–6; emphasis in the original). I will provide my own ‘Bill of Fare’ towards the end of this introductory chapter: my book will offer religious icons, computer gaming, and postmodern embroidery, if not Bayonne ham. First, though, I want to explore what it means to equate reading words with eating food. By tracing how the metaphor is used by a diverse group of authors, this chapter will argue for reading’s physicality, its relation both to our bodies and to the material world of which we are a part. This is not a rejection of reading’s imaginative and intellectual functions or its role in shaping interiority. Instead, I want to think about how reading, by its nature, can mobilise the entire being. Crossing between the boundaries and splits that characterise both the individual and society, reading has much to tell us about our imagined relation to the outer world, and the outer world’s impact on our inner selves. It is a forcefield in which numerous domains overlap and are altered by each other; these include the linguistic, the bodily, the intellectual, the social, the psychological, the technological, and the emotional. I will revisit many of these areas in the course of this book but it feels appropriate to start in the mouth, a place where words and food meet. In ‘Of Studies’ Bacon claims that there is no ‘impediment in the wit’ that may not be ‘wrought out by fit [suitable] studies, like as diseases of the body may have appropriate exercises’. As a result, ‘every defect of the mind may have a special receipt’ (Bacon 1985: 210); in other words, every mental deficiency can be addressed by a particular course of reading. In Bacon’s time ‘receipt’ could indicate either a medical prescription or a culinary concoction; indeed the two meanings blur into each other and the latter usage survives, residually, as an upper-class alternative to ‘recipe’. So reading is a medical intervention, a cure for whatever the mind is lacking, but it can also be part of one’s everyday diet. Bacon’s usage is newly apposite given twenty-first-century medicine’s attention to books as a cure for psychological distress. In truth, though, writers have never stopped linking reading to various forms of oral consumption, whether these be witches’ brews, health-giving salads, or decadent blow-outs. As with eating, however, there are protocols to be observed. Having been a youthful gobbler, Virginia Woolf turns in adulthood to a more

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contemplative savouring of words. In ‘How Should One Read a Book?’ (1932) she writes that although we ‘learn through feeling’ we should ‘train our taste’ in reading until we can ‘make it submit to some control’. Then, when our taste has ‘fed greedily and lavishly upon books of all sorts’, we shall find that it is ‘not so greedy, it is more reflective’ (Woolf 1986: 268).2 This is a recurring theme in commentaries on reading. For Woolf, as for many other critics, initial tastes have to be refined; excessive feeding is encouraged only so that you can mortify the very urges that you have previously been indulging. Woolf’s need to make her taste ‘submit’ to ‘control’ reveals nervousness about the strange alliances which reading can produce and an anxiety, too, about the bodily dimensions of reading. Woolf’s refusal, when insane, to ingest either food or words suggests a wish to discipline the body by depriving it of the sustenance it craves. The US poet Frank Bidart explores this territory in two extraordinary works inspired by Ellen West, a woman with a severe eating disorder, who was treated in the early 1920s by the psychiatrist Ludwig Binswanger. (The name ‘Ellen West’ is Binswanger’s invention but the case study is genuine.)3 In ‘Ellen West’ (1977) Bidart alternates Ellen’s re-constructed voice with that of her doctor. Bidart shows Ellen as an attentive reader who also writes poetry but whose engagement with language is compromised by her troubled relationship to food. At one point Ellen considers the rumour that Maria Callas had eaten a tapeworm in order to transform her body shape; Ellen identifies with the singer’s metamorphosis even though Callas’s dramatic weight loss was widely believed to have caused the premature decline of her voice, a deterioration that Ellen vividly describes.4 Another section of the poem follows Ellen’s response to a beautiful couple whom she watches while she is reading alone in a restaurant. Initially drawn to them, she is disgusted when they start putting forkfuls of food into each other’s mouth, a gesture that she equates with having sex. (‘I knew what they were. I knew they slept together.’) Ellen does not deprive herself of food; rather, she combines compulsive eating with an excessive use of laxatives. Bidart juxtaposes these habits with her immersion in language: she reads Goethe’s Faust, noting in her diary that ‘art is the “mutual permeation” of the “world of the body” and the “world of the spirit”’ (Bidart 1977: 34). She comes to believe, however, that her own poems are ‘weak­– ­without skill or perseverance; only managing to beat their wings softly’. Shortly after this, Ellen’s doctor reports that she has ‘for the first time in years, stopped writing poetry’; a month later she is released from hospital, her team having decided there is nothing more that they can do for her. Three days after coming home she eats so much

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Reading, incorporated 5

at lunchtime that ‘for the first time in thirteen years’ she ‘is satisfied by her food’; she has ‘chocolate creams and Easter eggs’ with her afternoon coffee, takes a walk with her husband, ‘reads poems, listens to recordings’ and ‘is in a positively festive mood’. Then, having written farewell letters in the evening, she takes a fatal dose of poison. Bidart implies that Ellen might not have killed herself if she had felt that her poetry was strong enough to produce the ‘mutual permeation’ of ‘the body’ and ‘the spirit’ that she looks for in high culture. Without the power to make her own art, she takes a cue from her reading of Goethe, whose Faust is saved because he manages to find enough joy in a single moment to redeem his soul. Ellen pursues an earthbound version of this resolution by finally allowing herself to embrace the rapture of having a body, knowing that she will end her life at the close of the day. ‘Mutual permeation’ is a curious term. It suggests a coming together of mind and body in which both are transformed but neither is obliterated. This seems to echo Ellen’s wish to gratify bodily sensations while simultaneously seeking the body’s dissolution. There are various ways in which these paradoxical wishes might be achieved, notably through sex and religion, but Bidart’s solution is linguistic. Metaphor offers a transcendence that the flesh cannot achieve, and reading is a way of engaging creatively with lives other than one’s own­– ­and thus of losing one’s selfhood in someone else’s being. Revisiting the case in his 2013 poem ‘Writing “Ellen West”’, Bidart reveals that identifying with Ellen’s voice was an ‘exorcism’ in which he, by taking on her mental and physical identity, could ‘survive her’. In articulating Ellen’s attraction to­/­repulsion from her physicality, Bidart is able to come to his own accommodation with what he calls ‘the war between the mind and the body’. Writing of himself in the third person, Bidart describes how he needed to ‘enter her skin’ so that he could ‘make her other and expel her’. In doing so­– ­and this is crucial to my point about ­ idart sees himself ‘eating the ground of Western language and food­– B thought, the “mind-body” problem’ (Bidart 2013: 4, 7–8). When Bidart reads Ellen’s words, he is able to imagine himself as her. But more than that, his reading of her lets him use her as a proxy through which he can ‘eat’ up the philosophical issue that defines Western culture and of which Ellen is both a product and a symbol. As ‘Writing “Ellen West”’ makes clear, ‘Ellen West’ was a crucial stage in clarifying Bidart’s own take on the ‘“mind-body” problem’, including his conflicted relation to gay desire. (Significantly, Bidart uses ‘Ellen West’ as the final piece in a volume that he titles The Book of the Body.) These two poems, written almost forty years apart, cry out to be read

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in corporeal terms, and not only because they are thematically concerned with physicality. They represent an allegory of verbal incorporation­– ­a story of what can happen when language is taken into the body.5 But although Bidart’s poems explore this territory with a rare degree of philosophical toughness, metaphors of linguistic incorporation abound in literary and popular culture. If ‘Ellen West’ charts an embrace of, and a recoil from, the interwoven sensualities of words, voice, and food, then Isabel Allende’s Aphrodite: A Memoir of the Senses (1998) provides a more easily assimilated mixture of autobiography, recipes, and erotic story-telling. As its title implies, Allende’s memoir explores the very thing that drives Ellen West to suicide: the polymorphous perversity of mouths that are capable of forming and savouring words, tongues, gobbets of food, and other people’s bodies. In one anecdote, Allende describes going to a ‘celebrated guru’ who tells her to chew a ‘large rosy grape’ for twenty minutes so that she can learn to respect what she is eating. At the end of the exercise Allende finds that she knows the fruit intimately even though she normally cannot bear to have anything in her mouth for more than a few moments. Or rather, as she explains somewhat archly, she doesn’t like keeping food in her mouth but has ‘more patience with other things’ (Allende 1998: 68). The anecdote is typical of a book that requires its reader to taste all sorts of fruits, especially forbidden ones; indeed Allende includes a section with that very name.6 Allende is far from being the only internationally renowned literary artist to have written a cookbook. Maya Angelou’s Hallelujah! The Welcome Table: A Lifetime of Memories with Recipes (2004) provides a compelling mix of autobiography, social history, and instruction. In a pattern that is beginning to seem familiar, however, Angelou followed this exuberant publication with a diet book that counselled portion control as the key to weight loss (Angelou 2010). In a different vein, Len Deighton, author of the Harry Palmer spy series, created a series of cookstrips for The Observer in the 1960s; one of these is pinned up in the hero’s kitchen in the 1965 film of The IPCRESS File when Harry (played by Michael Caine) seduces a fellow spy over a tin of champignons. Different again is Molly Keane’s Nursery Cooking (1985) which conjures the lost world of the Anglo-Irish gentry through their eating preferences. The book echoes Keane’s fiction, which often uses food to reveal the cruelty and wilful blindness of the landed classes. The elderly hero of Time after Time (1983) is one of the dying breed who insist on saying ‘receipt’ for ‘recipe’ while the heroine of Good Behaviour (1981) manages to kill her mother by force-feeding her rabbit mousse.

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Reading, incorporated 7

I could go on. But rather than multiplying examples of food in books (a subject that is all but inexhaustible) I want to press further at the notion of linguistic incorporation, the taking of words into the body. One of the reasons that food analogies abound in poetry and fiction is that words can be construed as a form of nutrition. Clearly, this frequently happens at the level of metaphor. But language and food are also mixed up, literally, in the mouth. Words are formed by the same parts of the body that begin the process of digestion, which may be why etiquette rulebooks require us to separate these activities. (‘Don’t eat with your mouth full.’ ‘Don’t read at the table.’) Such diktats can be compared to Woolf’s wish to discipline her native greed for reading, or to Ellen West’s revulsion at forks entering mouths in unsanctioned ways. Appetite, the craving that spurs the consumption of books, turns some people into such gluttons that they recoil from their voracity and decide that reading must be rationed and anatomised. But appetite is also a condition of life; it drives us to ingest the sustenance that we need to thrive. Isabel Allende breaks off from her aphrodisiac recipes to comment that ‘The poet and the baker are brothers in the essential task of nourishing the world’ (Allende 1998: 127). In a different register, Adrienne Rich’s essay collection Blood, Bread and Poetry (1987) argues that a healthy body politic needs art as well as food, and food as well as art. Moving outwards from the ‘fragmentations [that] I suffer in myself’, Rich notes that ‘the majority of the world’s illiterates are woman’ and that she lives ‘in a technologically advanced country where forty per cent of the people can barely read and twenty per cent are functionally illiterate’. Even so, because of language or its lack, ‘we are all in this together’, our world diminished by collective deprivations (Rich 1987: 186). In 2013, almost thirty years after Rich wrote these words, statistics produced by the US Department of Education showed that 21 per cent of adults in the US had poor reading skills and 14 per cent were illiterate; meanwhile 70 per cent of the country’s prison population were judged to have the reading skills of a ten-year-old, and 85 per cent of those passing through the juvenile court system were functionally illiterate. Black citizens were almost three times more likely to be illiterate than white citizens.7 As every dictator knows, a population that cannot read or write, or whose access to language is controlled through censorship and surveillance, is a population with fewer choices, less representation in public discourse, and lower earning power. (By no coincidence, these circumstances also allow national resources to be concentrated in the hands of an elite few.) The 17 per cent of the world’s population who, in 2016, were judged by UNESCO to be illiterate will have a lower life expectancy and a considerably lower

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standard of living than their literate peers. These disadvantages are also experienced on a national level. High-earning and wealth-creating jobs require advanced reading and writing skills, and societies that lack a large concentration of literate citizens are disadvantaged within the global economy. Meanwhile, as Rich indicates, women remain especially vulnerable to educational deprivation. According to UNESCO, of the 775 million people without basic literacy, two-thirds are women (UNESCO 2017). When the Taliban shot Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani advocate for female learning (who was fifteen at the time of the attack), they were trying to destroy the very idea that women could be educated. Brutal though their message was, their target survived, and two years later Ms Yousafzai was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. It is an inspiring and emblematic story that gives hope for the future. As with so many ills, however, the greatest threats to equality are ones that have been internalised by the very people who suffer most from them. More women have been rendered illiterate by socialisation and ideological conditioning than by Taliban marksmen, abhorrent though the latter are. There is more at stake here than the earning power of a given individual or the viability of our globalised economy. Reading is also a gateway to pleasures, dreams, and ambitions; it sustains life by adding texture to it. These less tangible benefits cannot be measured via the reductive tests used to determine basic literacy but they are undoubtedly a spur to living. Just as palatable food tempts the sickly, so does reading feed the mind. Putting this into the language of Bidart’s ‘Ellen West’, one could say that reading produces an everyday ‘mutual permeation’ of ‘body’ and ‘spirit’. And it does so, not for complex metaphysical reasons (or not only for such reasons), but because it demonstrates that the physical and the mental are aspects of each other: neither can exist on its own. It should be clear, from all this talk of food, that reading is bound up with the body, and with the body’s interactions with the material world, including our fundamental need for nourishment. The title of this introduction­ – ­‘Reading, incorporated’­– ­registers my belief that reading is a sensory experience as well as an analytic activity. This is borne out in multiple ways, even though many of them are too naturalised for us to be aware of them. Blinking eyes scan printed letters. A thumb holds open a place in a book. Pages are turned and lines murmured under the breath. A fingertip scrolls up and down a computer touchscreen. An adult leaps around a bedroom, acting out the words they are reading to a child. A commuter listens to a talking book. Fast-moving digits sweep across cells of braille. A singer

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Reading, incorporated 9

converts words into melody. A hospital visitor reads the newspaper to a sick friend. Each of these activities engages one or more senses, and the brain that processes the resultant messages is itself a physical organ. Furthermore, our emotional and psychic responses are played out upon the skin, the stomach, the mouth, and the genitals. Reading has numerous physical manifestations, including grumbling stomachs and salivating mouths, blushes, laughter, headaches, moving lips, clenched fists, and sexual arousal. An extreme instance would be Emily Dickinson’s definition of poetry: ‘If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry’ (Dickinson 1971: 208; italics in the original). Then there is the test traditionally applied to Gothic novels: when reading it, did your hair stand on end? Or, in a more everyday context, consider the sick dread in the stomach produced by reading bills or certain kinds of work-related email. If we acknowledge that reading has a somatic dimension, we can trace how bodily responses might inform our emotional and intellectual responses to written language. You do not have to be the archivist of a manuscript library to know that words affect us differently according to the physical form in which they are presented to us. A photocopy of a treasured love-letter will not have the same impact as the letter itself even though they bear the same words; the original includes information that the copy lacks, not least the lover’s DNA. One document will be more visibly aged than the other. There will be storage folds, dust particles, perhaps a residue of perfume or aftershave. My point is not that the original is ‘better’ than the copy; it is that we cannot help experiencing the two documents in contrasting ways. Before our eyes focus on the words, we are already making buried or half-conscious judgements about the thickness of the paper, the crackle of the pages, the strength of the ink; and all these things will feed into our response to the words themselves. Or rather, there is no such thing as ‘the words themselves’. Writing is always mediated by the physical and technological forms through which we encounter it, whether these be computer print-outs, vellum manuscripts, laptop screens, or the back of the envelope on which you scribbled your shopping list. Another way of putting this would be to say that I conceive of reading in broadly phenomenological terms. That is, I am just as interested in how a text ‘feels’ to a reader as I am in what that reader believes the text to ‘mean’. Interpretation is a key component of reading and I do not want to abandon it. However, interpretation is only one of the means by which we process texts, and it is probably not the dominant one, especially outside of specialised contexts such as a courtroom or a university seminar. The

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fruits of reading are often presented in discrete forms­– ­a legal report that synthesises previous judgements on a difficult case, a comment on an online forum, a scholarly monograph­– ­but these ‘outputs’ (to use a particularly inadequate piece of jargon) are backed by the unconfessed or unperceived circumstances in which they were executed. In other words, the ‘output’ is a tangible product of the otherwise unremarked activity going on within the brain and the rest of the body. By extension, reading (and the thoughts we have about reading) are embedded within the larger material structures of our lives. These physical contexts include the spaces in which we read (bedrooms, libraries, cafes, pubs) and the people who impinge on us while we are doing so. The eyes that scan a government bill in a parliamentary office might be blindfolded a few hours later by a dominatrix in a dungeon. The hands that hold open a rare first edition could be the same hands that stroke a baby goat in a petting zoo or that chop up limes while making margaritas for a friend. The moral of this particular story is that reading mobilises an intensely symbiotic relationship between eyes, hands, brain, nose, ears, skin, blood, sex organs, lips, and tongue. But while the workings of our senses have remained fairly stable over the last twenty thousand years, the same is not true of the technologies through which we process written language. Reading a paperback novel, reading a computer screen, reading music, reading a roll of parchment, reading braille, reading layers of graffiti on a public monument, reading hieroglyphics on a tomb: although we use the same verb to describe these pastimes, they engage different senses and require mental processes that are adapted to particular physical circumstances. Inevitably, the technologies that govern these different forms of reading are themselves bound into social, material, and intellectual history. The martial carvings on Trajan’s Column are not the same as the print marks in a copy of Pride and Prejudice; the texts serve different cultural functions and make contrasting assumptions about their readerships. This in turn reveals that the history of reading is also, and inescapably, a history of how bodies occupy space. A victory column is a singular object that announces its message in a specific public location while the novel is a reproducible form that can be carried by a multitude of readers wherever they wish. Construing reading as a set of socio-historical practices helps us recognise that our own reading rituals are located in a particular time and place. The final sections of this book will explore how new technologies are transforming the reading experience; I argue, throughout the book, that the way we read is itself a force for change: if reading habits alter decisively,

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Reading, incorporated 11

other social and educational formations may also shift, for better or worse. For this reason, it is important to stress that although the history of reading overlaps with the history of the book, these things are not coterminous. Reading existed for hundreds of thousands of years before humans started folding and binding sheets of writing into books, and reading would continue even if everyone in the world suddenly and irrevocably switched to using electronic screens. Indeed the tendency for affluent users to have multiple phones and computers means that there is more reading in the world now than at any point in the past. And although our forebears would struggle to recognise some of the writing genres of the twenty-first century, there are surprising continuities between modern screens and ancient manuscripts, not least in the ways in which they use images. Given its mutability, I prefer to view the thing that we call ‘reading’ as a set of activities, some of which overlap and others of which run parallel. It is not just that reading alters over time, although that is certainly so. Within any given historical moment, habits and expectations will also vary according to who is reading, what they are reading, and why they are reading it. In other words reading is contextual: its purposes (and the meanings that it produces) change according to the cultural, historical, and ideological frameworks within which it takes place. A devout Christian is likely to respond differently to the Bible and to a copy of Barbra Streisand’s memoirs; after all, only one of them is the word of God. But if the Christian sat down to read scripture with a Jewish friend, would they see the same text when they looked at the Book of Genesis? Although they start at the same place, the Jewish and Christian scriptures name and understand their contents in divergent ways. Since Judaism does not recognise Jesus as divine, there is no Jewish concept of ‘Old’ and ‘New’ Testaments­– ­there is simply the Tanakh (the Hebrew Bible), which has around forty fewer books than the Christian Bible. Given this­– a­ nd factoring in questions of translation and of authorised versus non-authorised texts­– ­can my Jewish and Christian friends be said to be reading the same words when they open their respective holy books? This brings me to the second reason why I have called this introduction ‘Reading, incorporated’. In the language of governance, a ‘corporation’ is a group of people who have been granted the right to be recognised as a single entity under the law; the process by which they are brought into being is called ‘incorporation’. Deriving from ‘corparare’ (the Latin for ‘to embody’) corporations can be religious organisations, charities, municipal groups, government agencies, QUANGOs, think tanks, and so on; a

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c­orporation is not necessarily a for-profit business, although many are. Then there are ‘corporate interests’ and a ‘corporate mentality’, phrases that we use to describe financial protectionism and economically motivated groupthink. In one way or another, all these usages exploit the fact that in Latin ‘corpus’ indicates both an individual body and a mass of people who are recognised as having a collective identity. (Compare the English term ‘body politic’.) But ‘corpus’ is also a synonym for a writer’s works: it denotes the linguistic remains that survive after the authorial flesh-andblood has been buried or burnt. If we put these bodily terms into dialogue with each other (or rather, if we attend to the ways in which they are already implicated in each other) certain patterns become observable. Specifically, we begin to see that readership is bound up in both literal and institutional forms of incorporation. Take literary estates. A financially successful writer leaves a tangle of intellectual property that will go on benefitting the author’s heirs for as long as the work is in copyright. This authorial corpus has to be protected, usually by the dead writer’s agents and publishers, who will have their own incentives for guarding the writer’s posthumous earning power. These days the agents and publishers will probably be part of a larger business that can market lucrative writers across a variety of countries and media, sometimes even commissioning ‘official’ spin-offs and sequels. Other estates make a priority of safeguarding the artistic integrity of the literary remains, and some are parsimonious in granting reproduction rights. Samuel Beckett’s representatives are famously rigorous in holding directors to the playwright’s original vision: Deborah Warner’s 1994 production of Footfalls was forbidden from fulfilling a scheduled engagement in Paris after its initial London run deviated from the stage directions specified in Beckett’s text (Gussow 1994). This last example has a resonance that goes beyond its immediate context. It constitutes a parable in which one body (the author’s) posthumously controls the workings of another body (the actor’s) through the operations of a third body (the estate, with its legal authority to interpret and enforce Beckett’s perceived wishes). Whatever you think of the decision, the chain of command is almost as literal as the one that Lucky and Pozzo demonstrate in Waiting for Godot: when Pozzo says dance, Lucky dances. Happily, the relations between readers, authors, and texts are a good deal looser than this. Unlike stage directors working with copyright texts, readers have the power to throw books away, to disagree with them, to deface them, to talk back to them, to cherish them until their covers fall off, to denounce them in a public place, to laugh and cry in unexpected

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Reading, incorporated 13

places, and to read them against the grain. If I am lying on my bed perusing a copy of Footfalls, the Beckett estate cannot stop me from picturing the lead character taking twenty steps rather than the nine stipulated in the script.8 That said, I may feel self-conscious about transgressing Beckett’s wishes, and even though literary estates have no direct control over a reader’s imagination, some exert such a high degree of vigilance that their operations begin to resemble a vanguard action against the very idea of readerly autonomy. With their mixture of linguistic, legal, and financial imperatives, literary estates offer an especially vivid instance of literary incorporation. But this is just a small part of what the term can denote. However culturally or economically successful a given writer might be, their work depends on platforms that are larger than they are. This is true both for authors in the conventional sense and for anyone who has ever written an email, contributed to an online discussion, or sent a letter in the post. As media conglomerates buy up smaller-scale publishing houses, multinational technology companies such as Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and Apple exert an almost unimaginable level of control over written language. They do this, not through censorship, but by providing the platforms on which innumerable acts of reading and writing take place. The genres of the early twenty-first century (tweets, status updates, blog posts) are only possible because of the technologies that produced them, and the resulting writing templates are themselves corporate products. This has major implications for how we conduct journalism, artistic creation, and political activism. Is it possible to think beyond the forms that corporate technology has created? Are communications that occur within those forms necessarily constrained by their origins? But although the scale and ubiquity of these platforms is new, the underlying structural issues are as old as writing itself. One could make comparable comments about how journalese emerged as a by-product of mass circulation newspapers, about the editorial habits of old-style publishing houses, or about the effect on the book trade of government restrictions on paper use during the Second World War; indeed it is a pretty safe bet that the quality of the clay tablet supply was an issue in ancient Babylon. Reading has always been subject to state censorship and to blasphemy and heresy laws; my point is that these targeted controls exist alongside more amorphous cultural and commercial factors. The latter are so naturalised that we are barely aware of them but their impact may be all the greater for this reason. Just as we cannot read a love letter without registering its physical presence, it is impossible to buy a new novel without being

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affected by the way in which it has been framed by its publisher. The cover image, the colour of the packaging, the advance praise (preferably from established writers occupying the same market niche), the author photo (including the fact that there almost always is such a photograph), even the precise location of the book within the store: all of these material factors will have been determined, at least in part, by the publicity department and by the size of the advertising budget that the publisher has allocated to the book. There is a coming together, here, between the two kinds of incorporation that I have been discussing. When we start reading a book we are not only taking in the writer’s words, we are also being touched by a set of narratives that have been calibrated by a publisher or by an online writing platform. Reading can never be a wholly individual act; it always takes place within institutional and ideological frameworks. Although these contexts are not necessarily malign, they undermine the widespread and understandable assumption that reading is private simply because we often do it behind closed doors. (‘Privacy’ is itself an ideological concept, of course.) Many of us will have learnt to read in schools that display national flags or religious symbols; our education will have been shaped by government-regulated exams or a national curriculum; and the place where literacy is most likely to be stalled or promoted, the family, is one of the most monitored, politicised, and over-determined units in society. In each of these instances we are imbibing more than just words on a page; we are also being exposed to worldviews, to ways of being, to cultural and political stories. When our bodies process written language, and when that language makes us laugh, cry, or blush, we are also encountering the history of how language has been used­– a­ nd continues to be used­– a­ s a way of influencing people. There is nothing inherently sinister about this dynamic; after all, books have to persuade their readers to go on reading, and a book that does not want to influence the reader in this most basic of regards is a book that has no reason to exist. But, just as education can be a force for ill as well as good, language’s power is not always benign. In analysing the institutional and ideological factors that impact on reading, we have to consider words as part of a larger frameworks of signs, not all of which are verbal. These ideological frames are not deterministic: they cannot make us dance, as if at Pozzo’s command. But nor are they neutral. They are part of the information that texts contain, and they are related, in turn, to larger political and cultural narratives. An obvious example would be the gender stereotyping that leads certain kinds of fiction to be marketed with pink covers and sparkly cupcakes, or to be labelled as

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Reading, incorporated 15

‘chick lit’, ‘mum’s lit’ or ‘clit lit’. In such cases, advertising does not merely draw on particular constructions of femininity, it helps to form them. Individual citizens may or may not embrace these versions of themselves, but whatever their stance, they are being addressed as if they were a particular kind of person. In Louis Althusser’s terms, book covers interpellate us as prospective readers and, in doing so, they position us within ideology whether we like it or not. Ideology is the ultimate instance of incorporation because, as Althusser shows, we are formed as ideological beings even before we are born. From their conception onwards, children are ‘expected’ in ways that extend far beyond their due date; for example their parents will have sets of wishes and assumptions on the basis of the possible gender of the infant, their place in the larger family structure, and so on (Althusser 1971: 164–5). Like the simulated reality that gives its name to the Wachowskis’ 1999 film The Matrix, ideology is everywhere even if we cannot see it. As a result, it affects both the shape of what we read and the ways in which we read it. I remember being disconcerted, as a first-year undergraduate, when I learnt that the Protestant Bible excludes several books that are included in the Catholic Bible. Having been educated in Northern Ireland’s religiously segregated school system during the Troubles, I was hyper-aware of differences over doctrine and the sacraments but I genuinely did not know that the Christian churches also diverged over the Bible’s composition. Even more shocking was the realisation that the Bible was an unstable text and not the revealed truth that I had always taken it to be. I now know that Christian scholars have been arguing about the integrity of scriptural sources for two thousand years, and that Jewish theologians were engaged in the same activity hundreds of years before the birth of Christ.9 Moreover, theological enquiry has repercussions for lived identities. As sectarian cultures such as Northern Ireland demonstrate, one person’s religious truth is another person’s dangerous heresy. Throughout our world, hate crimes, war, and state violence continue to be pursued with reference to particular interpretations of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic holy texts. Meanwhile, there are controversies within individual Christian churches about what the Bible can or cannot tell us about issues such as the legitimacy of gay relationships and women priests. With their different lengths and interpretive traditions, the Catholic and Protestant Bibles represent a graphic instance of ideology’s relationship to reading. Moreover, literary criticism’s development into an academic discipline is bound up with the history of Biblical studies. For centuries, hermeneutics primarily meant scriptural hermeneutics and the practice

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was pursued with intensity (as you would expect, given that a heretical interpretation might doom you to hellfire). The fundamental purpose was to uncover how God’s intentions were manifested in holy writings; it was only in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that scholars began to treat scriptural texts as historically bounded works rather than as timeless emanations of truth. (Study of the Greek and Latin classics was a useful precedent here.) Significantly, this was also the period when modern literary criticism started to take shape, with many commentators using techniques drawn from Biblical exegesis. For example, although Bishop Thomas Percy is best known for the ballad collection Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765)­– ­a work of historical reconstruction that hugely influenced English Romanticism­– h ­ e also translated and wrote commentaries on Biblical texts.10 Over time, increasingly probing forms of scriptural analysis led to doubts about Christianity itself, and­– ­in a striking turnabout­– ­secular forms of writing (especially the novel) began to assume a moral force of their own. Literary criticism’s recurring search for the ‘intentions’ of an author can be seen, therefore, as a throwback to an earlier structure of analysis in which God was the author of us all and his book was the only one that counted. But I am getting ahead of myself: I will have more to say about the history and protocols of literary criticism in chapters 3 to 5. For now, though, I just want to reiterate that Biblical analysis is an extreme instance of the more general premise that reading is inescapably ideological. My subsequent chapters will argue that academic criticism is tied up in assumptions about ‘correct’ and ‘incorrect’ reading habits, and that these assumptions are themselves located in particular social and historical circumstances. Staying with the development of literary criticism in the eighteenth century, and going back to my earlier comments on food, I want to bring these threads together with a case study in how institutional forms of literary incorporation deal, or fail to deal, with the body of the reader. To do this, I want to focus on the thing that we call ‘taste’. Or rather the things that we call taste, given that the word denotes both our cultural preferences and one of our five senses. Over the course of a lifetime we amass complex bundles of likes and dislikes that help make us who we are. We think of these preferences as highly individual and it is true that they are often contradictory and unconscious. But however idiosyncratic our predilections may be, we form them in the context of the tastes that prevail in the groups to which we belong. This is not deterministic: if you grow up in a family of opera buffs you do not

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Reading, incorporated 17

automatically love Wagner any more than a chiropodist’s child becomes a foot fetishist. However, you will have a response to opera, whether positive or negative, simply because that is what you have been exposed to. In other words, taste is relational; it depends on what we encounter, what we are told about it, and whether or not it is valued by other people. An obvious instance is the way that accusations of ‘good’ or ‘bad’ taste involve projections about social class and artistic value. This tendency is already present in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when taste became a dominant aesthetic category; indeed if we look at some foundational texts, we find that class differentiations are integral to notions of taste.11 A prime example is Joseph Addison’s 1712 essay on taste in The Spectator. Although Addison shifts quickly towards the ‘mental taste, which is the subject of this paper’, he starts by illustrating bodily taste via reference to an acquaintance whose palate was so subtle that he could distinguish between different blends of tea without seeing what they looked like. This immediately assumes an affluent sphere because, in Addison’s time, tea was so expensive that it was kept under lock and key. Addison then provides a rather intimidating account of literary discrimination. Like his tea-drinking friend, a ‘man of a fine taste in writing’ will ‘discern … not only the general beauties and imperfections of an author’ but will also discover ‘the several ways of thinking and expressing himself’ that distinguish that writer ‘from all other authors’; this will include the ability to spot ‘foreign infusions of thought and language, and the particular authors from whom they were borrowed’. Having moved from the physical palate to aesthetics, Addison now makes a further leap, this time from the aesthetic to the spiritual. A ‘fine taste in writing’ may be defined, he says, as ‘that faculty of the soul, which discerns the beauties of an author with pleasure, and the imperfections with dislike’ (Addison 1970: 172–3; emphasis in the original). Unlike later philosophical tradition (which tends to differentiate between moral and aesthetic judgements), eighteenth-century writers frequently use taste as an index of moral worth­– ­hence Addison’s ‘faculty of the soul’. (We see the impact of this in Jane Austen’s use of educated taste as a marker of civilised values and ethical integrity.) But the more it continues, the more rarefied and exclusionary Addison’s essay becomes. If a man (and it always is a man) wants to know ‘whether he is possessed of this faculty’ Addison advises him to ‘read over the celebrated works of antiquity, which have stood the test of so many different ages and countries, or those works among the moderns which have the sanction of the politer part of our contemporaries’. (Note the gate-keeping role played by the ‘politer part’

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of modern society.) When he reads these works, the would-be man of taste must ask himself if he is ‘delighted in an extraordinary manner’­– ­if he is, then he has taste. However, if ‘he finds a coldness and indifference in his thoughts, he ought to conclude, not (as is too usual among tasteless readers) that the author wants [lacks] those perfections which have been admired in him, but that he himself wants [lacks] the faculty of discovering them’ (Addison 1970: 173). In other words, you have either got it or you haven’t. And if you haven’t, then it is your fault and not the fault of the cultural sphere from which you have been excluded. Having cast off anyone who fails to be thrilled by Livy, Sallust, and Tacitus, Addison concedes that there are ways of enlarging our taste providing that ‘the faculty’ has already, to some degree, been ‘born within us’. These methods include being ‘conversant among the writings of the most polite authors’ and conducting ‘conversations with men of a polite genius’ (Addison 1970: 173–4). In eighteenth-century discourse, ‘polite’ has aesthetic as well as social connotations: Johnson’s Dictionary defines it first as ‘glossy, smooth’ and then as ‘elegant of manners’. The same source describes ‘politeness’ as ‘elegance of manners; gentility; good breeding’ (Johnson 1755b: 388). These usages suggest a circular, mutually reinforcing relationship between ‘good taste’ and ‘polite society’. Good taste is exemplified by qualities of which the educated middle classes approve, and the middle classes are shown to have good taste by their approval of these qualities. Meanwhile, taste is ‘born within us’ and entry to ‘polite society’ is governed by ‘good breeding’. Faced with so much class-based gatekeeping, it is easy to suspect that polite society prefers ‘glossy, smooth’ art on the grounds that it is unlikely to scare the horses. (Or incite the servants.) At this point, Addison makes a leap that is vital for my argument. Having used the vocabulary of politeness to secure cultural capital for an affluent elite, he introduces another category of gatekeepers: ‘It is likewise necessary for a man who would form to himself a finished taste of good writing, to be well versed in the works of the best critics both ancient and modern’. Unfortunately, some critics merely describe the formal attributes of literature, thus equipping tasteless people to pretend to be more cultured than they are, but the best critics ‘enter into the very spirit and soul of fine writing’ (Addison 1970: 174). Here we see the apparatus of the literary criticism beginning to form itself through organs such as the one in which Addison is writing. Exploiting the publishing boom of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Addison had co-founded The Spectator with his friend Richard Steele; Addison had already written for The Tatler and would later contribute to The Guardian, both of which were started by Steele. These

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Reading, incorporated 19

periodicals (which are not to be confused with their modern-day namesakes) were among the first literary-philosophical publications to appear in England; they were followed by Johnson’s The Rambler and The Idler, by Eliza Haywood’s The Female Spectator, and by general interest works, such as The Gentleman’s Magazine and The Lady’s Magazine, which often included conduct book-style advice about acceptable forms of social behaviour. The message of these publications is clear. The aristocracy, on their own, cannot be trusted to form taste, and the emerging middle classes require even more guidance if they are to avoid vulgarity. Hence the need for culture-defining commentators such as Addison, Steele, Johnson, and their successors.12 If I seem to be staking a lot on eighteenth-century theories of taste, it is worth remembering that Addison belonged to the Kit-Cat Club, a group of writers, wits, and politicians who, as Whigs, upheld the Protestant succession, the powers of parliament over the Crown, and (more amorphously) the values of trade and commerce over the landed interests of the Tory gentry. Other members of the group included the philosopher John Locke, the playwright and architect Sir John Vanbrugh, and the future Prime Minister Robert Walpole. Whig tendencies were expressed through culture as well as in public debate; one of the club’s members, Richard Boyle, third Earl of Burlington, popularised neo-classical Palladian design as the default architecture of the new aristocracy. (It is mostly thanks to Burlington that so many eighteenth-century English country houses have symmetrical porticos, pillars, and pediments.) The Whig preference for neo-classicism achieved two things. First, it downgraded the Gothic and Jacobean styles associated with the Tory establishment; and second, it legitimated Whig property-owners by associating them with imperial Rome. Reading this context back onto Addison’s essay on taste we find that of the seventeen writers mentioned, six are Roman, two are Greek, one is Spanish, and another eight are French neo-classicists; none are English. Through these choices, Addison announces where he stands in the culture wars of his time. And through his journalism, he disseminates the Whig worldview beyond his immediate coterie. Considered more generally, the eighteenth-century preoccupation with taste also allows us to connect two themes that have run through this introduction­– ­religion and the body. In a pre-Darwinian Christian context, the disastrous, defining moment of taste is when Eve eats the apple and persuades Adam to follow her into sin. Thereafter, greed is always suspect, as are signs that we might be over-relishing our sensory pleasures. Johnson’s first definition for ‘To Taste’ is ‘To try by the mouth to eat’, which he

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illustrates with a quote from Paradise Lost: ‘Of this tree we may not taste nor touch’. His fourth definition is ‘To relish intellectually; to approve’, which produces another Miltonic warning: ‘Thou, Adam, wilt taste no pleasure’ (Johnson 1755b: 907).13 Although it is ironic that England’s most famous lexicographer should illustrate the verb ‘to taste’ with a warning not to taste, the usage neatly illustrates the post-Fall belief that linguistic and bodily pleasures will lead you into trouble. Viewed from this perspective, one can see a religious sub-text in the notion that citizens should attend thoughtfully to their tastes. The line that Johnson quotes also reminds the Christian reader that language and the body are implicated in each other. The punishments for eating the forbidden fruit (and thus gaining linguistic knowledge) include labour pains for Eve and death for both her and Adam. To over-indulge, or to taste the wrong things, is to doom oneself to mortality and pain. These religious narratives co-exist with other kinds of bodily anxiety and help to explain why the eighteenth-century discourse on taste tends towards metaphorical abstraction rather than physical analysis. Although the period saw major advances in science and medicine, commentators were more interested in exploring visual perception than in thinking about the bodily roots of taste.14 This follows the conventional Western ranking of senses and body parts, in which the eyes are more privileged than the mouth or the nose. Licking, tasting, and sniffing put you alongside pigs and dogs whereas the eyes connect you to legendarily clear-sighted creatures such as St John the Evangelist and the eagles of classical mythology. (Not for nothing does the long eighteenth century get called ‘the Enlightenment’.) This adds a further layer to how we should understand the ‘refined’ taste of Addison’s ‘polite’ society. Untrammelled consumption is vulgar as well as sinful. It reminds onlookers that eating is not only about savouring fine tastes, it is also­– ­more basely­– ­about satisfying bodily hunger. The poor might wolf their food down but the upper orders shouldn’t be too obvious about doing the same. And nor, by extension, should they indulge in what Virginia Woolf would later call ‘rubbish-reading’ (Woolf 2009: 577). Indeed there is a striking correspondence between Woolf’s terminology and the rhetoric with which twenty-first-century journalists demonise the perceived eating habits of the poor. Putting all this together, we find that although taste is experienced as a personal preference, it is also implicated in cultural politics. And the latter are related to money, class, and governance. Ideology does not vitiate our cultural preferences, or render them inauthentic, but it does complicate attempts to enshrine any one ‘taste’ as superior to any other.

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This has obvious consequences for how we think about literary criticism and reading. Even though our tastes are heterogeneous, unpredictable, and changeable, accounts of reading often spring from generalisations based on individual preferences and experiences. By virtue of what they have chosen to do with their lives, literary commentators tend to have had more bookish childhoods than the average person, a circumstance that ought to make critics and academics wary of extrapolating too much from their own lives or background. (I include myself in this warning.) Apart from anything else, people who have benefitted from high culture are likely to privilege such texts over other kinds of writing; and they are correspondingly perplexed when readers with different interests prefer Dan Brown, Danielle Steele, or Jackie Collins. Yet it is entirely possible to respond with rapture and intelligence to books that lack conventional prestige. The heroine of Barbara Pym’s Excellent Women (1952) confesses that she is more likely, come the dark night of the soul, to reach for a volume on Chinese cookery than a seventeenth-century religious autobiography (Pym 1980: 21, 159). Such preferences say much about the creative power of readerly attention. Cook ­ r books about DIY, fossils, or film stars­– c­ an become privileged books­– o texts if that is what their readers want them to be. The newly married Sylvia Plath worries that ‘instead of studying Locke’ for her English degree she is immersed in The Joy of Cooking (1931–51), ‘reading it like a rare novel’. Recoiling from Locke, Plath finds herself in danger of ‘falling headfirst into a bowl of cookie batter’ (Plath 2000: 269). This version of the mindbody problem is distinctly gendered: The Joy of Cooking epitomises 1950s domestic housewifery, while Locke represents the overwhelmingly male canon of Western philosophy. Plath finds one option rebarbative while the other is all-too-dangerously seductive. On the face of it, Plath’s fascination with The Joy of Cooking seems hard to square with the projections of violent femininity found in her later poetry. However, although it is true that she repudiates the model offered by cookery manuals, those templates return with sarcastic force in many of her most famous works. The 1950s housewife who nearly drowns in a bowl of cookie batter ends up writing of a dead woman who leaves a ‘Pitcher of milk, now empty’ for her children and of a ‘Lady Lazarus’ who rises from the grave to eat men ‘like air’ (Plath 1981: 272 and 247). Indeed Plath’s 1960s poems are stuffed with knives, fridges and cookers, with devouring mouths, with raw and cooked meats, with poisonous or sustaining liquids, with disastrous attempts at domestic entertaining, and with words and food employed as synonyms for each other.15 These usages are super-charged

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by Plath’s earlier internalisations of culinary femininity; the poetry’s power comes from the tenseness of the poet’s exchange with her own past. Reading The Joy of Cooking as if it were ‘a rare novel’ is not a generic mistake, therefore, but a preparation for the poet that Plath will become. Plath’s long-simmering use of The Joy of Cooking illustrates a larger point. For me, what matters is not the literary or generic status of a given book but the quality of attention­– ­and of desire­– ­that the reader brings to the act of reading. If there is enough at stake in the encounter just about any piece of writing can trigger an exchange of energies that is more conventionally associated with reading canonical literature. This leads to another axiomatic proposition, namely that we can learn as much from the process of reading as from the content of the books we read. For reading to give us access to new fields of thought, there must be an interchange in which the reader internalises written language and written language addresses the reader. Thus, our understanding of a book’s content is formed through something that is larger than both the reader and the text. And, by extension, the experience of reading can be an end in itself; it need not be directed towards a particular ‘learning outcome’. The chapters that follow will have more to say about taste’s role in literary commentary. They will also return to the ‘something larger’ of reading, its capacity to create a field of being that is bigger than any single reader or writer. But before I give a preview of those chapters, I want to acknowledge that my own tastes and habits of thought have shaped the writing of this book. Given the enormity of the topic, I have chosen to focus the discussion around representative issues in the history and theory of reading. These topics­– ­the common reader, close reading, reading and technology, and so on­– a­ re ones that speak to me in particular ways. I have used my notes and bibliography to sketch out some of the roads not taken, and I try to be clear about my methodology. For instance, although I have followed neurological research on reading, my focus is on ideology not science. For related reasons I do not seek to ‘perform’ particular kinds of critical reading. Instead, I am interested in how reading practices arise and what they tell us about culture and society. This means that although my work is informed by critical theory, I am more likely to ask how deconstruction affects conceptions of written language than I am to offer a deconstructive reading of a given text. The same is true of the way I use psychoanalysis and philosophy. While gathering insights from a variety of disciplines, my analysis remains broadly historicist­– ­and I recognise that this is itself an ideological choice.16

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Reading, incorporated 23

Chapter 2 develops an argument that I have already broached, namely that readers (and the readings that they produce) vary according to time, place, and social grouping; thus, there is no such thing as a single ‘reading public’. The analysis is organised around images of reading from the late Medieval period and the twentieth century. As well as emphasising the visual aspects of reading, the images allow me to trace how technological developments have changed the physical interaction between readers and text. The reading scenes in chapter 2 provoke questions about gender, class, and literacy, and these are developed further in my third chapter, which takes ‘the common reader’ as a microcosm of humanist criticism. Although the figure is mostly associated with Dr Johnson and Virginia Woolf, I demonstrate that notions of ‘common reading’ have a long and shifting history. The chapter uses these changing constructions to comment on the evolution of professional literary criticism from the publishing boom of the seventeenth century through to the emergence of academic English studies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Rather than being an end in itself, this historical analysis asks what ‘the common reader’ tells us about cultural constructions of readership. A central argument will be that the figure is created by specialist readers as a foil for their professional practices; it is a cultural fantasy, not a representation of what ‘real’ readers feel or believe. Chapter 4 extends my exploration of critical practice by studying one of modern academia’s founding methods: close reading. Moving from I. A. Richards and New Criticism to the UK’s National Curriculum, the chapter argues that close reading has become a constituent element of ‘good’ citizenship, hence the political uses to which reading is put in secondary school syllabuses. This insight is further explored in chapter 5, which considers how postmodernism and critical theory have affected how academic conceptualisations of reading. Centring on queer theory, the chapter asks if marginalised citizens are well-served by disruptive reading strategies, or if there is still something to be said for respectful close readings. My final chapter speculates on how reading will change as a result of emerging technologies. Making a virtue out of open-endedness, I use debates about screens to examine the larger question of the relationship between textuality, history, and identity; I extend this discussion in an afterword that considers reading’s place in the evolution of our digital futures. Although the book as a whole covers a lot of historical and conceptual ground, it is not intended as a minute survey of literary-critical history. Instead it analyses the cultural work that certain reading formations perform. Why have they become prominent and what is at stake in the

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ways that they construct readership? Inevitably, this means revisiting subjects that might be thought old-hat, but I have two reasons for going back to these earlier debates. First, the academic humanities are now so specialised that it is possible to be an expert in one area of study without having the slightest knowledge of what a colleague in one’s own department is researching; increasingly, this is also true at undergraduate and postgraduate level because syllabuses can no longer offer a coherent version of what ‘English’ or ‘Literary Studies’ might consist of. In many ways this is a good thing­– ­certainly in preference to a rigidly canonical approach­– ­but it also means that it is often hard to see how we have got to where we are. Related to this, there is a pervasive sense, on both sides of the Atlantic, that the academic humanities are in a state of existential crisis, threatened not only by budgetary constraints, but also by a radical uncertainty about their social function. My book seeks to help the academy reflect on its own history, so that it might be better able to explain itself to the outside world. And, for me, the most important part of that history is the thing that stands at the heart of English: reading. Of course, alongside these thematic preoccupations, this is also a book about the writers that I cite along the way, many of whom have forced their way into my text by virtue of their influence on my non-academic life. Virginia Woolf, Roland Barthes, Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, and Charlotte Brontë are recurring presences and Jane Austen gets a chapter to herself. Then there are the paintings, films, internet sites, computer games, and art objects that are scattered throughout the analysis. It would be tempting to describe these as ‘another story’ except that they are not ‘another story’. Rather, they contribute to the world in which ‘literary’ and ‘popular’ writing circulates, and they help to form the contexts in which reading occurs. As such, they have more relevance to contemporary reading habits than, say, Romantic poetry or Greek tragedy do. In any case, reading should not be contained by cultural gatekeeping. Tastes and manners vary and even in the most formal circles, a knife can be smeared with jam and a second scone bolted down when no one is looking. This is another way of saying that this book aims to be true to one of reading’s greatest strengths, its openness to the excessive, the eclectic, and the unexpected. Like the young Virginia Stephen, I intend to gobble. Notes   1 These scenes are reconstructed from Woolf 1985 and Bell 1976.  2 ‘How Should One Read a Book?’ was originally published in 1926; I am

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Reading, incorporated 25

quoting the revised version that appeared in The Common Reader: Second Series (1932).   3 An English translation of Binswanger’s account of the case can be found in Existence (1958) edited by Rollo May et al.   4 This is a deliberate anachronism: the historical Ellen West died when Callas was a toddler. As well as announcing the fictiveness of Bidart’s reconstruction, the Callas passage encourages the reader to find an overlap between Ellen’s voice and Bidart’s, especially since Bidart’s work often explores the techniques and emotional impact of singing.   5 For a critical practice that goes further into questions of incorporation, see Abraham and Török 1986.   6 The single most important predecessor of Allende’s memoir is Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin’s The Physiology of Taste (1825), which invented the concept of gastronomic science. Brillat-Savarin lists six senses, the last one being ‘the sense of physical desire’ (Brillat-Savarin 1994: 29; emphasis in the original). Roland Barthes’s ‘Reading Brillat-Savarin’ gives an account of the book’s erotic physicality (Barthes 1986: 250–70).   7 Hispanic citizens were judged even more likely to be illiterate but, insofar as the tests were conducted in English, the results only tell us about competence in the state’s official language. Many of those tested will have been fully literate in Spanish. For up-to-date statistics on US education levels, see the National Center for Education Statistics website, which is supported by the US Department of Education: https:/­/­nces.ed.gov/­.   8 Beckett himself changed his mind: May originally took seven steps. By insisting on nine steps, the estate attempts to repress what the play’s compositional history already admits: that words cannot be fixed in one spot.   9 The word of God is surprisingly hard to pin down. The standard Protestant Bible has sixty-six books to the Roman Catholic version’s seventy-three. The Eastern Orthodox churches add several more but differ between themselves as to which of the additions are authentic and which apocryphal. 10 Other figures who combined theological and literary-historical interests include Thomas Gray and William Mason. 11 As Fielding’s introduction to Tom Jones shows, taste was a defining preoccupation for eighteenth-century commentators. As well as appearing in the philosophy of Shaftesbury, Hume, Burke, and others, it finds its way into some of the period’s most famous poems, notably Alexander Pope’s ‘Essay on Criticism’ (1711) and ‘Epistle to Burlington’ (1731). Then there are dramatic burlesques such as Samuel Foote’s Taste: A Comedy (1720). All these use taste as a pivot for analysing culture and society. For an overview of the term’s literary and philosophical uses, see Gigante 2005. 12 The Spectator and its successors were the model for nineteenth-century journals such as The Edinburgh Review, Blackwood’s Magazine and Dickens’s Household Words and All the Year Round.

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13 For the original context of these lines, see Paradise Lost 9:651 and 8:401–2. Noah Webster reproduces Johnson’s second citation (which is a misquotation) in his dictionary of American English. 14 Two days after his essay on taste, Addison published a piece about the imagination, the first line of which is ‘Our sight is the most perfect and most delightful of all of our senses’ (Addison 1970: 175). For a more visceral response to taste, we need to go to the society doctor, George Cheyne, who became a famous embodiment of what we would now call yo-yo dieting. As a young man, Cheyne grew ‘excessively fat, short-breath’d, Lethargic and Listless’ (Cheyne 1991: 326; emphasis in the original). Restricting himself to an intake of vegetables and milk, he regained his health, only to rise to thirty-two stone when he relaxed his regime. A re-application of his vegetarian intake led to renewed weight loss and, meantime, he produced books about diet and the nervous system. Cheyne’s autobiographical writings reveal a prodigious appetite yet even he has little to say about the processes by which we savour or desire food. Instead, he dwells compulsively on how he purged his body through emetics and laxatives. (His use of the latter anticipates Ellen West’s.) For more on Cheyne’s theories and life, see Roy Porter’s 1991 facsimile edition of The English Malady (1733). 15 See, for example, the sugar and honey in ‘Wintering’ (1962); the lamb roast in ‘Mary’s Song’ (1962); the stand-off between sweet tea and the blood jet of poetry in ‘Kindness’ (1963); the communion wafers in ‘Mystic’ (1963) and ‘Medusa’ (1962); the ghastly aphrodisiac foods of ‘Gigolo’ (1963); the golden apples of ‘Letter in November’ (1962); the parodic afternoon tea in ‘The Tour’ (1962); the kitchen hell of ‘Lesbos’ (1962); the refrigerator-smile in ‘An Appearance’ (1962); the mottled sausages that look like body parts in ‘Little Fugue’ (1962)­– ­and, of course, the bloodsucking Germanic vampire in Plath’s most famous poem, ‘Daddy’ (1962). 16 The enormity of the topic also means that my work intersects with that of previous writers. Alongside the debts charted in my footnotes, I am conscious that there are also critics whom I do not discuss in detail but whose work has nonetheless influenced me; these include Wolfgang Iser, Stanley Fish, and Mary Jacobus. Marcel Proust’s writings about reading are also an unseen presence throughout.

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The time and place of reading

The chances are, you aren’t reading this out loud. Nor are you listening to someone recite it. In the early twenty-first century, in the majority of Western contexts, reading books is a silent, non-communal activity. We may read in waiting rooms and parks­– ­even, sometimes, in libraries­– ­but we rarely make direct contact with the people who surround us. On the contrary, a glance around a rush-hour train indicates that reading is one of the key ways by which we insulate ourselves from other people, albeit by immersing ourselves in the alternative throngs that we find in novels, biographies, and histories. Such isolation has not always been the norm, however, and there remain many circumstances in which reading is neither silent nor solitary. Every day millions of people attend services in which holy texts are pronounced aloud. Celebrities, politicians, and sportspeople earn enormous sums of money by reading speeches to paying audiences. Talking newspapers are produced for the blind. Internet sites will read books to your children if you tire of doing so yourself. I am not vain enough to imagine that troops of devoted readers will form clubs in which they read portions of my prose aloud and debate my arguments. Yet, when the novel form emerged in the early eighteenth century, many prose texts would have been consumed in exactly that way.1 A high proportion of early novels were composed of letters and, until the invention of the telephone, letters were the main engine of public communication: whether you were a politician, a businessperson, an artist, or a scientist, you would have conducted your business by mail, and your missives would have been passed between numerous readers. Even ostensibly personal letters were often read aloud to larger groups: think of the scene in Jane

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Austen’s Emma (1815) where the heroine congratulates herself on learning the contents of one of Jane Fairfax’s letters without having to endure Miss Bates’s promised reading of it (Austen 1985: 169–76). At this point in the book no one knows that Jane Fairfax is simultaneously exchanging letters with a secret fiancé; far from being read aloud, these letters are so tightly guarded that Jane becomes ill with the strain of keeping the correspondence clandestine. This dynamic, whereby letters can serve both as public announcements and as secret channels, is a useful model for thinking about epistolary fiction and about the novel form more generally. For instance, Samuel Richardson’s novels were recited and discussed in the drawing-rooms of polite society; his most ardent admirers corresponded with him, even suggesting future directions for his work. Meanwhile, in the servant-halls of the same houses, Richardson’s Pamela (1740–1) was being communicated to a different class by the simple expedient of being read aloud: it only took a single literate servant to disseminate a text among an entire household of downstairs staff. Significantly, Pamela acknowledges this practice by depicting its heroine, a lady’s maid, reading to another servant (Richardson 1985: 49).2 Many subsequent eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels show middle-class families asserting their group identity via communal reading, and the practice is also documented in the letters and journals of figures as various as Lord Byron, Queen Victoria, and Virginia Woolf. Outside the parlour, in dormitories, factories, and village greens, public recitations spread the written word to people who were unable to pick the words out for themselves (Lyons 1999: 331ff). Simultaneously, however, books were also a vehicle for introspection and individual self-fashioning. When Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre takes a volume from the bookcases of a house in which she is a poor relation, it is not enough for her to read silently and on her own, she must also retreat into a window embrasure and close the curtains to shield herself from view; the gesture is both a defence from her hostile cousins and an opportunity to find out who she is by engaging intimately with a book that she loves (Brontë 1985: 39–41). This tension between public and private, interior and exterior, also runs through contemporary reading practices: the commuters who escape a crowded bus by picturing themselves on the Hogwarts Express are processing the same words as the 15,000 young fans who gathered in a Toronto baseball stadium in 2000 for a mass reading by J. K. Rowling. From ancient times onwards, reading habits have been shaped by new ways of recording and disseminating language but these days the rate of technological change is much faster than in the eighteenth century, and new

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The time and place of reading 29

formats are continuing to complicate how we think about silent and nonsilent reading. For instance, if I listen to a podcast of a book serialisation while travelling on a train, should my activity be seen as public or private? Although the book is being read aloud, the people around me cannot hear it; and although I am surrounded by people, I am consuming the text on my own. As with the letters that were read aloud in the servant-filled houses of Georgian and Victorian England, it is not always clear what is private and what is public: does a servant count as an auditor, and might the letter secreted in a hidden drawer suddenly reach the wrong pair of eyes? Such questions speak to specific historical circumstances but they also suggest something of reading’s protean qualities. As well as producing an interpenetration of mind and body, reading has the power to cross backwards and forwards between social and psychic spaces. Its ability to do this partly hinges on its relation to speech, which is why I have chosen to begin (and will end) this chapter by thinking about reading’s relation to oral culture. Long before written language became a vehicle for solitary consumption, it was a prompt to public recitation, and to some extent, reading still oscillates between these functions. As a result, its operations cannot be contained within either the public or the private spheres. Rather, it mixes these supposedly separate categories together in a way that suggests the division between them is an ideological fiction. Indeed this talk of ‘public’ and ‘private’ is itself the mark of a particular historical moment, namely our own; it is much harder for us to know how pre-modern readers would have experienced the written word. Not only do ancient concepts of identity differ from our own; language is not presented in the same way across time. Greek and Latin inscriptions consist of a solid block of letters with no punctuation, and no gap between the words.3 Skilful readers would presumably have been able to meet the challenge of construing such inscriptions, but even experienced eyes would have struggled to put expression into a passage that was new to them.4 Scribal practices such as these would have left little room for the reader to generate an individual relation to the text; the task is comparable to a modern musician sight-reading an unfamiliar score for the first time. In many contexts this would not have mattered because ancient literary texts were usually learnt by heart; a manuscript was a record, and a prompt to recollection, rather than something to be consumed in its own right. Taking this observation further, if writing mostly exists to jog the memory, then the written word, in the classical context, is a means to an end, the end being the vocalisation of the text.5 Here we reach a question that bedevils histories of reading, namely the

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status of silent and non-silent reading in the ancient world. According to some historians, silent reading only became the norm around eleven centuries ago, which is several thousand years after the emergence of writing.6 Other experts hold that this is an overstatement and that early readers could, and did, read silently. In many ways this is an argument about the timing of particular cultural changes rather than their sequence. Few scholars doubt that humankind’s oldest stories circulated as oral texts before they were written down. The tale of Gilgamesh, the Rigveda, the Iliad, and the Odyssey, the Hebrew Bible, the Mahabharata, and the Christian Gospels all began as verbal performances and they would have still have been consumed in this way long after they were recorded on clay tablets or papyrus. Similarly, no one believes that silent reading came into being precisely one minute after written language was invented, or that the two were immediately practised with universal confidence and fluidity. Rather, it is a question of the degree to which silent reading was common before the modern era. Linguistic evidence suggests that, if you go far enough back, ‘to read’ meant to read out loud. In Aramaic and Hebrew, the words for ‘speaking’ and ‘reading’ are the same (Manguel 1996: 45). The philologist Jesper Svenbro argues that ‘if the Greeks of the classical age read aloud, we must assume that their ancestors did the same. When there are no documents, it seems logical to conclude that reading aloud was the primordial form of reading’ (Svenbro 1999: 38); he supports this position by citing archaic Greek verbs in which reading is equated with ‘distributing’ a text to other people and to one’s self­– ­the implication being that such ‘distribution’ would have involved reading the words aloud, even if one was alone (Svenbro 1999: 38–44). But difficulties arise when we move from the pre- to the late classical period. In a famous story from his Confessions (390–400 CE), St Augustine visits Ambrose of Milan and is astonished to discover that the latter never read out loud: When he was reading, his eyes ran over the page and his heart perceived the sense, but his voice and tongue were silent. He did not restrict access to anyone coming in, nor was it customary even for a visitor to be announced. Very often when we were there, we saw him silently reading and never other­ wise. After sitting for a long time in silence (for who would dare to burden him in such intent concentration?) we used to go away … We wondered if he read silently perhaps to protect himself in case he had a hearer interested and intent on the matter, to whom he might have to expound the text being read if it contained difficulties, or who might wish to debate some difficult questions … Besides, the need to reserve his voice, which used easily to become hoarse,

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could have been a very fair reason for silent reading. Whatever motive he had for his habit, this man had a good reason for what he did. (Augustine 1998: 92–3).

Like so much in the history of reading, this passage has been interpreted in radically divergent ways, and this disparity is itself illuminating. Many historians take Augustine’s words as evidence that silent reading was previously unknown to him; others argue that Augustine was astonished, not at the fact of interior reading, but at Ambrose’s persistence in doing so in front of guests. In other words, it is not the silence that takes Augustine aback, it is Ambrose’s breach of convention: if he is going to read in company he should do so out loud, so that he can debate the text’s meaning with his visitors. In the absence of an ancient manual detailing the reading processes of the past, historians are forced to draw inferences from sources that mention reading in passing; these are mostly works of imagination, which further complicates their value as evidence. In the end, the debate comes down to individual judgement and, in my view, Augustine’s words do suggest that he was previously unfamiliar with silent reading, and that he felt a need to understand why Ambrose should practise it. That said, the classical scholar M. F. Burnyeat has convincingly pointed to silent reading occurring well before Augustine’s time, in texts from the second and third centuries CE by Ptolemy and Plotinus (Burnyeat 1997: 74–6). It seems likely, therefore, that silent reading was known to the ancient world, but that it was not a universal practice and that its prevalence was probably linked to class and education: put bluntly, the higher your status, the more likely you were to read silently.7 Habits and conventions do not change overnight, and cultural practices would have emerged slowly and patchily in a world lacking telecommunications and advanced forms of transport. In this regard, it is worth bearing in mind that when they met, Ambrose was fourteen years older than Augustine and had been Bishop of Milan for nine years; by contrast, Augustine, who had been born into a Latinised Berber family, was in his late twenties and had only recently left the Rome’s North African territories. Rather than either replacing or being replaced by the other, silent reading and public recitation continue to exist alongside each other in a manner that recalls Raymond Williams’s notion of dominant, emergent and residual formations (Williams 1977: 121–7). That is, at any given moment, several ways of reading will hold sway, some of them starting to gather prominence, while others persist in a position of reduced significance. It is

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curious, for example, that even if Augustine had already encountered silent reading, his story still implies that reading belongs, properly, to speech and that it is bad form to read silently while in the presence of other people. As an analogue, consider Diarmaid MacCulloch’s observation that Judaism and early Christianity viewed silent praying with suspicion because fellow worshippers could not know what the silent participant was requesting from God (MacCulloch 2014: 21 and 63–4). It was not that worshippers were unable to pray silently, it was that peer pressure (and its attendant ideology) discouraged them from doing so. Something similar might be said of silent reading, namely that cultural pressures can militate against a fully private experience of reading, even where silent reading is present. Moreover, spoken reading continues to occupy a powerful, if amorphous, position in the contemporary imaginary. Discussing the ‘myth’ that the ancients only read out loud, the poet James Fenton has commented that this is ‘a myth we appear to want to believe, since the evidence against it is strong’ (Fenton 2006). Although Fenton does not elaborate, one could speculate that this particular ‘myth’ (or perhaps it would be better to say ‘overstatement’) has stuck because it makes for a good story. Probing that story deeper, it could be that modern readers want to demarcate themselves from their ancestors while simultaneously imagining a form of reading in which orality was key. In other words, there might be a need to believe both that current reading practices are totally different from ancient ones and that ancient spoken forms have a primordial authenticity that our modern habits lack. Instead of positing a sharp historical divide between silent reading and reading aloud, I prefer to think in terms of an ongoing tension between interior and exterior reading. This has two results, which I will explore in more detail in the rest of this chapter. First, it enables us to grasp that reading out loud can itself produce an experience of interiority; as we will see, this is especially the case with religious recitation. Second, it suggests that privacy, rather than silent reading per se, may be the key factor in developing what we think of as modern versions of selfhood. The post-Romantic notion of reading as an intimate escape would have been impossible in the corridor-less spaces of a medieval household, where one room led directly into another and where masters and servants shadowed each other at every turn. Intellectual historians have argued that one of the hinges of Renaissance humanism was the ‘closet’ or retiring-room where privileged readers could ponder books without being inhibited by other people (Grafton 1999); thus, alternative forms of social organisation gave rise to new ways of being. Three centuries later, when Jane Eyre hides

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The time and place of reading 33

behind the curtains in her aunt’s house she is gesturing towards a female (and a child’s) version of this space; her need to read privately foreshadows her insistence that she, as much as any titled lady, has a right to happiness and autonomous choice. And although the scene ends with Jane’s male cousin hurling the book at her and telling her that she has no right to touch his property, Brontë’s novel allows Jane to present herself as the author of her own life-story. Like Richardson’s Pamela, Jane writes her experiences in the first person singular and is thus granted a primacy denied to her tormentor. Linguistic control lies at the heart of Jane Eyre and Pamela: both heroines contest their right to read and write on their own terms without being abused by more socially powerful people. This theme is amplified by the context in which it was articulated. In the century that separates the two books, the novel form was widely condemned as immoral, particularly for female readers. (‘Can it be true, that any young woman, pretending to decency, should endure for a moment to look on this infernal brood of futility and lewdness?’)8 Of course, eighteenth-century panics over reading have additional impetus because the novel, unlike a medieval manuscript, is a genuinely mass-market form. Comparable anxieties attend subsequent formats, such as pulp fiction magazines, superhero comic books, email, text messaging, online social media platforms, and emojis and emoticons. These phenomena are not interchangeable; the creation of the internet and the invention and subsequent mechanisation of the printing press are epochal shifts, but their effects on authors, readers, and society are very different. There is, though, a sense that reading has a recurring capacity to trigger ethical anxieties. These cluster around issues of who has the power to read, how reading should be conducted, what kind of texts get circulated, and whether all readers are given equal access to written materials. Associated anxieties hover around writing, and both fields are defined by an overarching question: who is taught to read, and why? Implicit in this question is a recognition that reading is a craft, a learnt activity, rather than an innate capacity. Although literacy should not be taken for granted, it is easy to forget how much good fortune is involved in its acquisition. (As I type, I am trying­– ­and failing­– ­to imagine the lives of the millions of people throughout the world who cannot read or write their own names.) Book prices and the prevalence of silent reading are therefore not just interesting topics in their own right, they are also part of a history of privilege and power. Rather than attempting a linear survey of these issues, I have chosen to focus this chapter around some images from the history of reading­– ­specifically, a medieval illumination and two twentieth-century portraits.

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By juxtaposing scenes from different periods, I will investigate the changing mechanisms by which reading and identity become embedded in each other; I will also reflect on how reading is itself a visual medium. Although this will involve some sharp turns backwards and forwards in time, I will make the transitions as explicit as I can, and my final section will return to the questions of silent and non-silent reading that I have just canvassed. I should also note that although the chapter mostly explores class and gender, I want these areas to stand as examples of how literacy is always a function of privilege more generally. The scene of the crime With a view to historicising my own reading position, I am going to begin with an early twentieth-century painting that speaks to ‘modern’ Western selfhood; I will then look back at a depiction of reading from the late middle ages. The first image is Duncan Grant’s Crime and Punishment from 1909. The picture depicts Grant’s cousin, Marjorie Strachey, in whose family Grant largely grew up. Both painter and sitter were members of what would later become known as the Bloomsbury Group.9 While working on the painting, Grant referred to it as ‘Marjorie’, Grief’, and ‘Despair’ before settling on ‘Crime and Punishment’, a reference to Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novel of 1866; this, we assume, is the closed book in the foreground.10 The uncertainty in the picture’s naming echoes an oddity in its composition. If this a portrait, it is a strange one. The sitter’s head is obscured by her hands, she does not face the viewer, and her posture makes it hard to make out the shape of her body. Strachey’s black-clad figure throws shadows on the upper half of the canvas while the book, which occupies a space of its own on the sofa, is bathed in light. It is as if the conventional focus of a portrait, a human figure, has been pushed into the background by an object. However, even though Grant’s final title emphasises the book over its owner, the volume itself is unimpressive and indistinct. The cover and spine are illegible, we cannot see the words inside, and its appearance announces it as a mass-market publication with no material value beyond its selling price. If something seems held back in the representation of both the woman and the book then this, for me, is because the painting is neither a portrait of Marjorie Strachey nor of Dostoevsky’s novel. Rather, it depicts the transaction between the two of them. The word ‘transaction’ suggests narrative and Crime and Punishment is a definitely a narrative work. But unlike the illustrative paintings that dominated Victorian taste, Grant’s

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Figure 1  Duncan Grant, ‘Crime and Punishment’

image eschews plot depiction. Instead of dramatising a pivotal scene from within the novel, Grant requires the viewer to infer the contents of the book from its effect on a reader: it is a drama of internal emotions not of plot turns. This effect is intensified by the composition. By drawing attention to the discarded volume on the sofa, and by denying us access to Strachey’s facial expression, Grant encourages us to speculate on the relationship between the reader and the book, and on the source of Strachey’s abjection. The implication is that Strachey’s hunched posture is a response to her reading of a novel that many have found harrowing, not least because it refuses the relatively comfortable trajectory of so much English fiction. Crime and Punishment turns on a double murder­– ­significantly, of two women­– ­and its plot touches on prostitution, psychological disintegration, and urban poverty. The novel is also formally inventive, with a fugue-like structure that sometimes occupies more than one viewpoint simultaneously. By depicting the emotional impact of this book­– a­ nd not, say, Pride and Prejudice­– ­Grant signals his interest in psychological extremity and

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narrative innovation. So, while the surface of his painting is relatively conventional, its inner world places Grant and Dostoevsky within a broadly Modernist aesthetic. Above and beyond its position in twentieth-century art, Grant’s painting makes the more general point that reading is a psychological process. Facing away from the viewer and hiding her eyes from the room in which she sits, Marjorie Strachey inhabits an inner world that other people cannot penetrate. The busy designs on the sofa, cushion, carpet, and wall do not distract her because her attention lies somewhere else. That ‘somewhere else’ is the place where we ‘see’ the books that we read. Grant’s painting dramatises the otherness of reading, the way that our surroundings can seem less real to us than the phantasmatic worlds conjured by novelists, poets, and dramatists. Highlighted by a shaft of light, Dostoyevsky’s novel wields a power that goes beyond its everyday appearance. Considered as an object, it is just ink and paper but becomes something else when a reader internalises its contents. And, as Grant’s image shows, the reader in her turn is changed by the process of reading. This mutual alteration is crucial to reading’s power. Although Grant’s painting shows a reader’s identity being re-oriented by a novel, Dostoyevsky’s words couldn’t have that effect­– ­indeed they couldn’t have any effect­– ­if the reader weren’t prepared to co-operate with them. Crucially, though, readerly co-operation is not fixed. Rather than tamely following an author’s intentions, readers have the power to transform books by the attention that they give them, and there is nothing inevitable about the impact of a particular piece of writing. Other readers may resist Dostoevsky’s novel, or be unmoved by it; and although I have assumed that Grant’s painting depicts existential anguish, a mischievous viewer might ask if Marjorie Strachey has covered her face to hide tears of laughter. Nor do our responses remain fastened in one position over time. When Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling appeared in 1771, it provoked a nationwide outpouring of emotion. Mackenzie’s novel soon fell victim to a large-scale cultural shift, however, and the following generation met its sentimental vignettes with helpless laughter (Todd 1986: 146). On a more individual level, many of us will have had the disconcerting experience of re-reading a favourite book, only to discover that it has an entirely different effect on us second time around. By their nature, re-readings are not as innocent as first readings: there is less surprise, and more knowledge. Often, though, we misremember or completely forget key episodes, which suggests that the disjunctions of re-reading cannot be straightforwardly linked to narrative familiarity. Indeed misremembering is one of the most

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The time and place of reading 37

characteristic ways in which the uncanniness of re-reading makes itself felt; it is as if we both recognise and do not recognise what we are reading. In such cases, since the words on the page have not altered, it seems reasonable to infer that we, the readers, are the ones who are different. Re-reading can also be highly selective: it is not unusual for a reader to return, over and over, to a particular episode while skipping past another. And even first readings can manifest an ebb and flow in which we rush over some words but dwell on others. In such instances, are we expressing mastery over the book by picking and choosing what we read, or is the book compelling us to revisit phrases or scenes that speak to us in ways that we do not fully understand? Reading Thomas Bewick’s History of British Birds (1797–1804) in her window embrasure, Jane Eyre insists that she is chiefly interested in the pictures, yet she finds that ‘there were certain introductory pages that, child as I was, I could not pass quite as a blank’; these include passages dealing with ‘the haunts of sea-fowl’ in ‘the vast sweep of the Arctic Zone’ amid ‘solitary rocks and promontories’ that were inhabited only by other birds (Brontë 1985: 40). Jane’s identification with isolated migratory creatures seems loaded, and Brontë’s phrasing is suggestive. The use of negatives and qualifiers­– ­pages that ‘child as I was, I could not pass quite as a blank’­– m ­ akes the meaning curiously opaque. Something in the pages makes them seem blank to Jane, but they cannot be a literal ‘blank’ because they are printed with what she archaically calls ‘the ­ r ‘not quite’ a letterpress’. At the same time, though, they are not a blank­– o blank­– ­because something else in them compels her attention. The concept of a page that both is and is not ‘a blank’ could stand for the whole wager of reading; this same dynamic is enacted every time someone opens the first page of a book and wonders whether or not to continue. What will we find in the words? Will they speak to us? Will the text turn around, as Roland Barthes imagines, and choose the reader that it desires (Barthes 1975: 27)? Ultimately, the marks that the author has caused to be imprinted onto the paper by means of ‘the letterpress’ are only a starting point. What happens next depends on what the reader finds in the words, or projects onto them. Because without the reader’s answering response, the printed page will remain a mere ‘blank’. Although I can describe what one might call ‘reading reactions’ from the outside, it is harder to show cognition in action. Even our most sophisticated scientific resources offer a brain map that is, literally, low-resolution: as of 2019, brain-imaging techniques reduce hundreds of thousands of neurons to a single cube-like structure. And although neuroimaging reveals basic chemical responses it does not explain thought, selfhood, or

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‘the mind’. As if recognising the limitations of current technology some scientists have reached back to literary models of identity by using the rhetorical device of personification to describe mental states­– ­an approach that is wittily exploited by the 2015 Pixar film Inside Out, in which five emotions struggle for dominance inside the young heroine’s brain.11 This, though, is just the latest iteration of an ancient phenomenon. Thwarted by the inaccessibility of thought and memory, culture has long sought ways of inferring the mind from its traces. Grant’s Crime and Punishment is a good example of this process. Using Marjorie Strachey’s posture to capture readerly introversion, the image seeks to understand consciousness by making its effects visible. The painting’s relation to this history is complex because the composition faces both backwards and forwards in time. Grant’s depiction of Strachey, especially her hunched bearing, recalls Albrecht Dürer’s Melencolia I (1514) in which a flightless angel slumps, half in shadow, with her head on her hand. Dürer’s engraving is probably the most famous Renaissance depiction of mental enervation, and its force continues to be felt in Western culture. Echoing the beliefs of his time, Dürer identifies Melencolia with creativity as well as ennui: the angel is surrounded by objects that represent human potential, particularly ones associated with architecture and geometry. These instruments will remain unused, however, unless the imaginative aspects of Melencolia can win out over the dejection that keeps the angel earthbound. For my purposes, the most important aspect of the image is that it is allegorical: it externalises a mental state by personifying it in the figure of Melencolia and by surrounding the angel with symbolic devices. By contrast, Grant uses the most prominent object in his painting, the paperback novel, to lead us inwards. The reader is invited to see the sitter’s mood as a product of her identification with Dostoevsky’s character. Their ‘Despair’ becomes hers (and, possibly, ours), hence the painting’s working title. By re-framing Dürer’s composition so that it becomes a statement on the inner self, Grant echoes the explorations of identity that were being mounted by his friends and relations in the Bloomsbury Group. In 1920 ­ ho was Marjorie’s brother and Duncan’s cousin­– James Strachey­– w ­travelled to Vienna to be analysed by Freud; he soon started translating Freud into English and subsequently became the general editor of the standard edition of Freud’s works. In 1928 Freud published an essay on Dostoevsky, whom he ranked next to Shakespeare in greatness, and although there is no causal link between Grant’s painting, Freud’s essay, and James Strachey’s translations, each can be seen as facets of a larger

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The time and place of reading 39

history in which Romantic interiority informs the emergence of psychanalysis. Writing to Stefan Zweig on 19 October 1920, Freud remarked that Dostoevsky ‘cannot be understood without psychoanalysis … he illustrates it himself in every character and every sentence’ (Frank 1990: 109), and Freud’s subsequent essay ‘Dostoevsky and Parricide’ (1928) uses Dostoevsky as a vehicle for presenting a capsule version of the Oedipus Complex to a general audience. (The essay was commissioned as the introduction to a volume of Dostoevsky’s working drafts; it was not written for other psychoanalysts.) As this example suggests, literature was a major resource for Freud. As well as expressing his theories through drama and fiction, he reads biographical experiences as if they were literary texts. This produces a hybrid discourse, part-psychoanalysis and part-hermeneutics, which has had a huge impact on literary criticism. In many ways, the application of literary-critical techniques to a writer’s life-story is continuous with Freud’s clinical method, in which close linguistic analysis is brought to bear on the testimony of living subjects. Moreover, if we put this technique alongside Dostoevsky’s novel and Grant’s painting, we see that structures of identification (including adjacent concepts such as projection, incorporation, and transference) are fundamental both to the theory and practice of psychoanalysis and to how modern subjects experience reading. Indeed psychoanalysis could itself be described as a form of super-attentive reading in which analyst and analysand collaborate in the creation and interpretation of an infinitely extensible text. The words that are spoken and heard (or misspoken and misheard) in the consulting room are like an open-ended epistolary novel in which messages from the past, present, and future are set in an ever-changing dialogue with each other. Although the worldview is different, Freud’s explorations of identification can be placed alongside Dürer’s ‘Melencolia I’ as another of humanity’s attempts to illuminate the mind by analysing its residues. What is more, Freud’s theories have shaped twentieth- and twenty-first-century culture as much as allegory and personification shaped Dürer’s time. This is not to say that all contemporary readers have to espouse psychanalysis, or even be aware of it. Rather, I am making a point about the historicity of modern reading practices. Without necessarily realising it, Western readers have inherited assumptions about childhood, memory, and ‘the individual’ that were initiated by the Romantics and further developed by Freud and his peers. Among their many other effects, these concepts have helped form the notion that reading is a paradigmatically private act in which we­– l­ike Marjorie Strachey­– ­are brought into contact with our unconscious.

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I will return to Duncan Grant and Marjorie Strachey later in this chapter: I want to consider what Grant’s painting tells us about gender. But first I need to develop the proposition that reading means different things at different points in history. To do so, I am going to analyse an image that is closer in time to Dürer’s ‘Melencolia I’ than to Freud and Dostoevsky. This work in question is a miniature from a late fifteenth-century book of hours that depicts a woman reader very unlike Marjorie Strachey. Mary of Burgundy’s book of hours Books of hours are devotional texts that set out prayers for different parts of the day. By meditating over each entry at its allotted hour, readers aimed to become closer to God as each new day revisited the spiritual exercises of the previous one; they were a secular equivalent to the Divine Office which Roman Catholic priests were (and are) required to recite at set times every day. Until the print revolution of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, illustrated books were extremely expensive, and although some books of hours were within the grasp of averagely wealthy people, the one I want to discuss is from the very top of the financial scale. It dates from the 1470s and was made either for Mary of Burgundy or for Mary’s stepmother, Margaret of York, both of whom belonged to powerful dynasties; neither can be taken as typical of their period or gender. For the purposes of this chapter, I am going to assume that the book belonged to Mary of Burgundy, since that is the position taken by most medieval historians.12 In the world of medieval religious patronage, public art such as altar pieces were overwhelmingly commissioned by men whereas books of hours tended to be produced for female patrons: women’s spending was expected to be less visible than men’s (Pearson 2005). Faced with this tacit restriction, books of hours sought other ways of privileging female experience. One way of doing this was to highlight the Virgin Mary, who was often shown reading. Some of the most expensive books of hours also include representations of the women who first owned them. This enabled the female reader and/­or commissioner to see herself depicted alongside the Queen of Heaven, a ruler whose spiritual authority trumped the worldly power of any prince or king. While this does not translate into material benefits for women more generally, the image I want to look at works harder than most to grant primacy to female experience. In doing so it suggests that books may provide an imaginative ownership of otherwise restricted public spaces. The most important thing to say about this miniature is that the woman

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Figure 2  Mary of Burgundy reading her book of hours

reading in the foreground would also have been the book’s first owner. As a result, when she opened the volume, she would have seen a picture of herself studying the very book that she was holding in her hands. This makes the miniature into a sort of mirror in which the original owner (and only she) can view herself in the act of reading. Also, the more she looks, the more she binds herself into the scene depicted in her book. The interrelationship between the miniature and its owner is further complicated by

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what is happening within the image. Here we need to distinguish between the space in the foreground that the female reader occupies and the more distant scene on the other side of the window. Although the first of these locations has touches of symbolism (for example, the red carnations on the windowsill are a reference to Christ’s Passion), it seems to represent a recognisable reality, namely the Duchess’s private chamber. However, with regard to the more distant of the two spaces, we should not assume that there is an actual church beyond the woman’s window frame. Although retiring-rooms sometimes opened onto spaces of worship, the arrangement is rarely, if ever, encountered on the scale depicted here.13 It is therefore safer to view the church as the externalisation of an interior world, a representation of the spiritual/­psychic space in which the woman communes, through prayer, with the Virgin Mary and the Christ Child. In other words, if I can make an incongruous comparison, the scene in the church is like a thought bubble that tells us what a cartoon character is thinking, except in this case we are seeing a woman’s prayers. Reading is fundamental to this arrangement because the book in the woman’s hands is the fulcrum between the room in which she sits and the  church that she sees in her imagination. Moreover, by studying her book, the woman in the image gains privileged access to a space that is usually controlled by men. Without drawing her out of the indoor sphere, the miniature allows her to inhabit a vast Gothic church that is dominated by other women, foremost among them the Virgin Mary. The only man who is prominently featured in the church scene has his back to the viewer; female witnesses outnumber male ones; and Christ is shown as a child in his mother’s lap rather than as a redeeming saviour or an all-powerful judge. The ultimate focus of a pre-Reformation church would have been the centre of the high altar, where the priest turns water and wine into Christ’s body and blood; here, though, that space is occupied by Mary’s head and shoulders. The implication is that the Mass (in which a man reenacts Christ’s sacrifice) is unnecessary if you already have Jesus in your lap. Symbolically, Mary’s role as the Mother of God trumps the power of priests, and she connects other women to Christ via their own potential as mothers. Although this is unlikely to strike twenty-first-century eyes as a progressive position, it would have had greater significance for the original owners of these books, not least because many female patrons would themselves have had dynastic significance as mothers.14 There is another sense in which the Christ Child is related to reading. As we have seen, the book invites its owner, Mary of Burgundy, to direct her prayers through an image of which she herself is a part. The foreground of

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The time and place of reading 43

that image shows the Duchess using a book to project herself into a contemplative space. Meanwhile, the imagined space inside the church includes a kneeling woman (possibly the Duchess once more) who has also got a book tucked under her arm.15 Thus, we have three books to keep track of: two of them are in the miniature and the third is the book in which the miniature appears. Each of these volumes can be seen as an analogue of the others, with the same book appearing across three distinct planes. A modern reader is liable to feel dizzy studying these correspondences: it is like tracing an endlessly repeated reflection in two facing mirrors. However, a medieval reader would probably have taken the interplay between the image’s literal and symbolic spaces as an expression of a permeable relationship between earthly and heavenly existence. Familiar as they were with parsing stained glass windows, religious sculpture, and the Latin Mass, even illiterate viewers would have been well placed to grasp the nub of a picture such as this. In particular they would have known that the books that proliferate in the miniature are a reminder that in Christian doctrine Jesus is the human embodiment of a God who is already identified with language. As the start of St John’s Gospel puts it: ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God … And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us’ (John 1: 1–14). That is, the God who created the world by naming it has now taken bodily existence in the form of Jesus. Thus, the child in Mary’s lap is also the Word Incarnate. This worldview grants additional significance to devotional texts because if Christ is the Word-made-Flesh then he is also the ultimate book­– ­a living embodiment of God’s power to govern and create through language. By reading and carrying spiritual texts, the women inside and outside the miniature import Christ’s function as Word into their own lives: the book becomes a proxy for Christ’s presence. This strengthens the sense in which this particular book of hours is a performative text that aims to bring about the state of grace that it depicts. Reading the image means placing one’s self within the same sacred space as Mary, and that identical space is held out as a reward for close and active attention to the image. By inhabiting the iconography, you gain contact with the Word-made-Flesh, who is also the child in Mary’s arms. In this context, a job of reading is being done, and this would still be so even if the reader didn’t understand the accompanying Latin. This last point is important. Reading, we should note, does not just mean reading words. As the methodology of this chapter demonstrates, we also read images.16 Indeed the visual and the linguistic are so intertwined that we do not always register their mutual reliance. Their symbiosis can

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be traced in the rich illuminations of many medieval manuscripts but it is also apparent in twenty-first-century web pages with their ads, emojis, and gifs. And even when they lack illustrations, books address the eye. Some functionally illiterate office workers can perform seemingly impossible tasks by training themselves to recognise recurring blocks of text. Unable to understand individual words within the sequence, they nonetheless respond successfully to triggers that they have formed, through practice, into a sort of pictograph. In such cases writing operates precisely as a visual form. By contrast, skilled readers are only occasionally reminded of written language’s visual specificity­– ­for example, when they are confronted by an unfamiliar alphabet. Picture books teach children the alphabet by encouraging them to identify letters with representations of familiar objects. These identifications seem inevitable once language has been mastered but initially this is far from the case. (Why does ‘B’ go with ‘butter’ and not with ‘cheese’? The answer isn’t so clear when you’re four.) Books of hours remind us of this primary state because they, too, make a feature of the visual quality of words. Indeed the term that we use for an introductory text, especially one concerned with language, is ‘primer’. This derives from ‘Prime’, which formed the first entry in any book of hours, and it is thought that the modern meaning of ‘primer’ evolved from the medieval practice of using books of hours to teach children how to read. Literacy would thus have been tied to religious observance, especially for girls, who were less likely to receive additional forms of instruction. The following section will press further at this question of reading, education, and gender by returning to Duncan Grant’s portrait of Marjorie Strachey and placing the painting and its subject alongside Mary of Burgundy’s book of hours. Mary, Marjorie, and Lytton Mary of Burgundy’s miniature and Duncan Grant’s Crime and Punishment both illustrate reading’s impact on the inner self. But whereas Grant’s painting shows a solitary, in-turned reader, the miniature conveys its female protagonist to an imagined community. This hints at the historical distance between the two images. One springs from a feudal, Christian society, in which your sense of self depends upon your hierarchical relationship to God and to other people; the other expresses a desolate emptiness, in which a solitary reader is thrown back on herself. These two moments are separated by the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, by Enlightenment philosophy, by industrialisation, by Western imperialism, and by Marx,

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The time and place of reading 45

Darwin, Nietzsche, and Freud. Over this period books also change beyond recognition and although the imagination remains integral to reading, its focus shifts between the religious and the secular. As we have seen, the miniature in Mary of Burgundy’s book represents a trance-like state of contemplation, in which a visionary ideal is approached through close immersion in a book. Clearly, this is a religious rather than a literary state of mind: Mary of Burgundy is transported by the Word of God rather than by the linguistic patterns of a novel. In contrast, the hopeless isolation of Duncan Grant’s Crime and Punishment speaks to the post-Darwinian crisis of faith that defined late nineteenthand early twentieth-century British culture (hence the painting’s working title ‘Despair’). The portrait can be seen as a doubting, sceptical response to a world in which religious certainties are under attack, not from rival Christian systems (as was the case in the fifteenth century) but from atheism itself. Taking this thought further, Grant’s painting captures what happens when the elevation associated with religious experience is siphoned off into literary culture. In Western Europe, as the power of the Christian Church has been eroded, non-religious power systems, such as the university sector and the arts world, have grown in influence. Rather than disappearing, notions of spirituality have been subsumed into Romantic concepts such as genius, transcendence, sublimity, and immanence. These categories have in turn informed the development of professional literary criticism, much of which still concerns itself with literature’s supposedly redemptive qualities. This tendency can be traced through works such as Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy (1869), T. S. Eliot’s After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy (1934), and W. K. Wimsatt’s The Verbal Icon (1954), all of which invoke Christian iconography in their attempts to define cultural value.17 A more recent book, Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon (1994), enacts the logical consequence of this approach: in an almost papal tone, Bloom identifies himself as a ‘priest of the aesthetic’ (Bloom 1994: 24), whose job is to defend Western civilisation from ‘Feminists, Afrocentrists, Marxists … New Historicists, or Deconstructors [sic]’ (Bloom 1994: 20). Tellingly, Bloom sees high culture as the preserve solely of the bourgeoisie, claiming that ‘Workers have anxieties enough and turn to religion [rather than literature] as one mode of relief’ (Bloom 1994: 38). As well as revealing the social and intellectual snobbery that powers Bloom’s critical elitism, this comment shows that, in Bloom’s view, art and literature have assumed the visionary and moralistic roles previously occupied by religious observance. Hence his assertion that ‘If we could conceive of a universal canon … its

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one essential book would not be … Bible, Koran, or Eastern text, but rather Shakespeare, who is acted and read everywhere, in every language and circumstance’ (Bloom 1994: 38). Viewed from a purely material perspective, books such as The Western Canon are a by-product of modern literature’s diversity; if there wasn’t so much writing, there would be less of a perceived need to sort the wheat from the chaff. Contrastingly, Mary of Burgundy’s stepmother, Margaret of York, had a collection of twenty-four books, all of which were religious. If twenty-four books are a large library, then you are likely to do a great deal of re-reading.18 You are also likely to inhabit your books in ways that are hard to conceptualise in an age of mass production. In the late middle ages, the majority of Western books would still have been religious, with even many secular books carrying spiritual references (and vice-versa). So not only were you likely to spend your time re-visiting familiar texts, the texts in question were calculated to emphasise God’s presence in your life. As we have seen, the Bible’s specialness is related to Christ’s own uniqueness as Word-made-Flesh. Bible means ‘book’ and, for centuries, it was indeed the book; devotional manuals, such as books of hours, were avatars of the Bible in that they used scriptural extracts to draw their readers into a close and daily relationship with the divine word. Continuing my comparison of the two images, it is a safe bet that Marjorie Strachey possessed more than twenty-four books. Like the rest of her family Marjorie received an education that would have been unimaginable for most women­– ­or men­– ­a few generations beforehand; indeed, even in the twenty-first century, such privilege remains exceptional. A key part of her good fortune lay in having access, from childhood onwards, to as many books as she could wish. These, though, would have been very different to the object that Mary of Burgundy used for her daily prayers. The mass-produced volume depicted in Grant’s painting differs in shape, size, and value from a book of hours. Because of its relative cheapness, an affluent person with a taste for such things would be able to amass considerably more than twenty-four such volumes before feeling a dent in their income. Moreover, because they are replaceable, such books rarely attain the almost-sacramental significance of an illuminated manuscript. Yes, we may find ourselves revering a text that speaks to us with urgency; and yes, particular volumes may hold sentimental value. But bulk-production and wide circulation mean that the intimacy of the reading relationship now has more to do with the linguistic content of a book than with its appearance. Unlike a medieval manuscript, a modern paperback is not unique, and this alters how we treat it.

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The time and place of reading 47

That said, books retain a symbolic value, and continue to come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. This is aptly demonstrated by Grant’s Crime and Punishment because if you turn the painting over you find that there is a second canvas on the other side of the frame. This one bears a portrait of Marjorie’s brother Lytton reading a folio volume that is as large as his torso. The two paintings date from the same time, are tonally similar, and were designed so that the two sides could be displayed simultaneously. (In other words, they would have been inserted into an open stand rather than hung on a wall.) Both are saturated with a sense of Edwardian gloom, and each has been designed to draw attention to the books that they prominently feature.19 However, these similarities also underline the disparity in the postures and reading materials of the two sitters. Lytton’s book is no disposable paperback. Rather, his massive hardback has the air of an expensive specialist publication; it could be a volume of Victorian scholarship or perhaps a printed text from the Renaissance. The folio is propped on a table that bears three more hardbacks; the shelf behind Lytton has a further twelve books, and there is a smaller volume on the left foreground. Every book in the picture has a hard cover and at least seven of them are outsize. Although Lytton is in shadow, his profile remains visible and his glowing hands rest upon his book with sensuous delicacy. Reflected light shines from his fingers and from the volume that he is holding: they are at one with each other, as if words and hands are sharing an act of exegesis. The pose implies that reading is the foundation of the sitter’s identity, and it is striking that Dora Carrington’s 1916 portrait of Lytton Strachey uses the same composition but tightens the focus still further on the sitter’s profile, hands and book.20 Earlier in this chapter, I remarked that Mary of Burgundy’s miniature resembled a mirror in which she could catch herself in the act of reading; Grant’s portrait of Lytton is also, metaphorically, a mirror. The book that he holds does not bear a literal reflection of his face, but the serenity of his gaze suggests an interchange between self and text in which he discovers­– o ­ r composes­– a­ version of himself with which he can be comfortable. More broadly, the relationship between reader and book exemplifies Lytton Strachey’s ongoing assimilation of Western thought, and his determination to gain a place within that tradition.21 Taken together, Grant’s representations of the Strachey siblings stage an implicitly political commentary on reading. As if to combine female abjection and phallic power in a single object, a woman with her head in her hands is backed by a man whose hardcover book rises from his lap like a massively erect penis. The size and positioning of the folio volume,

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Figure 3  Duncan Grant, ‘Lytton Strachey’

combined with my earlier comments on the book’s mirror-like function, reveal Strachey’s fingering of the pages as a sort of linguistic self-pleasuring; again, the contrast with Marjorie Strachey is strong, and hardly accidental. Given the contents of Dostoevsky’s novel, Marjorie Strachey’s reaction to Crime and Punishment could well contain an element of sexual shame. In contrast, her brother’s immersion in his folio suggests phallogocentric selfsatisfaction. Lytton Strachey was hardly known for macho womanising­ – ­he was famously effeminate and habitually fell in love with heterosexual men­– ­but he had few doubts about his mastery of what we would now call cultural capital. However, it would be a mistake to use Grant’s paintings to argue that men and women are essentially different and that this is born out in how they read. Nor is there an intrinsic reason why a man who is reading should be represented as scholarly while a reading woman is abject­– a­ fter all, Mary of Burgundy is in complete control of the reading scene in which she is represented. Rather, I see the two images as a microcosm of how a

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The time and place of reading 49

gendered social order reproduces itself through the dynamics of family life. When Grant painted the portraits, Lytton was an unknown 29-year-old who had failed to get a first class undergraduate degree, had been rejected for the Civil Service, and had been twice turned down for a Cambridge fellowship despite spending two and a half years writing a 400-page dissertation. But notwithstanding the listlessness that runs through Lytton’s letters of the time, he and Grant were able to collaborate in producing an image that burnished Strachey’s wished-for reputation as a man of letters. Having grown up alongside his Strachey cousins, Grant was aware of the high expectations that clung to Lytton, who had been marked out as a genius from childhood onwards. But no such prospects were attached to Marjorie: Bloomsbury mythology mostly mentions her as a performer of ribald rhymes.22 It is as if Grant, having learnt the household script, deems his male cousin worthy of an iconic portrait whereas his female cousin is only good for a psychological case study in which the sitter is allowed no distinguishing features. Not only is Marjorie’s face obscured by her hands, her hat turns her into a generic middle-class woman. This impression is strengthened by the painting’s title, which erases Marjorie’s name in favour of the book that she has been reading.23 Towards the literary The purpose of this chapter has been to argue that reading is a conglomeration of learnt practices rather than a stable unchanging activity, and that reading habits are shaped by social and historical contexts. However, while exploring these themes, I have sensed another subject rising to the surface, namely religion. I therefore want to end this section of the book by examining how religious structures have informed two of the issues that have run through my discussion so far. These are the tension between individual and collective versions of reading, and the overlapping histories of silent and non-silent reading. The concept that brings all these subjects together is recitation, a practice that features in the rituals of all three of the Abrahamic faiths. As well as noting a continuity between historical and contemporary religious observances, I want to argue that the theory and practice of religious recitation have left a mark on how Western culture thinks about secular literature. Indeed, the culture of ‘the literary’ can be seen as an adjunct of Western belief systems. Thus, the title of this chapter (‘The time and place of reading’) refers to over-arching cultural narratives, as well as to the individual reading scenes featured in the images I have been discussing.

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For my purposes, the most significant thing about recitation is that the term can indicate both an act of public reading and a recital from memory. What might seem like distinct activities are linked by their shared role in the histories of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic belief. Oral recitation is especially significant in Islam, which holds that the Qur’an was dictated directly to Mohammed by the angel Jibril (or Gabriel). Mohammed, who is believed to have been illiterate at the time of these divine revelations, spoke the words to his followers who memorised them through repetition. This process carried on during the twenty-three or so years that it took for the 114 suras (chapters) of the Qur’an to be revealed, with Mohammed being required, every year, to recite the revelations that had been received so far; meanwhile, the verses were also learnt and recited by his followers. The revelations were formed into an authorised manuscript after the Prophet’s death because it was feared that the men who knew the revelations by heart might die out over time.24 In recognition of this dynamic, Islamic daily prayer requires believers to repeat Qur’anic verses aloud and in Arabic so that their utterance will come as close as possible to Jibril’s original speech. Even if it is not your native language, Arabic must be used because although translations can approximate the literal meaning of Qur’anic verses, they cannot replicate the divine word. An extensive body of ancient teaching advises believers where to pause, whether particular letters should be run together, how to stress vowels, and so on. Moreover, the oral performance of language is emphasised within the Qur’an: ‘The word qur’an means “reading/­reciting” and came to refer to “the text which is read/­recited”’ (Abdel Haleem 2005). The formation ‘qur’an’/­‘he read’ appears seventy times within the book. Here we see a version of textuality in which revealed truths cannot be separated from the language that embodies them: sound, script, and ‘meaning’ are as one. This one-ness is accentuated by the Islamic concept of the lawh al-mahfouz, which is a heavenly tablet on which all of creation has already been inscribed, including a complete version of the Qur’an. Thus, the oral message that that Jibril coveys to Mohammed is itself a recitation of a written script authored by Allah. Although Judaism and Christianity do not precisely share the notion of this ‘heavenly tablet’, the Bible does feature divine texts: the Commandments that Moses brings down from Mount Sinai on tablets of stone are the inscribed word of God. Like Islam, Jewish worship emphasises linguistic authenticity. Orthodox services are conducted in Hebrew, and although most Reform congregations incorporate the vernacular into their ceremonies, the sacred texts still tend to be uttered in their original languages. Both the Tanakh and the Christian

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gospels existed as speech before they were written down, which means that when a modern worshipper recites a passage of scripture, they are participating, symbolically, in a tradition that reaches past the written word to its earlier spoken form. Although the Abrahamic religions have subtly varying attitudes to language, they all require their adherents to demonstrate their faith publicly by reciting set prayers with other believers. In Islam and Judaism, the worshipper must say their daily prayers out loud even if they are alone, and while Christianity does not make daily worship compulsory, it does expect its followers to attend weekly services that contain a high degree of communal participation, including the recitation of scripturally derived texts such as the Lord’s Prayer. Such practices emphasise the ongoing significance of reading aloud. As individuals, we may read in private, but the groups to which we belong (families, religions, political parties, pressure groups, fan clubs, social media sites) pull us towards shared forms of textuality, including the public performance of written texts. I have been emphasising religious recitation because the practice reminds us that silent and non-silent reading continue to overlap, and that their histories and ongoing practice are not as rigidly demarcated as has sometimes been claimed. But I am also interested in the psychology of group recitation, and its relation to interiority. Communal recitations enable individual believers to assert their faith in public. Their utterances are ratified by the presence of witnesses and, simultaneously, the resultant sense of togetherness helps shape their inner experience of belief. Thus, instead of being a wholly singular conviction, their declaration of faith places them within a wider community. In other words, the public recitation of religious texts is both an individual and a communal act, and it pivots on the notion that worshippers come closer to God when they share the sacred word with other believers. This should matter, even to nonbelievers, because the dialogue between inner and outer forms of religious belonging echoes a larger tension in literacy itself. Coming into language is, like religious recitation, both an individual and a shared process. No one can learn how to read for us: we each have to undergo the process for ourselves. But nor do we inhabit words on our own; they only make sense as a part of a shared system. Moreover, language systems are folded in with other kinds of cultural signalling. For example, I noted earlier in this chapter that books of hours were used to teach children how to read. But to do so is to induct the child into Christianity as well as to help them learn their letters: the process is as much about group identity as it is about individuation.

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Clearly, a contemporary ABC and a book of hours embody different attitudes to language. Medieval Christian writings try to bring the reader closer to a God who is identified with language whereas contemporary liberal democracies associate literacy with secular values such as selfempowerment and economic and social worth. Structurally, though, both cultures use books to introduce readers to ways of taking part in group conversations. And that, after all, is what language is for, and the process occurs both through our interactions with other people and on the broader level of our social and cultural affiliations, including what we read. Also, if we return to the question of recitation, we find that secular texts, as well as religious ones, can be read out loud to powerful effect. We saw at the start of this chapter that early novels were often recited. A little later, Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814) uses reading aloud to explore a power struggle between religious and secular values.25 When Austen was writing, Romanticism was giving renewed emphasis to poetry’s oral power and this, too, could have sacramental connotations. In a diary entry from 1959, Sylvia Plath comments that she ‘read [Ezra Pound] aloud and was rapt. A religious power given by memorizing. Will try to learn a long and a short each day. Best to read them in the morning first thing, review over lunch and catechize at tea’ (Plath 2000: 514). More recently, Ian McEwan’s Saturday (2005) makes a bold claim for the redemptive power of reciting poetry aloud.26 I want, though, to take a less mainstream route through this territory, starting with a 1979 interview between the writers and activists Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich. Discussing childhood alienation, Lorde remarks that speaking poetry out loud gave her a voice that would not otherwise have been available to her as a black lesbian growing up in a racist and homophobic culture: Audre: When someone said to me, ‘How do you feel?’ or ‘What do you think?’ or asked another direct question, I would recite a poem, and somewhere in that poem would be the feeling, the vital piece of information. It might be a line. It might be an image. The poem was my response. Adrienne: Like a translation into this poem that already existed of something you knew in a preverbal way. So the poem became your language? Audre: Yes. (Lorde 2007: 82).

Later, Lorde finds that already-published poems are not enough. Audre: This was the first reason for my own writing, my need to say things I couldn’t say otherwise when I couldn’t find other poems to serve. Adrienne: You had to make your own. Audre: There were so many complex emotions for which poems did not exist.

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I had to find a secret way to express my feelings. I used to memorise my poems. I would say them out; I didn’t use to write them down. I had this long fund of poetry in my head. (Lorde 2007: 82–3)

Lorde’s recourse to poetry is all the more striking given that her memoir Zami: A New Spelling of my Name (1982) reveals that she did not speak at all until she was four. This, and Lorde’s reluctance to write her poems down­– ­preferring the ancient protection of memory­– ­suggests that reading poetry aloud was a way of dealing with trauma and with the fear that language could be taken away from her if she did not lodge it in her inner self. Such strategies recall the actions of political prisoners. The verbalisation of personal experience­– a­ nd its validation through collective speech­– ­is a recurring theme in second-wave feminism but Lorde’s experience is particularly striking because of the religious undertone in her account of the transformational power of the language. In Zami, as in the Bible, language is creative and political. But instead of Judaeo-Christianity, Lorde provides what she calls a ‘biomythography’; that is, her memoir is a literary-mythological reinvention of herself in which she looks forward to (and therefore helps to construct) the kind of world in which she would wish to live. This is symbolised by the book’s title, with its reference to re-naming, and by the appearance in the final pages of Kitty, short for Afrekete, whose straightforward and erotic acceptance of her blackness and her lesbianism helps Lorde become the person that she feels herself to be. Significantly, Afrekete is the mother of a daughter, and when she leaves New York, it is so that she can be with her child and with her own mother. An epilogue identifies Afrekete with the ‘youngest daughter’ of ‘MawuLisa … the great mother of us all’, adding that Afrekete is ‘the mischievous linguist, trickster, best-beloved, whom we must all become’ (Lorde 1996: 223). MawuLisa (often written as ‘Mawu-Lisa’) is the androgynous creatorfigure of the Dahomean religion which flourished among the Fon people of what is now Benin; these myth-structures were carried to the Caribbean and the Americas by the men, women, and children who were trafficked as part of the West African slave trade. Three years before Zami was published in the US, Lorde wrote an open letter to the feminist theologian Mary Daly regretting that Daly’s Gyn/­Ecology (1978) had marginalised such instances of ‘African myth/­legend/­religion’: So, I wondered, why doesn’t Mary deal with Afrekete as an example? Why are her goddess images only white, western, european, judeo-christian? Where was Afrekete, Yemanje, Oyo, and Mawulisa? Where were the warrior

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goddesses of the Vodun, the Dahomeian Amazons and the warrior-women of Dan? (Lorde 2007: 67)

Lorde’s recovery of these myth-structures enables her to plot an alternative genealogy that properly values black female experience. And just as Lorde’s Afrekete is a far cry from the patriarchs of the Abrahamic faiths, so too does Zami: A New Spelling of my Name mark a break from the conventions of realist, linear autobiography. In this regard it is important that Afrekete is both a ‘linguist’ and a ‘trickster’. For Lorde, language leads the way into a different future, but it must be playful, inventive, non-fixed language, rather than the authoritarian voice of ‘judeo-christian’ tradition. Unsurprisingly, Lorde goes unmentioned in the 578 pages of Bloom’s The Western Canon.27 There is no reason to think that she would have sought or welcomed Bloom’s approbation and, more important, her work has succeeded in sparking a newer tradition of its own: see, for example, Catherine McKinley and L. Joyce DeLaney’s 1995 anthology Afrekete: An Anthology of Black Lesbian Writing. But canons matter, both as cultural markers, and for their influence on reading habits. Western culture has always made judgements­– ­after all, the plays of Sophocles, Aeschylus, and Euripides were first presented in state-sponsored drama competitions­– ­but the notion of a tightly defended national canon emerges, alongside modern literary criticism, in the eighteenth- and nineteenth- centuries (Levinson 1989: 67–8). This coincides with the developments in Bible scholarship that I mentioned in chapter 1; indeed the nineteenth-century literary canon, with its authoritative judgements and it emphasis on ‘inspiration’, follows cues that were first established in relation to Biblical canonicity. The concept of literary ‘genius’­– ­which was so key to the establishment of ‘national poets’ such as Shakespeare and Milton­– ­can be read as a secular version of the divine speech attributed to Old Testament prophets. The mutually reinforcing relationship between literary and religious utterance helps us understand the theological intensity of commentators such as Harold Bloom, T. S. Eliot, and Matthew Arnold. As Bloom himself points out, the word ‘Canon’ (note his capitalisation) ‘is religious in its origins’ (Bloom 1994: 20), and both he and Eliot have written on Biblical and doctrinal issues as well as literary ones.28 It is precisely because this version of literary tradition is so steeped in Judaeo-Christianity that Lorde rejects it in favour of her self-made, but community-informed, ‘biomythography’. Lorde’s feminism, her retrieval of African myth, and her mission to re-name the world are all connected to oral tradition. Her breakthrough into poetry after years of silence resembles an epiphany that might occur

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during a religious ritual or a politically charged public lecture. Like Lorde’s poetry, such scenarios demonstrate the spoken word’s connection to social, as well as individual, empowerment. Note, for instance, the role that calland-response prayers and song have played in sustaining black identity, particularly in the southern states of the US, and the way that these techniques have become part of the repertoire of activists and politicians from Martin Luther King to Barack Obama.29 The consciousness-raising practised by 1960s and 1970s feminists drew inspiration from the black civil rights movement, with both groups emphasising the importance of voicing historical abuses. This led to a reappraisal of received canons, and an awareness that cultural capital could itself be a tool of oppression. Tillie Olsen articulated this connection between cultural objects and lived experience when she addressed Radcliffe College in 1962 with a speech beginning: ‘Literary history and the present are dark with silences’ (Olsen 1980: 6); this provided her with the title of her landmark feminist volume, Silences. As well as recovering lost women writers, second wave feminism scrutinised male literary behemoths. One of the hallmarks of this enterprise­ – ­visible especially in Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics (1970)­– w ­ as a determination to read against the grain. That is, instead of taking canonical authors at their own estimation, it was suddenly possible to read them according to alternative principles. This exposed the misogyny and racism of mainstream literary-critical culture and helped produce new criteria of value. Reflecting on the rights of sub-cultural groups to form their own canons and reading strategies, Alan Sinfield has questioned the assumptions lying behind received academic versions of reading: When we ask: What are the truly literary qualities? we should ask also: Who says these are literary qualities, and why? Not just: What is it about this text that makes it literary? but: What is it in the social organization that makes some people regard this text as literary? Literature becomes one set of practices within the range of cultural production; a ‘discourse’, we might say, meaning the working assumptions of those involved in those practices, together with the institutions that sustain them. (Sinfield 2005: 29)

Sinfield’s intervention re-states the point that I have been making throughout this chapter, namely that there is no single activity that we can label ‘reading’. And nor, by extension, can there be a universally agreed definition of literary worth. The reason that Bloom and Lorde value contrasting texts is they are looking for different things when they read. This returns us to my first chapter’s discussion of ideology, and the same point holds. No one has ever read a book without their experience being

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shaped, to some degree, by pre-existing ideological assumptions; however, the aim should not be to abandon our belief structures, or to minimise them. Rather it is a question of knowing that they are there, and acknowledging that they will inform (though not necessarily determine) our judgements and interpretations. Similarly, reading cannot be considered separately from class, gender, ethnicity, and sexuality because the thing that Adrienne Rich calls ‘verbal privilege’ is not distributed equally (Rich 1986: 33). Consequently, there are political problems with any reading style that sets itself up as wholly authoritative. Instead of recognising his own partialities, Harold Bloom mistakes personal preferences for universal truths. But, as Sinfield shows, there is nothing natural or inevitable about the ‘literature’ that Bloom celebrates. Instead, I would argue that ‘literature’, as a category, is created by a particular form of address. One might call this ‘literary reading’, by which I mean a way of reading that brings into being the exalted object that it purports to analyse. Just as received pronunciation is one accent among many, ‘literary reading’ enjoys special status, not because of any intrinsic rightness, but because it is the default mode of the establishment, as administered by academics and mainstream book reviewers. It is possible to recognise ‘literature’ the way we recognise Received Pronunciation: the latter has no innate superiority over a Geordie or Mancunian accent, it just happens to be the one that has been granted cultural authority. Of course, like BBC English, the ‘accent’ of literature has changed over time, and it continues to change: tones and genres move in and out of favour according to altering tastes and social expectations. As this chapter has shown, tastes change, and so do social and political orthodoxies. Models of gender, class, ethnicity, and sexuality mutate over time, and concepts of readers and reading alter with them. Mary of Burgundy’s privilege is not the same as Marjorie Strachey’s; Freud and Dürer both engaged with melancholia, but on different terms and using contrasting methods; Lorde is not in Bloom’s canon and Bloom is not in Lorde’s. Towards the beginning of the chapter I asked, ‘Who is taught to read, and why?’ and, as I close the chapter, the same question pertains. The next section of the book will pursue the matter further. Chapter 4 will examine how ‘literary reading’ became the dominant mode in US and UK English departments, but before we get to that point, chapter 3 will analyse ‘the common reader’, a concept that is associated primarily with Virginia Woolf and Samuel Johnson. According to Johnson, literary reputations rest ultimately with the judgement of ‘the common reader’­– ­so to talk about this figure is also to talk about canon-formation. However, my analysis will show that common reading is a much more slippery and diverse concept

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than is usually admitted. In particular, I will argue that ‘the common reader’ is a convenient fiction that has been used to ventriloquise the values of the literary establishment. The larger purpose of the chapter­– ­as with my book as a whole­– ­is to explore how ways of reading can produce, as well as reflect, cultural identity.

Notes   1 For a more detailed account of eighteenth-century reading cultures than I can offer, see Williams 2017.  2 In Jane Eyre, Bessie tells stories which Jane only realises in adulthood are derived from Pamela and Henry Brooke’s The Fool of Quality; or, The History of Henry, Earl of Moreland (Brontë 1985: 41). There is no suggestion that Bessie is reading the novels aloud; the implication is that they have becomes folk-tales that live through paraphrases and oral re-telling.   3 In early Roman usage words are usually separated by dots but from around the second century CE letters and words run together without differentiation; opinions vary as to whether this was as a sign of linguistic regression or of cultural sophistication (Winsbury 2009: 35ff).   4 Latin presents particular challenges because it is an inflected language in which a noun’s function is determined by how it ends rather than by its position in a sentence; the reader has to scan ahead, matching verbs with nouns, while wondering if the noun’s location will affect the emphasis of the sentence.  5 For orality and recitation in Roman scribal culture, see Winsbury 2009: 111–25.   6 The earliest surviving writing tablets date from the fourth millennium BCE; less systematic forms of writing, such as cave inscriptions, are much earlier.   7 This, broadly, is the position put forward by B. M. W. Knox in ‘Silent Reading in Antiquity’ (1968). Knox was reacting against Josef Balogh’s 1927 essay, ‘Voces paginarum: Beiträge zur Geschichte des lauten Lesens und Schreibens’, which seems to have originated the theory that all reading in the classical period would have occurred out loud. Among recent histories of reading, Manguel 1996 and Fischer 2003 remain in Balogh’s camp; by contrast, Gavrilov 1997 argues that scholars who assert the dominance of reading out loud have completely misread Augustine’s account of Ambrose.   8 These words are from the fourth of James Fordyce’s Sermons to Young Women, in Two Volumes (Fordyce 1776: 148–9). Richardson’s are the only novels that Fordyce passes as fit for female consumption.   9 Grant was a poor relation who bonded with his Strachey cousins and their well-connected friends, including Leonard and Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes (who, for a time, was Grant’s lover), and Vanessa Bell (with whom Grant would have a child).

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10 For the painting’s working titles, see Spalding 1998: 91 and 94. Occasionally its name is also given as ‘Le Crime et le Châtiment’; this refers to Victor Derély’s French translation of 1884, which seems to be the version that Strachey is reading. (Although the book’s title is illegible in the painting, the colour of the binding matches the French edition.) The most influential English translation of Crime and Punishment appeared in 1914; as if to illustrate the enclosed nature of early twentieth-century English literary life, the 1914 translation was by Constance Garnett, whose son David was another of Duncan Grant’s lovers. 11 The film’s scientific consultants responded to Inside Out in a piece for The New York Times (Keltner and Ekman 2015). 12 A general account of illuminated manuscripts, and of the status of Mary of Burgundy’s book, can be found in Harthan 1977; for a more detailed analysis of the volume’s form and production, see Kren and McKendrick 2005: 137–41 and 227–9. For a feminist contextualisation of the book, see Pearson 2005: 41–60. For an overview of how books of hours fitted into the larger story of medieval books and manuscripts, see De Hamel 1994: 168–99. 13 One analogue might be Philip II of Spain’s bedroom at the Escorial, which looks into the Palace’s vast chapel; however, this parallel simply underlines the probability that the scene in the miniature is not mimetic because few, if any, medieval rulers would have had access to riches like Philip’s. 14 Mary of Burgundy’s relationship with her stepmother, Margaret of York, is relevant here. After her father’s death, Mary was the sole inheritor of Burgundy, but Margaret (as Dowager Duchess) exerted a sympathetic political influence, helping her step-daughter make a marriage that was personally and strategically beneficial. In such cases, female authority is eked out from family bonds that would otherwise favour male primogeniture; although the women remain defined by their relation to husbands, fathers, and sons, the system offers just enough play to produce some alternative alliances. 15 There has been much discussion about the identity of the other figures in the miniature, particularly the woman in the steeple headdress kneeling beside the  Virgin. There are two main schools of thought: that she is Mary of Burgundy herself (which would mean that the woman in the church is the same as the woman in the foreground) or that she is Margaret of York (which would mean that the woman in the foreground is picturing her stepmother alongside the Virgin). Pearson 2005 argues in favour of Margaret of York, pointing to the kneeling woman’s facial similarity to the effigy on Margaret’s tomb, and deducing that Margaret commissioned the book for Mary as a gesture of crossgenerational support. Although this is an attractive reading, I feel that Pearson overstates the resemblance between the miniature and Margaret’s effigy. Moreover, the woman in the church echoes the style of dress and posture of the woman in the foreground so strongly that we are surely being invited to view them as continuous, rather as two distinct personages. In any case, irrespective of how we identify the kneeling woman, my point remains the same: namely

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that the picture’s foreground and the imagined space of the church are linked by the visualisations that occur during reading. 16 This is an appropriate point at which to note that Stewart 2006 reflects more fully on images of reading than I have space to do here. For some case studies in reading images, see Manguel 2001. Inmann 2009 is an appealing book devoted to pictures of women reading. My approach is also indebted to art historical theory, particularly Clark 2000, Clark 2006, and Fried 1980. 17 Arnold’s categories of ‘Hebrews’ and ‘Philistines’ come from the Old Testament. After Strange Gods (which contains an infamously anti-Semitic passage) articulates a vision of what one might call Anglican fundamentalism. The Verbal Icon includes chapters on ‘Poetry and Morals’ and ‘Poetry and Christian Thinking’; its title explicitly co-opts Christian iconography for the study of literature. I return to Wimsatt in chapter 4. 18 Compare the impoverished ‘Clerk’ from ‘Oxenford’ in Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales (c. 1387–1400) who would rather have had ‘twenty bookes’ of ‘Aristotle and his philosophie’ than expensive clothes, a fiddle, or a ‘gay sautrie’ [a lute-like instrument] (Chaucer 1992: 9); from this we can infer that philosophy books cost as much as a playboy’s luxury goods. 19 The vase in the top right-hand corner of Crime and Punishment is echoed by a similar vase in the bottom left-hand corner of the Lytton Strachey portrait. The vases in each canvas create a diagonal line running from the bottom-left to the top-right of the picture; this, in turn, emphasises the books that lie at the centre of the diagonals. 20 Carrington’s portrait of Strachey is held by the National Portrait Gallery, London. Another two portraits from 1913, one by Vanessa Bell and the other by Grant, also depict Strachey reading. For more on Bloomsbury’s representations of itself, see Shone 1993. 21 Virginia Woolf’s diary records a conversation in which she and Strachey tried to identify where he ranked among historians: they decided that his style placed him above Thomas Babington Macaulay and Thomas Carlyle but that he lacked their productivity (Woolf 1978b: 114–15). 22 According to Vanessa Bell, Marjorie’s ‘astonishing gifts as a music-hall artiste were perhaps appreciated only in Bloomsbury­– ­visitors from other districts were apt to be shocked by her renderings of innocent nursery rhymes’ (Bell 1998: 103). In a 1919 letter to Bell, Virginia Woolf pointedly compares Marjorie’s solitary life ‘in a room in Kensington’ to the ‘allowance’ that Lady Strachey granted to her son James, who would travel to Vienna to see Freud the following year (Woolf 1976: 341). For Lytton’s hothouse education, see Holroyd 1973: 62ff. and 79ff. 23 Grant’s emphasis on Dostoevsky is ironic given that the Russian author would later influence Lytton’s breakthrough work, Eminent Victorians (1918); however, in 1909 when Grant painted the siblings, Marjorie had read Dostoevsky but Lytton had not (Holroyd 1973: 455 and 565ff.). As for hats,

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George Steiner has described the humanist tradition of ‘cortesia’, whereby a reader would have dressed formally for reading, thus turning the act into an orderly ritual; Steiner’s example is Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin’s ‘Le Philosophe Lisant’ (1734), in which a be-hatted scholar peruses a large folio (Steiner 1997: 2). Compared to the poise of Chardin’s philosopher, Grant’s Marjorie Strachey looks dishevelled and uneasy. I am not suggesting that Grant is specifically referencing Chardin’s painting, but Strachey’s pose does imply an ironic commentary on humanism’s idealisation of reading; the hat is still worn, but it fails to produce the expected mental equanimity. 24 Abdel Haleem 2005 gives an overview of the text’s evolution and transmission. Also see Ramadan 2017: 42–55 and Mourad 2016: 1–36. Ahmed 2016 analyses the Qur’an (and Islam more generally) from a perspective that takes account of critical theory. 25 The novel pits the landed classes (the Bertrams) against amoral rivals from London (the Crawfords). While Austen’s heroine, Fanny, regrets that morning and evening prayers are no longer recited by servants and family in the private chapel of a great house, Mary Crawford insists that ‘Every generation has its improvements’ (Austen 1998: 62). Mary and her brother Henry are more interested in performing a morally dubious play that leads, eventually, to adultery. The amateur theatre that gets mocked up for this play shares many of the features of a family chapel but the two spaces stage diametrically opposed versions of textuality and morality. One system uses sacred utterance to support established hierarchies while the other uses words as ambiguous signs that mask and advance selfish desires. The hero, Edmund Bertram, laments the falling-off of reading standards in boys’ schools and in public life, including in his own profession, the clergy. Edmund espouses unflashy sermons, but Henry Crawford admits that, while he would enjoy making a stir as an occasional preacher in a high-profile London church, he would be ill-suited to weekly performances in front of an obscure congregation. Henry’s oratorical skills are demonstrated, during the same scene, when he ingratiates himself with Fanny by taking up a volume of Shakespeare and reading all the parts fluently despite not knowing the lines in advance (Austen 1998: 228–33). When set beside the conversation about family prayers, Henry’s bravura recitation suggests that reading-as-secular-entertainment is flourishing at exactly the same moment that religious observance is floundering. Secular reading also provides opportunities for self-invention. The play that Henry recites is Henry VIII­– ­a hint that if you loosen your attachment to the established church, you can always create an alternative self through literary identifications. It goes without saying, though, that Austen is not on Henry’s side. 26 The novel’s climax sees an act of violence being headed off by a recitation of Matthew Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’. 27 Of the twenty-six authors that Bloom deems central to the Western canon, only four are women (Austen, Woolf, George Eliot, and Emily Dickinson); none is black.

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28 See, for example, Eliot’s For Lancelot Andrewes (1928) and Bloom and Rosenberg’s The Book of J (1990). 29 I am thinking, most vividly, of the moment when President Obama broke into what became a communal performance of ‘Amazing Grace’ during the funeral service of Pastor Clementa Pinckney, who was killed with eight others in a racist shooting in Charleston, S.C., in June 2015.

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The common reader

In class-riven Britain it is a short step from ‘common or garden’ to ‘common as muck’. Before the enclosure acts of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the ‘common land’ supported ‘the common people’ who held the nation’s resources ‘in common’. From this we derive the concept of ‘common weal’ or ‘common wealth’­– ­hence the ‘Commonwealth’ governed by Oliver Cromwell. Skipping forward three hundred years, Britain’s postimperial ‘Commonwealth of Nations’ is a different beast from Cromwell’s, not least because it was established by a monarch. The Church of England is organised around The Book of Common Prayer (1549–1662) but a riot ensued when Charles I’s version of the book was first used in Scotland: Anglican rituals turned out not to be at all ‘common’ (in the sense of ‘shared by all’) in the Scots Presbyterian Church. ‘Common woman’ used to be a synonym for prostitute, which is why it is still insulting to say that someone looks ‘common’. And have you noticed that although members of the royal family are sometimes described as having ‘the common touch’, they are never reported as suffering from ‘the common cold’?1 The literary-critical concept of ‘the common reader’ participates in this force-field of social and linguistic associations, and its applications and meanings are correspondingly complex. With an ancestry that stretches back to Samuel Johnson and Virginia Woolf, the underlying idea appears simple: appeals to ‘the common reader’ are a way of acknowledging the judgement of a literate but non-specialist person who stands apart from the world of professional critics and whose verdict is said to be the ultimate arbiter of literary value. It is an odd formulation, though, not least in its fantasy of representative singularity. That is, it conjures up an imaginary individual who somehow stands for the public at large. As the previous

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chapter argues, any historical moment or cultural location will contain a variety of reading practices­– ­there is no such thing as a single ‘reading public’. But at least the phrase ‘the reading public’ acknowledges a multiplicity of readers. By contrast, references to ‘the common reader’ present a single person as the embodiment of a supposedly universal set of thoughts and feelings. Woolf and Johnson stand out in discussions of the common reader because Johnson used the phrase in his 1781 life of the poet Thomas Gray, and Woolf borrowed it from Johnson for her essay collections, The Common Reader (1925) and The Common Reader: Second Series (1932). However, the term does not originate with Johnson and nor does it end with Woolf.2 Tellingly, the discourse enclosing the common reader also includes fantasies about its opposite. A prominent example is Alan Bennett’s The Uncommon Reader (2007), a comic parable in which Elizabeth II abandons her corgis to become a passionate reader. Four decades previously, George Steiner used the same formula for his essay ‘The Uncommon Reader’ (1978) and this, in turn, provided a hook for Christopher Knight’s study, Uncommon Readers: Denis Donoghue, Frank Kermode, George Steiner, and the Tradition of the Common Reader (2003). Although the modern idea of the common reader attracts a good deal of earnest approval, these titles suggest a yearning for a more elitist, less pseudo-democratic figure. Sometimes this is comic, as in Alan Bennett’s depiction of a monarch who is as un-common as it is possible to be. But, in other cases, the effect is reproachful: Steiner’s essay laments a falling-away of readerly standards, and a loss of the seriousness with which the ‘uncommon’ readers of the Renaissance would dress in formal clothes before spending time with their books (Steiner 1997: 9–19). With such mixed messages, it is no wonder that the concept of the common reader is volatile as well as widespread; although it fulfils a cultural wish, the nature of that wish changes according to context. It is also a figure that attracts ironies. For example, the more effort that literary critics put into describing and imagining a general reader, the further they propel themselves into specialist analysis. (This is a tendency to which I am not immune, although I at least try to be aware of it.) Another paradox is that the common reader is implicated in the very structures that it is supposed to override. Whatever Johnson and Woolf may claim, the power to make taste and to confer literary status resides with editors, anthologists, r­eviewers, and university teachers far more than with a notional ‘common reader’. Indeed, I will argue that the common reader is defined by, and dependent upon, the words of professional writers.

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This last insight produces a dilemma. If we recognise that the common reader is a constructed entity, we can no longer trust that invented personage to tell us anything reliable about popular reading tastes. So why bother discussing it? The answer­– ­for me­– ­is that the common reader is a potent guide to the ideological frameworks of the critics who invoke it. From the periodicals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to the establishment of English as a university subject, the figure circulates as a fantasised ideal, an obscure object of critical desire. Where ‘readers’ (in the plural) are contradictory and changeable, ‘the common reader’ (in the singular) is a helpfully silent receptacle for generalisations and projections. Another way of putting this would be to say that ‘the common reader’ provides an oblique, and therefore illuminating, perspective on the institutional history of reading. Almost useless as a guide to ‘actual’ reading habits, it is a revealing window into the worldview that produced and disseminates it.3 After analysing the term’s evolution in seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury publishing, I will consider Johnson and Woolf’s allusions to ‘the common reader’. The final part of the chapter will contrast Woolf’s theory of reading with the one put forward in F. R. Leavis’s The Common Pursuit (1952); I am especially interested in Woolf’s and Leavis’s divergent uses of the word ‘common’. As a whole, this chapter will trace how notions of ‘professional’ and ‘non-professional’ reading have changed over time, and how these relate to democratic and elitist constructions of authority. (‘Authority’­– ­like ‘common’­– ­will recur throughout my analysis.) In Johnson’s day, the professional side of this equation was mostly represented by literary journalists, but by the time that Woolf was writing, these existing experts had been joined by university teachers, including Leavis. This brought a new issue to the fore: who should be valued more, the amateur enthusiast or the government-funded lecturer? Twenty-first-century attacks on the humanities have given this question a new significance. Before we reach that point, though, I want to explore how the term ‘common reader’ has come to be invested with literary-critical significance. Early references to the figure are relatively offhand; they do not carry the range of implications that post-Woolf usages do. Even so, from its first appearances, the term crystallises a tension that runs through the history of reading, namely the power struggle between readers and writers. It is no accident that the phrase emerges alongside mass printing; as we will see, its evolving use is related to the demographics of literacy.

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The common reader before The Common Reader Forty years before Johnson used the term in his life of Gray, the narrator of Henry Fielding’s 1742 novel Joseph Andrews contrasted ‘common Readers’ with the actions of ‘the slower and more accurate Reader’ who is apt to think more fully about what is being read (Fielding 1999: 119). At the end of the same century, Mary Wollstonecraft noted in the ‘Preface’ to Maria, or The Wrongs of Women (1798) that while ‘common readers’ will look for novels full of ‘great misfortunes’, she believes that ‘the merit of our best novels’ lies in ‘the delineation of finer sensations’ (Wollstonecraft and Shelley 1992: 59–60). By referring to ‘common readers’ (note the plural), Fielding and Wollstonecraft distinguish between a generality of novel ­ ho are presumed either to be careless or to have melodramatic readers­– w tastes­– ­and the discriminating readers who linger over the written word and/­or have a more refined palate. These allusions hint at the social impact of the genre that Fielding and Wollstonecraft are practising: by the middle of the eighteenth century, educated citizens would have been unable to visit a coffee shop or a circulating library without being implicated in debates about the morality of novels. Although the growth of the fiction market stoked discussions of ‘the common reader’, the expression predates the modern novel. Its pre-­ twentieth-century use peaked between 1750 and 1800 when variations of the phrase occur, on average, in around twenty printed books a year. Going back another hundred years, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century printed texts already contain over one hundred allusions to ‘common readers’ and ‘the common reader’. (After a handful of uses in the period before 1700, occurrences rise sharply from 1710 onwards.) As is to be expected in a time of violent ideological conflict, many of these early references appear in tracts about religion or government, but the term also crops up in scientific, philosophical, and legal contexts, where it mostly indicates an ‘average’ or ‘general’ reader. This is the sense in which it is used in a 1685 volume by Robert Boyle, one of the founders of modern chemistry. The book’s title, Of the Reconcileableness of Specifick Medicines to the Corpuscular Philosophy, seems unlikely to appeal to casual consumers but in the seventeenth century many educated gentlemen would have followed new work in medicine and physics as well as in poetry and philosophy. With an eye to such readers, a note states that ‘The Publisher thought fit to translate for the benefit of every common Reader, some Latin passages contained in the foregoing Treatises’ (Boyle 1685b: unpaginated front material). Boyle’s publisher presumably wanted to maximise the book’s

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market by accommodating non-classically educated readers, but the note highlights two separate audiences: the minority who have Latin, and the more numerous ones who do not (‘every common Reader’). The latter are not disparaged­– i­ndeed they are recognised as more representative of book-buyers than those with a classical training­– ­but the usage inevitably produces a sense of a divided, rather than an integrated, readership.4 Division is a recurring theme in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century references to common readers. Sometimes the term appears on its own and sometimes it forms part of a list of reading types. One of the phrase’s earliest appearances is in the preface to George Herbert’s The Temple (1633), where Herbert’s friend Nicholas Ferrar distinguishes between the ‘Divine Majestie’ to whom the book is dedicated (God) and ‘the common Reader’ who will want to know something about the poet’s life (Herbert 1633: unpaginated front matter; emphasis in the original). Here, the divide is so enormous that it renders smaller distinctions irrelevant: it is not class that is at stake but the separation between the heavenly and the human. Less than ten years after Herbert’s The Temple, James Howell published Dendrologia: Dodona’s Grove, or, The Vocall Forrest (1640), a fabulously eccentric allegory that retells English history through the medium of bushes, trees, and shrubs. The book features a joint dedication: ‘To the Common Reader’ and to ‘To the Criticall Reader’, and its closing pages refer to ‘a discerning Reader’ (Howell 1640: 216). Later in the same decade, William Mercer, who had fought for the Parliamentary side in the Civil Wars, wrote Angliæ Speculum: or England’s looking-glasse (1646), a verse satire in two parts. Mercer prefaces sections of the work with addresses to various constituencies, including ‘the Criticall Reader’, ‘the Curteous Reader’, and ‘the Common Reader’ (Mercer 1646: unpaginated). Staying in the seventeenth century, the dialogue between Thomas Hobbes and John Bramhall, ‘The questions concerning liberty, necessity and chance’ (1656), contrasts ‘a simple Reader’ with ‘a Judicious reader’ (Hobbes 1656: 239) and refers to phrasing ‘such as a common Reader may understand’ (Hobbes 1656: 214). Thirty years later, John Dryden became embroiled in a controversy about whether or not Charles II had supported Roman Catholicism. The resultant work, A Defence of the Papers Written by the Late King of Blessed Memory (1686), refers to ‘the Common Reader’, ‘the Conscientious Reader’, and ‘the Impartial Reader’ (Dryden 1686: 88, 120, 125).5 To understand this recurring rhetorical tic, we need to consider the historical circumstances of which these books are a part. The ultimate backstory is the Reformation. As many commentators have pointed out, Protestantism was the child of Gutenberg as much as Luther: without

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The common reader 67

the printing press, dissent against the Papacy could never have spread in the way that it did (Gilmont 1999; Pettegree 2010: 203–25). Following Henry VIII’s break from Rome in the early 1530s, the Tudor and Stuart periods saw numerous changes of religious policy, which in turn affected the evolution of the book trade. A significant moment came in 1557 when Mary Tudor established the Stationers’ Company, a guild through which the Crown regulated publishing. Subsequent legislation ensured that state censorship remained a weapon in the religious and civil disputes of the next two centuries. The Anglican/­Roman Catholic/­Puritan power struggles of the Tudor and Stuart periods, the War of the Three Kingdoms, the deposition of James II by William and Mary, and the Jacobite rebellions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were fought via censorship and legal and illegal printing, as well as on battlefields. During this period, the existence of the monarchy, the legitimacy of competing branches of the royal family, the status of parliament, the inter-relation of the England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, and the very continuance of ‘the state’ were under violent scrutiny. In such circumstances, the popular imaginary becomes divided from itself on multiple grounds and the very notion of ‘authority’ is cast into doubt. This matters to my argument because ‘author-ship’ makes its own claim on ‘authority’, which is why authoritarian rulers have always been so keen to control the dissemination of printed materials. This in turn has implications for the relationship between readers and writers. Although it had always been theoretically possible to disagree with the contents of a book, or to prefer an illicit text over a sanctioned one, pre-Reformation religious hegemony had discouraged such responses; hellfire was a potent disincentive. But Protestantism fractured the supremacy of the Papacy, and the mechanisation of printing put books within the reach of middleclass people who could not previously have afforded them. Licensing laws fought a rearguard action against these developments but there would have been no need to regulate the book trade if free thinking­– ­a suggestive term­ – ­had already not been burgeoning. Crucially, ‘free thinking’ did not just occur with regard to religious or political orthodoxies. It also manifested itself in a loosening of the reader’s imagined relation to the text, and a concomitant attempt­– ­on the part of many writers­– ­to tell their readers that they, the authors, were still in charge. In this respect, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century discourse on reading ‘types’ can be seen as part of the period’s wider intellectual and political history, particularly its drive towards gaining knowledge and mastery by compiling lists and commentaries. At the same time, however,

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designations such as ‘the common reader’ or ‘the impartial reader’ only become imaginable because of increased literacy and cheaper print publications. Upsurges in the proportion of the European population with better than basic literacy skills meant that reading was becoming a middle-class activity rather than the sole preserve of a monied elite. Thus, the perceived need to classify readers comes about because there are more people reading, new genres being published, and greater diversity within the reading public. In this context, references to ‘the common reader’ fulfil a variety of needs. Most obviously, the figure is used to represent an average or default reader­– ­a non-specialist, rather than a highly educated expert. But, as we have seen, this was also a period in which public disputes were conducted through the medium of print, and the pamphlet wars of the seventeenth century are echoed in subsequent eighteenth-century clashes over religious emancipation, the American War of Independence, the slave trade, and the French Revolution. By their nature, polemical texts put people on the spot: by refusing neutrality, they force a response from the people who peruse them. Reading these documents, inhabiting their rhetoric, would therefore have meant having one’s own beliefs challenged or confirmed. This, in turn, would have made people aware of their power to agree or disagree with a given text: aware, that is, of their status as readers. The emergence of the ‘common reader’ is part of this struggle over textual control because when disputatious authors manoeuvre their public into categories such as ‘judicious’ or ‘impartial’ readers, they are tacitly admitting the existence of different kinds of reader, including sceptical or undeferential ones. At the same time, such terms challenge book users to identify or dis-identify with the proffered categories. In doing so, they steer the reader’s response to the text, and are thus part of the rhetorical machinery through which the author tries to persuade the reader to adopt a particular position. Often this operates via flattery­– ­as, for example, when a writer tries to seduce ‘the judicious reader’ into accepting their arguments­ – ­but ‘the common reader’ is a more equivocal term that can be applied in both positive and negative ways. Take, for instance, a 1662 collection of plays by Margaret Cavendish, which was so unreliable that twenty-four lines of corrections were appended to the text. A notice explains that ‘many [other mistakes] of lesser note are obvious to the eye … but all these are too numerous to be here set down, and so inconsiderable [unimportant], that they may be by every common Reader at once observed and corrected’ (Cavendish 1662: unpaginated end matter). In this case, the ‘common Reader’ is being trusted to spot and correct typographical errors made by a professional printer. More usually, the common reader takes the form

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given by Vicesimus Knox, whose Essays Moral and Literary refers airily to the ‘common reader or superficial reader’ (Knox 1787: 207). This phrase is from an expanded version of Knox’s essay on Pliny the Younger; when the essay first appeared, in 1779, Knox referred to those who were ‘illiterate or superficial’ (Knox 1779a: 256; my emphasis). The shift from ‘illiterate’ to ‘common’ in an essay about a classical figure says much about Knox’s perception of his readers. On one level, the substitution is merely politic. Knox has little to gain from insulting his readers by telling them that they are ‘illiterate’; ‘common’ is less overtly dismissive. But the switch also reveals an underlying contempt for readers whose knowledge is restricted to English, and this taint cannot help but inform Knox’s use of the word ‘common’. The disjunction between Knox’s and Cavendish’s versions of the common reader is partly attributable to half a century of anti-novel-reading diatribes. Knox participates in this tradition by representing novelists and their readers as enemies of the classical tradition that he prefers (Knox 1779b: 185 ff). This is another spin on the questions of authority that have run through this chapter: more than just controlling a reader’s response to a particular text, Knox wants to regulate how an entire body of writing is consumed. This underlines the common reader’s implication in debates over genre and linguistic register. The novel­– ­which is, by definition, a vernacular form­– ­was viewed with suspicion precisely because it was popular. Thus, when commentators such as Knox asserted the superiority of classical learning, they were ratifying a social hierarchy as well as an intellectual one. Classical texts were central to teaching in public schools and in Oxford and Cambridge (all of which, of course, were still male-only spaces), and scholarly books written in English often contained untranslated classical quotations. As well as demonstrating the author’s learning, such gobbets were a way of keeping knowledge private, hence the widespread use of Latin and Greek in writings about sex. Meanwhile writers, as well as readers, were emerging from what Daniel Defoe called ‘the middle station of life’ (Defoe 1965: 28)­– ­and, increasingly, these emergent authors included women as well as men. The result was a battle between rival forms of legitimation, one based on widening readership, and the other resting on elite knowledge. To bring this section of the chapter to a close, I want to examine two eighteenth-century works in which the (gendered) struggle between classical and vernacular knowledge is played out in references to the common reader. The second of the texts is aware that publishing can be elitist, but the first book­– ­John Maubray’s The Female Physician (1724)­

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– r­ eproduces social inequality while supposedly addressing it. The Female Physician describes itself as a guide to ‘all the Diseases Incident to that Sex, in Virgins, Wives and Widows’ along with an account of the ‘Whole ART of New improv’d Midwifery’. It is dedicated ‘To all Learned and Judicious Professors of PHYSICK, as well as Ingenuous and Experienced Practisers of MIDWIFERY’ (Maubray 1724: iii). Reaching beyond these expert circles, Maubray also feels that ‘Any Woman, who reads’ and is ‘conversant with this BOOK’ can discover ‘before She sends for her Physician, not only her Distemper, but also the Danger, with which she is threatened upon every Sickly occasion’ (Maubray 1724: xiv). Like so many doctors through the ages, however, Maubray cannot let go of his specialised vocabulary: If here and there a brief Philosophical way of Reasoning has crept in, I would have you consider, that it could not be avoided … However in such Cases the Reader may go on, or pass by what does not suit with his Taste, as he pleases. Again if here and there, I have retain’d a Term of Art, which the common Reader may call a hard Word, I declare it is out of no Design to amuse any one, but out of mere Necessity … In the mean time I have taken what Care I could to explain the most, or at least the most requisite of These, insomuch that whatever Words or Sentences of this Kind are not fully interpreted, you may slip over, without losing any thing Material of the Purport of the Matter, such Things concerning the Practitioner more than the common Reader. (Maubray 1724: xiv–xv)

Structurally, this passage resembles many others where the common reader acts as a counterpoint to a specialised ‘Practitioner’. However, in the context of a gynaecological handbook, it can hardly be accidental that Maubray’s reference to ‘Any Woman, who reads’ is followed immediately by the appearance of a ‘common Reader’ and the pronoun ‘he’. Nor can Maubray’s fondness for technical language (‘a Term of Art’) be separated from the process by which eighteenth-century doctors and ‘man-midwives’ displaced the female practitioners who had previously taken care of pregnancy and labour.6 Maubray’s role in this shift can be gauged from his emphasis on innovation (‘New improv’d Midwifery’) and from his habit of dropping untranslated chunks of Latin into his text. Where Robert Boyle’s editor translated Latin quotations ‘for the benefit of every common Reader’ (Boyle 1685b: unpaginated), Maubray puts classical texts beyond the reach of anyone who has not already been schooled in them, including ‘the common Reader’ who already stumbles over ‘a hard Word’ of English (Maubray 1724: xv). In one piquant instance, Maubray does provide an English paraphrase, but

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only after he has inserted an extract from an ancient Greek doctor into the mouth of a modern woman: But now a-days Women may well complain and cry out with Soranus, ‘O malè Occupatum vivorum Genus, occidimur nos, non Morimur. Et ab illis, qui inter vos peritissimi existimantur, perperam curatae, vos vero de qualibet vel levissima vestrarum, Affectionum, Libros ex Libris facientes, Bibliothecas voluminibus oneratas, de Nostris inter ea diris ac difficillimis Cruciatibus, nulla vel exigua, & ea quidem satis oscitanter mentione facta: That Men, in short, study their own Good, and take more Care of Themselves than of the Women’. (Maubray 1724: viii–ix)7

Given that most women had no organised way of learning how to read English, let alone Latin or Greek, there is a kind of violence in using a female speaker to ventriloquise a classical citation. Faced with this gesture, and encountering the book’s many non-English quotations of Galen, Plato, Aristotle, and Hippocrates, Maubray’s female readers may have reflected that another of the ways in which professional men ‘study their own Good’ is by mystifying the knowledge that they claim to be disseminating.8 Although it is also a niche publication, Mary Astell’s An Impartial Enquiry into the Causes of Rebellion and Civil War in this Kingdom (1704) displays a different attitude to classical tongues. As part of its warning against ‘rank Popery’, the book notes that ‘The Learned Reader knows where to satisfie himself of the Truth of [these things], much better than my Want of Learning can direct him. [As for] the English Reader, I need only refer him to an admirable Book, which will sufficiently confirm and satisfie his Aversion to Popery, and convince him of the Pernicious Practices of that Church’ (Astell 1704: 23). In other words, Astell is saying that a ‘Learned Reader’ will be able to examine a wealth of relevant materials in Latin, whereas the ‘English Reader’ (who, by definition, only knows the vernacular) should consult the specialist book that Astell goes on to recommend.9 By referring to her ‘Want of Learning’, Astell identifies herself with ‘the English Reader’ rather than the ‘Learned Reader’. This recalls Astell’s A Serious Proposal to the Ladies (1694), which highlights gender-based educational disparities and argues for the establishment of an all-female college for Anglican gentlewomen.10 Strikingly, however, Astell’s critique of educational sexism does not blind her to her own privilege. In the Impartial Enquiry, after she mentions Henry Foulis’s 1671 book on Popery, she recommends the same author’s attack on Presbyterianism, adding that ‘Tis Pity indeed, that both these Books are Folio’s [sic]; so that the common Reader, who stands in most need of them, may want Money to purchase them, and Time to read them’. To

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make up for this, she ‘transcribes a few Passages’ from Foulis into her own book (Astell 1704: 23; emphasis in the original). There would have been a considerable price difference between Astell’s quarto volume and Foulis’s folio, so by copying out Foulis’s propaganda, Astell made it available to a less well-off audience. Here Astell recognises, not just the cost of books, but also the time taken to read them; in registering that not everyone enjoys the luxury of free time, she acknowledges something that her contemporaries almost entirely ignore, namely that some ‘common Readers’ might actually have to work for a living. Given the range of positions adopted by the books that I have been examining, it is not surprising that ‘the common reader’ should emerge as an incoherent and contradictory figure, and Astell’s usage embodies these anomalies. Although her Impartial Enquiry recognises working readers, it assumes a male audience; conversely, her Serious Proposal addresses women­ – ­but only those who are genteel. Perhaps the more surprising circumstance is that the concept keeps being applied to a reading public which is expanding and becoming more heterogenous. This tension suggests that the term carries within it a wish to contain and to simplify a more complex social reality in which class, gender, and authority are intricately related to each other. To take this insight further, I now want to turn to the two writers most associated with the common reader: Samuel Johnson and Virginia Woolf. ‘The common sense of readers uncorrupted with literary prejudices’ Although Johnson helped to shape forms such as literary biography and the critical essay, his judgements on books and writers have not always dated well, partly because he emphasised morality over aesthetic analysis, but also because he was so contemptuous of other people’s judgements. At its best this produces a bracing independence from received views; at its worst it leads to a sort of pointed eccentricity. Or, as Alan Bennett’s version of Queen Elizabeth puts it in The Uncommon Reader, ‘I can see why Dr Johnson is well thought of, but surely, much of it is opinionated rubbish’ (Bennett 2007: 51). This strenuous individualism throws a curious light on Johnson’s praise of the common reader. The relevant passage forms the closing paragraph of his 1781 life of Thomas Gray, and part of the reason that it stands out is that the preceding biography is one of the biggest hatchet jobs in literary history. Having scornfully dismissed almost all of Gray’s poetic output, Johnson turns to his most famous work, the ‘Elegy in a Country Churchyard’ (1751).

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In the character of his Elegy I rejoice to concur with the common reader; for by the common sense of readers uncorrupted with literary prejudices, after all the refinements of subtilty and the dogmatism of learning, must be finally decided all claim to poetical honours. The Churchyard abounds with images which find a mirror in every mind, and with sentiments to which every bosom returns an echo. The four stanzas beginning ‘Yet even these bones’ are to me original: I have never seen the notions in any other place; yet he that reads them here, persuades himself that he has always felt them. Had Gray written often thus, it had been vain to blame, and useless to praise him. (Johnson 1975: 470; emphasis in the original.)

Some literary historians have identified this passage as a nodal point in cultural history­– ­a moment when Johnson pushed back against the rising tide of professional criticism by asserting the value of non-specialist reading.11 But if this is true, it has more to do with the retrospective significance cast by Woolf’s use of the phrase than with any meaning actively generated by Johnson. Not only does Johnson not invent the term, we have seen that the discourse on common reading long predates his birth. In any case, there is something revealingly skewed about Johnson valuing the ‘common sense’ of a ‘common reader’ when he himself delighted in upsetting generally held opinions. His phrasing tacitly acknowledges that although in this case he ‘rejoice[s] to concur with the common reader’, his judgement is not always in line with public taste. Furthermore, by installing the common reader as a singular, homogeneous being who stands in for a larger group of like-minded people, Johnson reproduces the faultline that I have been highlighting throughout this chapter. Although he differentiates between readers who are ‘uncorrupted with literary prejudices’ and the professional commentators who display ‘dogmatism of learning’, he does not see that all readers­– ­whether professional or otherwise­– ­are linked to, and divided from, other groups of readers by virtue of their shared or divergent belief systems and social circumstances. (In other words, we all have dogmas and prejudices, even if they are not always literary ones.) At face value, Johnson’s point is that professional commentators are stymied by over-sophistication, internecine quarrels, and an excess of knowledge. The common reader, by contrast, is represented as experiencing literature in a direct and unmediated way. But these comments come from a position of professional primacy. By the time that The Lives of the English Poets appeared, Johnson had been in receipt of a royal pension for almost twenty years; he had even had an audience with George III, who revealed a detailed knowledge of his work. There is therefore a paradoxical relationship between Johnson’s personal fame as a critic and his supposed

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demurral to a nameless ‘common reader’. Moreover, the earlier part of Johnson’s appraisal of Gray is equivocal about the artistic value of shared human experience. While he praises ‘Elegy’ for containing ‘sentiments to which every bosom returns an echo’, Johnson says of Gray’s ‘Ode on the Spring’ that ‘the thoughts have nothing new’ (Johnson 1975: 466), and he damns Gray’s ‘Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College’ on the grounds that it ‘suggests nothing to Gray which every beholder does not equally think and feel’ (Johnson 1975: 467). It is curious, here, to find Johnson celebrating one poem for generating a supposedly universal response while rejecting another because it articulates something which ‘every beholder’ thinks and feels. Although it is possible to reconcile these judgements, the effort required to do so reveals an uncertainty as to whether literary texts should be prized for their novelty or their familiarity. This tension is partly a question of when Johnson is writing: he and Gray are part of a generation that is poised between classical imitation and Romantic innovation. But beyond the specifics of late eighteenth-century culture, there is also a sense that the critical discourse that Johnson is helping to create is one that will be riven by disagreements over the status and purpose of literature. According to the OED, the modern meaning of the word literature (‘writing which has claim to consideration on the ground of beauty of form or emotional effect’) is ‘of very recent emergence’. In the eighteenth century, the term denoted ‘acquaintance with “letters” or books; polite or humane learning’; it referred to a mass of knowledge, it did not connote an aesthetic judgement. There is therefore a tension between Woolf’s criticism (which approaches literature in terms of aesthetic excellence) and Johnson’s (which places Christian morality above all other criteria). This disjunction can be seen at work in Johnson’s account of Gray, which tackles the poetry via a disapproving account of the life. The issue, as Marilyn Butler points out, is that Johnson systematically undermines Gray’s literary authority by stigmatising him as effeminate (Butler 2015: 85). Johnson’s reference to the ‘fantastic foppery’ of Gray’s compositional methods is particularly loaded because it simultaneously undermines Gray’s manhood and his poetic persona.12 Here, the normative drift of Johnson’s criticism is directly connected to his use of the common reader. The claim that the ‘Elegy’ generates an identical reaction in ‘every mind’ and ‘every bosom’ not only situates the common reader as an emblem of supposedly shared humanity, it also normalises Gray’s poem by turning it into a catalyst for blandly uniform responses. By making the reader occupy a default reading position­– o ­ ne that assumes ‘common’ human experience­– J­ ohnson reduces the range of

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interpretations that his ‘common reader’ can produce. By extension, this discourages ‘actual’ readers from occupying a position other than the quasiuniversal one that Johnson has articulated. Because it positions reading as something that will confirm rather than challenge the world of which it is a part, Johnson’s ‘common reader’ obscures the poem’s treatment of homoerotic desire. Furthermore, by discouraging alternative responses, Johnson undermines anyone who does not identify with the representative average that his criticism assumes; subject positions that fall outside this notional average are disenfranchised, as are the readings that they might produce. Ironically, this side-lines the aspects of Gray’s work that have most engaged recent criticism, namely the erotic dissidence of the poetry, and Gray’s engagement with literacy and class.13 This last point is especially important in relation to the common reader because the ‘Elegy’ is one of the few works of its type that recognises that not everyone can read and that even the literate may still be circumscribed by poverty. While meditating on the residents of a country churchyard, Gray’s narrator pictures figures such as an unrecognised genius who could have been as great as Milton but who instead remains ‘mute’ and ‘inglorious’ (Gray et al. 1969: 128). These anonymous lives dramatise the gap between education and ignorance, wealth and poverty, and the provinces and the metropolis; they also disrupt the assumptions of universal literacy and of shared human experience that underlie so much literary commentary. Johnson’s common reader erases these inequalities by subordinating them to a supposedly universal human identity. This also has implications for how Johnson’s criticism deals with women. Although he was economically generous towards many of his female friends, Johnson was not always supportive of their literary enterprises; of the 140,000 quotations in his Dictionary, fewer than thirty come from female writers (Brewer 2012).14 This raises a question that goes beyond Johnson: does the common reader have a body and, if so, what form does that body take? This is not just a matter of sex; it also touches on class, ethnicity, and voice. Indeed, to misquote the title of an essay by Gayatri Spivak, one could ask: ‘Can the Common Reader Speak?’15 If we apply this question to the common reader we notice that the latter is always being spoken of, it is never allowed to utter words of its own. There are several reasons why this should be. First, speech would enable the common reader to talk back to the authors who are trying to construct and control their readerships. Second, speech is not abstract. It is shaped by the body and by social context, and therefore contains a range of cultural markers. If the common reader spoke, would s/­he sound ‘common’? Would s/­he have a regional accent? Would s/­he be

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baritone or falsetto, tenor, or mezzo? To put this another way, the common reader cannot be allowed to speak because doing so would pin the figure down to a specific identity, thus destroying the fiction that he/­she/­it can stand in for all non-professional readers. This in turn lays bare the ultimate truth about the common reader, namely that the figure does not exist beyond the projections and constructions of critics. Relatedly, it is illuminating how often ‘the common reader’ is cited in introductions, dedications, conclusions, prefaces, and appendices. These sections of books­– ­Gérard Genette calls them ‘paratexts’­– ­have a complex relation to the texts of which they form a part (Genette 1997). Like frames around a painting, they appear extraneous, yet they help determine how the book is read. This makes paratexts an apt place to encounter the common reader because the latter is similarly positioned between centrality and marginality. Of the passages I have cited so far, the ones by Ferrar, Boyle, Mercer, Howell, and Cavendish all mention the common reader within their framing materials. This is also the case with my next case study, Virginia Woolf, who introduces her 1925 Common Reader with a short sketch in which she reclaims Johnson’s life of Gray for her own purposes. The difference is that, by naming her book in the way that she does, Woolf also places the common reader centre stage. In doing so, she turns the figure into a vessel for her own identity as a reader and a writer while also activating an ongoing battle over how literary criticism imagines its relation to ‘common’ things. ‘The sanction of the great man’s approval’ Questions of gender and invisibility permeate Woolf’s Common Reader volumes, partly because of the circumstances under which the articles were first distributed, and partly because many of the essays concern neglected female writers such as Dorothy Osborne, Geraldine Jewsbury, Jane Carlyle, Margaret Cavendish, and Dorothy Wordsworth. The collections also contain pieces on better-known authors including Austen, George Eliot, the Brontës, Christina Rossetti, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Elizabeth BarrettBrowning. Significantly, Woolf pictures these women reading as well as writing. She describes how the eighteenth-century memoirist Laetitia Pilkington compromised her honour by staying up late with a book when there was a gentleman in her bedroom, and how Frances Burney wanted to copy Samuel Johnson’s style after reading Rasselas (1759). Such vignettes, combined with the high concentration of female subjects in the first Common Reader, highlight Woolf’s interest in specifically

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female experience. In line with this, the beginning of the volume conjures a determinedly modest reading scene: There is a sentence in Dr Johnson’s Life of Gray which might well be written up in all those rooms, too humble to be called libraries, yet full of books, where the pursuit of reading is carried on by private people. ‘…I rejoice to concur with the common reader; for by the common sense of readers, uncorrupted by literary prejudices, after all the refinements of subtilty and the dogmatism of learning, must be finally decided all claim to poetical honours.’ It defines their qualities; it dignifies their aims; it bestows upon a pursuit which devours a great deal of time, and is yet apt to leave behind it nothing very substantial, the sanction of the great man’s approval. (Woolf 2003: 1.)

Woolf’s address to ‘rooms, too humble to be called libraries’ acknowledges the less privileged readers who lie at the margins of cultural history. By implication, these unheralded readers are more likely to be poor women than wealthy men. As is so often the case with the common reader, however, a faultline appears in Woolf’s account: The common reader, as Dr Johnson implies, differs from the critic and the scholar. He is worse educated, and nature has not gifted him so generously. He reads for his own pleasure rather than to impart knowledge or correct the opinions of others.

He? Who is this ‘he’? Having started off as gender-neutral, Woolf’s common reader is suddenly and unambiguously male. Still talking of the common reader, Woolf writes that ‘he’ is guided by an instinct to create for himself, out of whatever odds and ends he can come by, some kind of whole­– ­a portrait of a man, a sketch of an age, a theory of the art of writing. He never ceases, as he reads, to run up some rickety and ramshackle fabric which shall give him the temporary satisfaction of looking sufficiently like the real object to allow of affection, laughter, and argument. Hasty, inaccurate, and superficial, snatching now this poem, now that scrap of old furniture, without caring where he finds it or of what nature it may be so long as it serves his purpose and rounds his structure, his deficiencies as a critic are too obvious to be pointed out; but if he has, as Dr Johnson maintained, some say in the final distribution of poetical honours, then, perhaps, it may be worthwhile to write down a few of the ideas and opinions which, insignificant in themselves, yet contribute to so mighty a result. (Woolf 2003: 1–2.)

This is the default ‘he’ of liberal humanism, a pronoun that displaces and subsumes alternative gender identities, replacing them with a hegemonic masculinity. Clearly, Woolf is writing in a particular time and place, and

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it would be another forty years before feminist activists started arguing explicitly for gender-neutral language.16 However, it is nonetheless disconcerting to find Woolf ascribing such a definite gender to the common reader, especially since so many of her essays meditate on the marginalisation of female experience.17 On one hand, then, Woolf is trying to undo the invisibility that has been enforced on her predecessors; simultaneously, however, her gendering of the common reader thrusts women back under the cloak of a universal ‘he’. Woolf’s repetition of these exclusionary patterns underlines how defended they are, and how readily they reassert themselves even­– ­or especially­– ­when they are put under pressure. The slippage says a great deal about literary criticism’s drift towards a masculine norm, and about the role that the discourse on ‘the common reader’ plays in securing such normativity. Of course, this faultline is bigger than any single writer­– ­it lies in history, and in language­– a­ nd Woolf’s version of the common reader emerges from an especially fractured context. Against the background of the First World War, which had radically undermined the moral authority of the European aristocracy with their civilised values and well-stocked libraries, Woolf’s celebration of the common reader can be seen as an attempt to expand and preserve a literary-historical inheritance that was in danger of being lost. If the genteel libraries of old could not be counted on­– i­f, indeed, they were part of the problem­– t­ hen more ad hoc arrangements would need the money and space to develop. As I hinted above, Woolf has a personal stake in these issues. Her identification with the common reader is clear from her account of how the latter creates ‘out of whatever odds and ends he can come by’, a ‘portrait of a man, a sketch of an age, a theory of the art of writing’ (Woolf 2003: 1–2.). With its emphasis on forming a unity out of apparently disparate fragments, this description recalls numerous passages in which Woolf describes her own aesthetic practices.18 Moreover, The Common Reader is itself a ‘rickety and ramshackle fabric’ that aspires, nonetheless, to ‘some kind of whole’; Woolf constructed it out of re-written and re-framed items of previously published journalism. Here, Woolf’s aesthetic theories come into dialogue with the politics of invisibility because the bulk of Woolf’s early criticism was produced for the Times Literary Supplement, and before 1974 all contributions to the TLS were anonymous. This illuminates Woolf’s description of reading as ‘a pursuit which devours a great deal of time, and is yet apt to leave behind it nothing very substantial’ because, according to Derwent May’s history of the journal, Woolf wrote fifty reviews for the paper between 1905 and 1907 while, in the following

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two years, she ‘was on the page almost every week’ (May 2001: 51, 70). Twelve of these pieces eventually found their way into the first Common Reader, but when they initially appeared their authorship would have been unknown to anyone outside Woolf’s circle, and the rest of her contributions would have remained unattributed. Woolf’s involvement with the TLS is a microcosm of the ambiguous position that women readers and writers have occupied in literary history. By requiring both sexes to be anonymous, the paper granted women shared space with men, but only at the cost of abandoning their personal and political distinctness: as with Woolf’s use of ‘he’ as a default pronoun, many readers would have assumed, unless there was reason for doing otherwise, that the writer of any given TLS essay would be male. Woolf tries to redress this balance by emphasising women who are lost from history and by retrieving ‘the common reader’ from the margins of literary discourse. This chimes with a project that she left unfinished at the time of her death. Anon was to be an alternative history of English literature told via writers whose works survive but whose names remain undocumented. Like her espousal of the common reader, Anon would have highlighted people who stand outside of recorded history, particularly women; as she had already said in A Room of One’s Own, ‘I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman’ (Woolf 1992: 63). As if to underline the continuities in her thought, Woolf refers to her 1941 Anon project as her ‘Common History book’; during the same period, she responds to Vita Sackville-West’s suggestion that she write a biography of the Elizabethan aristocrat Bess of Hardwick by saying (rather improbably) that she would ‘make [Bess] a Common Reader’ (Silver 1979: 356–8). Although these projects have an underlying logic, they are governed by a paradox. As Gray’s ‘Elegy’ and Woolf’s ‘Lives of the Obscure’ make clear, hardly anyone’s name endures beyond their death. If a common reader truly existed, such a person would have to remain unidentified since anyone whose name lasts through time is, by definition, un-common. This tension is aptly demonstrated by Woolf’s own career. She lays claim to the nameless and untutored role of ‘common reader’ at the very point at which she uses a highly crafted critical persona to take possession of her previously anonymous essays. As this suggests, Woolf’s version of the common reader cannot help but express contradictions that are inherent to her writing identity. Most obviously, her family background has ‘special case’ written all over it. It is not just that she was economically advantaged; she was also born into the uppermost reaches of the Victorian intellectual establishment.

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Few of us, when finding ourselves short, can subsidise our lifestyles by auctioning original manuscripts by Thackeray at the rate of £1,000 for ten pages, and this at 1906 prices (Woolf 1985: 182). To do so is not simply to draw on inherited resources; it is also to demonstrate the specifically literary nature of that inheritance. Even more tellingly, the publications of Woolf’s father, Leslie Stephen, included several works on eighteenth-century writing and a biography of Dr Johnson. This casts an ironic light on Woolf’s championing of the common reader because she, through her father’s work on Johnson, has a privileged point of access to the history that she is trying to uncover. In response to these objections, Woolf could legitimately point out that she­– ­like her common reader­– ­ was ‘worse educated’ than her brothers, her father, her husband, and the majority of her male friends. Like many women of her class and period, she was not given a formal schooling; and although she learnt Greek from a family friend, she was conscious of arriving late to a world that already belonged, by right, to her brothers. Excluded from their schools, she educated herself amid her father’s bookshelves; one of her autobiographical essays describes Sir Leslie looking over her shoulder at what she was reading and giving a ‘little amused surprised snort’ on discovering her with ‘some book that no child of my age could understand’ (Woolf 1985: 111). Woolf’s account of the common reader roaming with a ‘great man’s’ patronage through ‘rooms … full of books’ therefore has a double resonance. On one hand the ‘great man’ is Johnson, under whose aegis her common reader shelters. But, on a more intimate and immediate level, the ‘great man’ is her father. Together, Johnson and Sir Leslie amplify each other’s authority, and although Woolf is allowed to rove though her father’s library­– ­and, by extension, through literary history­– ­she does so on terms that have been set by the male guardians of that space. After all, they are the ones who have amassed the collection in which she wanders. In a sense, then, Leslie Stephen occupies the same position in relation to Woolf that Samuel Johnson occupies in relation to literary tradition more generally. Both are gatekeepers with the power to close down, as well as open up, access to culture. Commenting on A Room of One’s Own, Adrienne Rich has argued that even when Woolf was addressing a female audience, she was conscious of being overheard by men, including her father, and that this produced a ‘dogged tentativeness’ in which she made herself replace anger with charm (Rich 1980: 37). This illuminates the strenuous modesty with which Woolf refers to the ‘rickety and ramshackle fabric’ of The Common Reader with its ‘deficiencies’ that are ‘too obvious to be pointed out’. It is as if Woolf

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feels forced to offset her critical identity with a conventionally self-effacing version of femininity. But this is also a matter of class: boasting would be vulgar. Woolf’s performance of modesty is integral to her version of the common reader because it enables her to distance herself from full-time literary critics. Unlike ‘the critic and the scholar’ who read for a living, the common reader is one of the ‘private people’ who follow ‘the pursuit of reading’ for its own sake. Of course, in Woolf’s milieu ‘private people’ tend to have private incomes, and although their houses may lack the vast libraries of the aristocracy, they will probably have studies where reading and writing can occur without external interruptions.19 Free time and privacy are themselves class privileges, and although Woolf would probably concede this point, it does not curb her visceral dislike for professional men and women of letters, such as John Middleton Murry, Rose Macaulay, and­– ­her particular bête noire­ – ­the Edwardian critic Edmund Gosse, whom she refers to as ‘the little dapper grocer Gosse’ (Woolf 1980: 115).20 The distaste that Woolf expresses for these critics is connected to what she sees as their vulgar grubbing-around in the marketplace. Paradoxically, however, it would be hard to think of a more assiduous critic than Woolf herself. She not only took infinite pains with her writing, she also paid close attention to remuneration and became adept at doubling her payments by publishing the same essay twice, once in Britain and once in the more lucrative US market. Ultimately, Woolf’s identification with neglected and invisible readers is undermined by her failure to acknowledge the extent of her own special status. More ‘uncommon’ than ‘common’, she illustrates the precariousness of generalising about reading. If she, as a single individual, has a conflicted relation to the term that she is presenting, then how can the figure of ‘the common reader’ be said to contain the responses of an entire constituency of non-specialist readers? For me, though, Woolf’s strategic presentation of herself as a common reader is valuable precisely because it is so slippery, and because its internal contradictions illuminate an important phase in twentieth-century reading practices. In Johnson’s day ‘the common reader’ articulated a split between those who published their critical thoughts for money and those who did not. This distinction survived into Woolf’s time­ – ­hence her ambivalence towards people like Gosse­– ­but her greatest scorn fell on a set of professional readers who did not exist in Johnson’s time, namely university lecturers. And here, finally, Woolf can genuinely claim to be a non-specialist reader. Although she was paid for her criticism, she worked freelance and was not a tenured academic. The next section of this chapter will use the stand-off between Woolf

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and academia to analyse how nascent university English departments began to institutionalise certain ways of reading. But in closing this phase of the argument I want to emphasise, once more, that when Woolf solicits ‘the sanction of the great man’s approval’ for the common reader, she locks that figure into the very structures that it is supposed to stand outside. Perpetually nameless, the common reader has no power except that which critics project onto it: they are the ones who define common reading, and they do so in relation to their own, more professionalised identities. ‘The common pursuit of true judgment’ At the time of Woolf’s birth in 1882, English was not a fully established degree subject, but it became one over the course of her lifetime. Although University College London had started teaching English in 1828, Oxford and Cambridge only founded Schools of English in 1894 and 1919, while Yale’s English department began taking shape around 1884 (Fry 2008). Initially despised within the existing academic community, the discipline quickly grew in status, eventually displacing the sort of subjects­– ­like classics, philosophy, theology, and mathematics­– ­that so many of Woolf’s male friends and relatives had studied before becoming colonial administrators. Since the late twentieth century, English degrees have prepared students for employment in multi-national companies and banking, as well as for careers in arts management and the public sector. Subsequent innovations­ – ­such as American Studies, Media Studies, and Cultural Studies­– ­have underlined literary criticism’s power by borrowing its vocabulary: we now ‘read’ films and advertisements as well as novels and poems. Throughout these changes, the common reader has continued to be invoked by cultural commentators but the figure’s meaning has altered with shifting academic practice. These days, the ‘wish’ of the common reader has a good deal to do with nostalgia for a pre-Critical Theory version of Literary Studies, in which teachers and students had a shared notion of what was worth reading, and what was not. (This is the worldview that Harold Bloom mourns in The Western Canon, which I discussed in chapter 2.) Like all nostalgias, however, this picture does not bear close examination; English has always been a divided discipline. To bring this last point into focus, I want to compare Woolf’s theories of reading to those espoused by one of her most implacable critics, F. R. Leavis, perhaps the most influential English teacher in twentiethcentury Britain.21 The son of a musical instruments seller, Leavis shifted literary studies away from belles lettres and made English a vehicle for

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ethical debate. Even commentators who disagree with Leavis’s judgements acknowledge that he made criticism imaginable to students for whom literature was not an automatic birth-right. His combative, confrontational style has not aged well­– h ­ e savages where Woolf charms­– b ­ ut this, too, is part of his importance. Loathing the self-satisfaction of the literary-critical establishment, and the privilege that made such complacency possible, Leavis and his wife (Q. D. Leavis) used the journal Scrutiny (1932–53) to establish an alternative power base in which they and their followers could attack rival commentators. And although Leavis’s literary instincts were ­ is embattled tone was elitist­– v­ ery few authors received his endorsement­– h an expression of class consciousness: despite being a Fellow of Downing College, Cambridge, he maintained a life-long sense of being an outsider.22 Woolf and her Bloomsbury colleagues were prime targets for Scrutiny because their class background encouraged the assumption that they were spoilt dilettantes. In this regard, Woolf has been hoist with her own petard because by presenting herself as a common reader, she lays herself open to accusations of genteel amateurism. Before I address the specifics of this critique, I want­– ­by way of contrast­– ­to highlight Leavis’s regard for Samuel Johnson. According to Leavis, Johnson ‘was a great writer and a great highbrow­– ­or would have been, if the word, and the conditions that have produced it, had existed’. Moreover, ‘For all his appeal to “the common reader” [Johnson] was constantly engaged in the business of bringing home to his public and his associates […] that there were standards in these things above the ordinary level of the ordinary man’ (Leavis, F. R. 1952: 97). By placing disinfecting quotation around ‘the common reader’, Leavis implies that non-professional readers are given to indiscriminate pronouncements and that if you want a precise judgement you need a Johnson (or indeed a Leavis) rather than an ‘ordinary man’ on an ‘ordinary level’. For Leavis, being a highbrow is evidently preferable to being a common reader; moreover, there is the further implication that the ‘conditions’ that produce a ‘great highbrow’ exist for Leavis and not for Johnson because Leavis­– ­unlike Johnson­– ­inhabits the world of academic literary criticism. The reproof to Woolf’s version of the common reader is clear, especially since the essay that I have been citing comes from The Common Pursuit (1952), a book in which Leavis asserts a very different vision of ‘commonness’ to the one proposed by Woolf. Appearing twenty years after Woolf’s second Common Reader, The Common Pursuit takes its title from T. S. Eliot’s 1923 essay ‘The Function of Criticism’. Leavis quotes Eliot’s remark that ‘The critic […] if he is to justify his existence, should endeavour to discipline his personal prejudice and cranks … and compose his differences

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with as many of his fellows as possible in the common pursuit of true judgment’ (Eliot 1975: 69). Dwelling on these words, Leavis further develops the relationship between the individual and the communal: ‘“The common pursuit of true judgment”: that is how the critic should see his business, and what it should be for him. His perceptions and judgements are his, or they are nothing; but whether or not he has consciously addressed himself to co-operative labour, they are inevitably collaborative’ (Leavis, F. R. 1952: v). Initially, this sounds like an attempt to construe critical opinion as a balance of individual and collective judgements in which each critic has a duty to bear in mind the views of ‘his’ [sic] colleagues. Within this model the critic works collaboratively and does not try to enforce ‘his’ perspective over that of his peers and predecessors. But, having quoted these words, Leavis shoves them in a decidedly elitist direction by adding, pointedly, that ‘Criticism, the “pursuit of true judgment,” is not, of course, a pursuit that one can count on finding very commonly practised or favoured’. To think so would be to fall victim to ‘the wrong meaning of “common”’ (Leavis F. R. 1952: vi). Without actually naming her, Leavis hints that Woolf is foremost among those who indulge in the ‘wrong meaning’ of common. Crucially, the ‘commonness’ that Leavis finds in Eliot refers to the shared priorities of a self-appointed elite; it has nothing to do with trying to construct a general reader. To put this more strongly, Leavis­– ­like Eliot­– ­has an anxiety about popular taste that is also a fear of a newly emergent class of educated, but directionless, readers. Leavis’s insistence on aesthetic value, and his strenuous gate-keeping, enact a wish to funnel this group towards the improvements of high culture, and away from the degradations of the new media. Here, the theme of authority that has run through this chapter rises, once more, to the surface. Woolf and her fellow Modernists are often accused of despising popular culture, and of pursuing an agenda that is so elitist that it verges on the fascistic.23 However, the Leavises were authoritarian and discriminatory in comparable ways. Q. D. Leavis’s Fiction and the Reading Public (1932) complains that cinema, advertising, and the popular press produce bovine conformity because they are consumed passively by people who find that it is ‘pleasanter to be one of the herd’ (Leavis, Q. D., 1970: 157); F. R. Leavis takes the same line in Mass Civilization and Minority Culture (1930). Through these interventions, the Leavises sought to appropriate the moral authority of the writers that they most admired while simultaneously denigrating the writers of whom they did not approve. Thus, Scrutiny represented Bloomsbury as a decadent backwater presided over by a

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self-indulgent scribbler.24 Unfortunately, taking the moral high ground can easily turn into unreflecting self-righteousness, and the blind-spot in the Leavisite attack on Woolf is that they are so intent on convicting her of class arrogance that they fail to see their own sexism. Or rather, their critique is so embedded in normative gender assumptions that it cannot help but reproduce a form of institutionalised misogyny. This pattern is evident in Q. D. Leavis’s review of Woolf’s pacifist polemic, Three Guineas (1938), a work in which Woolf links fascism to establishment power structures, including the rituals of higher education. Woolf’s argument, and Leavis’s response, are relevant to my argument because Three Guineas takes the ad hoc reading strategies proposed in The Common Reader and extends them into a full-scale vision of anti-establishment learning. Echoing earlier essays in which Woolf connects militarism to university English teaching,25 Three Guineas juxtaposes the destructions of war with the self-important finery paraded by male members of the establishment, including academics. In reaction to this status quo, Three Guineas proposes a ‘Society of Outsiders’ that will seek wages for wives and mothers. Woolf also envisages a new kind of women’s college built not of carved stone and stained glass, but of some cheap, easily combustible material which does not … perpetrate traditions. Do not have chapels. Do not have …libraries with chained books and first editions under glass cases. Let the pictures and the books be new and always changing. Let it be decorated afresh by each generation with their own hands cheaply. (Woolf 1992: 199)

Like her version of the common reader, Woolf’s ‘Society of Outsiders’ is inherently paradoxical. By banding together, its members stop being outsiders; they cannot be external to their own group. However, the concept’s radical impossibility hints at an alternative model of identity in which belonging is not an absolute and where subjects and selves are organised around inclusion rather than refusal: ‘The aim of the new college, the cheap college, should be not to segregate and specialize, but to combine. It should explore the ways in which mind and body can be made to cooperate; discover what new combinations make good wholes in human life’ (Woolf 1992: 200). These more fluid selves should produce communities with unclear or permeable boundaries rather than the falsely sharp divisions manifested by the nation state, by academic disciplines, and by the patriarchal family. Literature features in Woolf’s alternative college because it is one of the ‘arts that can be taught cheaply and practiced by poor people’. She also

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recommends ‘the little arts of talk, of dress, of cookery’ and the allied ‘art of understanding other people’s lives and minds’, which she opposes to ‘the arts of ruling, of killing, of acquiring land and capital’. To put these principles into operation, the ‘experimental college’ will be one where ‘there are no degrees’ and ‘lectures are not given’ (Woolf 1992: 199–201). It is true that this curriculum bears the mark of­– ­and is limited by­– ­Woolf’s class and time. Similarly, it is a lot easier to reject economic utilitarianism if you already have an independent income. Even so, there is something bracingly provocative about Woolf’s suggestion that, while ‘students must be taught to earn their livings’ (Woolf 1992: 202), their surplus income ought to be spent on re-forming the education system along anti-capitalist lines. In this model, money is not an end in itself, and nor is it a route to bourgeois luxury. Rather, it buys the time and space that makes critical reflection possible. This rejection of academic functionalism, though, was the aspect of Three Guineas that most annoyed Q. D. Leavis, whose 1938 review of the book for Scrutiny bears the obscure heading, ‘Caterpillars of the Commonwealth Unite!’ (‘Commonwealth’­– ­that word again.) Insofar as it means anything, Leavis’s title seems to mock Woolf as a female Cromwell trying to rally her countrywomen out of a vegetative stupor, but the main body of the essay fingers Woolf as a corrupt Cavalier who manifests ‘a deliberate avoidance of any argument’ and a preference for ‘feminine inconsequence’ (Leavis, Q. D. 1964: 382–3). Leavis is especially scornful of Woolf’s attack on academic practice, and resents Woolf’s audacity in criticising professional university teachers; tellingly, she finishes by comparing Woolf unfavourably to Margaret Mead, adding that ‘there is no longer any use in this field of speculation for the non-specialist like Mrs Woolf’ (Leavis, Q. D. 1964: 391). By the time that Leavis starts using her review to explain Cambridge’s entrance policies, it is hard to resist the suspicion that she, as much as Woolf, has a personal agenda which might blinker her to a wider social context. Indeed, one of the most disheartening aspects of the Woolf–Leavis face-off is that both parties seem locked into a view of higher education in which only Oxbridge is deemed worthy of attention. That said, Woolf provides a radical alternative to the established order whereas Leavis explicitly identifies herself with the very structures that Woolf wants to undo. Moreover, although Leavis is right that Woolf is cocooned within her own class inheritance, she herself is guilty of what Francis Mulhern calls a ‘myopic, truculently conformist femininity’ when she claims that Woolf would have been better employed raising a family rather than

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writing Three Guineas (Mulhern 1998: 141). At such moments, Scrutiny’s distaste for Bloomsbury reveals itself as a proxy for a broader assault on gender dissidence.26 Largely thanks to the Leavises’ influence on a generation of school and university teachers, Woolf’s reputation went into free-fall after her death. The status of her fiction and essays surged upwards, however, when 1970s feminism returned to questions that she had canvassed earlier in the century. Such oscillations ought to make us question the common reader’s role in determining cultural value: Woolf’s standing has been shaped by publishing trends and warring ideologies as much as by grassroots consumers. But although I have been tracing contradictions in Woolf’s version of the common reader, I do think that her model directs us towards alternative reading practices. In particular, her championing of non-academic reading is newly pertinent now that the university sector’s traditional functions have been undermined by its adoption of a business model in which academic qualifications are re-imagined as a product. Woolf’s version of the common reader frustrates capitalist appropriation by construing reading as a pursuit that ‘devours a great deal of time, and is yet apt to leave behind it nothing very substantial’ (Woolf 2003: 1). As well as preventing reading from being reduced to a product, this insubstantiality protects the common reader from being absorbed into larger institutional structures, such as universities, which demand exam scripts and scholarly articles as evidence of reading. Here Woolf’s arguments have the prophetic effect of rebuking the corporate and bureaucratic structures through which the twenty-first-century self is increasingly articulated and experienced. Since her death, the university sector has moved, or been forced into, an ever-closer relationship to capitalism. Correspondingly, its disciplines have been turned into commodities, and reading is often reduced to a vehicle through which students acquire tradable qualifications. In this sense Woolf was more prescient than Scrutiny. By defending academia from what they saw as Bloomsbury chit-chat, the Leavises ushered in a more noxious enemy. The seriousness that they brought to English helped make it a credible subject, but the discipline’s success has allowed reading to be turned into something that can be used instrumentally. Learning and reflection are no longer justifiable solely in their own terms and have instead been redefined as stepping stones towards supposedly measurable outcomes. Within the academic humanities, a turf war persists between old and new disciplines; meanwhile­ – ­beyond the level of the individual subject­– t­here is a battle for public funding between the humanities and the sciences.

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Given this backdrop, universities are unlikely to relinquish their claim on specialised knowledge because to do so would be to undermine their own selling power. A Woolfian response might be to consign the sector to its fate, viewing it as already ethically bankrupt. I would not go so far myself, but I would certainly argue that disciplinary structures often impede the work that they are intended to promote. By contrast, Woolf’s antiinstitutional approach holds that reading (and the insights that it produces) can be acquired elsewhere, and with less upfront cost. Although access to books is never class-neutral, Woolf’s perspective reminds us that it is more important that reading and critical thinking should flourish than that departments of literature should be preserved in aspic. But this represents a challenge for English Studies, and for the academic humanities more generally. What would society lose if academic reading practices were no longer supported? What happens, for good or ill, when bureaucratic frameworks ossify around intellectual exploration? With these questions in mind, my next chapter will test the claims that have been made for academic versions of reading­– ­in particular, I want to look at how the ‘wish’ of the common reader gives way, in schools and universities, to the ‘wish’ of close reading. Notes   1 Among many other phrases, also consider ‘common sense’ and ‘common law’. Then there is Pulp’s 1995 hit ‘Common People’ (from Different Class) and Alison Light’s memoir Common People: The History of an English Family (2014).  2 Post-1930s uses include Richard D. Altick’s The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800–1900 (1957), Alexander Pettit’s Textual Studies and the Common Reader (2000), and Stefan Collini’s Common Reading: Critics, Historians, Publics (2008). Literary scholars have contributed specialist studies including Katerina Koutsantoni’s Virginia Woolf’s Common Reader (2009) and Juliet Dusinberre’s Virginia Woolf’s Renaissance: Woman Reader or Common Reader? (1997). At the more popular end of the spectrum, Clara Clairborne Park’s Rejoining the Common Reader (1991) and Anne Fadiman’s Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader (1999) explore how reading can shape everyday lives.   3 Because I am analysing ideology rather than reading habits per se, this chapter is silent on ‘actual’ readers. For an empirical analysis of popular reading tastes, see Altick 1957; Leavis, Q. D. 1970 explores similar territory in a politically charged way; Willes 2008 also has a chapter on the subject. Other useful accounts of reading and publishing include Flint 1993, Maynard 2009, Raven et al. 2007, and Turner 1992. Stanley Fish’s concept of interpretive communi-

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ties is valuable for thinking about readers’ imagined relations with each other (Fish 1981).  4 Philosophical, theological, and scientific texts would once, as a matter of course, have been written in Latin but, from the mid-seventeenth onwards, it became more usual for writers to use the vernacular. The shift, though, was uneven. One of the founding texts of empiricism, Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum (1620), is in Latin but Bacon’s The Advancement of Learning (1605) and New Atlantis (1627) are in English.   5 The work is in three parts; Dryden probably only wrote the final one.   6 Maubray insists that he does not favour male midwives over female ones but seeks to comment impartially on the faults of each (Maubray 1724: xii). For an overview of the struggle between male and female practitioners, see Fraser 2009: 537–65. For a revisionist account, see Vickery 1998: 94 ff.   7 Soranus wrote in Greek, although his work mostly survives in Latin translations. I have left Maubray’s Latin untranslated so that modern readers can experience his slap in the face for themselves; the gist is that men write volumes about their most trivial illness while leaving female conditions unmentioned.   8 Maubray’s performance of masculine knowledge came a cropper, two years after the publication of The Female Physician, when he endorsed the claims of Mary Toft, a servant who was said have given birth to a litter of rabbits. Maubray was drawn into the controversy because The Female Physician had stated that if either partner thinks about an animal at the moment of conception then the resultant child may be born with the head of a dog, cat, lamb, calf, or ‘any other thing whatsoever’ (Maubray 1724: 368–9).  9 The book in question is Henry Foulis’s History of Romish Treasons and Usurpations (1671). 10 In the 1730 edition of another of her books, Some Reflections Upon Marriage, Astell complains that men, ‘through their Skill in Languages, and the Tricks of the Schools, wrest [the Bible] from its genuine Sense to their own Inventions’. While women are ‘kept in Ignorance of the Original’, men will be able to control them via inaccurate scriptural translations (Astell 1730: 145). Some Reflections was first published in 1703, then expanded; these comments come from the last edition published in Astell’s lifetime. For more on Astell’s relation to ancient tongues, see Hall 2016. 11 See, for example, Gualtieri 2000: 57–8. 12 Johnson complains that instead of making rough drafts, Gray perfected each phrase before moving to the next; worse, he only wrote when he felt like it. 13 For Gray and sexuality, see Haggerty 1996, Haggerty 2004, and Quinn 2012. 14 For more on Johnson’s relations with women, see Clarke 2000 and Chisholm 2012. 15 Spivak’s essay ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ first appeared in 1988; for the original and a revised version, see Morris 2010. 16 For an overview of feminist linguistics, see Cameron 1985. For a much fuller

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account of Woolf’s gender politics than I can offer, including reflections on her use of personal pronouns, see Bowlby 1997. 17 For example, ‘Lives of the Obscure’ from the first Common Reader summons up a ‘faded, out-of-date, obsolete library’ where forgotten books slumber on the shelves like ‘nameless tombstones’ (Woolf 2003: 106). These ‘nameless tombstones’ echo the neglected graves in Gray’s ‘Elegy’ but Woolf pointedly makes the stories in ‘Lives of the Obscure’ female-centred. 18 See, for example, ‘Modern Fiction’ in the first Common Reader. For the autobiographical origins of her interest in making wholes out of fragments, see Woolf 1985: 71–3. For an overview of this aspect of Woolf’s aesthetic, see Marcus 2004: 17–40. 19 The characters in Woolf’s fiction are uninterested in the municipal libraries that made literature available to the Victorian and Edwardian working classes, but she often uses the private libraries of great houses as a figure for longstanding civilisation. The Reading Room of the British Museum and the library of Trinity College, Cambridge are mentioned (not entirely approvingly) in A Room of One’s Own; the library in ‘Lives of the Obscure’ is run by subscription and peopled by the shabby genteel. 20 Short of telling Gosse to use the tradesman’s entrance, the remark could hardly be more disdainful in its upper-middle-class aversion to those who write for money. This class-recoil is underlined by Woolf’s obituary essay on Gosse, which pictures a man who could be ‘as touchy as a housemaid and as suspicious as a governess’ (Woolf 2009: 249). Gosse functioned as a lightning-rod for Woolf’s ambivalence towards the critical establishment. She wrote more than one essay about him and often mentions him in her private writings. Like Woolf, Gosse had no university degree. 21 Leavis was not alone in challenging the belles lettres model of English, and I discuss his contemporary, I. A. Richards, in my next chapter. But his war with Bloomsbury over the word ‘common’ makes him a crucial figure for my current argument. 22 Leavis’s grudge against Cambridge was understandable. It was over twenty years before he was invited to join the English Faculty and he was never given a Chair; he was 64 when he became a Reader. He subsequently held honorary professorships at Bristol and York. 23 The most influential version of this thesis is John Carey’s The Intellectuals and the Masses (1992). Woolf’s posthumously published essay ‘Middlebrow’ (Woolf 2011: 470–9) illuminates her relation to mainstream cultural production. For an analysis of mid-century debates on high, middle, and low brows, see Napper 2009. 24 This manoeuvre is exemplified by the Leavisite appropriation of Woolf’s father. Ridiculing Bloomsbury’s accounts of Leslie Stephen, Q. D. Leavis pointedly dubbed Stephen ‘a Cambridge critic’ (my emphasis) who had illuminated literary criticism in the benighted years before T. S. Eliot’s The Sacred Wood had

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‘reached the common reader’ (Leavis, F. R. 1968a: 22). Such comments suggest a larger psychodrama in which Scrutiny used Woolf’s terminology, and her own flesh-and-blood, as fields on which they could challenge Bloomsbury for ownership of the foundations of English criticism. 25 See, for instance, her 1926 piece on Walter Raleigh, the first professor of English at Oxford, which depicts Raleigh as using the Boer War and the First World War as manly correctives to the feminine world of letters (Woolf 1950: 89). The 1931 essay ‘All About Books’ complains, similarly, that a recent collection of academic essays turns literature into ‘troops’ that ‘march in step’, halting and advancing as if ‘under the command of officers mounted upon chargers’ (Woolf 1950: 115–16). 26 Scrutiny was equally rude about Lytton Strachey; and, again, the dismissal savours of heteronormativity­– ­see, for instance, Barnes 1968.

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Close reading, citizenship, and education

  It is difficult to get the news from poems   yet men die miserably every day              for lack of what is found there. (Williams 1962: 161–2)

These lines by William Carlos Williams represent both a challenge and a warning to literary commentators. Even as he asserts the importance of poems, Williams demonstrates how difficult it is to talk about them. There is something in poetry that can save us from misery but if a poet cannot tell us ‘what is found there’ except to say that it is not the news, then how do the rest of us know what we are looking for, and how will we know when we find it? In one sense the answer is straightforward: we discover ‘what is found there’ by reading. But, as I have argued throughout this book, ‘reading’ is a set of diverse practices rather than a single, easily comprehended activity. ‘What is found there’ may include ‘what we put there’, ‘what we fail to see’, and ‘what we couldn’t help noticing because the publisher mentioned it on the back of the book’. Most of us are untroubled by such issues; it is enough to enjoy the reading experience, and to take whatever we can from it. But university academics have made it their business to investigate ‘what is found there’, and how best to access it. If ‘it’ exists (and that is not a given), should we best understand it as an emotion, an experience, a life lesson? Are its gains specific to poetry or can we expand Williams’s insight to include literature more generally? What about writing that does not fit expected notions of literary value?1 The first chapter of this book indicated how I might answer these

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questions. Citing the example of Sylvia Plath reading The Joy of Cooking as if it were ‘a rare novel’ (Plath 2000: 269), I argued that quality of attention is as, if not more, important than the object under scrutiny, and that any kind of writing can become a hallowed text if the reader wants it to be one. In chapter two I added that ‘literature’ should not be put in a separate, sacred category of its own; instead it should be understood, like any other form of communication, as a collection of registers and effects that have been evolved by the communities that use them. This chapter will extend that discussion by exploring how university commentators have tried to systematise reading. Specifically, I am going to talk about close reading, a practice that intersects with numerous academic formations but that has also shaped how literature is taught in schools. As the title of this chapter suggests, I am preoccupied by reading’s role in forming civic identity, and it is in education that reading and citizenship come together most visibly. All theories of reading participate in the cultural imaginary of reading, by which I mean the stories that we tell about reading, the claims that we make on its behalf, and the ways that we think about it in relation to ourselves and society. Within this imaginary, ‘close reading’ suggests a greater-than-average level of focused observation. Clearly, there have always been attentive readers, but ‘close reading’ asserts a particular kind of a professionalised legitimacy. It emerges from broadly the same historical moment as the Leavises’ quarrel with Woolf over ‘common’ reading and, like Leavisite criticism, ‘close’ reading proclaims a ‘rigour’ and ‘seriousness’ that distinguishes it from the literary ‘appreciation’ associated with earlier academics such as Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch and Sir Walter Raleigh. Rejecting belles lettres, I. A. Richards (the key figure here) and his successors sought a scientific basis for literary analysis by bolstering their interpretations with insights drawn from psychology, linguistics, and anthropology. In doing so, they established close textual analysis as the default method of English studies. Rather than providing an intricate account of close reading’s influence on literature teaching, I will use this chapter to ask a more conceptual question about what it means to read a text ‘closely’. What is being staked out by commentators who make ‘close’ textual attention the gold standard of literary criticism? How close is ‘close’, and can you get too close?2 I will begin by examining a metaphor that runs through Richards’s criticism, employing it to illuminate both the benefits and the potential limitations of close reading. One shortcoming is that certain interpretive traditions (notably New Criticism) have used close reading to evacuate literature’s social and political contexts. Another difficulty is that close

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reading can become arid when it is applied mechanistically; I will show that this is a particular danger in how literature is taught at school. As well as critiquing reductive versions of close reading, I want to champion a more experiential version of textual attentiveness, a paradigm of which can be found in the reading scene at the start of Jane Eyre. From time to time I will also refer back to William Carlos Williams, using his words to argue that the ‘what is found there’ of reading can take so many forms­– ­intellectual, social, personal, psychic, emotional­– t­ hat we should be wary of critical traditions that valorise any one of these terrains at the expense of the others. Reading machines In his second monograph, Practical Criticism (1929), I. A Richards describes a set of experiments that have had an incalculable impact on how literature is taught in schools and universities. Richards wanted to create a control through which he could study how literate readers respond to poetic language. His inspiration was to give his students unattributed poems, asking them to comment on and evaluate the pieces solely on the basis of the words on the page. It is a testament to Richards’s influence that this exercise now seems commonplace: without it, unseen literary analysis would probably not be a standard component of A-level English exams, and nor would ‘practical criticism’ have featured in degree-level courses for most of the twentieth century. But, in its original context, blind reading was revolutionary. Robbed of the cues that come from knowing an author’s name, reputation, and period, Richards’s students reacted in unexpected ways. One condemned a John Donne sonnet as sounding like ‘the first labours of a school boy’ (Richards 1964: 48), while another said that an obscure Wilfred Rowland Childe piece produced a feeling akin to falling in love (Richards 1964: 156). Many of his respondents appeared baffled by even the most basic aspects of the poems they were asked to discuss. Faced with these results, a relativist might have deduced that when we engage with cultural objects we are responding to the stories that are told about those objects as much as to the objects themselves. However, this was not Richards’s position. Instead he interpreted the students’ responses as evidence that reading needed to become a more disciplined, quasi-scientific practice in which properly organised techniques would help readers recognise literary quality when they were in its presence. In retrospect, Richards’s scientific pretensions are questionable: Chris

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Baldick accuses him of hiding a conventional, Matthew Arnold-derived view of culture behind modish jargon (Baldick 1996: 79). Even so, there is an intriguing tension between Richards’s valorisation of poetry and his pragmatic, sometimes even permissive, attitude to reading. Although he implicitly disparages the students’ responses to the unattributed poems, he also writes in Practical Criticism that ‘It is less important to like “good” poetry and dislike “bad”, than to be able to use them both as a means of ordering our minds. It is the quality of the reading we give them that matters, not the correctness with which we classify them’ (Richards 1964: 349). This attitude is already implied in the opening line of his preceding monograph, Principles of Literary Criticism (1924), which states that ‘A book is a machine to think with’. Richards was evidently both invested in, and anxious about, this metaphor, because he revisited it at intervals during his career. The third edition of Principles of Literary Criticism (published in 1928) reproduces the same five words but adds a qualification: ‘A book is a machine to think with, but it need not, therefore, usurp the functions either of the bellows or the locomotive. This book might better be compared to a loom on which it is supposed to re-weave some ravelled parts of our civilization’ (Richards 1930: 1). Richards’s terminology reflects the ambivalence with which machines were viewed in the first quarter of the twentieth century. Modernism was both fascinated and horrified by the effect that mechanisation was having a response that was sharpened by the First World on everyday life­– ­ 3 War. Against this backdrop, it is unsurprising that Richards rejects the industrial-sounding ‘locomotive’ in favour of the ‘loom’, a machine in ­ which the apparatus and the operator work in tandem. (He seems to be picturing a hand-operated device rather than the power looms that became standard in the early nineteenth century.) In this expanded form the metaphor situates written language as a catalyst for mental activity; just as a loom enables a weaver to produce more fabric than hand embroidery, books allow intellectual connections to be generated more efficiently than if we were trying to do all the work on our own. This, though, is not an equal partnership: the book is imagined as a mechanical tool rather than an intelligence in its own right. Moreover, looms demand disciplined, structured actions­– y­ ou have to be taught how to use them by someone who already knows the correct technique. Two decades later, and after a further world war, Richards opened another of his books by reflecting, once more, on the machine metaphor at the start of Principles of Literary Criticism: ‘Twenty years ago a very inexperienced writer commenced authorship with the remark. “A book

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is a machine to think with” … [The young author] seems to have been uneasy about the word “think” then, for he added in a later edition, “but it need not usurp the functions either of the bellows or the locomotive”’. The Richards of 1948 then runs through a page of further mechanical analogies, including books as forms of transport that will ‘drag [readers] passively hither and thither’, and books as microscopes, ‘consolidators’, and ‘pulverizers’. He finally concedes that ‘My readers will have to choose for themselves what sort of machine they will compare this book to. I do not believe that either a washing machine or a combination harvester is the right comparison’ (Richards 1961: 9–10). The passage betrays, if not hysteria, then certainly an anxiety, on Richards’s part, that his metaphor has run from his control, and that it contains possibilities that he would prefer to suppress. In particular, his words acknowledge that if a book is a machine, then reading can be used to promote miscellaneous mechanical activities, not all of them edifying. Again, this would have been an especially potent reflection in 1948.4 Later in this chapter I will argue that ‘pulverizers’ is a pretty accurate description of the tests which British pupils have been forced to undergo in the years since the introduction of the National Curriculum and school league tables, and although Richards cannot be held directly responsible for this regime, it was made possible by rhetoric that he helped to introduce. His equation of books with machines produces a peculiarly instrumental spin on William Carlos Williams’s ‘what is found there’. Richards’s metaphor positions reading as a form of manufacture, with ‘thought’ as the resultant product. The term ‘practical’ criticism makes a similar claim; by connoting hands-on solidity, it gestures towards artisanal craftsmanship and the applied sciences. This meshes with Richards’s attempt to formalise English Studies by rescuing reading from the presumably impractical habits of an earlier generation. However, Richards’s intervention also reinforced an emerging perception that ‘good’ reading required a form of professional training. As well as asserting that some ways of reading are ‘better’ than others (a view that is not as defensible as it might first seem),5 Richards and his followers strongly implied that reading expertise could only be acquired from a university professional. Taken to its logical conclusion, this would result in a technocratic version of ‘close reading’ that is as much concerned with granting authority to the teacher as it is with empowering the student. A mark of this disciplinary regime can be found in the innumerable books in which English professors tell other people how to read. Twentyfirst-century examples include Harold Bloom’s How to Read and Why (2000) and Terry Eagleton’s How to Read a Poem (2007). If Eagleton’s

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subsequent volume, How to Read Literature (2013) does not radiate enough authority there is always Thomas C. Foster’s How to Read Literature Like a Professor (2003), a volume that the same author followed with How to Read Novels Like a Professor (2008) and How to Read Poetry Like a Professor (2018). Such books prey on the difficulty of performing well in an education system that privileges exam results over learning, but the ‘how to read’ genre predates the exam-mania of late capitalism. Mortimer J. Adler’s How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading appeared in 1940, while in 1948 Richards himself published How to Read a Page: A Course in Effective Reading with an Introduction to a Hundred Great Words, the first chapter of which is ‘How a Reader Might Improve’. Ironically, this is the book which opens with Richards distancing himself from washing machines and combine harvesters. In defence of Richards, it has to be admitted that attentive reading is a skill, and that reading fluency should not be taken as a given. Unlike, say, Quiller-Couch’s On the Art of Reading (1920), Richards’s How to Read a Page does not assume that its reader is an already-literate member of the middle classes with a family library at their disposal. When Quiller-Couch addresses his readers as ‘Gentlemen’, buttonholing them with patronising familiarity, it is hard to forget that he is a professor and that his book is derived from a Cambridge lecture series. Living up to the appellation, these ‘Gentlemen’ (a word that Quiller-Couch capitalises throughout) would have been drawn from the professional upper-middle classes. (The same is true of the students to whom Richards showed his unattributed poems.) University access only began to expand beyond the uppermost tiers of British society after R. A. Butler’s Education Act of 1944, which put free secondary school education in place for all students and raised the schoolleaving age to fifteen. The 1944 Act enlarged the pool of students who were able to study at grammar school and although this policy created new problems­– ­notably the gulf that it established between students who were successful in the 11+ and those who were not­– i­ t did allow a larger number of lower-middle-class students to be schooled to a high academic standard.6 For a further gifted, lucky, and determined few, university scholarships opened up the possibility of degree-level education and it was these students, more than any others, who benefitted from­– ­and in turn promoted­– ­the versions of literary studies being developed by Richards and by Leavis. Such students seized on close reading because it appeared to neutralise the class advantages enjoyed by their more materially and culturally secure contemporaries. So, while Quiller-Couch’s On the Art of Reading implies a reader whose only motive is individual pleasure (and who is likely to have

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a good deal of free time), Richards’s How to Read a Page addresses readers who are educated but lacking in class confidence. Moreover, his machine metaphor takes reading out of the drawing room and re-imagines it as a form of artisanal self-improvement.7 This constitutes another version of the faultline discussed at the end of my previous chapter, where I noted that the Leavises helped turn English into a serious discipline but, in doing so, exposed it to a twenty-firstcentury discourse of ‘outputs’, ‘outcomes’, and ‘objectives’. The limitations of this vision are revealed if we place the opening of Principles of Literary Criticism alongside a similar aphorism attributed to Neil Gaiman: ‘A book is a dream that you hold in your hand’ (Gaiman 2014).8 Where Richards uses a mechanical metaphor to emphasise a supposedly measurable outcome (thought), Gaiman uses a material object (the book) to offer an escape from materiality (into dream). Gaiman’s coinage highlights qualities­ – ­such as pleasure, escape, and a capacity for surprise­– ­that are missing from Richards’s depiction of reading as a skilled craft with a quantifiable product. It doubtless says something about my personality that I would rather inhabit Gaiman’s dream than Richards’s machine, but that does not mean that reading is always an escapist pastime. Some books are more conspicuously dream-like than others, and not all dreams are welcome­– a­ circumstance that is intrinsic to their power. Placing Gaiman’s dictum alongside Richards’s prompts the insight that both aphorisms are true, but neither is the whole truth. Philosophical, artistic, and personal breakthroughs often spring from contemplative states where one would be hard-pressed to say whether reason or fantasy is uppermost, and although the rhetoric surrounding ‘thought’ and ‘dream’ positions them as opposites, they can sometimes be the same thing. This complicates how we should think about the purpose and mechanics of close reading. In academic contexts, ‘close reading’ usually indicates an intricate parsing of linguistic and stylistic choices and an attempt to relate these features to textual meaning. However, this does not necessarily involve an expressive encounter between reader and text. Readers who make themselves minutely au fait with the technical components of a piece of writing might still feel out of kilter with its emotional or psychological currents. In such a scenario, a purely technical form of close reading does little to bring about a more meaningful sense of presence. Indeed, a narrowly academic performance of close reading may serve to keep other ways of experiencing the text at bay. In contradistinction to purely pedagogic versions of the practice, another form of close reading might more closely resemble a dreamscape. In this

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scenario, the reader could live in or alongside the text, experiencing it intimately while remaining ignorant or unconscious of its formal parameters. (An obvious parallel is Freud’s notion of ‘dream work’, which hints at the struggle and the contestations that underlie both the production of dreams and our attempts to understand them.) The episode from Jane Eyre that I mentioned in chapter 2, where Jane reads Bewick’s History of British Birds while hiding from her aunt and cousins, fictionalises this process. While keeping Richards and Gaiman in mind, I want to use my next section to ask what we can learn about close reading from Jane’s interaction with Bewick. In particular, I want to argue that her relation to the text helps her develop a viable sense of self, and this provides a model for how we might think about reading and civic identity. ‘Loving Bewick’ As its most famous line attests (‘Reader, I married him’), Jane Eyre is aware of its own status as an object to be read (Brontë 1985: 474); and, given the frequency with which the narrator addresses her imagined reader, it is striking that the novel begins with a vignette in which Jane herself is a reader. In chapter 2 I noted of this scene that although Jane professes not to care for Bewick’s words, she finds that ‘there were certain introductory pages that, child as I was, I could not pass quite as a blank’. Specifically, she cannot ignore the pages dealing with ‘the haunts of sea-fowl’ and with ‘the solitary rocks and promontories’ of which the birds are the only inhabitants. ‘Nor’, she continues, ‘could I pass unnoticed the suggestion of the bleak shores of Lapland, Siberia, Spitzbergen, Nova Zembla, Iceland, Greenland’ or ‘the  vast sweep of the Arctic Zone, and those forlorn regions of dreary space­– ­that reservoir of frost and snow, where firm fields of ice … surround the pole, and concentre the multiplied rigours of extreme cold’ (Brontë 1985: 40). Clearly, the ‘multiplied rigours of extreme cold’ are not confined to the polar regions of which Jane reads­– ­they also speak to her everyday life. The pages from Bewick that Jane cannot ‘pass quite as a blank’ are echoed by the ‘pale blank’ of mist and clouds on the other side of the ‘clear panes of glass’ which are ‘protecting, but not separating’ her from ‘the drear November day’ (Brontë 1985: 39–40). The correspondence between the two is strengthened by Jane’s habit of looking out of the window while turning the pages of her book. As a result of this action, Bewick’s Arctic descriptions are interleaved with Jane’s experience of the English winter. Thus, Bewick becomes a fulcrum through which Jane apprehends both the weather outside and her inner state of mind.

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Jane’s encounter with Bewick shows how a particular reader may gravitate towards a specific book with both being re-shaped in the process. Through Jane’s gaze, Bewick is turned from a taxonomical text into a symbolist, almost apocalyptic, work.9 Meanwhile, Bewick gives Jane a space in which to acknowledge and experience her loneliness. Emotions that would otherwise be intolerable, especially for a child, can be articulated through, and safely ‘held’, in the pages of the book. Crucially, Jane’s interaction with Bewick may be partially involuntary but it is not passive. As if giving a study of consciousness in operation, Brontë shows how Jane’s response to the introductory rubric shapes her internalisation of the illustrations that follow: Of these death-white realms I formed an idea of my own: shadowy, like all the half-comprehended notions that float dim through children’s brains, but strangely impressive. The words in these introductory pages connected themselves with the succeeding vignettes, and gave significance to the rock standing up alone in a sea of billow and spray; to the broken boat stranded on a desolate coast; to the cold and ghastly moon glancing through bars of cloud at a wreck just sinking. (Brontë 1985: 40)

Later, the watercolours that Jane paints at school will echo Bewick’s iconography but already, two pages into the novel, she is generating her own version of Bewick’s illustrations (‘Of these death-white realms I formed an idea of my own’). In William Carlos Williams’s terms, something is ‘found there’­– ­because Jane helps to bring it into being.10 This process­– ­by which Jane’s internalisation of verbal and visual cues ‘[gives] significance to’ the text that she is reading­– h ­ as a wider resonance than one character’s fictional autobiography. With its awareness of projections, incorporations, and compulsions, Brontë’s description provides a paradigm for thinking more generally about post-Romantic reading habits. A key insight is Brontë’s recognition that reading can produce ambivalence, blockages, and fear, as well as solace. Although Jane can generate meaning by putting verbal and visual signs in dialogue with each other, this capacity does not flow with machine-like rapidity. Her ability to produce ‘significance’ is frustrated by images that cannot immediately be construed, and by emotions that tax her young self. I cannot tell what sentiment haunted the quite solitary churchyard, with its inscribed headstone; its gate, its two trees, its low horizon, girdled by a broken wall, and its newly-risen crescent, attesting the hour of eventide. The two ships becalmed on a torpid sea, I believed to be marine phantoms. The fiend pinning down the thief’s pack behind him, I passed over quickly: it was an object of terror.

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So was the black, horned thing seated aloof on a rock, surveying a distant crowd surrounding a gallows. (Brontë 1985: 40)

As well as acknowledging the contingent and the provisional (‘I cannot tell what sentiment haunted …’, ‘The two ships becalmed on a torpid sea, I believed to be …’), Brontë hints at Jane’s need both to see and not to see. Jane passes over the fiend as ‘an object of terror’ but she looks at it long enough to recognise that it is ‘an object of terror’. Earlier, Jane had referred to the introductory pages that she could not ‘pass quite as a blank’; now, she ‘passe[s] over’ the fiend ‘quickly’. The rhythm of her reading­– ­rushing over some pages while lingering on others, sometimes against her will­– ­suggests the psychological complexity of her task. Unlike Richards’s loom, with its predictable range of movements and measurable outcome, Jane’s reading proceeds by fits and starts, catching on her unconscious. In Brontë’s telling, Bewick is more like Gaiman’s ‘dream that you hold in your hand’ but it is not a cosy or easily assimilated dream. On the contrary, the frequent recurrence of dreams and dream-like states in the novel, and the correspondence between these dreams and Jane’s response to Bewick, suggest that Jane’s reading of Bewick is itself a kind of ongoing ‘dream work’. Taking this thought further, Jane’s quasi-autobiography can be apprehended as a working-through of childhood trauma and a writing-out of the ways in which her psyche uses words and images to construct a liveable identity. But while Bewick can make her life tolerable, it cannot remove the circumstances of her oppression. (As becomes clear when her cousin physically assaults her with the very book that she is reading.) Perhaps, also, ­ r rather, there is a sense that Bewick unsettles as well as comforts Jane­– o the unsettling and the comforting are part of the same process. By stimulating a range of complex responses, Bewick helps Jane to discover and own the emotional vulnerability born of her role within an abusive family. But, as with the fiend that she sees but cannot allow herself to contemplate at length, it is not pleasant (although it is instructive) to be made to witness the spectacle of her own isolation. In this context, the ‘introductory pages’ of Bewick that Jane cannot ‘pass quite as a blank’ gain new relevance. Because this episode takes place at the very start of the novel, Bewick’s ‘introductory pages’ become analogous to the ‘introductory pages’ of Jane’s own autobiography. Viewed from this perspective, Jane’s life-story can be seen as a struggle to overlay her own words and experiences on the pages from Bewick that she cannot ‘pass quite as a blank’. In other words, through reading Bewick, Jane learns not to pass over her own life ‘as a blank’. I have dwelt on this episode at length because it demonstrates reading’s

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paradoxical ability to take us ‘out of’ ourselves while simultaneously giving us greater knowledge of ourselves; the self that Jane returns to is subtly different to the one that first took up the book. It seems reductive, given the complexity of this scene, to ask if Jane is thinking or dreaming. Surely, she is doing both, and a few other things besides, including (in a metaphorical sense) weaving. I want to pause, though, on the question of verbs and what they indicate because, despite their different centres of gravity, Williams’s ‘what is found there’, Richards’s ‘a book is a machine to think with’, and Gaiman’s ‘a book is a dream that you hold in your hand’ share a revealing tic: none of them mentions reading. Instead they offer us something you hold, something you think with, and something that you have to find. Although figurative language often involves such elisions, it is legitimate to ask why such omissions occur and what is being enacted when one concept is substituted for another. The gesture is particularly revealing in Richards’s case given that his phrase forms the first line of a book that seeks to establish rules for evaluating literary work. By replacing reading with thinking, Richards isolates one function of reading and evacuates its other possibilities, including the dreaming emphasised by Gaiman. Needless to say, this has repercussions for the kind of reading that is encouraged by Richards’s Principles of Literary Criticism. But I wonder if there is not also a wider hesitation­– ­shared by all three commentators­– ­whereby the verb ‘reading’ is recognised as an inadequate description of the activity that it attempts to connote. In different ways, each of the writers is indicating that books and poems can be powerful objects, and they seek to underline that power by omitting any reference to the verb that most often describes how those objects are internalised. ‘To read’ is a recognisable shorthand for a complex and multifaceted set of activities but perhaps the verb’s functional usefulness is in tension with the mysteriousness and inaccessibility implicit in Williams’s notion of something that ‘is found there’ but that cannot be easily identified. This dynamic is taken further in Paula Rego’s 2003 image ‘Loving Bewick’, which illustrates the opening scene of Jane Eyre without depicting either the object that is being read or the physical act of reading. In this regard, Rego’s image resembles a surreal riposte to the sort of pictorial reading scenes that I discussed in chapter 2. Where Duncan Grant uses posture to hint at Marjorie Strachey’s depression after reading Crime and Punishment, Rego shows one of Bewick’s birds breaking out of the book and interacting directly with Jane. This suggests that if a book is a powerful object, part of its force may lie, precisely, in its resistance to analysis. Instead of remaining behind to be parsed, the page that Jane is reading is

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obliterated by the force of her response to its contents. (And it is significant, here, that Rego’s title is ‘Loving Bewick’ not ‘Reading Bewick’.) Discussing the illustration (which forms part of a suite of Jane Eyre images by Rego), Marina Warner remarks that Jane kisses the bird’s beak with an air of ‘Eucharistic rapture’ and it is true that Jane’s pose mimics that of a communicant (Rego 2003: 9). But you could also argue that the creature is prising Jane’s jaws open and that she has no choice but to swallow whatever it is offering. This goes straight to the ambivalence that Brontë discovers in reading. On one level, Rego’s composition shows how words and images can master us; rather than being in control, Jane is subject to something that looks like oral rape. At the same time, however, even while the bird forces her body backwards, Jane embraces it with her right hand as if to guide its force in a direction that she can accept. Thus, Rego represents Jane’s compulsive reading both as a form of forced incorporation and as a scene of nurture. Here, Rego’s choice of bird­– ­a pelican­– ­is important. The creature is feeding Jane as if she were its offspring and, in Christian mythology, pelicans are associated with parental self-sacrifice. (It used to be believed that if food was lacking they would peck their breasts in order to feed their blood to their young.) Lacking a parent-figure from within her own family, Rego’s Jane is fostered by a book that becomes the thing that it represents. This chimes with Rego’s decision to age, shrink, and expand her central character, so that Jane appears, variously, as a middle-aged woman, as a doll, and as a figure of indeterminate age. In this particular illustration, depicting the ten-year-old Jane as if she were a much older woman dramatises the Romantic (and Freudian) notion that adult selfhood is founded in childhood experience. The presence of an older Jane in the scene also underscores reading’s role in creating Jane’s adult sense of self. By replacing the book-as-physical-object with a representation of its internal effect on the reader, Rego evokes a form of reading so ‘close’ that the text enters, and becomes part of, the reader’s body. (Hence the sacramental function noted by Warner.) This, though, is not the ‘close reading’ associated with Richards and William Empson. Where the latter would offer an intricate analysis of Bewick’s sentence structure and word choices, Rego highlights something that is both looser and more fundamental. ‘Looser’ in the sense that Jane’s relation to Bewick is not founded on detailed linguistic interrogation; ‘more fundamental’ in that Jane’s reading becomes, almost literally, a condition of living. Moreover, through its surrealism, Rego’s image emphasises reading’s magical, dream-like possibilities, rather than Richards’s mechanistic cogitations. Taking this thought further, it is possible to view certain academic versions of ‘close

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reading’ as a way of shutting off reading’s more destabilising possibilities by re-intellectualising the visceral exchange dramatised by Rego. In other words, where Rego shows the page being obliterated by the force of Jane’s identification with the text, Richards insists on the page. (Hence his 1948 publication, How to Read a Page.) This focus on the print and paper (or, these days, on the screen) can be seen as an attempt to control what is potentially most dangerous, invigorating, and scary about reading­ – ­namely its ability to transport the reader somewhere else (including somewhere that they do not want to be). In one sense, it seems right to insist on the primacy of the page: reading cannot occur without some form of text. But, equally, reading is more than just the mechanical deciphering of a series of marks. As the Bewick episode shows, reading becomes forceful when external signs (such as words and pictures) foster identifications and resistances that are played out internally, in the mind and imagination of the reader. Going back to Williams’s ‘what is found there’, the ‘there’ of the formulation cannot just be the print on the paper; it is also the emotional, physical, social, and psychological terrain of the reader. More precisely, ‘there’ indicates the point at which these planes come together, and this is a fluid location. Different readers may have a divergent sense of what matters in a text, and the same reader may respond to the same text in different ways according to the context in which they read it. This last point has particular relevance to the gap between academic and non-academic experiences of close reading, and it is an issue that produces a quandary for me. Although I am hesitant about Richards’s machine analogy, I share his notion that you can think ‘with’ books. This chapter, like my others, is organised around readings that attempt to uncover a text’s larger assumptions by excavating its linguistic details. But while I believe in, and practice, an academic version of close reading, I also feel an affinity to Jane Eyre that stretches back to when I first encountered Brontë’s novel in school at the age of fourteen. Like many readers before and after me, I became immersed in Jane Eyre almost as Jane becomes immersed in Bewick. It was the first Victorian novel I had encountered and although its vocabulary and social milieu were baffling, I found an unexpected satisfaction in identifying with Jane’s travails. Ironically, this unsophisticated but transformative immersion in a fiction led, ultimately, to a different kind of textual engagement. Jane Eyre was an exam text and, looking back, I can see that my teacher approached it via his own training in the post-Richards, post-Leavis university system. Something in this method appealed to me; I liked finding patterns in Brontë’s language. Fortunately­– ­for me, at least­– ­this was what

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the exam system was looking for, and I got good grades. And so I learnt to be a close reader in the academic as well as the experiential sense. These days, I wonder if my adolescent pleasure in textual analysis was as worthy and disinterested as it seemed at the time. Perhaps I liked the process of interpretation, not because it brought me closer to Jane Eyre, but because the education system rewarded my virtuosity. This makes me question, not just my personal trajectory in the years that followed, but also the disciplinary regime in which academic reading has been enfolded. It is in the nature of such regimes that those who are in the middle of them internalise them, often taking them as exemplary and inevitable. Elsewhere, there is more scepticism, as in Susan Sontag’s classic 1964 essay ‘Against Interpretation’, a text that looks into the academy from outside. The next section of this chapter cites Sontag’s intervention as part of a wider exploration of how academic versions of close reading evolved after Richards. In sketching this territory, I will argue that although Sontag represents herself as a foe to university literature departments, she is merely opposing a particular version of interpretation, and that her version of reading would have been welcomed by many of her academic contemporaries. As well as showing what ‘close reading’ turned into after Richards, I want to use this section of the chapter to think about the political undercurrents of academic reading theories. This will be especially important as a preparation for the final section of the chapter, which will analyse how these debates have affected the way literature and reading are taught in schools. Interpreting interpretation Sontag’s attack on hermeneutics has become celebrated partly because of its author’s unusual profile: Sontag came to prominence as a media-savvy intellectual who defined herself in relation to the European avant-garde rather than the North American university system. Her independence from academic structures gave weight to her attack on the academically trained ‘literary critics’ who have ‘understood it to be their task to translate the elements of the poem or play or novel or story into something else’, an activity that (in Sontag’s view) reveals interpretation as ‘the compliment that mediocrity pays to genius’ (Sontag 2009: 8–9). This aspect of Sontag’s essay has been a boon to subsequent commentators wishing to denigrate the critical humanities as a racket producing endless unnecessary textual readings. Paradoxically, however, Sontag’s essay echoes a complaint that had already been sounding through academia for twenty years, and although she emphasised European touchstones, her argument is foreshadowed by

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a quintessentially North American formation, New Criticism. Moreover, her essay continues to be invoked by university commentators who resist particular interpretive frameworks, especially Marxism and psychoanalysis (Marcus and Best 2009). This is ironic given that the essay is in tension with a good deal of Sontag’s later, openly political work. Although its title seems unequivocal, ‘Against Interpretation’ supports ‘interpretation in the broadest sense’, an activity that Sontag connects to Nietzsche’s dictum that ‘There are no facts, only interpretations’ (Sontag 2009: 5). She writes that in ‘some cultural contexts, interpretation is a liberating act. It is a means of revising, of transvaluing, of escaping the dead past’. However, these positives merely throw into relief the ‘reactionary, impertinent, cowardly, stifling’ form of interpretation that Sontag finds antipathetic (Sontag 2009: 7). In her view, ‘interpretations of art’ emit an ‘effusion’ like ‘the fumes of the automobile and of heavy industry which befoul the urban atmosphere’ (Sontag 2009: 5–7). She is especially exercised by a ‘modern style’ of interpretation which ‘excavates, and as it excavates, destroys; it digs “behind” the text, to find a sub-text which [it represents as] the true one’. She connects the latter approach to Marx and Freud whose ‘doctrines’ she views as ‘elaborate systems of hermeneutics, aggressive and impious theories of interpretation’ (Sontag 2009: 6–7). Although there is no reason to think that Sontag is deliberately echoing Richards, her reference to industrial fumes could almost be a parody of the opening metaphor of Principles of Literary Criticism. It is as if she is saying: ‘Look, this is what happens when books are turned into machines’. It is also striking that she calls the ‘doctrines’ of Marx and Freud ‘impious’, and that she decries literary studies for manifesting the ‘philistinism of interpretation’ (Sontag 2009: 8). The reference to philistinism hints at Matthew Arnold’s influence, but the religiosity of her language and her rejection of Marxism suggests a more immediate (though possibly unconscious) sympathy with New Criticism, the dominant reading practice of the 1950s US academy. Although they were not a consciously unified school, the ‘New Critics’ shared a formalist approach to literature that combined Richards’s emphasis on close reading with a conception of literature derived from the Christian poetics of T. S. Eliot.11 By focusing on what they took to be the internal structures of poetic language, commentators such as John Crowe Ransom and Cleanth Brooks headed off the idea that literary objects could be conditioned by ideological pressure, or that literary language and literary criticism might themselves be ideological concepts. Instead, the poem (and it almost always was a poem rather than a novel) was granted a mystical authority and viewed as a self-contained linguistic entity. This notion of

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textual inviolability is reflected in the titles of two of the most influential volumes of the time, Cleanth Brooks’s The Well Wrought Urn (1947) and W. K. Wimsatt’s The Verbal Icon (1954).12 Although she is not writing from a Christian perspective, Sontag believes, similarly, that art has a quasi-sacramental quality that should be met with respectful appreciation, not ideologically motivated interrogation. Her preference is for ‘a really accurate, sharp, loving description of the appearance of a work of art’ and for essays which ‘reveal the sensuous surface of art without mucking about in it’ (Sontag 2009: 13). She and the New Critics view interpretation (or rather, certain kinds of interpretation) as an assault on literary plenitude; they return constantly to the danger of literary works being ‘reduced’ to interpretive paraphrases. Insisting (and note, again, the religious language) on the ‘miracle’ of the poem, Brooks complains that ‘positivists have tended to explain the miracle away in a general process of reduction which hardly stops short of reducing the “poem” to the ink itself’ (Brooks 1971: vii). Wimsatt goes further, arguing that the critic’s role is to appreciate the literary text rather than question it. Anticipating Sontag’s repudiation of Marxist interpretations, New Criticism opposed materialist approaches to literature. Brooks complained, in 1947, that ‘the behaviour of the more popular critics, particularly through the war years’ had helped produce ‘the much advertised demise of the Humanities’ because they had turned criticism into ‘cultural anthropology’ (Brooks 1971: vi). This is tantamount to Brooks arguing that his contemporaries in ‘the Humanities’ should ignore a war that had ended only two years previously in which over fifty million people had died, and that they should instead focus solely on ‘what the poem says as a poem’ (Brooks 1971: vii)­– ­as if this were something that could easily be determined. Moreover, even though the New Critics rejected socio-historical approaches, they pursued an equally ideological programme of their own, but because this was a Christian agenda, they were able to represent it as naturalised and inevitable. For example, Wimsatt claims that King Lear is a ‘greater’ play than Antony and Cleopatra because the latter’s ‘poetic values’ are ‘strictly dependent’ on ‘immoral acts’ such as ‘suicide and … the whole glorified story of passion’ (Wimsatt 1962: 97); consequently, ‘the greatest poetry will be morally right’ (Wimsatt 1962: 100). Paradoxically, the work of Brooks and Wimsatt could itself be used as evidence that history informs the production of meaning. New Criticism flourished during the Cold War; from the late 1940s onwards, US civil society was gripped by state-sponsored anti-Communist hysteria. This was the period of McCarthyism, blacklisting, and the House Committee

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on Un-American Activities (HUAC). In this context, New Criticism’s preference for formalist appreciation over material politics could be seen as institutional self-preservation. A more cynical response would say that New Criticism was itself an indirect instrument of Cold War propaganda. This can be seen both in its resistance to sociological approaches to literature and in its espousal of Eliot’s conservative Christianity. When Wimsatt argues (in a chapter entitled ‘Poetry and Christian Thinking’) that poetry has a transcendental quality that goes beyond human knowledge, he is not only disallowing non-religious constructions of literature, he is also implicitly upholding a white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant academic establishment in which racism and anti-Semitism were rife.13 Moreover, by dismantling rival forms of analysis, this approach deprived students of frameworks that might have helped them challenge the injustices of the status quo. Recasting this debate in the terms with which I began this chapter, Sontag and the New Critics insist that the ‘what is found there’ of literature should not include political analysis; in their view, poems are diminished by reading them in such terms. However, the poem from which this phrase is taken, William Carlos Williams’s ‘Asphodel, That Greeny Flower’, is itself a product of the historical moment that gave rise to New Criticism, but it deals with that time very differently. Published in 1955, the work examines eroticism, death, and creativity via reflections on the atomic bomb, Juan Perón’s Argentina, witch hunts from Salem onwards, and the 1953 execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for espionage. The poem is illuminated by Williams’s own entanglement with McCarthyism, and by his lifetime of work as a doctor in the New Jersey borough of Rutherford.14 These contexts should remind us that ‘what is found there’ is only one part of Williams’s formulation: the other half of his phrase hints at the things that make people ‘die miserably’, and these include poverty, social injustice, and systemic power differences. To assert the transcendence of ‘what is found there’ without remembering differentials based on class, gender, and ethnicity is to assume that everyone has equal access to language, culture, and education. But these are exactly the insights that New Criticism would outlaw, replacing them with a narrowly formalist approach. (It is also striking that although Williams writes that it would be difficult to get ‘the news’ from a poem, he says this in a poem which contains a great deal of news: this ought to tell us something about poetry’s right to concern itself with the everyday as well as the transcendent.) The tension between these different modes is illuminating. Not only is there is a division between academic and non-academic forms of close reading, the academic versions are themselves splintered. Indeed, when

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Sontag’s essay appeared in 1964, her so-called ‘modern style of interpretation’ was on the cusp of being derailed by deconstruction. Under the influence of French linguistic philosophy, critical theory came to see both interpretation and the text itself as provisional. Rather than the imposition of a ‘true’ interpretation, meanings became multiple, and the ‘truth’ was reconceptualised as a perpetually deferred chimera. But although deconstruction is sometimes represented as a complete rupture with previous traditions, one way of understanding it would be to see it as an ultra-attentive form of close reading­– a­ practice that tries to enter the very grain of language.15 Instead of taking linguistic signs on their own terms, deconstruction is alive to the instability and unreliability of human discourse; it attends to the ways in which words can conceal and distort or can contain multiple and contradictory meanings. In pursuit of these slippages, it uses philosophical tools that were either unavailable to earlier commentators or were ignored by them. By attending to how verbal minutiae disclose or enact inconsistencies, gaps, and contradictions, deconstructive readings undermine the very notion of authorship. This move places responsibility, as well as power, on the shoulders of the reader since they are the one to construe the text through their imaginative interaction with it. This has the further effect of allowing critical attention to be focused on acts of reading, as well as on the literary works that provoke such readings. Many of the most influential deconstructive writings are ones that examine aporia in previous accounts of given texts, or that use the history of a text’s reception to reflect on reading itself.16 Gestural versions of deconstruction can sometimes seem like another version of formalism, one that prizes undecidability rather than the closure favoured by the New Critics, but the strongest deconstructive interventions are as much concerned with philosophy as they are with literary analysis; by considering the hesitations and blockages of reading, as well as its insights, they produce new ways of thinking about epistemology and ontology. This has, in turn, recalibrated debates about interpretation. Of particular importance, for my argument about reading, education, and citizenship, is the insight that reading cannot be trusted, that it will always be subject to moments of blindness or blockage. This last point problematises, but not does not disallow, interpretations that pursue an explicitly ideological agenda. By their nature, deconstructive readings tend to work against master narratives, including the Marxism decried by Sontag. But deconstruction has also helped produce a more nuanced way of thinking about how texts (and the interpretation of texts) might embody or act out points of ideological conflict. Like close reading more generally, deconstruction need not be apolitical and, in the years

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since Sontag’s essay, the academic humanities have fostered hybrid critical formations that combine social or political critique with deconstruction’s detailed and sophisticated grasp of textuality. Despite their different centres of gravity, cultural studies, new historicism, cultural materialism, feminism, black studies, post-colonial theory, and queer criticism all share a preoccupation with what is read and how it is read. The result is a critical terrain that uses close reading but that no longer naturalises it or takes it as an unchanging universal. Unsurprisingly, the version of close reading taught in British schools is not exactly open to deconstructive undecidability, or even to creative uncertainty. This is unfortunate because English, at its best, explores how language constructs the texture of our lives, including our sense of what it means to be human, and deconstruction could provide a useful entry into discussions of twenty-first-century technology, personal disaffection, and social fragmentation. Without a recognition that reading occurs in an ever-changing present, and that textuality is itself subject to change, literary study will be reduced to a branch of the heritage industry; this is why English, as a university discipline, needs to keep asking, proactively, what it means to be a reader in the twenty-first century. This question is even more pressing at primary and secondary school level because, without it, teachers are denied one of the main ways in which they might justify their discipline to sceptical students. Sadly, however, UK school children are offered no opportunity to reflect on their own status as readers, and nor are they allowed simply to read for their own enjoyment. In the next, and final, section of this chapter I want to explore the related questions of how literary reading is taught under the National Curriculum and how the assessment regime that followed the introduction of school league tables in 1992 has affected young readers. In discussing this culture of testing, I will argue that successive governments have encouraged a blinkered attitude to the humanities with the result that reading and literature are taught in ways that refuse the wider possibilities created by academic research. Instead of being allowed to embrace the implications of critical theory (which many of them will have studied at university), teachers are forced to inhabit, and reproduce, an increasingly technocratic and reductive version of ‘close reading’.17 Pulverising machines There are innumerable ways in which the British education system advantages certain learners at the expense of others, but I am focusing on the

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National Curriculum because it dictates how reading is taught in the majority of schools, and because it is a bureaucratic manifestation of the double standards that successive governments­– ­both Labour and Tory­– ­have brought to the relationship between education and class. The crucial point, here, is that the National Curriculum is only compulsory in local-authoritymaintained schools, whereas public schools, grammar schools, academies, and so-called ‘free schools’ are trusted to educate their pupils on their own terms rather than via a government-imposed grid. By forcing local authority schools to adopt (and subsequently abandon) measures such as the literacy hour, and by forbidding them to deviate from centrally determined targets and methods, post-National Curriculum education policy has inflicted a Gradgrind-like literalism and refusal of nuance on one set of students and educators while allowing their contemporaries elsewhere in the education system to float free from overt state interference.18 There is, in both senses, no ‘play’ in the National Curriculum­– n ­ o opportunity for experiment or pleasure. Although pupils in fee-paying schools are also subject to a competitive and potentially damaging environment, they inhabit a culture in which teachers and students are able to explore around the exam syllabus, and where there are resources for non-curricular workshops, theatre visits, lectures by visiting writers, and so on; although they sit the same exams as state-sector students, they come to them by a more generous route. The result is a kind of privatisation of play, a scenario in which educational pleasure is more possible outside of the state sector than inside it. This disjunction matters because from the last decade of the twentieth century onwards, playfulness has been further undermined by a shift of focus, in state education, from learning to examining. School league tables have generated a complex assessment regime that previously did not need to exist, in which students as young as four have been tested in English schools.19 The fact that the tables rank schools, not students, is of little consolation to the pupils who have to take the tests, especially since their prospects will be affected by their school’s results. The emphasis on exams (and the schools’ dependence on good results) has produced a culture of micro-management in which free time, and the individual discoveries which that time makes possible, have become objects of suspicion. Teachers in the state sector frequently point out that pre-determined and arbitrarily shifting assessment goals prevent them from responding flexibly or spontaneously to the needs of their pupils (Read: 2006). Needless to say, one of the first casualties of this regime is the idea that students might be allowed to read for pleasure. Ironically, given the faith that education ministers place on exams,

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shrinking resources mean that the exams by which students are measured­ – ­GCSEs and A-levels­– ­are increasingly unreliable as evidence of anything other than the students’ ability to internalise a particular exam regime. Student work is assessed via a tick-box grid in which answers will be marked down or disqualified if they do not conform to be a preconceived map of the subject. In English, this produces a ‘teaching-to-the-test’ in which literary works are not so much ‘read’ as processed. Instead of conceiving of the relationship between the reader and the text in fluid and holistic ways, this model of reading treats language as an abstraction that can be removed from the circumstances in which the text is being read. In place of an enabling and open-ended immersion in a text, or the self-reflexive inquiries into culture and identity promoted by the academic humanities, close reading is here reduced to a mechanistic ‘performance’ of analysis in which going though pre-scripted motions takes the place of thought. Indeed, ‘thinking’­– ­in the sense of an active and imaginative engagement with language­– ­is actively discouraged by a grading system that punishes originality.20 This constriction was already implicit in a policy document on literacy from the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA), the quango that oversaw teaching standards in English and Northern Irish schools between 1997 and 2008. The QCA piece splits reading into two functions, ‘Reading for Meaning’ and ‘The Author’s Craft’. The first of these asks students to ‘identify the purposes of texts, analysing and evaluating how writers structure and organise ideas to shape meaning for particular audiences and readers’ while the second includes the demand that they ‘analyse and evaluate the impact of combining words, images and sounds in media, moving-image and multimodal texts’. Within this pincer movement, reading is reduced to technical analysis and textual interpretation. The author’s ‘meaning’ and ‘craft’ are privileged over the reader’s role in forming the text, and there is no allowance for ambiguity, for play, or for pleasure.21 When the Office of Exam Qualifications and Exam Regulation (Ofqual) took over the QCA’s regulatory role in 2008, the reading agenda remained the same: a 2016 post on the group’s blog site alerted users to a forthcoming test that would take a snapshot of the reading skills of GCSE students. The students would be given extracts from ‘high-quality, challenging texts’ and asked ‘five or six’ questions, some of which would carry ‘one or two marks’ and would involve a short answer or a multiple-choice response. These would ‘check for understanding of information, plot or key details in the text, or relate to the writer’s methods or use of language and structure’. There would also be a ‘6-mark question and a 10-mark

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question where longer, more in-depth responses need to be given’; as well as focusing on ‘analysis and evaluation of particular aspects of the text’, these questions would require students to ‘draw comparisons between the texts’ (Leslie 2016). Here, Richards’s commitment to close reading has been turned into a vacuous instrumentalism in which a reader’s experience of a text is reduced, literally, to ticking a box. Worse, English GCSE and A-level exams manifest the same tics as these informal tests. Their shared characteristics include an obsession with compare-and-contrast exercises, an over-dependence on literary extracts as proxies for the texts from which they are taken, and a reductive grading system that attempts to justify itself through spuriously specific mark allocations. The reliance on extracts also highlights one of the most-criticised aspects of recent practice in primary education, namely the tendency for books to be read, not in their entirety, but as chopped-up excerpts illustrating points of grammar or style. This does not just prevent children from immersing themselves in fiction; it is an act of violence against the very idea of readerly pleasure (Rosen, M. 2005). The ability to interpret written texts is an important life skill, all the more so in an era of ‘fake news’, but if the aim is to make lifelong readers out of children, it would be politic to emphasise pleasure over textual interpretation and grammatical analysis, especially in the earlier stages of school. The more that children read, the more likely it is that they will continue to read, and that they will acquire the analytical skills that reading can encourage.22 However, instead of creating an environment in which reading is allowed to be its own justification, Westminster policies have freighted reading with so much critical baggage that children have been turned away from the very activity that these policies claim to support. Indeed, successive education secretaries have been so antagonistic to the notion of individual reading pleasure that one begins to wonder if their undisclosed aim is stop children from ever opening a book after they leave school. A case in point is the literacy hour introduced by David Blunkett in 1998, which was summarily ended by another Labour minister, Ed Balls, after eleven years during which literacy levels failed to rise, a circumstance that many educators blamed on the inflexibility of the system that they were forced to administer.23 The children’s author Michael Rosen has compared such initiatives to cults that gain the eye of policy-makers, only to be displaced by the next hot idea (Rosen, M. 2016). As Rosen suggests, the problem is not just with individual policies, it is also with a refusal of sustained thinking; each new secretary of state seems obliged to obliterate what has gone before, thus producing a systemic blindness in which no one is allowed to learn from previous mistakes. (A painful irony in the context

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of education.) It also makes it harder for any organisation or individual to be held responsible for the ways in which a nation’s children are being failed. Instead, policy fiascos are palmed off onto teachers, students, and schools­– ­thus compounding the underlying problem. Analysing German education in ways that seem prophetic of how state schooling would later develop through much of Europe and Asia, the poet Hans Magnus Enzensberger­– ­describing the last decades of the twentieth century­– ­identified ‘a horde of bureaucrats and curriculum researchers who are extraordinarily difficult to pin down’ and whose ‘true intentions are obscure’ (Enzensberger 1992: 13). According to Enzensberger, literature ‘owes its charm … to the fact that everyone is free to ignore it’. Everyone, that is, except ‘the minors among our fellow citizens’ who are ‘compelled to read poems endlessly and, what is even more shocking, to interpret poems in which, in most cases, they have displayed no interest whatsoever’ (Enzensberger 1992: 12). Critical fashions come and go, but ‘as long as the technocratic function of this work remains constant, the contents and methods can be exchanged without any difficulty’. Moreover, ‘behind the ritual of interpretation there always stands another, that of examination, and of an examination that determines the life of schoolgirls and schoolboys, since it regulates access to the universities, and so to many professions’. But since ‘the essential content of an examination is still always the examination itself’, the ‘object of their class essay is not the poem at all’ (Enzensberger 1992: 14); instead, what matters is the pupil’s ability to reproduce an authorised form of words. In opposition to this technocratic regime, Enzensberger asserts the reader’s right ‘to skip whole passages, to read sentences against the grain, to misunderstand them, to reshape them, to … embroider them with every possible association, to draw conclusions from the text of which the text knows nothing, to be annoyed at it, to be happy because of it, to forget it, to plagiarize it’ (Enzensberger 1992: 11). As this suggests, Enzensberger views education as the ground on which a battle is being fought between rival conceptions of reading and citizenship. Under one dispensation, reading is a source of personal enjoyment and/­or empowerment, while the other uses reading as a tool with which to assert authority at the expense of individual identity. And exams are the enforcers of this authoritarian version of reading. Analysing the pre-National Curriculum British system, Alan Sinfield has pointed to the ways in which exam questions on Shakespeare are phrased in such a way as to force students to internalise a version of culture in which they themselves may not be represented. As well as encouraging a quiescent attitude to dominant social structures, the style

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of questioning disadvantages students who have not already been socialised into the worldview that the examiners are privileging. This ideological shaping sets the majority of students up to fail­– ­which in turn makes them available for capitalist exploitation (Sinfield 1985). Over thirty years later, this dynamic is still at work, but the surrounding social context is even more precarious than it was when Sinfield’s essay was published, and the questions that are asked of students are even less empowering.24 The coercions noted by Sinfield in 1985 mesh with the forms of citizenship that would soon after be imagined by the National Curriculum. As numerous commentators have pointed out, the contents of the National Curriculum are subject to ideological contestation, especially in relation to subjects such as English and History, in which national prestige is deemed to be at stake. The same force is conspicuous in citizenship lessons, which are compulsory under the National Curriculum. One of the official requirements is that such lessons should instruct students in ‘the precious liberties enjoyed by citizens of the United Kingdom’ (National Curriculum 2014). Nothing is said about the ways in which states might fail their citizens. It is not that these ‘precious liberties’ do not exist, it is that they are not the whole story, and to claim that they are is a falsification of history.25 Reading is central to this dynamic because, from its inception, the National Curriculum envisaged reading as a key element of citizenship lessons.26 Clearly, much depends on the forms of citizenship that are being envisaged in such initiatives. Reading can help children and young people develop a sense of personal agency and civic responsibility. However, it can also be used to cow learners into abjection and submission, dooming them to a sense of inferiority, irrelevance, invisibility, and powerlessness. Here, the National Curriculum forms an unholy alliance with school league tables and the tests that serve them. The more that tests are made into the raison d’être of education, the more they fail the very students that they are meant to test. Students who are seen to ‘fail’ will not only get a lower grade than they might have achieved under a different educational model, they will also be made to feel that their subjectivity is less valid than those of their peers who have succeeded. In this set-up, a test-centred version of education does not empower students, it renders them abject, and their choices and agency are reduced. Although this does not irrevocably lock pupils into their existing identities, it does work against the likelihood of class transition, let alone any larger re-imagining of class structures. In the years since Sinfield’s and Enzensberger’s essays, British education has become more coercive, less playful, and more destructive to the students forced to undergo it. Paradoxically, in the same period, the English

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school syllabus has become crushingly banal. Although students are put under pressure to excel, they are asked to do so via tasks that offer little in the way of individual growth or increased social understanding. Look, for instance, at how Jane Eyre is imagined in the current AQA and OCR exam board syllabuses.27 It might seem brave to ask teenagers to read a text that satirises authoritarian teaching structures and that acknowledges that books can be used against their readers (as when John Reed hurls Bewick at Jane), but no such complexities are traceable within the AQA’s GCSE syllabus. Instead, the exam board converts literary texts into ‘themes’ and ‘styles’ that are disconnected from the possibility of individual or imaginative responses. Thus, the 2017 exam paper uses twenty-five lines of Mr Brocklehurst’s public attack on Jane as a preface to the following words: ‘Starting with this extract, explore how far Brontë presents Jane as a victim of the cruelty of others’. Candidates are told that they should ‘write about how Brontë presents Jane as a victim in this extract’ and ‘how far Brontë presents Jane as a victim of cruelty in the novel as a whole’ (AQA 2017: 13). A 2014 specimen paper on the AQA website follows the same format. After thirty lines of Rochester and Jane’s conversation about Miss Ingram, students are asked: ‘Starting with this extract, how does Brontë present Jane as a strong female character?’ They are then told to ‘write about how Brontë presents Jane in this extract’ and ‘how Brontë presents Jane as a strong female character in the novel as a whole’ (AQA Specimen 2014: 13). Year after year, every question in this part of the exam employs the same structure, irrespective of the text under consideration. How does Dickens present Scrooge in this extract; how does he present Scrooge in the novel as a whole? How does Shakespeare present Shylock in this extract; how does he present Shylock in the play as a whole? Jane may be a victim one year and a strong woman the next but, as far as the examiners are concerned, these are identical fates. They exist only as prompts for textual description, and there is no recognition that the opposition between ‘victim’ and ‘strong woman’ might have anything more than abstract relevance to the young people taking the exam. The deadening blandness of this formula means that nothing of substance is allowed to be at stake in the question, and even gifted candidates would find it hard to say anything interesting or original in response to it. This lack of edge, and the accompanying air of repetition and rhetorical emptiness, backs up Enzensberger’s argument that the ostensible content of an exam question bears no relation to its larger function, which is to provide a pretext for dividing one group of students from another. It is also telling that these exams place so much emphasis on how

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characters and topics are ‘presented’ by writers. In this strikingly oldfashioned view of authorship, writers are imagined as setting out discrete ‘themes’ for their readers to absorb, and the pupil’s role is restricted to re-describing things that have supposedly been laid out by the writer. Because it denies the reader’s role in forming meaning, this style of question removes the student’s identity from the act of reading and punishes them if they raise preoccupations that have not been ratified in advance by the examiners. Students are given templates that reward them for identifying technical aspects of language (metaphor, onomatopoeia, and so on) but these leave little room for thinking about reading’s psychological complexity or its ability to produce ambivalence and unease. The result is an empty performance of ‘close reading’­– a­ parody, almost, in which the reader’s subjectivity is displaced by a mechanistic identification of literary tropes. As a result, students are deprived of an opportunity to ‘read themselves’­– t­ hat is, to become their own person, as Jane does when she immerses herself in Bewick. Tellingly, this also works against a candidate’s ability to reflect upon their relation to an education system that has tested them almost from infancy. One sign of the ideological coerciveness of these exams is that, by assuming a complete endorsement of Brontë’s heroine and the novel in which she appears, they do not allow candidates to form themselves in opposition to Jane. This tendency was already apparent in Sinfield’s account of Shakespeare and education, but SATs, GCSEs and A-levels are now supported (if that is the word) by an extensive body of study materials that further reinforce a default normativity. (In an exam-obsessed world, these workbooks are, of course, a cash cow for their publishers.) Take the CGP text book accompanying the AQA GCSE syllabus, which includes a specimen question asking how Rochester changes over the course of the novel. The subsequent model answer describes how Rochester’s ‘newfound respect for and worship of God’ is part of a ‘progression of character’ in which he is able to ‘re-evaluate his past behaviour and atone for his mistakes’. As a result, ‘by the end of the novel, Rochester has overcome his flaws, and the reader sees that he is now worthy of marrying Jane. This makes the novel’s resolution satisfying for the reader, who sees that the characters have received the outcome that they deserve’ (Bowen et al. 2017: 123). On one level this is an innocuous, if unimaginative, account of Rochester’s part in the novel. But note how bullying those last sentences are, with their assumption that ‘the reader’ will automatically find the book’s ending ‘satisfying’. As well as disallowing a more sceptical response to Jane and Rochester’s relationship, this phrasing constructs readership as

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a homogeneous and unified entity. A syllabus that was genuinely interested in empowerment would want to tell students that they are part of a diverse reading community and that they are correspondingly free to experience their set texts in whatever way they like. Here, however, they are told that the novel’s ending is universally accepted as a complete resolution of what has gone before. There is no possibility of an against-the-grain reading, or even a raised eyebrow at the heroine’s union to a man who married his first wife for money before incarcerating her in his attic. Full of ‘newfound virtue’, Rochester ‘has come to understand what is truly valuable in life’ (Bowen et al. 2017: 123), and that is all there is to be said on the matter. It may seem as if I am using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. What does it matter what a GCSE textbook says about a nineteenth-century novel? But it does matter, and it matters precisely because infinitely more people will read the textbook than will ever read the latest, impeccably footnoted scholarly article on gender roles in Brontë’s fiction. It also matters that the CGP book contains factual inaccuracies and misleading statements about the texts that it purports to explain.28 Ultimately, however, the fault is not with the study aid, it is with the culture that produces it, and the greater issue is not how a given text is taught, but what the teaching does to the students who have to undergo it. This damage takes several forms; some problems are specific to individual subjects, while others spring from how the National Curriculum has been implemented and imagined.29 With regard to English, the fundamental problem is that learners are forced to repress their own agency as readers. Yes, they are shown how to spot and name parts of speech, and they become adept in listing examples of how authors ‘present’ themes in their books. But these are activities that a computer could perform; they are not ‘reading’ in the full sense of that word. In place of a potentially transformative experience teenagers are locked into forms of textual analysis that rob them of a sense of their own participation in language, as both readers and writers. This in turn has implications for what sort of adults the education system will permit them to become. If it is to mean anything, citizenship must include the possibility of being a dissident­– ­including being a dissident reader. But instead of allowing this outcome, students are required to stay within a narrow boundary of selfhood in which success is defined by the ability to reproduce a predetermined form of words. This instrumentalist approach compromises the imagination and the emotional lives of the very people (the young, the poor, the marginalised) who have most to gain from reading and fewest ways of encountering it outside of school. (This last point is particularly important, given the economic pressures under which many students learn.) But as well

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as defeating the larger purpose of education­– ­helping us to be human­– ­the current exam-based system works against its own stated rationale, which is to improve national productivity by raising teaching standards. Irrespective of how many students gain the highest grades, learners who have been taught a form of rote response are unlikely to be entrepreneurs, problem solvers, or creative thinkers. Instead, an ever-rising number of them will be depressed, will lack self-worth, and will drop out of education before their potential has any chance of being realised. As I write, a revised, exam-heavy version of GCSEs is reported to be so stressful that children have soiled themselves during assessment exercises (Weale 2018). Is this a scenario that is likely to produce healthy, happy, productive citizens? To finish this chapter, I want to raise a question about how English, as a subject, is imagined within this system. Putting it bluntly, if the National Curriculum can turn reading into a form of neo-liberal torture, is there something in the discourse surrounding literature that makes it vulnerable to such use? By definition, literary discourse is structured around cultural gate-keeping: notions of ‘literariness’ are used to police whether certain kinds of writing are granted authority and legitimation. But literariness is also tainted by social gate-keeping. For one thing, literary knowledge is greatly advanced by educational privilege; for another, literary canons tend to uphold certain linguistic registers over others, with the result that certain accents and sub-cultural genres are less likely to be accepted than others. (And when they are incorporated into the exam syllabus, it is in a gestural way.) Also, a reader’s ease within language is conditioned by whether they grew up in a home with books, whether they had easy access to a local library, and whether their parents or guardians had the time (and confidence) to read to them. These are class issues, and they are also connected to political decisions about local government funding, the welfare state, and who and what is valued within society. Gate-keeping, in other words, goes far beyond which books are allowed into the canon; it is also a question of who is able to become a reader. This aspect of the literary­– ­its propensity to be used as an instrument of social division­– ­is accentuated by the way in which English is imagined within the school curriculum. To return to the terms with which I began this chapter, the pedagogic regime that holds sway in English schools pursues a very narrow version of ‘what is found there’, and it uses that narrowness as a tool for making decisions about the abilities of students, rather than as a way of helping those students to enjoy language. Assessment has its place in education­– I­ would not like to be operated on by a surgeon whose skills had not been tested in advance­– ­but there is no virtue in turning reading

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into an obstacle course, especially one in which economically privileged children will always be at an advantage. Indeed, the current system works to confirm such advantages, rather than to unpick them. Against this background, I find myself drawn to Richards’s claim that ‘It is the quality of the reading we give [to literary works] that matters, not the correctness with which we classify them’ (Richards 1964: 349). Unfortunately, however, the bulk of Richards’s work remains committed to the principle of literary judgement, and he takes it for granted that certain linguistic registers are superior to others. How to Read a Page argues that, while ‘anything that is worth studying should be read as slowly as it will let you’, it is ‘absurd to read everything­– ­poetry, prose, pulp­– ­alike’ (Richards 1961: 42; emphasis in the original). Tellingly, Richards makes this statement in a chapter that provides an intellectual rationale for the compare-and-contrast exercises that continue to condition how literature is examined in schools. He claims that readers learn to distinguish quality when they compare different kinds of writing, but by labelling some writing as ‘pulp’ Richards short-circuits the very act of comparison that he is recommending; rather than being open-ended and exploratory, the exercise becomes the ratification of a previously held judgement. As well as ignoring the possibility that reading a ‘pulp’ text might itself be transformative, this approach reduces reading’s scope by turning it into a process through which readers are encouraged to internalise a particular version of linguistic ‘value’ without questioning how that ‘value’ has been reached. (His phrasing also implies a hierarchy between poetry and prose.) This moment reveals the paradox that animates Richards’s work. Though he celebrates reading as a vitally important cultural act, his ultimate focus is on the literary object, rather than on reading itself. And if we trace Richards’s influence through the schools of criticism that he helped to produce, we see that academic discourse has often reduced reading to an ancillary function: reading becomes the means by which we approach ‘the literary’ rather than a process that is its own justification. As a consequence, post-Richards criticism has had little time for the disturbing, transformative effects that reading can unleash. Indeed, literary criticism’s recourse to value judgements and over-determined comparisons often seems like an attempt to put a lid on the alternative realities that might be uncovered by a more open-ended conception of reading. In response to this impasse, Enzensberger’s celebration of the rights of readers seems more relevant than ever. By acknowledging the reader’s capacity to be unruly, Enzensberger allows reading its full force: unlike Richards, he recognises that transformation comes, not from the literary object, but from the

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complex identifications and transferences mobilised by reading. ‘What is found there’ turns out to be a process, not an artefact. Enzensberger’s attack on technocratic exam systems comes in an essay bearing the sardonic title, ‘A Modest Proposal for the Protection of Young People from the Products of Poetry’. The reference is to Jonathan Swift’s ‘A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People from being a Burthen to Their Parents or Country’, which recommended that the starving Irish should sell their children as food for the rich. Contemplating the pedagogic regime that holds sway in English schools, I feel moved to make some modest proposals of my own. First, let’s abandon laboured critical exercises that only serve to ratify a pre-existing notion of ‘literary’ style. Second, let’s abandon any attempt to regulate or examine how and what young people read. Instead, let’s just get them reading. And instead of making them study how themes and characters are ‘presented’, encourage them to talk to each other about anything that they, personally, have enjoyed reading. If they want to know more, help them to think about how cultural forms relate to the societies that produce them­– ­in particular, help them to think about their own relation to language and society. Stop testing students’ ability to identify grammatical ‘rules’; instead, help them to use written and spoken language in confident and creative ways.30 Let’s foster an environment where young people want to read, and where they do not feel belittled for reading the ‘wrong’ thing or for responding in the ‘wrong’ way. And if they really don’t want to read, then help them do something else that will bring them pleasure and make them feel fulfilled. Tell them that they are more than just data on a league table. Give them power through language. Trust them to use it. Notes   1 One might also ask if there is anything wrong with reading something in order to ‘get the news’ from it. In a post-truth era, getting ‘the news’ might itself be a matter of life and death.   2 For an illuminating take on the ‘closeness’ of close reading, see Armstrong 1995, which is a response to Barrell 1988; I take this subject up myself in chapter 5’s discussion of ‘loose’ reading. Franco Moretti’s ‘distant reading’ (Moretti 2013) and the ‘surface reading’ floated by Sharon Marcus and Stephen Best (Marcus and Best 2009) are also in dialogue with ‘close reading’. I discuss Moretti in the final section of this book. Marcus and Best’s coinage comes from their special issue of Representations on the subject of ‘The Way We Read Now’; the essays in the collection come from a variety of positions, but the editorial framing argues against ‘symptomatic’ reading (as practised, in particular, by Marxist

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and psychoanalytic critics) and in favour of an attention to the formal qualities of literature. As the editors acknowledge, this has a precedent in Susan Sontag’s Against Interpretation, which I discuss below; rather than addressing Marcus and Best in detail, I will simply observe that I take a different view of literary commentary­– ­as will become clear in my reading of Sontag.   3 On the mechanisation of daily life, there is a striking correspondence between Richards’s ‘A book is a machine to think with’ and Le Corbusier’s dictum of the same period, ‘A house is a machine for living in’ (‘Une maison est une machineà-habiter’) from Le Corbusier’s 1927 collection Vers Une Architecture.  4 To take just one of Richards’s metaphors, books were not the only things that pulled people ‘hither and thither’ across Europe in the years from 1933 onwards; there were also the literal trains that serviced the Holocaust. Although Richards does not make an explicit connection between genocide and Nazi propaganda, his desire to re-write his opening metaphor is part of a recurring pastoral nostalgia in which he questions his initial embrace of booksas-machines. In a similar vein, he puns that his book How to Read a Page could be called ‘How to reap a page’ (Richards 1961: 9; emphasis in the original); the context encourages us to take this as a reference to hand-reaping rather than the combine harvester from which he explicitly distances himself. In the twentyfirst century, debates about Artificial Intelligence have given yet another spin on Richards’s metaphor.   5 I return to this in chapter 5.   6 As numerous mid-century novels and memoirs attest, the 1944 Education Act suddenly gave lower-middle-class provincial life a purchase in the establishment. However, for obvious reasons, these benefits were much less available to working-class children: oral histories of the time are full of stories of children who passed the 11+ but were prevented from taking up their place either because they were needed as wage earners or because their families could not afford the accoutrements of grammar school. For a fascinating retrospect of this period from someone who was himself a grammar school boy, see Ellis 2013.   7 An analogous book from outside academia is Arnold Bennett’s Literary Taste: How to Form It (1909) which advises readers what to collect in order to amass a representative library of English Literature; significantly, Bennett came from a non-literary, lower-middle-class provincial family.   8 Gaiman tweeted the phrase on 18 September 2014, and although it is hard to trace its exact provenance, it does seem to have been coined by Gaiman himself.   9 Although Bewick’s History of British Birds contains some ghoulish vignettes, the bulk of the engravings are naturalistic representations of birds in their normal habitats; in many ways the book is a classic enlightenment work. 10 Jane’s watercolours include one where a ‘cormorant, dark and large’ holds a gold bracelet plucked from a drowned woman’s corpse; another shows ‘the pinnacle of an iceberg piercing a polar winter sky’ with the northern lights in the

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background. When Rochester asks where she found the ‘copies’ for the pieces, Jane replies ‘Out of my head’ (Brontë 1985: 156); the opening pages show that they get there via Bewick. 11 New Criticism was not a formally unified school. The name comes from John Crowe Ransom’s The New Criticism (1941) but the term is used to denote a wider body of critics who shared a formalist approach to literature and who were influenced by Eliot, Empson, and Richards. For more detailed accounts of New Criticism from a variety of ideological positions, see Baldick 1996, Maynard 2009, Parrinder 1991, Scholes 2001. 12 The ‘urn’ of Brooks’s title refers to classical-era funeral vessels. Like Wimsatt’s ‘icon’, Grecian funeral urns mediate between the human and the divine: they are for contemplation, not critique 13 When Columbia University made Lionel Trilling an assistant professor in 1939, he was the first Jew to hold a tenured chair in the university even though it had been founded over 180 years earlier. In 1950, Ralph J. Bunche became the first tenured African American faculty member in Harvard’s 300-year history; Stanford and Cornell appointed their first tenured black professors in 1970 (Slater 1998). For a fictional imagining of mid-century US academia, see Mark Merlis’s stunning novel, American Studies (1994), which draws on the life of F. O. Matthiessen, who killed himself in 1950 while under investigation from the HUAC. Another emblematic story is that of Newton Arvin, whose career at Smith College was cut short in 1960 by his prosecution for possession of softcore gay pornography; Barry Werth’s 2001 biography of Arvin, The Scarlet Professor, conveys the mixture of homophobia and anti-left paranoia that characterised the US academy in the decades immediately after the Second World War. 14 In 1952, following allegations that he was a Communist sympathiser, the FBI launched an investigation that prevented Williams from taking up an appointment as Poetry Consultant to the Library of Congress; by the time he was cleared, the post was no longer available (Mariani 1990: 651–67). 15 As Christopher Norris points out, de Man explicitly invokes New Criticism to frame his reading of Derrida in Blindness and Insight (Norris 1982: 22 ff). 16 I am thinking, here, of pieces such as Paul de Man’s ‘The Rhetoric of Blindness’, which is a reading of Derrida’s reading of Rousseau (de Man 1971); Shoshana Felman’s ‘Turning the Screw of Interpretation’, which uses the reception of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw to reflect on psychoanalytical theories of reading (Felman 1977); and a cluster of responses to Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Purloined Letter’ by Lacan, Derrida, Barbara Johnson, and others (Muller and Richardson 1987). For a sustained analysis of de Man’s impact on critical theory, see Guillory 1993: 176–265. For an account of US critical practice after New Criticism, see Lentricchia 1980. For more general accounts of deconstruction and reading, see Culler 1982, Norris 1982, Dunne 2013. 17 There are historic differences in how education has been organised throughout

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the UK, and devolution has heightened these disjunctions; consequently, it is impossible to talk about a unified British education policy. For the sake of concision, I am confining myself to policy generated by Westminster but the underlying themes remain relevant to education more generally. 18 The relationship between the private sector and what Tony Blair’s spokesperson, Alistair Campbell, termed ‘bog-standard comprehensives’ (Clare and Jones 2001) has been complicated by Labour and Conservative policies on faith schools, academies, and so-called ‘free schools’, but the money that has been poured into these alternatives simply underlines the degree to which funding structures continue to disadvantage the local education authority schools that the majority of students attend. Furthermore, the austerity agenda introduced by the Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition of 2010–15 (and maintained by the subsequent Conservative administrations of David Cameron and Theresa May) has had a disproportionate effect on communities that are already economically deprived. A squeeze on education budgets, combined with the austerity-led closure of libraries and the selling-off of recreation grounds, means that the main lesson that many children will receive from school is that they, and the communities from which they come, are unloved, invisible, or despised. This message is underlined by students’ vastly different experiences of health, housing, and nutrition: put bluntly, some children go to school on empty stomachs and return to temporary accommodation and unheated rooms while others do not. Meanwhile, the very idea of collective social responsibility is being eroded by neo-liberal policies in the UK, Europe, and the US. The drive towards free schools and academies (which are funded by central government, not local authorities) is part of this neo-liberal scenario because it undermines pre-existing frameworks in favour of atomised institutions that often work against the interests of the communities they serve (for example, by diverting tax revenues from local authority schools in the same area). 19 When he was Minister for Education, Michael Gove introduced so-called ‘baseline’ tests for pupils during their first weeks at primary school; this policy was dropped for technical reasons in 2016 but subsequent Tory education ministers have sought to re-introduce it. The devolved governments in Wales and Northern Ireland abolished league tables in 2001; Scotland followed suit in 2003. At the time of writing, they remain a fixture in England. 20 Although the situation is in some ways even more grim at A-level, in what follows I am going to confine myself to what happens in primary school and at GCSE because those levels are compulsory. 21 I would like to be able to provide a reference for this document but when the QCA’s functions were folded into the newly formed Office of Qualifications and Examinations Regulation, the QCA’s website was mothballed and its directives are no longer available online. Without easily tracked sources, it becomes harder to hold policy-makers responsible for discredited strategies. It is also telling that state education can no longer own its past; the erasure of its history

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says much about the contempt in which policy-makers hold the very idea of historical analysis. 22 For alternative, child-centred models of teaching literacy, see Meek 1991 and Paul 1998. 23 For a pseudonymous (and devastating) account of what it was like to teach the literacy hour (and other such initiatives), see Read 2006. 24 My discussion of twenty-first-century educational practices is greatly indebted to Sinfield’s work on Shakespeare and education, particularly his detailed reading of how exam questions interpellate students. In many ways, the second half of this chapter is an attempt to think through the twenty-first-century implications of Sinfield’s foundational work. McCormick 1994 draws on Sinfield’s perspectives in the course of a longer analysis of educational practices. 25 An obvious instance, at the time of writing, is the Home Office’s deportation of members of the Windrush generation, despite the latter’s legal right to remain in the UK (Gentleman 2018). 26 A briefing document produced when Charles Clarke was Minister for Education suggested that the story of the Three Little Pigs could be used to introduce young readers to civic concepts such as mutual responsibility. If this seems farcical, the joke is on the early learners, who are now introduced to folk tales, not for their anarchic possibilities, but so that the stories can be used as a template for lessons on civics and English. Having said that, I want to underline that my target, throughout this chapter, is not the teachers who have to plan and implement these lessons but the policy-makers who consider them necessary. 27 According to the OCR, Jane Eyre is a ‘literary heritage text’­– ­the linguistic equivalent of an heirloom tomato. 28 In a section on women’s place in society the CGP GCSE book states that in Brontë’s day it was ‘unusual’ for novels to be written by women; this is simply untrue. It then states that ‘by the end of the novel, Jane is both emotionally and financially independent’ (Bowen et al. 2017: 44) but, while Jane becomes financially comfortable thanks to a bequest from her uncle, nineteenth-century law meant that Jane’s property would have become Rochester’s after their marriage. Even if Jane retained control over her money, there would still have been an enormous economic disparity between her and Rochester, and the textbook overlooks asymmetrical aspects of their relationship (such as the fact that she calls him ‘Sir’ long after he ceases being her employer). By suppressing these edges, the textbook turns Brontë’s novel into a more conventional love story than its plot would suggest­– ­thus robbing students of an opportunity to reflect more generally on the complexities of sexuality and relationships. 29 On the broader question of the National Curriculum, it is telling that this aspect of Westminster education policy has been criticised by a set of people who know more than most about reading and education: children’s authors. Since the post of Children’s Laureate was established in 1999, seven of its ten recipients have opposed key aspects of education policy, including SATs and

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‘the literacy hour’. Of these seven, Michael Rosen, Malorie Blackman, Chris Ridell, Michael Morpurgo, and Lauren Child have been especially outspoken, with Morpurgo writing that an over-reliance on examining has produced a form of apartheid in schools (Ellis-Petersen 2016a), Child emphasising daydreaming over goals-oriented education (Thorpe 2017), Blackman calling out the eradication of black lives from Michael Gove’s revised History curriculum (Rustin 2013), and Riddell attacking SATs as the enemies of reading pleasure (Ellis-Petersen 2016b). Most prominently of all, Michael Rosen has used his blog (http:/­ /­ michaelrosenblog.blogspot.com/­ ) and regular columns for The Guardian to rail against child-unfriendly policies; indeed, in the absence of adequate official archives, Rosen’s blog is probably the single most useful resource for tracing failures in recent education provision. 30 Grammar teaching has long been a bugbear of both conservatives and progressives. My own view is that any account of English grammar has to start with the recognition that language is governed by usage and convention rather than divine diktat, and that the ‘rules’ of English are the product of a conscious process of linguistic purification that began in the eighteenth-century. Moreover, many of these ‘rules’ were actually derived from Latin then applied, retrospectively, to English. I do think it is useful to be able to study the structures of language, but this is not what happens when primary school children are required to learn parts of speech by rote; that this knowledge is assessed by multiple-choice questions suggests that it is an exercise in naming, not understanding.

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Loose reading: Jane Austen in a post-truth age

‘Wait! Are they together now? Donald Trump and­– ­Jane Austen?’ Well, why not? Internet memes create their own realities and fan fiction has long since specialised in mining literary and historical narratives for radically new pairings. In a post-truth age, why shouldn’t Donald and Jane get it together over their shared admiration for Trump: The Art of the Deal? Stranger things have happened, usually after polling companies have predicted the exact opposite. Don’t think, though, that I have invented this fantastic relationship entirely on my own. On the contrary, internet searches reveal an enormous archive of stories linking Austen and Trump. Not, to be sure, as lovers (or at least, not yet), but as cultural archetypes to be defined in relation to each other. As in any Rom Com, opposites attract.1 The backbone of the search results are stories in which the perceived values of the two figures are placed in opposition to each other (‘What would Jane Austen say about Mr Trump?’, ‘What Jane Austen could teach Donald Trump’).2 Another strand considers how Austen, as an iconic writer, has been appropriated for political ends (‘Pride and Racial Prejudice: Why the Far Right Loves Jane Austen’, ‘Jane Austen claimed by America’s “alt-right” movement’).3 Austen also provided a framework for columnists trying to get a handle on the 2016 presidential election (‘Hillary Clinton’s Sense Meets Donald Trump’s Sensibility at the Debate’)4 and the actor Kate Beckinsale triggered an especially rich cache of headlines while publicising her role as Lady Susan Vernon in Whit Stillman’s 2016 Austen adaptation Love & Friendship. Responding to recently surfaced footage in which the then presidential candidate boasted of seizing women by the genitals, Beckinsale laughingly speculated on how shocked Mr Trump would be on discovering

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the rebarbative corsetry underneath her character’s voluminous skirts. These remarks gave rise to The Sun’s ‘The Lady and the Trump: Kate Beckinsale “wishes” Donald Trump would grab her Lady Susan by the p***y’. Curiously, this pun had already been cued up by an earlier interview in which the film’s director had placed Trump alongside the cads and bounders of Austen’s universe (‘Trumping Jane Austen for a merrily wicked widow’).5 Like Shakespeare, and for comparable reasons, Austen has long been subject to appropriation from readers and interest groups wanting to turn her cultural prestige to their own ends; and, since the beginning of her posthumous celebrity in the nineteenth century, she has also been caught up in curiously sexualised narratives.6 Although there is nothing intrinsically new about these dynamics, they resonate differently in a post-truth age where ‘fake news’ is produced and contested on an hourly basis. How, in these circumstances, can we know when a story is fictitious­– ­and where, more generally, do the boundaries lie between ‘history’ and ‘fact’? Debates about historical truth are as old as history itself­– ­Austen herself examined them in Northanger Abbey­– b ­ ut relativist theories of history have come under renewed pressure now that technology makes it possible to circulate malicious misrepresentations and downright lies at the touch of a button. These are fascinating issues in relation to Austen given that so much of her fiction hangs on the need to discern, through close observation, what is ‘really’ going on in a given situation. The final sections of this book will return to the technological aspects of this terrain but first I want to think more generally about the effect that debates on ‘truth’ have had on how we think about reading. ‘Fake news’ presents a dilemma that is in some ways opposite to that discussed in the previous chapter. I. A. Richards asked his students to evaluate unattributed but genuine literary works: they did not know what they were reading but they knew that it had been written and published by a real person. By contrast, internet bots purport to be people that they are not, and digitally altered memes put false words into the mouths of real people. Unlike Richards’s students, we do not know that we are participating in an exercise; we are simply gathering information about the world from sources that we expect to be reliable. It is not just that we cannot tell when words have been falsely attributed, it is that we are often looking at what we take to be a real face, not knowing that it is a mask. The question faced by Richards’s students­– ­whether they were able to discern an artist from their words­– ­seems like a trivial luxury in a world where images of a young activist can be altered so as to make it seem as if she is tearing up a copy of

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the US constitution, a falsification that became viral and tainted both her name and the campaign with which she was associated.7 Yet, in another sense, ‘close reading’ may be one of our best hopes in the war over truth. Attentive scrutiny is the first line of defence against fake news. There is more chance of distinguishing between authentic and fictional statements if we are able to analyse linguistic patterns and hold them up beside other examples of speech from the same purported source. New Criticism’s version of close reading would be no good against fake news because it strips out the context in which linguistic utterances are made and it discourages the possibility of political or ideological critique. More than that, it represents its own procedures as transparent­– ­as if it was not itself subject to ideology. But a version of close reading that would enable citizens to interrogate what they see and hear would be beneficial, especially if it would also help us to understand our relation to the stories that we encounter­– ­including, for example, our susceptibility to confirmation bias. That, indeed, is still the best argument for the academic humanities, and for English teaching in schools: that it helps us to interrogate the narratives that make up our lives. But in the wake of deconstruction, and under pressure from relatively marginalised communities of readers, late twentieth-century critical theory began to evolve more interventionist ways of dealing with texts. The result is a radical, but contested, reorientation of academic approaches to interpretation. To get at these issues I want to re-visit a paradigmatic tussle between queer theory and right-wing US journalism for ownership of Jane Austen. This moment, which dates back to the 1990s, has spread in several directions and continues to provoke debate in different parts of the academy. For concision, this chapter will focus on the late Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s intervention on Austen, using it to explore what is at stake in postmodernism’s reaction against ‘close reading’. Although I will not dwell further on the Trump/­Austen axis, I suggest that the reader keeps it in mind while reading the rest of the discussion. Journalistic puns on the wicked Lady Susan and her pussy seem to have been anticipated in Sedgwick’s unapologetically sexualising account of Sense and Sensibility; however, it is striking that while queer theorists are routinely castigated for visiting interpretive violence on literary texts, a US presidential candidate can boast of actual assaults on women­– ­and be elected. My other reason for opening the chapter with Trump is that an unsympathetic account of Sedgwick’s work could describe it as a sort of ‘fake news’ before the term ‘fake news’ was invented. In other words, opponents of Sedgwick see her as someone who re-writes and misrepresents literary texts with the sole wish of making

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them into something that they are not. That is not my view, and I continue to find Sedgwick’s work fascinating. However, I do think that the early twenty-first-century crisis over ‘truth’ makes it all the more necessary for literary commentators to weigh the possible ramifications of their reading techniques. The story, at least as I choose to tell it, begins with the cover of the 9 November 1998 issue of The New Republic, which features two barechested men in an affectionate embrace; their heads have been removed and replaced with those of Shakespeare and Henry James. Alongside the image is the headline: ‘Literary license: how “queer theory” mindlessly sexualizes Henry James, William Shakespeare, and just about everything else’. The accompanying article by the cultural commentator Lee Siegel uses a review of books by Eve Sedgwick, Michael Moon, David Halperin, and Michael Warner to attack ‘the “queering” of literature’ (Siegel 1998: 35). Here, I want to interrogate the different attitudes to reading that are encoded in Siegel’s and Sedgwick’s writing. As well as exploring the strengths and weaknesses of Sedgwick’s version of queer theory, I want to think about how ‘reading’ is imagined more generally in critical practice. Arguing that Sedgwick’s reading styles represent a paradigm shift from ‘close reading’ to a less attentive form of textual analysis, I am going to use Sedgwick as a test case for asking why reading matters: what is it, and what is it for? These questions necessarily impact on the way we think about the discipline of English. But, as with the preceding chapter, they also have implications for teaching practice in schools and colleges. Sedgwick, Siegel, and Austen Lee Siegel’s New Republic article is not marked by subtlety of thought or expression. Rather, it is a biting polemic from a commentator (and a journal) renowned for attacks on so-called political correctness. Cranky though it is, Siegel’s intervention gains weight through its prominent position. What’s more, his account is a useful guide to the unease that LGBTQ research has provoked among right-wing commentators. Discussing ‘the queer enterprise’, Siegel insists that ‘Queer theorists … wish to dissolve the categories of sexual identity and, with them, the way in which society has invested sexual identities with moral value, endorsing some sexual identities and stigmatising others. Queers are engaged in a vast theoretical project of breaking up fixed sexual identities into the fluidity of sexual acts or practices’ (Siegel 1998: 32). Complaining that ‘academia … [has] sexualized everything’, he writes that ‘nowhere has the

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sexualization of reality proceeded so intensely and so relentlessly as in the seminar room’ (Siegel 1998: 30). This peculiar formulation (‘[sexualising] … everything’), which is highlighted on the New Republic’s cover, as well as in Siegel’s by-line, implies that desire is a foreign body forcibly imposed on the material world. By viewing ‘reality’ as a recoverable entity­– a­ material body which, in its original form, does not include the erotic­– ­Siegel is able to blame ‘queer theorists’ for ‘sexualizing everything’. This blurring of intellectual and socio-sexual anxieties is a symptom of a wider desire to govern the educational system. Thus, Siegel fights back against this tide of sexualisation by re-asserting moral and literary value. Speculating that Sedgwick ‘and her crowd’ are ‘not very comfortable’ with the ways of ‘great writers’, he condemns Sedgwick for her ‘deadness … to beauty and fineness of perception and fragile inner life’ (Siegel 1998: 40). For Siegel, it is bad enough that cultural historians such as Michel Foucault generalised about sexual identity, but at least Foucault ‘never dreamed of applying [his generalisations] to literature’ (Siegel 1998: 38; my emphasis). Here, we see a humanist critic asserting literary value in the face of what he sees as a dangerously political intervention; implicit in this manoeuvre is the assumption (which I would query) that ‘the literary’ gives access to a non-ideological and purely aesthetic realm of experience. Siegel also displays a fear of institutional infection, as if queer theory were an infectious disease taking over the academy. Note, for instance, his fear that as a result of reading Michael Moon’s A Small Boy and Others ‘we will start to become indifferent to­– ­or perhaps connoisseurs of­– ­physical pain’ (Siegel 1998: 42; my emphasis). Among other things, this implies that there is a body of ‘normal’ readers­– ­Siegel’s ‘we’­– ­whose sex lives are as vanilla as their reading habits. As I argued in the previous chapter, in relation to New Criticism, regulation and surveillance are typical responses to fears of intellectual infection. The ‘red scare’ in the 1950s US academy hinged on fears about communism and homosexuality in education; the same is true of later phenomena, such as Section 28 of the UK’s 1988 Local Government Act, which sought to outlaw the presentation of homosexuality as a ‘pretended family relationship’ in local-authority-funded schools.8 Arguments in the US about the National Endowment for the Arts are broadly comparable, as are Siegel’s claims about the ‘sexualisation’ of education. Against this background, it is unsurprising that Henry James and Jane Austen feature so prominently in Siegel’s article. Both are usually represented as the most incorporeal of writers. Not only were they unmarried and childless, their narrative voices are characterised by irony and apparent detachment. Of all fictional ‘realities’, theirs have been seen as the most un-‘sexualized’. This,

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along with their canonical importance, is why Sedgwick wants to queer them. It is also why Siegel, from his different perspective, is appalled by readings which centre on fist-fucking and masturbation. Crucially, though, the Siegel/­Sedgwick disagreement concerns more than just divergent textual interpretations. The real issue is not whether James’s prose represents what Sedgwick calls ‘fisting-as-écriture’ (Sedgwick 1991: 208), it is how those interpretations are produced. What is at stake is not a single interpretation but reading itself: its protocols and its purpose. This issue becomes clear in journalistic responses to ‘Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl’, a Sedgwick essay which Siegel describes as a ‘fantasy’ (Siegel 1998: 40). Siegel’s term is meant to be a curt dismissal­– ­the off-hand blow from which Sedgwick’s reputation will never recover. Yet the strength of Sedgwick’s essay is that it is, very precisely, a fantasy. If it is to tell us anything, that is how we should approach it. This is how she begins: The phrase itself is already evidence. Roger Kimball in his treatise on educational ‘corruption’, Tenured Radicals, cites the title ‘Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl’ from an MLA convention program quite as if he were Perry Mason, the six words a smoking gun. The warm gun that, for journalists who have adopted the phrase as an index of depravity in academe, ­ ffering the squibby pop … that lets absolutely anyone, in is happiness­– o the righteously exciting vicinity of the masturbating girl, feel a very pundit. (Sedgwick 1993: 109).

The ensuing essay, which began as a paper to the Modern Language Association in 1989, notes that although masturbation is no longer execrated, it was heavily policed around the time that modern sexual identities were emerging. Sedgwick then quotes chapter twenty-nine of Sense and Sensibility where Marianne Dashwood has risen in great distress to write a letter to Willoughby, with whom she is in love, after he has publicly snubbed her. Elinor Dashwood is woken by her sister’s sobbing and tries to talk to her, only to be told ‘ask nothing; you will soon know all’ (Austen 1995: 152). Sedgwick points out that this is a woman-only scene in which one of the participants is ‘vectored’ towards a man, while the other (Elinor) is directed towards a woman who happens to be her sister. Citing comparable work on Emily Dickinson, Sedgwick urges the reader to re-think the work of ‘such … homosocially embedded women authors as Austen and … the Brontës’. She argues that although ‘homo/­hetero’ identities were not available in the late eighteenth century, ‘one “sexual identity” that did exist as such in Austen’s times … was that of the onanist’. Having said that ‘the masturbator was only one of the sexual identities subsumed, erased, or

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overridden in [the] triumph of the heterosexist homo/­hetero calculus’, she claims that ‘the status of the masturbator was uniquely formative’ in that it was at the ‘center of a remapping of individual identity, will, attention, and privacy along modern lines’. Claiming that the novel’s ‘erotic axis is most obviously the unwavering but difficult love of a woman, Elinor Dashwood, for a woman, Marianne Dashwood’, Sedgwick argues that Marianne’s ‘erotic identity, in turn, is not in the first place either a same-sex-loving one or a cross-sex-loving one (though she loves both women and men), but rather the one that today no longer exists as an identity: that of the masturbating girl’ (Sedgwick 1993: 115–18). Thus, the ‘masturbating girl’ of the title is Marianne Dashwood, an identification that Sedgwick fleshes out by comparing Marianne’s symptomology with a supposed case history of onanism dated 1881. It was the contention that Marianne was an onanist which most exercised Sedgwick’s journalistic opponents but the story of the masturbating girl is only one half of Sedgwick’s article. The last portion of the essay uses the sadistic surveillance revealed in ‘the manuscript dated 1881’ as an analogue to ‘the punishing, girl-centred moral pedagogy and erotics of Austen’s novels more generally’. Sedgwick does not expand on this; instead she moves swiftly to an assault on existing Austen criticism, which she claims is ‘notable mostly, not just for its timidity and banality, but for its unresting exaction of the spectacle of a Girl Being Taught a Lesson­– ­for the vengefulness it vents on the heroines whom it purports to love’. Moreover, she writes, this critical tradition has produced a virginal ‘Jane Austen’ who needs, in her turn, to be taught a lesson by establishment critics. It is to escape such ‘punitive/­pedagogical’ readings that Sedgwick wants to ‘make available … an alternative, passionate sexual ecology­– o ­ ne fully available to Austen for her exciting, productive, and deliberate use’ (Sedgwick 1993: 125–6). Far from being virginal, Austen’s fictional world is suddenly a crucible, not just for masturbation and sexual-identity formation, but also for S/­M relations between Austen, her heroines, and her critics. At this, the climax of the essay, Sedgwick returns to her onanism manuscript, identifying it as a translation of ‘what appears to be a late-nineteenth-century medical case history in French’; she also reveals that it reached her via ‘the 1981 “Polysexuality” issue of Semiotext(e)’ and that she passed it to her graduate students without comment when she was last teaching Sense and Sensibility (Sedgwick 1993: 127). What she does not directly reveal, either to her students or to readers of her essay, is that Démétrius Zambaco’s ‘1881 document’ has a highly dubious provenance. (More of this later.)

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Given its range, it is hardly surprising that aspects of Sedgwick’s essay are vulnerable to criticisms. Some of these might be that juxtaposing Marianne’s symptoms with those of a supposed onanist does not, in itself, prove that Marianne is a chronic masturbator; that the eighteenth-century discourse of ‘sensibility’ (handily sign-posted in Austen’s title) provides a more appropriate key to Marianne’s distress than onanism; that a same-sex reading of the novel ignores the fact that it ends with a brace of heterosexual marriages; that the ‘co-dependency’ (Sedgwick 1993: 122) which Sedgwick anachronistically detects in Elinor might be better understood as another by-product of sensibility; that the essay over-reaches itself by trying to make masturbation pivotal both to Jane Austen’s fiction and to modern sexual identities; and that it is almost impossible­– ­given the nature of the activity­– ­to recover a history of solo masturbation. (As Sedgwick admits, it is a transaction which ‘escapes … the narrative of reproduction and … even the creation of any interpersonal trace’ (Sedgwick 1993: 111).) Like Sedgwick’s essay, these negative judgements are themselves open to objections. One could easily draw up a defence in which one argued that a same-sex reading of Sense and Sensibility is by no means implausible, and that it would not be over-ruled by the mere fact of heterosexual closure. (Sisterly relations are always highly charged in Austen’s writing­– ­not to mention her life­– ­and Elinor and Marianne, like many Austen heroines, settle within easy reach of each other.)9 The invisibility of masturbation need not prevent us from trying to uncover its history; and it is surely true that a private act which enjoins fantasy and physicality was­– a­ nd continues to be­– ­an anvil for the forging of sexual identity. The fetishisation of privacy which masturbation sometimes involves could well be related to the obsessive self-explorations of sensibility; and there should be no need, these days, to justify the choice of masturbation as a topic of academic study. It is part of Sedgwick’s idiosyncratic complexity that these lists are not mutually exclusive. It is possible to applaud Sedgwick’s conceptual brilliance while deploring her high-handed way with literary and historical materials. However, I do not intend to analyse the precise rights and wrongs of Sedgwick’s essay. Instead I want to argue that Sedgwick is simply not interested in empirical exactitude. She remarks, for example, that ‘a New Historicizing point that you can’t understand Sense and Sensibility without entering into the alterity of a bygone masturbation phobia is hardly the one I am making’ (Sedgwick 1993: 128). Although I regret this refusal of historicism, I think it raises interesting questions about critical practice. In other words: if she is providing neither a reliable textual reading, nor a fully documented, historically located contribution to the

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history of sexuality, then what is Sedgwick doing? And is it something that the academic humanities in general, and LGBTQ Studies in particular, should welcome?

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Queer reading practice Roger Kimball gives his own answer to this question when he includes Sedgwick in his excoriating attack on the US academy, Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education (1990). But where Kimball only mentions ‘Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl’ in passing, Siegel uses the essay to raise the question of Sedgwick’s academic competence and, in particular, her reading practices. Noting that Sedgwick ‘is one of the most influential academics at work today [yet] no one seems to read her closely’, Siegel resolves to ‘stay patiently and carefully with her writing’ but finds himself in ‘a twisting labyrinth of mad interpretations’. This leads him to the conclusion that ‘she does not read well, and took up theory and concocted those deliberately outrageous essay-titles to disguise her deficiency’ (Siegel 1998: 36–7). Reading is thus the ultimate point of contention in Siegel’s essay. By close reading Sedgwick, Moon, Halperin, and Warner, he tries to show that they themselves are incapable of attentive textual scrutiny. Noting Sedgwick’s interest in anality, he remarks that ‘it is all there because Sedgwick sees it there’ (Siegel 1998: 36). She can also ‘find homosociality anywhere she wants to find it’ (Siegel 1998: 37), while in Michael Moon’s ‘expert hands’ Henry James’s story ‘The Pupil’ is no longer ‘about what James seems to have meant it to be about’ (Siegel 1998: 41). In contrast to Moon, Siegel is able to tell ‘as a consequence of what I see on the printed page’ that James intends ‘The Beast in the Jungle’ to refer to a heterosexual affair (Siegel 1998: 38; my emphasis). Given his outrage at Sedgwick’s juxtaposition of Austen and onanism, and given the popular connection between masturbation and blindness, it is striking that Siegel describes Moon’s alleged mis-reading as a failure to see the words properly. There is an echo here of Cleanth Brooks’s plea (discussed in the previous chapter) that critics should focus on ‘what the poem says as a poem’ (Brooks 1971: vii), and both Brooks and Siegel seem to believe that working such meanings out is as simple as looking through a clear pane of glass to see the pattern underneath. As with Brooks, Siegel’s confidence is related to his humanism: other commentators might be more cautious in identifying their individual readings with the author’s intentions. He also enacts the familiar strategy of

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representing his perspective as natural and true, thereby denying the validity of alternative readings. In an especially unpleasant passage, he scorns the notion that Sedgwick’s ‘“queer,” marginal, “perverse,” stigmatised’ position might allow her to see things which have been ‘hitherto silenced’ (Siegel 1998: 36). In opposition to this sort of sneering marginalisation, queer commentators re-assert the importance of LGBTQ reading positions,10 but what interests me here is not so much Siegel’s demonisation of queer reading positions as his notion that these reading positions are necessarily accompanied by an inability to read ‘closely’. This re-opens the question of what ‘close reading’ actually is, and whether or not Siegel is right to invoke it in opposition to ‘queer reading’. As I argued in chapter 4, most schools of academic literary criticism are founded, whatever their ideological affiliations, on close reading. Most academic commentators have abandoned the search for authorial intent, but they nonetheless hold fast to the concept of close attention. Instead of believing in a recoverable version of what the author ‘really meant’, academic versions of reading are now are more likely to stress the reader’s responsibility to history or to their own experience of the text. Within this model, the reader has a responsibility to trace and consider their responses to the text, almost as if they were reading their own subjectivity alongside the literary work. For this arrangement to work, readers need to monitor their responses as they alter and mutate, and they should also reflect on questions such as the gap between their own time period and the one in which the literary work was written. Sedgwick, however, will have none of this. Like the mother in Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit (who changes the ending of Jane Eyre so that Jane marries St John Rivers, not Rochester), Sedgwick’s reading practice claims the right to ignore, distend, interpolate, and mutilate the text. The result is a final transferral of power from the author/­text to the reader. Instead of collaborating with the text to produce meaning, Sedgwick suggests that readers need not attend too closely to the small print of their readerly contract. Indeed if they want, they can rip it up. The patient elucidation of ‘meaning’ can be replaced by a complete reconstruction of the text. That’s why Siegel’s attack on Sedgwick misses the point. Of course she imposes her readings on Austen and James: that’s what one version of ‘queering’ a text is about. The very term carries with it connotations of imposition and forceful re-alignment. But Sedgwick’s reading practice is not the only one which enforces meaning. Reading is always a partial, even a violent, activity­– ­not least when it is practised by sensitive humanists. Professional readers are often the worst offenders in this regard, for what

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could be more brutal than the way in which academics (myself included) ignore what will not easily fit our arguments, or shift the light of analysis until our preferred narrative makes itself apparent? This process is rarely always acknowledged, even by commentators who are happy to stress, in other contexts, that reading and interpretation cannot be transparent in the way that Brooks would like them to be. As a defence against these rhetorical practices, it is tempting to re-assert the importance of ‘close reading’ with its connotations of morally praiseworthy attentiveness. But to what are we attending when we ‘close read’? We cannot read the ‘whole’ of Sense and Sensibility, since to do so would be to comprehend all of the readings, emphases, and meanings, that have been, and will be, produced by other readers of the book since it was first written. Instead certain contexts or strategies get privileged over others. For example, critical discussions of Sense and Sensibility have focused on questions such as its genre, its engagement with the eighteenth-century discourse of ‘sensibility’, and its standing as a novel written ‘By A Lady’. Critics get anxious about whether or not Austen mentions the Napoleonic Wars. The word ‘irony’ gets written solemnly in the margins of books while we discuss the fidelity of the latest screen adaptation. In the light of Edward Said’s landmark intervention on Austen (Said 1993), commentators are more likely than before to note references to India, or the navy, or the price of timber on Colonel Brandon’s estate. Whether we are students or professional academics, we piece these references together, quietly dropping the ones that don’t quite fit, and we re-present them as ‘our’ reading of the text. In doing so we imagine that we are reading the book properly, reading it ‘closely’. I am not antagonistic to these readings or the critical traditions from which they emerge. They delineate some of the ways in which I, too, read Austen’s work. However, it would be over-confident to believe that even the most attentive of our readings can ever be fully independent or ‘close’. Rather, they are conditioned and selective. There is nothing unusual about this: it is how we make sense of the world, interpreting our surroundings in the light of our experiences and worldview. But this also means that we should be wary of relying too closely on the magical effects of close reading, or of assuming that it represents a more rigorous or ‘authentic’ mode of analysis than, say, Sedgwick’s reading of Austen. One of the incidental strengths of Sedgwick’s analysis is that her leaps, juxtapositions, and over-statements acknowledge the violence of the reading process. By opening new areas of discussion she also undermines the assumption that an ‘attentive’ textual analysis is the only, or the ‘best’, way of experiencing a text. Given this problematisation of attentiveness, Siegel’s rejection of the

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‘Masturbating Girl’ as ‘fantasy’ (Siegel 1998: 40) begins to look misguided. Where Siegel scorns fantasy as a self-indulgent imposition, Sedgwick reminds us that reading literature is frequently a self-indulgent activity; indeed, that is one of its chief pleasures. She accomplishes this through her individualistic readings and through the specific content of ‘Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl’. Thus, she admits that she introduces her students to an onanistic case history ‘for reasons no more transparent than those that have induced me to quote from it here­– ­beyond the true but inadequate notation that even eight years after reading it, my memory of the piece wouldn’t let up its pressure on the gaze I was capable of levelling at the Austen novel’ (Sedgwick: 1993 127). Although Sedgwick does not make a direct equation between fantasy and interpretation, her statement acknowledges the unbiddable and deeply personal forces that condition memory and meaning. In doing so her reading legitimates the equally idiosyncratic connections which we all produce from time to time but tend to bury as ‘mis’-readings or ‘inauthentic’ associations. More importantly, Sedgwick’s essay plays with the notion that masturbation and writing are related activities. She complains of the way the ‘would-be-damning epithet “mental masturbation”’ is used to evade ‘the vibrations of the highly relational but, in practical terms, solitary pleasure and adventure of writing itself’. Soon after she writes that ‘masturbation can seem to offer­– ­not least as an analogy to writing­– ­a reservoir of potentially utopian metaphors and energies for independence, self-possession, and a rapture that may owe relatively little to political or interpersonal abjection’ (Sedgwick 1993: 111; my emphasis). Thus, before she introduces either Austen or her nineteenth-century case history, Sedgwick is inviting us to draw links between ‘literary pleasure, critical self-scrutiny, and autoeroticism’ (Sedgwick 1993: 110). As a consequence she lets us view her essay, and literary commentary more generally, as the residue of an autoerotic encounter. ‘Critical self-scrutiny’ bears as its issue the essay: a finely angled narrative of self and text which gestures at the outside world but cannot fully incorporate it. And crucially, though Sedgwick does not make this explicit, the physical residue of this ‘self-enquiry’ (the critical essay) is preceded and produced by acts of imagination. The fantasies of reading can therefore be seen as analogous to the fantasies of masturbation. As well as undermining the po-facedness of critical enquiry, this equation reveals the sexual narratives which underpin the ‘relationships’ (a loaded term) between reader, author, and text. It also underscores the textual nature of sexual fantasy.

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Critical/­creative writing Sedgwick’s comments about masturbation have implications for how we think about critical writing. If reading is underpinned by fantasy, then literary critical essays are a form of creative writing: this, indeed, is the logical conclusion of the argument that reading is an act of co-authorship. Such an insight is controversial because the ‘creative’ principle, if taken to an extreme, would undermine literary criticism’s attempt to be seen as a rigorous mode of analysis. It would also call into question the standards by which critical writing is assessed, for how can ‘creative writing’ be read in the same way as a supposedly impersonal assessment of Wordsworth’s debt to Milton? The acceptance of a fully ‘creative’ critical idiom would force a radical and timely re-imagining of the structures of examinations, grading, and peer assessment which underlie the higher education system; it would also throw into question the secondary school practices discussed in the previous chapter. This, however, is precisely why it is resisted by commentators such as Siegel and Kimball. By contrast, Sedgwick is at the forefront of the move towards ‘creative’ criticism, hence the self-conscious crafting of her style with its parodic over-performance of academic discourse. She is also a poet whose verse (published by a university press) echoes the preoccupations of her criticism.11 Her critical writing, moreover, is often organised around autobiography and anecdote. Tellingly, these have been among the most censured aspects of her work. Siegel complains that ‘her success is owed in part to … a reveal-all-hurts-and-wounds style of writing’ derived from ‘the confessionalism of the day’ (Siegel 1998: 39), while David Van Leer spends four pages criticising one of her anecdotes as an ‘unselfconscious narrative of self-authentication’ (Van Leer 1995: 129). A closer look at this story suggests a different reading. Because Sedgwick does not identify herself explicitly as the story’s subject, she evades Van Leer’s accusation that she has a vested interest in placing herself inside her own narrative. These personal but nonetheless teasingly elusive anecdotes are common in Sedgwick’s writing. Rather than viewing them as ‘unselfconscious’ narratives of self, I see them as a knowing modification of earlier feminism’s investment in the notion that the personal is political. Even when she makes overtly confessional statements, Sedgwick tends to frame her utterance as a set-piece narrative: the self-conscious crafting of her stories suggests the impossibility of a truly ‘transparent’ confession. Crucially, however, her anecdotes also underscore the fictive aspects of critical commentary. That is, Sedgwick doesn’t just ‘tell stories’ about herself and her friends, she also ‘tells stories’ about texts. So do all critics. But

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unlike the commentators who produce exhaustive studies of the unreliable narrator while insisting, implicitly, on the transparent fidelity of their own utterance, Sedgwick produces stories that are characterised by conspicuous withholdings of ‘evidence’ and blatant re-orderings of textual ‘clues’. Sedgwick’s extreme re-writings are disputed because they undermine the primacy of the text, replacing it with an entirely ‘new’ version of Austen or James. I have already argued that this is simply an extension of existing critical formations. It does result, however, in a critical idiom which is more overtly related to creative writing. Sedgwick is on record as saying that she experiences no division between writing poetry and writing criticism; the same interview reveals that she encourages her graduate students to develop a range of writing styles, including the autobiographical and the fictional.12 It is hardly surprising, then, that her work demonstrates an inter-­penetration of ‘critical’ and ‘creative’ models, such as in ‘A Poem is Being Written’, an essay that riffs on Freud’s ‘A Child is Being Beaten’ but which takes the form of an analysis of Sedgwick’s own poetry (Sedgwick 1993). Nor is it astonishing that these voices sometimes drown out the literary voices that are the nominal subject of analysis: that, indeed, is part of the point. I will return in a moment to some of the problems with this technique. For now, I just want to stress that Sedgwick’s use of the imaginary destabilises the polarity which commentators such as Siegel create between the fantastic and the real (hence Lee Siegel’s objection to ‘the sexualization of reality’). Her critical practice also reminds us that the imagination plays a fundamental part in the production of narrative pleasure and narrative meaning. Moreover, by saying that Sense and Sensibility is indeed about masturbation if we choose it to be, ‘Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl’ not only re-integrates the fantastic and the critical, it also reveals one of the great open secrets of textual interpretation: namely that, as readers, we make it up as we go along. ‘Good’ and ‘bad’ readers Making it up as you go along carries risks, of course, and Lee Siegel thinks that Sedgwick’s use of Démétrius Zambaco’s ‘Onanism and Nervous Disorders in Two Little Girls’ is one of them. This is Sedgwick’s ‘manuscript dated 1881’ (Sedgwick 1993: 120)­– ­the Semiotext(e) extract that she juxtaposes with Marianne’s post-party crying fit. Siegel’s objection is that ‘Zambaco was exposed as a fraud by none other than Jeffrey Mousaieff Masson’ and that Sedgwick publishes her essay ‘without making the slightest reference in her arguments to Masson’s paper, even to rebut him’.

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Having cited Catherine MacKinnon’s view that Zambaco’s ‘diagnoses are not true because their etiology … is not true’, Siegel triumphantly quotes Masson saying that: ‘Zambaco’s view about the sexuality of the two girls is a fantasy’ (Siegel 1998: 40).13 A fantasy: that word again. Siegel’s humanist sensibilities are offended that Sedgwick has the audacity to juxtapose Elinor’s concern for Marianne with a doctor who treats onanism by applying a red-hot iron to the vaginas of two offending sisters. He complains that ‘Sedgwick believes that the sadistic, misogynistic doctor and the exquisitely profound novelist share the same understanding of women’ (Siegel 1998: 40). Meanwhile, Sedgwick’s queer sensibilities use this shocking manoeuvre as a surgical strike (pun intended) against canonical reading. However, in my view, both commentators are dealing in fantasy: Siegel’s ‘exquisitely profound novelist’ is as much a product of the imagination as Sedgwick’s sadistic dominatrix. Nor is Sedgwick’s suppression of Masson fatal, as Siegel would have us believe. Sedgwick’s silence merely reproduces the provocative classroom stratagem by which she distributed Zambaco’s text without comment, and in a format ‘which refused to proffer the legitimating scholarly apparatus that would give any reader the assurance of “knowing” whether the original of this document was to be looked for in an actual nineteenth-century psychiatric archive or, alternatively and every bit as credibly, in a manuscript of pornographic fiction dating from any time­– ­any time including the present­– ­in the intervening century’ (Sedgwick 1993: 127). Deprived of framing narratives and faced with a text printed ‘entirely in capital letters’ (Sedgwick 1993: 119), Sedgwick’s graduate students were, one assumes, somewhat nonplussed. The manoeuvre reads as a parody of close reading. Like I. A. Richards in the classroom experiments discussed in the previous chapter, Sedgwick distributes an unidentified text to her class, daring them to make sense of it from internal evidence. In doing so she reveals the impossibility of ultimate attributions: the text is a medical document and an S/­M narrative and a pornographic ‘fantasy’. Moreover, it can be fitted into a range of historical moments, and it may or may not (according to the student) seem appropriate to a class on Sense and Sensibility. Sedgwick teases her readers in a similar way by turning the Zambaco document into ‘1881/­1981’, and referring, without elaboration, to the case study’s appearance under the ‘less equivocal scholarly auspices’ (Sedgwick 1993: 129) of Masson’s book. As a consequence, Sedgwick questions whether ultimate ‘knowledge’ can be made available through academic discourse.

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If Zambaco’s narrative is read as Masson directs (as a ‘fantasy’) it fits snugly into Sedgwick’s disruptive reading of Austen. That is, Zambaco’s ‘fantasy’ underscores and enables her own. However, Sedgwick also uses Zambaco’s sadism to attack traditional Austen criticism; she says that the latter sounds ‘hilariously like the leering school prospectuses or governess manifestos brandished like so many birch rods in Victorian S-M pornography’. This is another self-consciously provocative strategy, and Sedgwick pursues it in language as intemperate as Lee Siegel’s. Complaining of the ‘vengefulness’ of Austen criticism, she calls Tony Tanner ‘the ultimate normal and normalizing reader of Austen’, and transcribes examples of what she sees as his typically controlling manoeuvres. (‘“Emma has to be tutored … into correct vision and responsible speech. Anne Elliot has to move, painfully, from an excessive prudence”’ (Sedgwick 1993: 125; Sedgwick’s emphasis).)14 In her response to Tanner’s book, Sedgwick identifies, and tries to evade, a set of readings which invoke discipline and pedagogy as the ultimate touchstones of Austen’s fiction. Her attempt to queer Austen is as much about escaping these moralising narratives as making a fully documented case for Sense and Sensibility as a novel about masturbation. This is why she is uninterested in the ‘New Historicizing point that you can’t understand Sense and Sensibility without entering into the alterity of a bygone masturbation phobia’. Instead she says, ‘I am more struck by how profoundly, how destructively twentieth-century readings are already shaped by the discourse of masturbation and its sequelae: more destructively than the novel is’ (Sedgwick 1993: 128). In other words: the red-hot iron of moral surveillance and punishment has been applied more often by critics than by Austen or her narrator. This reading is strengthened when Sedgwick imagines that the virginal ‘Jane Austen’ of traditional criticism ‘is herself the punishable girl who “has to learn,” “has to be tutored”’ by her critics (Sedgwick 1993: 126). Although I do not share Sedgwick’s wish to demonise Tony Tanner (whose readings of Austen seem to me to be exemplary), her comments usefully indicate the wider implications of the term ‘critic’. By pointing out the ‘normal and normalizing’ tendencies of Austen criticism, Sedgwick suggests that literary criticism’s aesthetic assumptions are structured by equally moralising forms of social criticism. This takes place on the level of theme (by producing interpretations of Austen which emphasise good behaviour and self-control) and also on the level of technique. That is: close reading can, in itself, be seen as a moralising discourse which projects its practitioners into a set of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ reading habits. One could, therefore, gloss

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Sedgwick’s attack on Tanner by seeing the latter as an attentive reader who obediently follows what he takes to be appropriate hints from the text. The ­ oes not make outrageous conceptual good reader­– i­n this case a ‘he’­– d leaps; he would rather analyse historical context and stylistic nuance. Nor would he dream of finding sexual meanings in the pre-twentieth-century use of the word ‘queer’. Instead he carefully fulfils the established requirements of his critical contract. By contrast, the ‘bad’ reader­– ­now a ‘she’­– ­will dream whatever she wants. Her rebellion against ‘punitive/­pedagogical’ readings makes her gleefully unrepressed­– ­hence her value. Though Sedgwick restricts her discussion to Austen, the ‘punitive/­ pedagogical’ relationship extends beyond literary criticism. Popular manuals which tell you what, and how, to read are constructed around similar narratives of self-improvement and self-control; and, as discussed in chapter 4, ‘pedagogic surveillance’ (Sedgwick 1993: 128) also conditions much of the educational system, particularly when it comes to questions of gender and sexual identity. Although she inhabits a very different pedagogic world from Britain’s National Curriculum, Sedgwick’s refusal of ‘normal and normalizing’ criticism can be seen as an attempt to break out of this ­ ence Siegel’s ire at relationship between education and social control­– h seminar room ‘sexualization’. Her strategies, however, are not the only way of questioning normative assumptions and nor are they flawless. In my view, LGBTQ Studies should certainly challenge the inter-­ identification of ‘good reading’ and ‘good citizenship’. However, since Sedgwick’s is not the only form of textual commentary within Queer Studies, I want to differentiate her mode from that of other, more historically nuanced, writers by proposing the term ‘loose reading’ to describe reading strategies that refuse the patterns delineated by ‘close reading’. These ‘loose’ readings would include Sedgwickian analysis but it might also be used, more generally, of certain kinds of disruptive deconstructive and/­or confessional reading models. A genealogy of the style would also connect it to feminist attempts to read ‘against-the-grain’. These manoeuvres are arguably more of an inversion of close reading than an escape from it. For example, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s landmark study The Madwoman in the Attic (1979) contains a reading of Austen that is strenuously novel but that nonetheless relies on detailed textual analysis in a way that ‘Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl’ does not. Even so, againstthe-grain readings were among the first attempts to fracture canonicity and to problematise liberal notions of a universal reader.15 Moreover, although she is usually labelled as a ‘queer theorist’, Sedgwick always insisted that her preoccupations emerged in the first instance from her feminism; it

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would therefore be surprising if her critical practice has not, in some way, been informed by against-the-grain interventions. Given my comments on close reading, it ought to be clear that I do not use ‘loose’ as a stigmatisation. Although ‘looseness’ carries negative connotations reminiscent of the moral narratives which Sedgwick discovers in Austen criticism, these narratives need not be wholly containing. Instead, ‘looseness’ could be a boast underlining a rejection of ‘good’ reading habits and ‘good citizenship’. Its implications of moral and physical laxity place it within a philosophical tradition that prizes the excessive and the unrestrained; Mikhail Bakhtin’s work on the carnivalesque was evidently a major influence on Sedgwick. Her critical practice is akin to the valorisations of parody and surplus found in deconstructionist theorisations of mimicry and performativity (as for example in Homi Bhabha’s early writings). Her criticism also presents itself as gendered (as in, ‘loose woman’). Historically, the discourse of the ‘loose woman’ has been about shame and defamation but the usage seems appropriate in the present context, partly because the technique is related to feminist disruptions of canonicity, but also because Sedgwick has explicitly addressed this repressive history by alluding, in critical writings, to her gender and body-size: ‘There is such a process as coming out as a fat woman … it is a way of staking one’s claim to insist on, and participate actively in, a renegotiation of the representational contract between one’s body and one’s world’ (Sedgwick 1993: 230).16 Moreover, her efforts to recover an unrepressed female-centred model to set beside the pedagogic controls she associates with Tony Tanner are the actions of an unapologetically ‘loose woman’. ‘Loose reading’ should therefore be welcomed as a response to the ‘timidity and banality’ that Sedgwick finds in established critical readings (Sedgwick 1993: 125); it also offers a productive relation to creative writing. There may, however, be dangers in rejecting attentive reading strategies completely and embracing ‘loose’ reading as the only truly authentic reading mode. It would, for example, be foolish to valorise ‘loose’ reading without asking whether it only has meaning as a disruptive strategy if one already understands, and implicitly accepts, the rules of ‘close’ reading. Alternatively, if one practises ‘loose’ reading without first mastering ‘close’ reading, isn’t there a danger that one will be constantly mastered by discourses one cannot adequately interrogate? Moreover, if ‘loose’ reading defers the production even of contingent ‘knowledges’, it risks undermining the ground from which political critiques might be mounted. This last issue is as important as the control and pre-determination that Sedgwick complains of in conventional criticism. Therefore if queer reading is always

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to mean ‘loose reading’ (as it does for some, but not all, queer readers), we ought to consider the implications of the strategy, and the extent to which we are caught, as usual, between two unappealing forces. On the one hand we have reading practices which initiate us into intellectual good citizenship (placid, polite, and accepting). On the other, we have strategies which often operate as a flight from historical and material actualities. The former brings responsibilities but can be socially empowering. The latter enable one to re-write the text­– ­but may, paradoxically, divorce one from the social world that the text inhabits and informs. Sedgwick’s attack on Austen criticism provides a telling instance of the latter phenomenon. Her account is provocative but, in the end, curiously limiting. My dismay partly derives from a belief that Tanner’s work is more useful than Sedgwick allows, but I would also argue that it is counter-­productive to blame Austen’s critics for originating the ‘punitive/­ pedagogical’ dynamic. Sedgwick’s insight into this dynamic is undermined by her unwillingness to acknowledge Austen’s complicity: for surely it is Austen, not Tanner, who introduces a rhetoric of surveillance and control? In so far as Tanner uses this language, he is simply (like a ‘good’ reader) reproducing passages such as: ‘My feelings shall be governed and my temper improved … I shall now live solely for my family … As for Willoughby … His remembrance … shall be regulated, it shall be checked by religion, by reason, by constant employment’ (Austen 1995: 294–5). Or, ‘She had often been negligent or perverse, slighting his advice, or even wilfully opposing him, insensible of half of his merits, and quarrelling with him … but still … he had loved her, and watched over her from a girl, with an endeavour to improve her’ (Austen 1985: 404). Austen’s fiction is awash with tutors and pupils;17 it is also structured by a controlling irony that dictates the reader’s response to every character from Emma Woodhouse to Lady Bertram’s pug. Moreover, this panoptical style (apparently detached, yet deeply interventionist) is accompanied by a didacticism rooted in eighteenth-century conduct books,18 and by a particular interest in the politics of reading. Thus, Northanger Abbey deplores the ‘voluntary, self-created delusions’ which arise from bad reading practices: ‘She saw that the infatuation had been created … long before her quitting Bath, and it seemed as if the whole might be traced to the influence of that sort of reading which she had there indulged’ (Austen 1990: 160). Although Northanger Abbey is often described as a satire on the Gothic novel, this passage emphasises Catherine’s indulgent reading style rather than her choice of fiction; her future husband also reads Ann Radcliffe, but with an air of proper

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detachment­– h ­ e is the ‘good’ reader who tutors the naïve Catherine. Comparable ‘loose readings’ also underlie Marianne Dashwood’s neartragedy in Sense and Sensibility, the novel that Sedgwick places at the heart of her re-assessment of Austen criticism. It would be pointless to accuse Sedgwick of failing to spot Austen’s didacticism; this, after all, is exactly the reading that she is trying to displace. In any case, I am less interested in whether or not Sedgwick has produced a ‘true’ interpretation of Austen’s fiction than I am in the wider effect of her reading. By making Tanner the victim of the piece, Sedgwick ‘saves’ Austen for queerness, but the strategy can only achieve its success by obliterating Sense and Sensibility’s usefulness as a guide to the histories of manners, morality, and social control which circulate around and through Austen’s fiction, and which continue to condition Western social and sexual lives. Similarly, although it is invigorating to re-imagine Sense and Sensibility as a lesbian/­masturbatory text which has been repressed into heterosexual conformity by ‘normal and normalizing’ critics, to do so is to evade Austen’s collusion with precisely these normative forces. A more substantive subversion might involve a re-integration of literary, political, and historical values, rather than a concentration on establishment icons. By rejecting historicity as firmly as she does, Sedgwick falls, paradoxically, into a relatively normative regard for ‘the literary’. Likewise, her focus on a narrow band of writers has the effect of re-stating the canon’s efficacy. In other words: if you didn’t believe in it, why would you try to queer it? Ultimately, it seems to me that ‘Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl’ is more concerned with re-writing literary history than with analysing the residual effects of Austen’s moral code. Sedgwick’s intervention is a symbolic strike against academic complacency, but such gestures should not be taken as the only way of asserting a minority identity. That is why it is dangerous to follow right-wing commentators such as Siegel and Kimball in representing queer theory as a monolithic practice. To do so is limit the range of anti-establishment interventions and to slight the social contexts in which those interventions are formulated. We are all of us governed by written and unwritten rules; refusing to see these may be the first step to dismantling them, but it does not, in itself, remove them. Fantasy is an invaluable tool but it is only part of the answer. And nor is it necessarily progressive: Siegel’s version of queer theory is both ‘loose’ and fantastic, but it is hardly enabling. In some ways, moreover, the very ease of Sedgwick’s textual re-alignments serves to demonstrate the greater difficulty of re-aligning social prejudices, or repealing anti-queer legislation. In this context an attempt to understand the forces governing

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Austen’s fiction might be more rewarding than an attempt to ignore their continuing existence. It should be clear from my own critical practice that I myself am not ready to abandon attentive reading strategies. These, for all of their possible shortcomings, have enabled me to interrogate the homophobia of Lee Siegel’s ‘Gay Science’ while celebrating the freedoms offered by ‘Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl’. There is clearly an irony in using close reading to defend an essay which derives its power from an abandonment of attentiveness, but although I have focused closely on Siegel’s and Sedgwick’s texts, I do not pretend that my readings are objective. On the contrary, my readings have been conditioned by the a priori intention of supporting one and finding the other wanting. Unsurprisingly, both texts are more various than I have allowed. This is especially true of ‘Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl’, which could be read in ways far removed from my version. Indeed, in another day, or in another mood, I might read Sedgwick’s essay differently. (As I remarked above, critics make things up as they go along: but then, that’s what reading is­– ­the re-creation of a text in real time. The difference between critics and non-professional readers is that critics commit their readings to print and, in doing so, they give their textual responses an appearance of fixity.) An awareness of the mutability of critical judgements has not prevented me, however, from trying to persuade the reader that I am right to view Siegel and Sedgwick in the way that I do. On the contrary, my account of loose reading has been formulated through some very close writing. An urge to persuade is standard in critical essays, but the precise combination of ‘loose reading’ and ‘close writing’ may hold particular dangers. Sedgwick’s style, for example, is artfully excessive: her use of fantasy, parody, and over-statement is governed, paradoxically, by a regulating force which is sometimes in an uneasy tension with her more permissive textual interpretations. One could argue indeed that her style is not just controlled, it is also controlling. That is, her self-positionings have the effect of over-dictating the reader’s response to her texts. To some degree, all writers attempt such coercion; my anxiety about Sedgwick’s practice is that her interventions sometimes foreclose alternative methodologies­– ­note her rather slighting remarks about ‘the New Historicists’ (Sedgwick 1993: 127) in ‘Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl’. Ironically, this airy totalisation makes her sound like no one so much as Lee Siegel. In so far as my own allegiances are historicist, this is an area where I am likely to feel sensitive, but I do think that Sedgwick’s tone here (and in her account of Tanner) reproduces the sadistic narratives that she

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deplores in traditional criticism. Sedgwick’s willingness to dole out punishment raises questions, which she does not answer, about who decides which critics can be endorsed and which ones need to be disciplined. Crucially, it also reinstates moral judgement by implying that sadism is ‘good’ when applied to Tony Tanner but ‘bad’ when applied to Marianne Dashwood. Perhaps, then, I value Sedgwick’s essay less for what it says about Austen, and more for its suggestions about reading practice. Sedgwick’s use of fantasy has the two-fold advantage of revealing the impossibility of ‘close’ reading, while also allowing for a more creative form of criticism. The link between masturbation and writing underlines fantasy’s role in the reading process, but it also emphasises the desirability of a self-reflexive reading practice. Critical self-reflection may seem like an unacceptably narcissistic exercise; but it is also a prerequisite for good critical practice. This is why I am disappointed by Sedgwick’s failure to explore her rejections of historicism. A willingness to interrogate critical assumptions is particularly important for commentators who insist on the wider political context of their writing. If our work is to have maximum valency, we need to think about the uses and abuses of ‘loose’ and ‘close’ reading. (And here I use ‘we’ to mean anyone who reads and is interested in the politics of culture; I don’t just mean professional critics.) The challenge is to engage closely with social structures and cultural artefacts without colluding unconsciously in the processes of control and tutelage that Sedgwick identifies in Austen criticism. To do this we also have to reflect on the institutions which inform our responses. This is especially true for those who work in the public sector; it is also, to be fair, something which Sedgwick does elsewhere in her work.19 Most of all, we need to check and re-check our critical practice without losing sight of the inequalities which first prompted our desire for speech. Given that these are not easy tasks, it follows that we need as many modes of expression as possible: the creative as well as the critical, the loose as well as the close. A tactical preference for one mode should not preclude the use, or development, of other modes. Tracking the continuities and discontinuities of our reading positions and critical idioms should not, however, be an end in itself; rather, it should be a way of discovering what these voices will and will not achieve. Notes   1 A Google search for ‘Jane Austen Donald Trump’ will yield huge numbers of results because both halves of the search are independently famous: my enquiry

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on 25 January 2019 yielded 1,310,000 hits, the first several hundred of which explicitly link the two figures.  2 These are, respectively, from the Times Higher Education Supplement and Boston Public Radio: see Harris 2018 and Turesky 2016.   3 These are from The Guardian (Kean 2017) and The Daily Telegraph (Henderson 2017).   4 This was one of two Austen headlines on the USnews.com website for the day in question: see Stiehm 2016.   5 The Lady Susan headlines are from Taylor 2016 and Howell 2016.   6 I discuss this aspect of Austen’s reception, including its relation to fandom and the reading cultures, in Quinn 2007. The current chapter’s discussion of Sedgwick draws from Quinn 2000.   7 This is the case of Emma Gonzalez, who became a campaigner for gun control after she survived the Parkland shooting in which seventeen people were killed. The manufactured image was derived from an actual photograph of Gonzalez tearing up a shooting target (Wright 2018).   8 Among many publications on Section 28, see Jones and Mahony 1989.   9 For discussions of this aspect of Austen’s work, see Castle 2002 and Quinn 2007. 10 For a detailed account of reading positions and queer reading, see chapter four of Sinfield 1994. 11 See Sedgwick 1994. 12 See Mark Kerr and Kristin O’Rourke, Sedgwick Sense and Sensibility: An Interview with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, http:/­/­nideffer.net/­proj/­Tvc/­ interviews/­20.Tvc.v9.intrvws.Sedg.html. Last accessed 6 January 2020. 13 For Masson’s and MacKinnon’s views on Zambaco, see Masson 1986. Masson is an extremely contentious figure within psychoanalysis, which may be another reason why Sedgwick is less concerned about his account of Zambaco than Siegel thinks she should be. 14 Sedgwick is quoting from Tanner 1986. 15 See Lewis 1992 for a fuller account of this phase of lesbian-feminist enquiry. 16 Sedgwick doesn’t explicitly identify herself as ‘a fat woman’, but by discussing what it would mean to ‘come out as a fat woman’ she allows the reader to infer a personal investment in the topic. This is another example of her mediated confessionalism. 17 These often divide along gender­– ­as in Emma and Northanger Abbey, where older men teach younger women­– ­but not always. Elinor is the chief tutor of Sense and Sensibility, as is Anne in Persuasion; and although Edmund moulds Fanny’s education, it is she who really triumphs in Mansfield Park. 18 Nancy Armstrong’s Desire and Domestic Fiction lays bare the pedagogic impulses informing eighteenth-century fiction; for an account of Austen’s specific debt to Hannah More, see Waldron 1994. 19 See ‘How To Bring Your Kids Up Gay: The War On Effeminate Boys’ and ‘Nationalisms and Sexualities’, both in Tendencies.

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Reading and technology

In 1985 the book historian Armando Petrucci expressed pessimism about reading’s place in a world dominated by new technologies: Western reading practices were being eroded, he argued, by habits contracted from other media. In a move that would have seemed less quaint when it was originally formulated, he complained that ‘the use of remote-control devices has given television spectators the power to change channels instantly, jumping from a film to a debate, from a game show to a news programme, from a commercial announcement to a soap opera’. For Petrucci, this ‘is the exact contrary of reading understood in the traditional sense, which is linear and progressive’. By allowing for sequences that haven’t been planned by a given channel, remote controls produce an ‘unprogrammed disorder’ whose ‘only author’ is ‘the individual television viewer’. Such habits resemble ‘the traverse, desultory, interrupted reading style­– ­now slow, now fast­ – ­of deculturated readers’. Consequently, ‘the practice of zapping and the interminable plots of the soap operas have created potential readers who not only know no “canon” or “order of reading”, but have not acquired the respect, traditional in book readers, for the order of the text, which has a beginning and an end, and is thus intended to be read in a precise sequence established by someone other than the reader’ (Petrucci 1999: 361–2). Now that children and parents routinely wield mobile phones, tablet computers, and gaming consoles, Petrucci’s arguments seem to come from another world. But there are three reasons why his position is worth discussing. First, Petrucci voices an early and undiluted version of the anxiety that still clusters around hand-held electronic devices. Second, the very fact that his concerns seem old-fashioned reminds us that cultural panics belong

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to particular moments. and that subsequent anxieties may themselves become outmoded. Third, Petrucci exemplifies a particular kind of conservative response to technological change because he upholds the authority of the writer over that of the reader. Given that critics are themselves authors, this is a coercive and self-serving manoeuvre; although Petrucci argues for wider access to reading, he also wants to control what is read and how it is read. This is a recurring motif in responses to new technologies. Apocalyptic responses to technology interest me because they, as much as the technology itself, help shape the environment in which reading takes place. The first part of this chapter will use these debates to explore what is at stake in the struggle between commentators who embrace change and those who deprecate it. In pursuing these questions, I am less concerned with specific platforms or formats than with how the theory and practice of reading mutates in line with technology. In particular, I want to explore how screens, keyboards, and streaming devices have affected the power dynamics that govern language and narrative. By introducing new genres and altering existing ones, twenty-first-century media have transformed how stories are constructed and consumed. As well as engendering new kinds of writing, these generic innovations have undermined traditional gatekeepers and called into question established conceptions of the relationship between readers, authors, and texts. Meanwhile new forms of hardware and software continue to be developed, with ever greater efficiency, by markets that depend on innovation for their ongoing viability. The result is a culture in which obsolescence is both feared and sought,1 and where products are embraced and discarded with unprecedented speed. Formats, companies, and tools that seem invincible in 2020­– M ­ icrosoft, Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, PlayStation, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, WhatsApp, Tumblr­– ­may well go the way of floppy disks and cathode ray televisions. Indeed, they almost certainly will; the only question is when. Against this background, reading seems unimaginably ancient, an activity that stretches back five millennia and that has mostly been practised, during the last fifteen centuries, via the bound volumes that historians label ‘the codex’ and that everyone else calls ‘a book’. If we take the long view, we see that anxieties were voiced when vellum replaced papyrus, when the codex displaced the scroll, and when mechanical printing multiplied the reading population. These developments revolutionised the way that reading occurred but they did not destroy the human urge to engage with written language; if anything, they fed it. Bearing such precedents in mind, this chapter will argue that although books and reading are intimately related, they are not identical. Even if printed books were to become

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obsolete (an unlikely prospect), reading would continue. This, though, gives rise to a revealing tension. On one hand, there is more continuity than is sometimes acknowledged between ‘old’ and ‘new’ forms of reading. (Hence the way we ‘scroll’ though digital documents as our ancestors once scrolled through rolls of papyrus.) But, on the other hand, computer technology is changing how all culture­– n ­ ot just writing­– i­s imagined and consumed. As I have insisted throughout this book, context is all, which is why I want to examine reading alongside electronic formats that are sometimes represented as its enemy. What interests me here is a general culture of connectedness that depends on a variety of electronic devices and that manifests itself across a spectrum of formats including social networking sites, online archives (including ones compiled by their users), search engines, instant messaging, online gaming, email, Skyping and Facetime, blogging and vlogging, various forms of virtual reality role-playing, internet message boards, fan discussion groups, dating services, internet shopping, real-time sex play, online media sites (and their below-the-line debating forums), TV and film streaming services, and so on. These interfaces offer contrasting user experiences, and people who immerse themselves in one form may well be contemptuous of another. Given that my overall focus is on reading, I will only discuss some of these phenomena, but I nonetheless want to proceed on the understanding that digital culture is just as heterogenous as analogue culture, and its relation to reading is correspondingly complex. Although I disagree with the position from which Armando Petrucci is speaking, his voice provides a useful way of exploring tensions between innovation and tradition. In particular, I am interested in how his antipathy to television anticipates the arguments of internet sceptics. By looking at the continuities between pre- and post-digital responses to technology I want to open up a wider reflection on the role that screens (of various kinds) play in the cultural imaginary of reading. And I should emphasise that the chapter is interested in how reading intersects with technology in general, not just its relation to electronic formats. Consequently, I will discuss older technologies as well as twenty-first-century ones.2 Technologies and ‘tradition’ The claims that Petrucci makes on behalf of ‘traditional’ literary culture are founded on a misrepresentation of the texts that he purports to value. When he sets remote controls and ‘the interminable plots’ of soap operas against ‘the respect, traditional in book readers, for the order of the text, which has a beginning and an end, and is thus intended to be

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read in a precise sequence established by someone other than the reader’ (Petrucci 1999: 361–2), he is offering a revealingly authoritarian version of what it means to inhabit a written text. He is also ignoring the more nuanced picture offered by many ‘classic’ literary fictions. Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759–67) features a ‘Preface’ that comes in the middle of the third volume, blank pages inserted in the text, a black page in the first volume, and marble end-papers in the middle of his book (Sterne 1983: 30, 153, 182, 377 and 512–13). Another foundational English fiction, Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews (1742), has self-mocking chapter titles such as ‘Of Which You Are Desired to Read No More Than You Like’ (Fielding 1999: 290). Such promptings are not clear-cut. Do they empower readers to make their own way through the book or are they covert reminders of the narrator’s authority?3 The case could be argued either way, and the resultant ambiguity illuminates not just Sterne’s and Fielding’s fiction but also the wider connections between books and readers. In other words, the ambiguity is structural. Where, in a reading relationship, does the power lie? It lies all over the place. Petrucci’s version of culture is an overtly paternalistic one in which viewers/­readers are deemed to need guidance from authority figures whom they are then expected to respect. In the years since Petrucci complained about remote controls, internet streaming has further eroded the hegemony of established broadcasters. And what holds for TV now also holds for reading because digitisation allows for the almost boundless free downloading of out-of-copyright texts. As a result, readers can construct their own canons without reference to academics, reviewers, or mainstream publishing houses. Petrucci’s hostility to remote controls is therefore an early manifestation of a larger anxiety about technologies that enable readers or viewers to intervene in texts and canons. In response, I would argue that reading is itself a form of intervention: without it, the words on a page would remain inert. Cultural authoritarians such as Petrucci deny this dynamic so that they can instead represent the book as a sacrosanct entity to be imbibed, respectfully, by the reader. As their name suggests, remote controls place authority at a remove both from the object that transmits the text to the viewer (the television) and from the writers, technicians, station managers, and performers who are responsible for the programmes on a given channel. By taking power from these figures, and giving them to the viewer, remote controls externalise, and make explicit, the viewer’s power to create textual meaning and textual pleasure for themselves. This illuminates the reading process because reading is itself a kind of ‘remote control’ in which ‘the text’ is located­

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– ­and created­– s­ omewhere other than between the bindings of a book or the screen of a computer. Because they are the co-creation of the reader and the writer, textual meaning and textual pleasure are always ‘somewhere else’; they shift around inside the intangible space that is formed when a reader encounters another person’s words. (The ‘remoteness’ of this experience, its inaccessible invisibility, is one of the subjects of Duncan Grant’s Crime and Punishment, which I examined in chapter 1: although the sitter’s pose gives evidence of the book’s effect on her, we cannot visit the place where she ‘sees’ Dostoevsky’s plot unfolding.) Petrucci’s animus against remote controls may be less to with their supposedly populist impact, therefore, than with what they suggest about cultural consumption. Specifically, they indicate that cultural objects cannot be transferred in a logical and complete way from their creators to their consumers; and, because of this, writers are not able to control the meanings that readers take from their books. Another way of putting this would be to say that Petrucci discounts the positive potential of bricolage, the process by which people create new patterns of significance by juxtaposing materials taken from otherwise heterogeneous sources. This tailoring process is strikingly similar to the ‘zapping’ that Petrucci associates with television remote controls. The difference is that Petrucci calls the practice an ‘unprogrammed disorder’ and sees it as a wholly new development even though it has long been central to how humans generate and process meaning. By disrupting the false distinction that Petrucci draws between ‘popular’ and ‘high’ art, bricolage suggests that all culture is hybrid, or will become so as a result of how it is internalised. Petrucci resists this insight because it interferes with his assertion of generic hierarchies and with the authority that enables him (as a critic) to proclaim those hierarchies in the first place. Crucially for my purposes, as well as making judgements about the relative value of given genres, he also ranks different styles of reading. Citing evidence from his experience of ‘frequenting places of higher learning in the United States’, he complains that ‘young readers are changing the rules of reading behaviour that until now have somewhat rigidly conditioned reading practice’. These ‘young readers’ are as likely to sit under a table as they are to sit at one. They tend to rest their books on parts of their body rather than on a desk, and they have a ‘physical relationship’ with the book in which their reading material is ‘manipulated, crumpled, bent, forced in various directions and carried on the body’. In short, these readers ‘make [the book] their own by an intensive, prolonged and violent use more typical of a relationship of consumption than of reading and learning’ (Petrucci 1999: 364).

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Petrucci’s dichotomy between ‘reading and learning’ on one side, and ‘consumption’ on the other, betrays his anxiety about the erosion of cultural hierarchies. Not only do people create their own television schedules, they also fail to sit obediently at their desks while they read. This is another iteration of a power struggle that has already appeared several times in this book, most clearly in chapter 3, where I discussed how Woolf and Leavis contested the concept of ‘common’ reading, and in chapter 4, where I analysed how different schools of literary studies have struggled for control of the interpretive process. As an indication of where Petrucci lies on this spectrum, his essay includes a section on ‘Reading Disorders’. This is not a reference to dyslexia or alexia (where subjects lose their linguistic facility after a stroke); rather, Petrucci is hypothesising a cultural disorder in which otherwise competent people read in the ‘wrong’ way­– ­e.g. by placing pleasure or ‘consumption’ over respectful ‘learning’. In illustration of this so-called ‘reading disorder’, Petrucci bemoans ‘a mode of mass reading that some have hastily dubbed “postmodern”’. He describes this is ‘an “anarchic, egotistical, egocentric” mode … based on the one imperative, “I read what I want”’ (Petrucci 1999: 360). Unsurprisingly, this is also the point at which Petrucci warns of the destructive effects of TV remote controls. Petrucci is right that reading protocols changed over the course of the twentieth century but the book-crumpling, floor-hugging tendencies of his college students have as much to do with mass production as with the personalised programming licensed by television remote controls. Even medieval manuscripts carry marginalia from readers; some books of hours are thick with comments. It is therefore not surprising that contemporary readers find it easy to intervene, violently or otherwise, in cheap paperbacks. In any case, Petrucci’s investment in respectful, desk-located reading is primarily ideological. To borrow the motto of the university to which I am attached, he feels that students should ‘Be Still and Know’.4 But why should he, or any other critic, be disturbed that younger readers might feel empowered to ‘make [books] their own’? One definition of reading would be to say that it is, precisely, the process by which one makes a text one’s own. To be sure, twenty-first-century readers may have more freedom to do this than, say, scribes in a medieval monastery, but even the latter were often able to use marginalia to express an individual identity alongside their role within a religious community. Given this, it is hard to see Petrucci’s picture of linear, deferential reading as anything other than a fantasy based on a wish for order. In the period since Petrucci attacked TV remote controls, the internet has generated new platforms and new kinds of content; it has also allowed

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a much wider range of people to become producers and disseminators of culture. Unsurprisingly, a subsequent generation of polemicists have spoken, even more strongly, against the cultural self-fashioning that new technologies have enabled. One of the most prominent of these voices belongs to Baroness Susan Greenfield, sometime Professor of Pharmacology, Senior Research Fellow at Lincoln College Oxford, member of the House of Lords, and former President of the Royal Institution. Greenfield is a contentious figure, who has been accused of using her professional credentials to support an anti-technology agenda in which anecdotes and hearsay have drowned out peer-reviewed research. Although she is an expert in brain physiology and Parkinson’s disease, her attacks on information technology have eschewed scientific data in favour of unverified assertions and a populist tone. This approach is typified by Mind Change: How Digital Technologies are Leaving Their Mark on Our Brains (2014), which uses the model of climate change to warn that brain chemistry could be altered irreversibly by an overdependence on new media.5 As part of her project, Greenfield has claimed that computer games and the internet can be linked to a rise in autism and ‘autism-like’ behaviour, and that an over-­dependence on screens can hasten the onset of dementia.6 Although the content and methods of Greenfield’s work have been questioned by her fellow scientists, her institutional affiliations and media visibility have allowed her to become a figurehead for opponents of information technology. Greenfield’s overall thesis can be gleaned from a passage by her fellow internet-sceptic, Andrew Keen, which she quotes near the beginning of Mind Change. According to Keen, social networking sites such as Facebook ‘are creating a youth culture of digital narcissism; open-source knowledge sharing sites like Wikipedia are undermining the authority of teachers in the classroom; the YouTube generation are [sic] more interested in self-expression than in learning about the world; [and] the cacophony of anonymous blogs and user-generated content is deafening today’s youth to the voices of informed experts’ (Greenfield 2014; 4–5). The reference to ‘informed experts’ is a tip-off that Greenfield­– ­like Petrucci­– h ­ as an eye on her own cultural capital. Both writers display a fear of self-created, non-institutional authority. Reacting against technologies that empower individual users, they seek to fortify the pre-digital power bases (such as universities, mainstream publishing houses, and print journalism) from which they themselves derive legitimacy. It is typical of Greenfield’s tendency to load the dice against IT that she frames her account of online search engines around ‘the darker side of surfing’, including how to ‘make an improvised explosive device, determine the most

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effective way to commit suicide or … find the best method for cooking human flesh’ (Greenfield 2014: 213). Worse, her analysis ignores the complexity of the relationship between the virtual and the material. A statement such as ‘Time spent using technology is time spent away from the real world and real people’ (Greenfield 2014:149) assumes that there is a single ‘real’ world and that computers are not part of it. But the internet exists in a physical world: we access it through hardware and its users are embodied subjects as well as online presences. People who interact on social networking sites can become friends even if they never meet in person, and many ‘real world’ friendships only persist because of contextual accidents, such as sharing a work place or being regulars in the same pub. If the latter is a ‘real’ relationship, why can’t sharing aspects of your identity online also be ‘real’? Greenfield’s antagonism to online culture reflects a wish to uphold existing hierarchies; like Petrucci, she uses the idea of orderly progression to create an intellectual chain-of-command in which certain kinds of analysis (and certain kinds of commentator) are privileged over others. Having observed that walking consists of a ‘fixed linear sequence’ of steps, she adds that ‘so it is with thought: there is a beginning, a middle and an end in a specified linear sequence in a cause-effect chain. Any thought, be it a fantasy, a memory, a logical argument, a business plan, a hope or a grievance all share this basic common characteristic of a fixed sequence’. Developing this metaphor, she holds that the ‘idea of sequence […] is the very quintessence of a thought’ and this this sequencing is what distinguishes a ‘train of thought’ from ‘a one-off instantaneous emotion captured in a shriek of laughter or a scream’ (Greenfield 2014: 11–12). Thus, the mind’s supposedly logical processes are being undermined by new media so that instead of a ‘specified linear sequence in a cause-effect chain’, online multi-tasking produces something akin to going ‘Out of Your Mind’ (the title of her eighth chapter). This argument would be more persuasive if it did not hang on such an impoverished account of the human mind. With its implication of fixed structures and onward motion, Greenfield’s ‘train of thought’ metaphor does not acknowledge that mental activity might be governed by repetition or aporias as much as by progress; nor does she have anything to say about fantasy, memory, or the unconscious. In her mechanistic account, steps always press forward towards a knowable conclusion; they do not get stuck, jump in the air, or return obsessively to ‘Go’. Worse, when she connects online activity to going ‘out of your mind’, she makes an unearned and offensive comparison between popular leisure activities and degenerative

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brain illnesses.7 Such moments reveal the ideological basis of her attacks on technology. Alongside the internet, she names alcohol, illegal drugs, and ‘recreational environments filled with rave music’ as instances of how some people seek an ‘emotional, unreflective state’ by engaging in pursuits that share ‘an absence of self-consciousness, an abrogation of a sense of self in favour of becoming the passive recipient of the incoming senses’, an experience that she characterises as ‘being “abandoned”’ (Greenfield 2014: 91). To further this proposition, Greenfield provide a table that sets ‘Mindful’ brain modes against ‘Mindless’ ones. According to this chart, ‘Mindful’ activities can be identified with the material world, ‘cognition’, and the ‘Normal’ whereas screen-based activities are equated with ‘Sensation’, the ‘Mindless’, and the unreal. Greenfield also separates ‘Normal adult life’ from the behaviour of ‘Children, schizophrenics, gamblers, drug-takers; those with high BMI; [and] those engaged in recreational pursuits, e.g., fast-paced sports, sex, dancing, dreaming’ (Greenfield 2014: 99). Significantly, reading is absent from both sides of Greenfield’s table­– presumably because it would reveal the untenability of her opposition ­ between ‘Sensation’ and ‘Cognition’. As I have argued throughout this book, reading mobilises a variety of mental and emotional responses in which readers often cross backwards and forwards between a variety of subject positions; no wonder it cannot be incorporated into Greenfield’s crude and ideologically loaded schema. Moreover, reading’s power derives from its capacity to remove us from the material world and alter our perception of ‘reality’. As Greenfield’s fellow neuroscientist, Dorothy Bishop, has asked: ‘If it is detrimental to perform socially isolated activities with a two-dimensional surface rather than interacting with real people in a 3D world, then should we be discouraging children from reading books?’ (Bishop 2014). It is hard to overstate the importance of Bishop’s point because books, as much as computer screens, are mind-altering substances. They are not always, or inevitably, a force for good, and we use them in messy, multifarious, and contradictory ways. By setting up a polarity in which books are good and screens are bad, anti-technology polemicists ignore reading’s cultural and psychological complexity. They also display an ignorance of history. The early novel was accused of promoting the same states that Greenfield associates with computer use, including passivity, time-wasting, narcissism, and mental and physical abandonment. As was the case with those earlier polemicists, Greenfield’s arguments betray an impulse towards social control, hence her belief in what she unreflectingly calls ‘the Normal’. Reading, in Greenfield’s account, is always about mastering knowledge,

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and never about pleasure, emotional relief, escapism, or open-ended selfdiscovery. She does not recognise that it can be more than an instrumental gathering of information, and nor does she acknowledge that following internet links might enrich reading as much as endanger it. Her investment in linearity makes her suspicious of hyperlinks because they disrupt narrative order and create a multiplicity of open-ended textual possibilities. But Greenfield’s horror is not the only way of responding to the textual and inter-personal possibilities offered by the net. When Roland Barthes applies the term ‘jouissance’ to reading, he is celebrating the very thing that Greenfield most deprecates, namely the capacity of texts to produce a momentary but ecstatic dissolution of selfhood, an experience akin to orgasm. Instead of Greenfield’s puritanical vision, in which ‘being “abandoned”’ to something results in passivity and personal breakdown, Barthes offers a bliss that is intimately connected to the reader’s experience of a text, and that can fracture their sense of self and the structures that define that self. ‘The text of bliss’, he says, is ‘the text that imposes a state of loss, the text that discomforts (perhaps to the point of a certain boredom), unsettles the reader’s historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, the consistency of his tastes, values, memories, brings to a crisis his relation with language’ (Barthes 1975: 14).8 Ironically, given that he was writing before the internet came into being, Barthes offers a more productive way of thinking about twentyfirst-century textuality than Greenfield’s mechanistic reductionism. Where Greenfield upholds sequential logic, Barthes comments that ‘The Sentence is hierarchical: it implies subjections, subordinations, internal reactions […] any completed utterance runs the risk of being ideological […] The professor is someone who finishes his sentences’ (Barthes 1975: 50). The book from which this comes­– ­The Pleasure of the Text­– ­is disconnected, associative, and fragmentary. Although the book gestures towards an alphabetical arrangement, concepts and impressions are placed alongside each other in discrete sections that invite readers to make­– o ­ r not make­– c­ onnections as they see fit. Some of the ideas are developed at length, others are casually sketched then discarded. The impression of playful open-endedness is typified by Barthes’s final section. Just at the point when a more conventional book would be summing its findings up, The Pleasure of the Text introduces a previously unmentioned concept which Barthes describes in the following terms: ‘If it were possible to imagine an aesthetic of textual pleasure, it would have to include: writing aloud. This vocal writing (which is nothing like speech) is not practised, but … Let us talk about it as though it existed’ (Barthes 1975: 66; emphasis in the original).

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‘Writing aloud’ (‘l’écriture à haute voix’) interests me, both in itself, and in the way that Barthes describes it. It is not that ‘writing aloud’ anticipates the internet (although it is a suggestive concept through which to approach twenty-first-century electronic media);9 it is more that Barthes rejects the impulse to conclude and instead directs his reader towards an as-yet-unrealised form of hybrid textuality. By privileging gaps and disjunctions rather than the linearity espoused by Greenfield and Petrucci, Barthes creates a space within which one might begin to imagine an unknowable future without being contained by a master-narrative. Instead of asserting the fantasy of an ordered and respectful past, Barthes’s jump-cuts question the sort of professorial tone that insists on its own hierarchical status.10 In this regard, I see Barthes, Greenfield, and Petrucci as representatives of a larger stand-off between authoritarian and non-authoritarian approaches to textuality, and although this tension is as old as literary commentary, its stakes have been greatly raised by electronic media. As the other chapters of this book have made clear, I gravitate towards approaches that loosen the power of cultural gatekeepers and that acknowledge the reader’s role as well as that of the author. Therefore, rather than responding to technological innovation in the apocalyptic manner favoured by Greenfield, I would prefer to take my cue from Barthes’s willingness to look with curiosity towards a future that he himself could not see. Paradoxically, this might also involve transforming how we think about the past. Jonathan Rosen’s extraordinary memoir, The Talmud and the Internet (2000) connects the vagaries of twenty-first-century communication to the history and future of Jewish identity. The book is set in motion by Rosen’s insight that the Talmud, the multi-volume work that animates Jewish law and theology, can be seen as a sort of internet-beforethe-­internet in which ‘nothing is whole in itself but where icons and text boxes are doorways through which visitors pass into an infinity of crossreferenced texts and conversations’. Rosen points out that the ‘the Hebrew word for tractate [the sections from which the Talmud is composed] is masechet, which means, literally, “webbing”’. ‘As with the World Wide Web’, he adds, ‘only the metaphor of the loom, ancient and inclusive, captures the reach and the randomness, the infinite interconnectedness of words’ (Rosen, J. 2000: 8–9).11 Ultimately, Rosen decides that the internet, unlike the Talmud, has no moral centre, but rather than rejecting the web, he embraces the possibilities it offers for connectedness. Most obviously, this takes the form of dialogue between groups and individuals who would not otherwise have the opportunity to talk to each other or even know of each other’s existence,

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but it also means links across time. Rosen’s meditation on his family’s past, particularly the murder of his father’s family in the Holocaust, is both a record of a specific loss and an emblem of how the past, the present, and the future can brought to bear on each other through acts of reading and imagination­– ­including online activity. This means recognising that certain gaps cannot be filled, and that knowledge is always partial and contingent. Responding to T. S. Eliot’s notion of shoring fragments against one’s ruin, Rosen points out that ‘in the Talmudic universe, the world, and the culture of the world, hasn’t been whole for thousands of years­– i­f ever. And so it is an ideal place to learn to make do with fragments, to find wholeness in the face of too much information, which, for all of its abundance, is itself only a fragment’ (Rosen, J. 2000: 35). In contrast to Eliot­– ­who has the luxury of fantasising that Western literary tradition was once a unified whole­– ­Rosen contemplates a cultural inheritance that has always been both multiple and incomplete. Embodying this ongoing tradition, the Talmud can be seen as a set of polyphonic glosses on itself, a text whose many authors dispute each other’s meanings as part of a shared project of working out how best to live. These qualities­– ­polyphony, disputatiousness, expansiveness, formal fluidity­– ­allow Rosen to reflect that it is in the nature of things to be unfinished, and that when he ‘face[s] a page of Talmud’ or ‘face[s] a computer screen’ he discovers the same thing, namely that, in the words of one of the countless voices recorded in the Talmud, ‘It is not your duty to complete the work, neither are you free to desist from it’ (Rosen, J. 2000: 36–7). In its original context this refers to the work of living and of studying the law but Rosen lets it stand, also, as a statement on the miscellaneous and innumerable words that circulate on, and are generated by, the web. Faced with the Talmud or the internet, he comes to the same conclusion: that everything is commentary. The implication, although Rosen does not spell it out, is that all of our activities­– ­even unpromising ones such as fights over meaning and identity­– ­are an expression of a craving for mutual recognition. By giving up on the fantasy of authorial singularity (an impossibility, anyway, in the context of a multi-voiced, self-contradicting text such as the Talmud),12 Rosen embraces online connectedness as a legitimate response to human ignorance and isolation. Where Barthes looks towards as-yet-­ uncreated forms of communication, Rosen mines the past for what it can tell us about our need for language, including our wish to disagree with each other. Putting the two together, their joint lesson is that although the internet has re-made our social and intellectual lives, it does not necessarily offer us an entirely new textual experience. Yes, its technologies are revolutionary,

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and yes, we communicate differently because of it, but the force that powers it is language, and language has defined human life for millennia. By offering so much more of everything, online culture is creating new challenges over how we speak to each other, how we adjudicate between truths and fabrications, and how we negotiate between public and private identities. But while it is true the internet has invented new ways of lying (and that it has powerful ways of making lies stick without our even knowing that they are lies), it can hardly be said to have originated the phenomenon of people using signs to deceive each other. On the contrary, communication has always hinged on sign systems that are treacherous as well as advantageous. As an emblem of what digital technology can achieve, Rosen cites an online project that re-creates synagogues demolished by the Nazis. Visiting the site, he is able to enter a virtual-reality reconstruction of the main synagogue in Frankfurt, which was destroyed during Kristallnacht. At first the film leaves him ‘feeling empty, miserably detached from the past I hoped to encounter’ (Rosen, J. 2000: 57), but when he returns to the subject later, he is moved by the thought that ‘a German Christian living not far from Buchenwald, where my grandfather was murdered, has devoted himself to recreating synagogues destroyed on a day that shattered my father’s world’. As a result, he finds that ‘it isn’t the images themselves that console­ – ­they still seem flat and far away­– ­but the link they establish between this unknown German grappling with history and my own mystified self’ (Rosen, J. 2000: 65). In one sense, technology lets Rosen down because the graphic on his screen cannot undo points of historic rupture: the images ‘were like a dream a computer might have of being a person’. But that same technology also creates a sense of kinship with someone whose existence he would not otherwise have been aware of and whose cultural inheritance is radically different to his own. So, while a digital reconstruction of a building that no longer exists could be seen as a form of deception, here it functions as an offering from the present to the past; not a restitution, because that would be impossible, but a homage and an act of contrition. Rosen’s experience suggests that digital cultures are like any other form of textuality in that ‘meaning’ and ‘value’ are created by what we bring to the sites that we visit; as with reading, much of what we see is a refraction of our own needs and identifications. In Rosen’s case, the internet allows him to engage with lost worlds while simultaneously looking towards the future that his baby daughter will grow into. This is why I mistrust Greenfield’s apocalyptic narrative, with its implication that twenty-first-century IT marks a complete break from the past, and that it dehumanises its users, or makes them lose their minds. On the contrary, the thing that can make

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the internet overwhelming­– ­its plenitude­– ­is also what makes it possible to discover and create corners of the local, and the unexpected. That said, questions remain about what it means to read something on a screen rather than on a page, and although I do not think that there is anything intrinsically destructive about e-communication, many of its applications place users­– a­ nd entire states­– a­ t the mercy of under-regulated political and commercial forces. This, again, is an enormous area, the history of which is still unfolding. To get some grip on it, I am going to use the second half of this chapter to argue that it is unhelpful to talk about screens as if they were only one thing. By remembering that screens have a pre-internet history, I want to recover a longer perspective through which to consider the cultural work that they perform­– ­including their role in shaping the future. Screens, electronic and otherwise Having started this chapter with a remote control, I want to continue with a TV screen. Specifically, the one that appears on the first page of Muriel Spark’s 1988 novel A Far Cry From Kensington. Spark’s narrator reminisces about a period of insomnia during which she discovered that You can sit peacefully in front of a blank television set, just watching nothing; and sooner or later you can make your own programme much better than the mass product … You can put anyone you like on the screen, alone or in company, saying and doing what you want them to do, with yourself in the middle if you prefer it that way. (Spark 2008: 1).

Where Petrucci fretted that remote controls would rob programme-makers of their authority, Spark evokes a more complicated picture in which viewers can turn off official programming and replace it with a drama in which they themselves are centre stage. This raises the interesting question of what screens are for, and whether their most obvious function­ – ­transmitting content­– ­is shadowed, or perhaps even powered, by our narcissistic wish to put ourselves in the middle of them. When we watch a film or TV programme our interest and pleasure hinge, ultimately, on the ways that we identify with what we see on the screen; even though we are not literally watching ourselves, we nonetheless cannot see other people without thinking ourselves among them. By watching a blank screen, Spark’s narrator cuts out the actors in the middle and goes straight to the chase, the chase being her internal life. And note how intimate this process is: the drama that she imagines on the screen stands in for the dreams that her insomnia prevents her from having.

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The TV in A Far Cry From Kensington has more in common than one might think with twenty-first-century handheld devices, and not only because contemporary users also delight in putting their images in the middle of their screens. Even though they are operated by different technologies, there is a generic and familial relation between cathode ray displays, LCD, and pre-LCD computer monitors, plasma screen TVs, OLED (organic light-emitting diode) screens, and smartphone touchscreens. Early PC monitors resembled­– ­and used the same mechanisms as­– ­cathode-ray TVs, and although modern computers no longer use this technology, computing would not have evolved in the way that it has if television had not already been ubiquitous in affluent Western families from the 1950s onwards. As this suggests, electronic screens started dominating Western lives long before the arrival of the world wide web. The PC was Time magazine’s ‘Person of the Year’ in 1982 and, since then, office activities have been dominated by PC clones, by Apple, and by software companies such as Microsoft. The explosion of email and internet browsing in the mid1990s hugely increased screen usage, and the decreasing weight and price of portable machines, plus the mass adoption of smartphones in the early 2000s carried electronic screens into the world at large. During this period, screens became both larger and smaller (depending on their purpose) and they have been characterised by sharper resolutions, faster refreshment speeds, and increasing multi-functionality. Internet sceptics often object that what occurs on smartphones, laptops, tablets, desktop computers, watches, and headsets is not ‘really’ reading. It is true that the majority of screen-based verbal activity consists of using instant messaging services, composing and construing emails, processing work documents, following internet gossip, writing or perusing blogs, playing online games, reading electronic newspapers, and keeping up with friends and family on social networking sites. It is also true that this is not ‘literary reading’ of the kind theorised by I. A. Richards or Virginia Woolf. But, looked at in the round, these acts of reading constitute a textual milieu that is more widespread and, in many regards, more intense than ever before: more people are reading more often than in any previous point in history. As an index of this shift, note how written communications are edging out speech: these days, phones are hardly ever used for conversation­ – ­instead they have become vehicles for writing and reading instant messages.13 In any case, we are not faced with an either/­or choice between books and screens. You can be on Facebook and still read poetry, and some social networking sites actively promote literary culture. Goodreads (where users rate and review the books they are reading) is the electronic

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equivalent of a reading group, except you can exchange views with people on the other side of the globe as well as with your immediate neighbours. This throws a new light on the issues discussed in chapter 3. Thanks to technology, it is more possible than ever before for genuinely ‘common’ readers to be heard: instead of being ventriloquised by professional critics, they are blogging online and making YouTube videos about their favourite authors. In any case, although most acts of reading now take place on screens, this is not the same as saying that literature is read more frequently in electronic form than on paper. It is true that many kinds of reading only occur ­ ut on screens­– c­ hecking social media sites would be an example of this­– b novel reading is shared between print culture and electronic culture. After an initial surge in the sales of both e-books and e-readers in the first decade of the twenty-first century, sales of both have levelled off. By the end of the second decade of the century, sales of print books were increasing year on year, while the market share of e-books was going down; significantly, the resurgence of print publishing seems to be especially strong among younger readers (Cain 2017). Such statistics only reflect the sales of new books; they cannot tell us how often people re-read existing books, including printed ones already in their possession. Given this, it seems safe to say that fiction and poetry is still read more often in print form than online. It is also striking that electronic technology has had to explore ways of imitating the centuries-old experience of reading a printed page: one of the chief selling-points of e-readers is that they use a format known as ‘electronic paper’, which aims to give a reading experience closer to that of reading an ordinary page. There is an implicit recognition here that although e-reading saves on book storage, it offers an inferior reading experience.14 These circumstances suggest that in certain contexts literary culture and screen culture intersect, while at other points they bifurcate. One way of understanding these points of convergence and divergence would be to argue that electronic screens need to be understood in relation to an older history of pages and print, and not merely examined through the lens of the contemporary. For example, the cathode ray TV in A Far Cry From Kensington is not only a staging post on the journey towards iPhones and laptops; it also looks back to cultural processes that long predate electronic devices. The non-transmitting screen in Spark’s novel TV echoes Isak Dinesen’s story, ‘The Blank Page’ (1957) in which an ancient oral storyteller asks Where does one read a deeper tale than upon the most perfectly printed page of the most precious book? Upon the blank page. When a royal and gallant

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pen, in the moment of its highest inspiration, has written down its tale with the rarest ink of all­– ­where, then, may one read a still deeper, sweeter, merrier and more cruel tale than that? Upon the blank page. (Dinesen 1991: 100–1)

Like Spark, Dinesen is indicating that absence can be more powerful than presence because it stimulates us to supply something that is not there. This dynamic is made possible because both the page and the TV monitor can act as receptacles for their users’ fantasies. Lurking behind Dinesen’s and Spark’s stories is the blank page that suddenly appears in volume six of Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, with the narrator’s suggestion that the reader should fill the gap with their own illustration of the seductive Widow Wadman (Sterne 1983: 377). Sterne’s white page is itself a homage to John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), which argues that humans are born without innate qualities and that identity is formed in response to our sensory experiences. The mind, Locke holds, is like ‘white Paper, void of all Characters’ (Locke 1979: 104); this is a punning reference both to human characteristics and to the ‘characters’ of the alphabet. In a similar vein, at the start of the Essay Locke raises the question of whether or not there are ‘Characters … stamped upon the Mind of Man’ and ‘Truths imprinted on the Soul’ (Locke 1979: 48, 49). It is not accidental that Locke illustrates his philosophical point with metaphors about writing and printing because these technologies helped promote a philosophical revolution that made Locke’s own work possible. This emphasis on textuality is also fitting given Locke’s influence on subsequent cultural production. Just as his philosophy imagines the mind as an empty sheet on which identity is written through perception and experience, so too do the eponymous protagonists of eighteenth-century novels present their life-stories as evidence of how their interaction with the world allowed them to attain an adult identity. By commenting on this tradition of quasi-autobiographical fiction, Tristram Shandy draws attention to how contemporary philosophy helped shape an emerging literary form.15 On the face of it, Sterne’s and Locke’s blank pages are far removed both from Spark’s TV monitor and from a twenty-first-century smartphone screen. However, they all demonstrate that there is a relationship between identity, cultural production, and technologies of inscription. Moreover, the correspondences between Spark’s blank monitor and Sterne’s and Dinesen’s unmarked pages suggests that a screen can perform a function that is separate from, and older than, its ostensible role as a device for transmitting content. Pushing this further, one could argue that screens and pages are in some senses versions of each other since both have functioned,

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through time, as spaces of projection and incorporation. These histories converge in twenty-first-century attempts to produce screens that mimic printed pages (‘electronic paper’) but pages and screens are already linked via the things that we ask of them. Specifically, it matters that pages and screens are things that we can write on as well as view (although, as I shall show, we do not write on them in the same way, or with the same degree of literalness). The blank page in Tristram Shandy draws attention to something that is usually implicit, namely that words are defined by the spaces around them, and that printed books are full of gaps and blanks as well as words and pictures. Readers can change the appearance of a page by making additions or corrections of their own. These annotations will alter how that same page looks to subsequent readers, with the result that a densely annotated copy of a literary work will read differently to an unmarked copy of the same edition. Although the ‘official’ words are the same, one version of the book will be mediated by marginal comments which will frame the next reader’s experience of the text, even if they try not to read them. (I have more than once come across library copies of Tristram Shandy in which readers have indeed drawn their own versions of Widow Wadman.) Through these interventions, manuscripts and printed books can become palimpsests in which different layers of history are encoded in the inscriptions made by readers.16 But as well as this material ‘marking’ of the text, there is a more metaphorical sense in which readers project things on to texts. Sterne’s blank page in Tristram Shandy is, explicitly, an invitation to the reader to fill a gap that he has left for them: to do so is to allow the page to become a kind of holding-place for the reader’s imagination. The same is true of the scene at the start of Jane Eyre (discussed in chapter 4) where Jane constructs her own internal vision of the birds described by Bewick. Both instances are a reminder that readers, and not just writers, are in the business of image-making. Because such projections are part of how language works, they are not restricted to our interaction with literary texts. The Romantic-period novelist Frances Burney was in the habit of drafting letters and journal entries on tablets of thin ivory that had been tied together to form a memorandum book. This practice caught the eye of her future husband, Alexandre d’Arblay, who requested one of the jotters as a keepsake when he was courting her. When Burney offered him a new one, he gave it back, instead requesting one that she had already used; he also asked if she would sign the tablet as ‘Cecilia’ (a reference to her recently published novel of the same name) (Harman 2000: 244). As well as illuminating the fluid relationship

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between Burney’s professional and private selves, this exchange speaks to the power of semiotic traces. The notebook contained erased messages that could still be seen, in a ghostly form, on the used sheets of ivory. Because of these marks, and because of the power of d’Arblay’s animating gaze, the practical object gained an additional function as an interface between two lovers. D’Arblay (whose suit was not encouraged by Burney’s father) was able to feel connected to his beloved via her abandoned jotter. Here, the partially visible pencil strokes stand in for the absent woman, and the ivory tablet is the medium through which this spectral version of Burney is brought into being. In other words, in this instance the tablet is not just an erasable page, it also functions as a kind of screen. a Burney’s memorandum book recalls Freud’s mystic writing pad­– ­ device on which words can be inscribed and erased so that other words can be put in their place. Freud’s pad (which he discussed in a short paper of 1925) consisted of a layer of celluloid covering another layer of wax; the user writes on the upper sheet with a stylus, thus leaving a readable channel in the wax below. The pad can be re-used once the surface of the wax has been made smooth again (Freud 2001). Although it works on a different principle to Burney’s ivory tablet, the mystic writing pad raises comparable questions about memory, text, and imagination because both mechanisms leave a faint, though ever-receding, trace of what was previously inscribed on them. Freud discusses the pad in relation to the unconscious and, more recently, his account of the mystic writing pad has been used as a way of theorising hypertext and the internet. Without our being directly aware of it, every link we click leaves a trace on our browsing history that can, in theory, be recovered. And, once recovered, it would constitute a map of our preoccupations, including ones that we might not be aware of or that we would not admit in polite society.17 In connecting these phenomena­– ­blank pages, erasable writing devices, TV sets, computer screens, hyperlinks­– ­I am not trying to assert a linear history in which one follows directly from another. Although I have argued that Burney’s ivory tablet is both an erasable page and a kind of screen, it is not the same screen as the one on which I am writing these words (even though that, too, is called a ‘tablet’). Nor would I want to minimise the technological revolutions that lie between Burney’s time and my own.18 However, I do think there are continuities in what we look for when we use screens and pages, and these crossovers are rooted in a shared relation to textuality. Moreover, the histories of pages and screens have now converged because we have reached a point where written texts are read on electronic screens; as a result, the electronic screen has ‘become’ a page

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in a way that was not the case when Spark published A Far Cry From Kensington. However, this raises further questions. As I noted earlier, anecdotal evidence suggests that it may be harder to absorb and retain written material that is read on an electronic screen. To explore this issue, I want to put my examination of the history of screens into dialogue with my earlier comments about reading as a ‘remote’ activity, one in which the work occurs somewhere other than on the page. In particular, I want to ask if there are gradations of remoteness and if the distance between reader and text is accentuated when reading occurs via an electronic device. Surfaces and presence As I pointed out when discussing Armando Petrucci’s take on remote controls, films and TV programmes have always been mediated by technology, whether this is the projector and screen that enabled my parents to watch films in their local cinema or the video cassettes, DVDs, and Blurays that marked my own progress into adulthood. Even though these are not primarily technologies of reading, they do affect how we think about textuality because they are part of the larger culture within which books are consumed. (Otherwise, why would DVDs be divided into ‘chapters’ that we ‘bookmark’?)19 But unlike books, Blu-rays and DVDs cannot function on their own. Their contents can only be accessed via a player and you cannot write on the texts that they contain in the way that you might mark the margins of a book. With Netflix, Amazon Prime, and other online streaming services there is no physical object ‘containing’ the text; instead the text is manifested directly on the screen.20 Since this represents a further displacement of the material text, and an additional degree of ‘remoteness’, it would be strange if streaming didn’t encourage a changed notion of what texts ‘are’ and of where they are located. This is especially the case given that online data storage systems such as Dropbox, OneDrive, and the iCloud are doing for personally generated content what streaming services do for TV and movies, namely locating it at a distance from the user. Gradations of ‘elsewhere-ness’ matter because textual ‘presence’ seems to have a bearing on how we process and incorporate information. If it is true that we retain less information when we read on a screen, this is likely to be connected to the traditional book’s capacity for inviting a sense of embodiment. I stand by my contention that all texts are in some sense ‘remote’, and that this dynamic does not originate with late twentieth-century technology. However, it could still be true that the codex involves a more immediate, a more bodily, experience of the text than the screen. Here there is an

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analogue with Gillian Isaacs Russell’s work on online psychotherapy. In so far as psychoanalysis is a talking cure, why shouldn’t it be conducted via online formats such as Skype? Such practice is becoming widespread, especially in contexts such as China where the demand for analysis far exceeds the number of qualified local instructors. Yet Isaacs Russell finds that although words are exchanged in both methods, the transaction plays out in different, often unsatisfactory, ways when it occurs online; as a result, online therapy can feel­– ­and indeed is­– ­a different ‘kind’ of transaction from classic psychotherapy.21 The reasons for this are complex and beyond the scope of this book but Isaacs Russell’s emphasis on ‘presence’ provides a useful tool for thinking about e-reading. Drawing on twenty-first-century neuroscience research, she argues that ‘cognition is influenced and possibly determined by our experiences in the physical world’. Instead of being seen simply as ‘a matter of the manipulation of abstract symbols isolated in the brain’, cognition is now understood to be ‘firmly lodged in the bedrock of sensorimotor processing’. ‘Just as our minds are situated in the body, our sense of presence is also situated’ and, as a result, ‘the location of our bodies in space­– ­and what we can do in it­– ­is key to our sense of presence’ (Isaacs Russell 2015: 138). The implications for psychoanalytic practice are clear: the nature of the therapeutic exchange shifts when the classic model, in which the participants occupy the same physical space, is replaced by ‘telepresence’ (Isaacs Russell 2015: 139 ff). There could be a clue here as to why some readers might find the protocols of e-reading insufficiently binding­– ­why attention wanders or information seeps away. Authors and critics have often commented on the difficulty of absorbing the written word. In 1921 the literary theorist Percy Lubbock described reading as a ‘perpetually defeated’ attempt to ‘grasp the shadowy and fantasmal form of a book’ (Lubbock 1957: 1); similar observations have subsequently been made by critics who have been influenced by phenomenology. In response to the challenge of making books real, and of keeping them in one’s head as one reads, many of us resort to practices such as keeping one finger in the back of a book or feeling the number of pages that remain to be read. This kind of insertion stands for a larger way of dealing with books; it represents an attempt to inhabit textuality by making a physical connection between the distant text and one’s own body. Although e-readers allow one to gauge how much of a book has been read and how much remains, there is a big difference between sticking your finger in the back of a book and monitoring the changing percentages on a bar at the bottom of a screen. For me­– ­someone who was

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raised on books, not screens­– ­the first action feels like an anchoring while the second merely underlines the amorphousness that haunted Lubbock.22 With their two-thousand-year head-start on computers, it is not surprising that books are better than screens at harnessing readerly concentration. It will be interesting to see what happens with subsequent generations. My hunch is that electronic screens will continue to adapt themselves more fully to some kinds of verbal activity than others, and that books and pages will continue to exist alongside twenty-first-century media. This is because although both screens and books are interactive, they are interactive in different ways. Specifically, traditionally-bound books offer forms of bodily insertion that aid the reader’s creation of the text: we interact with them as physical objects by holding them, bending them, turning their pages, picking them up and putting them down. By contrast, although the interactivity of touchscreens enables them to display an infinite variety of words and images, these signs remain on the surface, with no impression of depth. Thus, although e-readers gesture towards annotations and bookmarking, they do not, at the time that I am writing, provide a fully materialised equivalent of scribbling on the inside cover of a book. Nor can they be hurled down with impunity. This ought to please Armando Petrucci, who is a confirmed enemy of cracked spines and dog-ears, but it is less rewarding for readers such as myself who derive pleasure from frayed covers and marginalia. These things are a form of information; they complicate and enrich one’s relation to a text, sometimes even constituting a rival text of their own. Viewing the comments that a friend had left in one of her books, Sylvia Plath felt as if her ‘children had been raped, or beaten, by an alien’ (Plath 2000: 226). Notes in an e-book are unlikely to produce such anger, not least because they can be deleted without trace at the touch of a button. For the same reason, they cannot endure for the benefit of subsequent readers.23 Unlike Plath’s ravaged books, electronic screens are all surface: their appeal is, precisely, that the words and images that they bear will dissolve into other words and images at the touch of a finger. Although a residue exists in a user’s browser history, this is neither visible to the eye nor traceable by a finger drawn along the screen. This is fundamentally different to the technology of printing which, until the late nineteenth century, was one that, literally, made an impression because it depended on inked metal type being pressed into paper. Even though different technologies now hold sway, we still speak of the first or second ‘impression’ of a particular book. When Locke envisaged ‘characters’ on a page, those letters would have got there either through printing or handwriting, and in either case

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pressure would have been required to make a mark, and the mark would have left an indentation on the page. (A negligible indentation mostly, but an indentation nonetheless­– ­hence Locke’s use of the word ‘stamped’.) The development of offset printing in the late nineteenth century, and the subsequent invention of laser-printing, removed this dynamic because these processes mark the page without producing even the suggestion of a dent.24 Electronic texts­– ­in which words form a surface that dissolves into a different surface at the touch of key­– ­carry us still further from Gutenberg’s ‘letterpress’ and involve us in a textual world which suddenly lacks even a residual concept of depth sensation.25 If anything, it is surprising­– g­ iven the capacity of screens to refresh themselves instantly­– ­that technology has not had more effect on reading. Hypertexts in e-books make it possible to follow up references, to search for content elsewhere on the web, to check meanings, and so on, but these are merely streamlined versions of pre-existing activities: rather than picking up a dictionary, you can click a button. And yes, there have been revolutions in how texts are circulated and consumed, with online publishing creating new possibilities for authors, and with e-readers and tablets making it possible to carry an entire library in a handbag. These, though, are primarily shifts in how writing is disseminated; they do not alter the fundamental look of the texts that are being read. Indeed, the search for an electronic version of paper­– ­a screen effect that will replicate something of how it feels to look at a printed page­– ­suggests that handheld devices are still caught in a dynamic of imitation. When e-readers were commercially launched in the first decade of the twenty-first century, I assumed that they would trigger generic innovations in which received forms such as the novel were re-imagined as multi-media experiences but, as yet, this has not happened. Indeed, one of the reasons that sales of e-books have slowed may be that they offer convenience, but nothing more. If e-reading is to take off as an activity its own right, rather than an offshoot of print reading, then e-readers will need to become a lot more sophisticated and the format’s multi-media possibilities will need to be embraced; there is room for hybrid texts that bring together fiction, film, illustration, autobiography, multi-authorship, music, and social networking. That no such form has emerged suggests either a lack of vision on the part of software developers or (more likely) a recognition that the novel, as a genre, may be nearing the end of its ability to generate new textual experiences. I am sure that conventional literary forms will continue to be written and read, and they will probably be available in both e-reader and print form, but it remains to be seen if they are going to evolve a specifically

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electronic identity. Another reason for this is that the multi-media innovations that I am looking for do exist, but they have taken place in online gaming, not literary fiction. Gaming already mines a space in which narratives are experienced on the body as well as on a screen and in which users can intervene actively (and often collectively) in the stories that they are experiencing; developments such as the immersive virtual reality system the oculus rift will push these possibilities further. And because the games market is considerably more lucrative than literary publishing, that is where investors and creators are increasingly concentrating their energies. As if wanting to push back against the scale of gaming culture, some theorists have argued (convincingly) that literary writing is itself a form of virtual reality (Ryan 2001). But, while it is true that reading fiction is an interactive process, games offer an especially direct­– ­and therefore seductive­– ­form of narrative self-fashioning. Where novels allow readers to identify with or against protagonists bearing names such as ‘Emma Wodehouse’ and ‘James Bond’, games enable their users to step into the story with avatars of their own choosing, and then to shape the outcome directly through their play. Although these operations are mediated by technology (and much more of it than is the case with books), they nonetheless produce an immersive effect so strong that the game becomes a world of its own with a logic and immediacy that places the user centre stage in a more palpable way than is the case when reading fiction. To choose an obvious instance, The Sims­– t­ he most successful simulated reality game of the early twenty-first century­– e­xperienced a spike in use following the terrorist attacks of September 11 2001. The reason for the sudden uptake can be inferred from a workshop I attended the following year in which a US cultural commentator confided that when she wasn’t at work all she wanted to do was play the game with her partner. There was something soothing about taking refuge in an alternative reality, especially one that could be shaped and controlled by the user and in which the user could themselves become a different person by touching a button. Although gaming has been the subject of recurring social panics (it features prominently in Greenfield’s work), many of the most popular games­ – ­such as Minecraft­– ­promote creativity, ingenuity, and ­co-operation. As with all cultural phenomena, the picture is divided but, taken as a whole, and avoiding knee-jerk judgementalism, gaming culture does seem to promote cross-cultural communities, whether these be the user groups attached to commercial games or the informal societies that have grown up around less goal-driven sites.26 As this suggests, online culture is adept at creating spaces in which individual self-fashioning intersects with

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large-scale group identifications. This mixture of individual and group selfpresentation is powered by the circumstance that I noted at the beginning of this section, namely that e-culture allows users to put themselves, literally and metaphorically, in the middle of their own screens and the screens of their friends and peers. As well as changing the terms on which people engage with screens, this has implications for how textuality will be experienced by future generations, especially with regard to whether screens and pages are ‘marked’ or ‘unmarked’ before we engage with them. In my discussion of the relationship between screens and pages I connected the early novel to Locke’s notion of the mind as ‘white paper, void of all characters’ (Locke 1979: 104). Implicit, here, is a sense that a particular moment in the history of ideas coincided with the emergence of mechanised printing, and the result was a genre that revolutionised how people thought about their relation to each other, and to themselves; that is, the novel was made possible by social, cultural, and technological factors that came together to promote an interest in textual self-fashioning. This provides a parallel to the way in which computers have transformed twenty-first-century culture and society, but there is an important difference between then and now. As my discussion of Sterne, Burney, Spark, and Dinesen showed, both screens and pages are caught up with the relationship between blankness and inscription. The empty spaces in Sterne, Dinesen, and Spark ask to be filled by the reader’s/­viewer’s imagination, and the pencil marks in Burney’s jotter are a prompt to conjure their absent writer. Something similar is going on when a social networking site such as Facebook asks ‘What’s on your mind?’ and provides a box for you to answer. But the crucial difference is that the Facebook prompt is the apex of a finely calibrated corporate machine that depends on its users for commercial survival and that has been angled, precisely, to elicit continuous responses from the viewer. In early years of the internet, users were advised to regulate their behaviour: we were told that technology is neutral and that what matters is how we employ it. Although the principle of self-policing is still invoked, subsequent scandals involving election interference, ‘fake news’, and the sale of personal data have revealed the degree to which individual users can be invisibly manipulated by the sites and platforms that they use.27 As a result, from the second decade of the twenty-first century onwards, there has been less emphasis on how consumers use online resources, and much more on the responsibilities that the companies that create and manage these interfaces have towards their users. From the market’s perspective, increased internet usage means higher advertising revenue and an expended user base­

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– ­which means a greater bank of data that can be made available to third parties who will pay for information on potential customers. Although the algorithms that govern these manipulations can often produce comically blunt or misplaced results, they have also had­– ­and continue to have­– ­a material impact on the world beyond each individual user. Even if you entirely eschew electronic communication, internet algorithms will have affected your life in that they have helped shape election results, social attitudes, and market forces. As well as contributing to the question of whether screens and pages can ever be ‘unmarked’, algorithms re-open the questions of linearity and authority that I raised in the first half of this chapter. Taking these issues in order, algorithms are not apparent to us when we use screens­– ­indeed their invisibility is intrinsic to their ability to manipulate us. But, of course, the effect of algorithms is, precisely, to ‘mark’ our screens in the sense of putting data before us, whether that be products we are encouraged to buy, opinions we are invited to share, or people we are expected to repudiate or embrace. The advertising box that appears in the corner of an online news site, suggested links on social media, affiliated links in newspaper columns: all these come courtesy of algorithms and each ‘marks’ the screens that we use for our everyday activities, preventing them from being the neutrally blank pages that we might hope or expect them to be. Of course, the technologies of writing have never been cost-free, and reading has always been conditioned by history and ideology. Frances Burney’s memorandum book may not have carried a commercial logo but it still came to her as a result of market forces, colonial expansion, and the despoiling of the natural world: its ivory leaves would have been hewn from the tusks of hunted elephants.28 Mineral alternatives to Burney’s ivory jotter were also subject to dubious practices.29 Similar horror stories haunt twenty-first-century IT, but it is hardly surprising that most of us are either ignorant of, or refuse to reflect on, the conditions under which our gadgets are manufactured.30 After all, the function of advertising algorithms is, precisely, to fill our screens with narratives that seduce us towards consumption for the sake of consumption, never mind the consequences to ourselves, other people, and the planet. The other issue here is that screens have become so much part of the currency of work and leisure that they cannot be turned off in the way that the narrator of A Far Cry From Kensington turns off her television set. There is no moment when streaming services are unavailable, no break in 24-hour news and entertainment services, no lull in the internet’s unending production of words and images. Unlike Spark’s character, twenty-first-century

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users cannot project themselves into a blank screen because such a thing no longer exists. Instead, unless we entirely opt out of e-culture (something that is increasingly difficult to do), our online interactions will be underpinned by various forms of social, political, and capitalist nudging. It is not just that search engines, social networking pages, mobile phone apps, and other online resources are framed by the corporate identities of the sites in question; it is also that sites can affect our decisions without out being aware of it. This phenomenon has been widely discussed in relation to the use of computer bots to influence election results, but I want to cite a phenomenon that is less dramatically invasive but that nonetheless says a great deal about how technology can shape textuality. Although Burney’s memorandum book was a product of exploitative practices, the book did not tell her how what she should write, and nor was M. d’Arblay forced to read her words in a particular way. As I write these sentences, however, a word processing programme is monitoring my phrases, suggesting that I amend my grammar to fit its preferred templates. Some of these hints are useful: my typing is inaccurate and I am given to typos. But the programme also marks my words as ‘wrong’ when I make stylistic choices that it does not recognise as legitimate. Sometimes I even change my preferred phrasing to avoid being nagged by the wavy lines on my screen. This may seem like a trivial matter, but it strikes at the heart of what language is and how we communicate with each other in a culture where textuality is increasingly ‘owned’ by corporate producers. If I, an experienced writer, feel bullied by Microsoft Word, then what does this editorial voice do to less confident users? Most of all, what is the effect on people who come to language through computer programmes­– t­hat is to say, on anyone born into an affluent culture from the twenty-first century onwards? Aside from the experience of individual users, there is the question of cultural homogenisation. Screen culture is the linguistic front of globalisation, with local differences and personal quirks being ironed out by a surge towards cross-national standardisation. (See, also, the effect on spoken language when children with regional or class-inflected accents amend their speech so as to be understood by virtual assistants such as Siri and Alexa.) Here we see cultural imperialism as enacted by corporations, not nations. Needless to say, the ultimate driver here is capitalism, which means that our screens are less neutral than ever before; capital seeks to control the very language we use, as well as the machines and formats through which we communicate. Paradoxically, however, these manipulations are enacted via screens that appear not to retain a trace of what they carry. Their ability to

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refresh themselves instantly encourages the fantasy that we are in charge of their contents; increasingly, however, it is the other way around, with apps and social media sites using techniques designed to create an experience akin to addition in their users (Andersson 2018). This is not the scenario depicted by Susan Greenfield: our brains are not being irrevocably altered by social media use. But it does raise questions about the limits of free will, and who or what is doing the choosing when we click on a suggested link. Towards the beginning of this book I made the point that one version of ‘modern reading’ begins with heresy: readers were able to generate a different sense of self once they claimed their right to disagree with the textual interpretations offered by church authorities. These days, modern multinationals occupy a position comparable to the medieval church: they cross regional and national boundaries and they have a power that exceeds that of the individual domains that they occupy. The genius of these companies is that have found a way of making money out of our collective drive towards individual self-expression, but they do so in a way that keeps the full extent of their power opaque. Where medieval Christianity enforced its power through hilltop cathedrals that were visible for miles around, companies such as Google and Facebook offer an illusion of individual choice while nudging us, constantly, towards choices that we might not otherwise make on our own. For many of us, ‘being yourself’ means curating your identity via social media, and although this is as legitimate as any other form of self-fashioning, it does produce a reliance on companies that are driven by profit rather than the wellbeing of their users. More than that, this dynamic rests on a troubling paradox whereby the freedoms offered by the internet are underpinned by systems of control that are all the more effective for being hidden from view. The brilliance of these companies is that they are hiding in plain view, having disappeared behind their own power. Here, notions of authority and linearity again become relevant. Throughout this project I have argued in favour of readerly freedom. In the context of online life, this translates into a wish that the internet be a free-wheeling space in which identities can be transformed or reimagined through language­– ­a place where neither people nor texts are tied down. However, I also have to recognise that this freedom is open to abuse and that it may even, in large measure, be illusory. One way of understanding this paradox is to return to Barthes’s notion of the sentence as a unit of authority: ‘The Sentence is hierarchical: it implies subjections, subordinations … The professor is someone who finishes his sentences’ (Barthes 1975: 50). When I cited these words earlier in this chapter, I argued in favour of Barthes’s embrace of fragmentation and against Susan

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Greenfield’s investment in linear logic; as an extension of this view, I upheld the value of hypertexts and of internet surfing. I still hold to this position, but with an important proviso. The internet may offer a liberating experience of textuality, but that feeling of freedom may be the very thing that enables us to be controlled. Internet algorithms are another iteration of the authority structures that I have discussed throughout this chapter. They are mathematical formulas that define certain results and that can therefore be used to produce particular effects. To put this in Barthes’s terms, we could re-describe logarithms as sentences which we finish when we click on suggested links. When we choose one of the offered options we have the illusion that we are making an individual selection, but the sentence (the algorithm) was generated elsewhere; moreover, the algorithm exists, not to fulfil our sense of individual personhood, but to create in us the restless wish for more and more consumption. In clicking, we accede to a version of reality that seems tailor-made for us, but that may actually make us less satisfied than before. That has always been capitalism’s best trick: commerce thrives on making individuals crave a fulfilment that is constantly receding and that is bought, moreover, at the expense of less solipsistic ways of being in the world. It remains to be seen what this means for reading: in the section that follows, I consider three possibilities. Notes   1 Built-in obsolescence is the sine qua non of most electronic devices, but platforms and hardware are also prone to unintended obsolescence when they are overtaken by rival providers­– ­for example, Facebook’s victory over the previously dominant MySpace in the 2010s.   2 Since this chapter only deals in part with twenty-first-century technologies, I want to mention some resources that deal with this area in more detail. The online archives of BBC Radio Four’s The Digital Human constitute a fascinating, still-unfolding portrait of how language, technology, ethics, and identity come together online. The main presenter of the programme, Aleks Krotoski, has also written on the subject (Krotoski 2013). For a detailed analysis of the interaction of the relationship between literary and digital cultures, see Hammond 2016. Other valuable interventions include Chartier 1995 and Wolf 2016. More specialised studies­– o ­ n fake news, for example­– a­ re in the footnotes below.   3 Among the most acute accounts of Fielding’s and Sterne’s narrative strategies are those of Wolfgang Iser; see, particularly, Iser 1974 and Iser 1988.   4 Psalms, 46:10; the university is Sussex.   5 In what follows, I am less concerned with adjudicating on the scientific basis

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of Greenfield’s claims than I am in investigating how ideology informs those claims and what they tell us about the cultural context in which they were created. However, there does seem to be a logical failure in her position. Brain plasticity means that brain functions may well change as a result of technology; however, the brain’s adaptability also means that its alterations are not final, and that any change could itself be undone by new circumstances. Greenfield’s central comparison is therefore wrong. If climate change goes unchecked, it will indeed become irreversible­– ­but the same is not true of ‘brain change’.  6 In a 2011 interview in The New Scientist, Greenfield claimed that internet use can be connected to autism (Swain 2011); this produced ripostes from Greenfield’s Oxford colleague Dorothy Bishop who, as Professor of Developmental Neuropsychology, is an autism expert (Bishop 2011 and 2014). Along with co-authors Vaughan Bell and Andrew K. Przybylski, Bishop further rebutted Greenfield’s claims in an editorial for the British Medical Journal (Bell et al. 2015). In Mind Change Greenfield contents herself with claiming that ‘an individual obsessively using social networking’ could ‘develop autistic-like traits’ (Greenfield 2014: 143; italics in the original).   7 ‘We [can] see the sad and tragic symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease, where the patient is indeed “losing their mind”, literally dementia. Yet we can also “lose” our minds on a more frequent, temporary and positive basis, in situations where the lure of here-and-now sensations turns us into passive recipients rather than proactive thinkers. In this case we have … “let ourselves go”’ (Greenfield 2014: 90; italics in the original).   8 Barthes’s ‘text of bliss’ (‘texte de jouissance’) is a pun on the French term for having a sexual climax. Here, Barthes is making a comparison with the ‘text of pleasure’, which he links to ‘a comfortable practice of reading’ (Barthes 1975: 14; emphasis in the original).   9 I am thinking of how a form made possible by the internet­– ­vlogging­– ­resembles Barthes’s ‘vocal writing (which is nothing like speech)’. As a development of blogging, vlogging has its roots in writing, but it also emphasises the ‘grain of the voice’. Barthes writes that ‘A certain art of singing can give an idea of this vocal writing’ but ‘we may find it more easily today [1973] at the cinema’. Perhaps, though, the internet brings us closer than the cinema of Barthes’s day to the ‘sound of speech close up’ in which we ‘hear in their materiality, their sensuality, the breath, the gutturals, the fleshiness of the lips, a whole presence of the human muzzle’ (Barthes 1975: 66–7; emphasis in the original). It would be against the spirit of Barthes’s writing to try to fix ‘writing aloud’ as a specific foretelling of YouTube but I offer the general correspondence between the two as an index of what an open-ended approach to technology might yield. 10 I should enter a caveat here. Saying that The Pleasure of the Text does not present a unified master-narrative is not the same as saying that it hands full control over to its reader. As with Sterne’s and Fielding’s fiction, there is a question over the degree to which authorial playfulness is liberating or controlling.

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It should also be said that the techniques and preoccupations that characterise Barthes’s work are not confined to his writing, or even to the literary field. Related gestures can be found in Lacanian psychoanalysis, ‘nouvelle vague’ film-making, and deconstructionist philosophy. 11 Rosen’s reference to the loom casts a new light on my discussion of I. A. Richards’s machine metaphors in chapter 4. 12 Insofar as it is said to a product of divine inspiration, the Talmud could be seen as a single-authored book. However, as Rosen points out, the text often undermines its own claim on singular authority, not least because it is structured around textual disputation. 13 Text messages deserve more space than I can give them but fortunately David Crystal has written a whole book on the subject (Crystal 2009); He argues that texting represents an enrichment rather than a degeneration of linguistic culture. This is also the point at which to note that emojis are the fastestgrowing language of the twenty-first century (Parkin 2016). Their prevalence is one of several ways in which twenty-first-century textual culture seems to glance back at earlier formations: it is not just that emojis resemble hieroglyphics, it is also that words and images are now mixed together in ways that recall macaronic writing, where different languages and registers are juxtaposed for expressive, often comic, effect. 14 Unlike the LCD displays used in tablets and laptops, electronic paper is not backlit; displays that use it are kinder on the eyes but have a slower refresh rate than LCD displays. Despite the appeal of electronic paper, sales of dedicated e-readers are (at the time of writing) falling; rather than having a device designed primarily for reading, consumers seem to prefer reading books on multi-functional devices such as laptops and smartphones (Wood 2017). 15 As well as being in a symbiotic relationship with the genres and technologies of his time, Locke is also in dialogue with more ancient forms of writing. Although he does not use it directly, his work is often associated with the term ‘tabula rasa’. This phrase refers to slates which can be wiped clean after having been written on with chalk, but it also evokes the wax-covered tablets used by classical scribes. (After writing in the wax with a sharp tool, you could re-use the tablet by heating the wax until it began to melt then rubbing it smooth again.) In De Anima, Aristotle uses these wax tablets to express a comparable idea about the relationship between thought and the mind. 16 As Pompeian graffiti demonstrates, all signs eventually become valuable, however banal they may seem at the point of inscription. My favourite example of textual marking is provided by Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell, who papered their flat with pictures cut from library books and returned other loans with amended contents pages. Under their care, The Collected Plays of Emlyn Williams was changed to contain ‘Knickers Must Fall’ and ‘Fucked by Monty’, while readers of Dorothy L. Sayers’s Clouds of Witness were advised to read the book behind closed doors ‘and have a good shit’ while doing so. In 1962, this

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led to six months’ imprisonment apiece but by 2011 the affected organisation, Islington Council, was happy to hold an exhibition celebrating the pair’s creative vandalism (Brown 2011). 17 Similarly, the ‘dark web’ can be seen as a compendium of forces that also drive the visible web but that are not always openly unacknowledged by it. It would be simplistic to boil these factors down to sex, power, and money, but these are certainly leading drivers in capitalism’s exploitation of both open and covert internet activity. 18 Historians of cinema and visual culture have found correspondences between twenty-first-century technology and earlier ways of producing images on screens; some of these include the camera obscura, the Claude glass, and magic lanterns. (For an overview of this terrain and its relation to subsequent technologies, see Cashmore et al. 2018: 23–35.) But the culture of screens stretches further back than the Romantic period; further­– e­ ven­– t­han the invention of the codex: its first instance, arguably, is Plato’s allegory of the cave (from the Republic) in which prisoners interpret the shadows that fall on the wall of their place of incarceration. 19 Such usages suggest a nostalgic pull back to previous technologies, as well as an attempt to naturalise new formats by associating them with already familiar ones. Terms such as ‘scroll’ and ‘tablet’ are relevant here, as is the habit of customising portable electronic devices to look like leather-bound books. It is also striking that one of the largest internet sites for accessing out-of-copyright digital texts is called ‘Project Gutenberg’. Consider also: ‘Face-book’. 20 Streaming services seem, at the time of writing, to be killing off CDs, DVDs, and Blu-rays but there is a reviving appetite for vinyl records. Even more than LPs, books are interactive objects that offer a sensual pleasure that runs alongside their utilitarian function as holders of text. They are likely to survive­– ­and flourish­– ­for as long as this appetite for sensual, holistic ownership survives. 21 I am grateful to Vicky Lebeau for mentioning Gillian Isaacs Russell’s work to me in another context. 22 Isaacs Russell cites a question from a colleague that has particular relevance to my account of reading. In asking ‘Where is analysis?’ (Isaacs Russell 2015: 135; emphasis in the original), she echoes the issues raised in chapter 4 when I discussed the ‘what is found there’ of reading. Specifically, the ‘there’ of reading is analogous to the ‘where’ of analysis, as theorised by Isaacs Russell. In each case, a question is being asked about the relation between space and cognitive and emotional activity. And given the amorphousness of both reading and analysis, it is unsurprising to find their purchase being weakened by the reduced sense of ‘presence’ that technology can sometimes bring. 23 Related to this, and thinking about cultural ‘presence’ more generally, alongside an individual’s experience of textuality there is also the question of what would happen to history if marginalia, and everything that it represents, were to disappear. A papyrus roll or a codex embodies more than just the words or signs that

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it contains. Because it is a temporally located object, it can tell stories about its previous owners in a way that a digitally accessed text cannot. Computers are also temporally located, but not in a helpful way. As anyone who has tried to retrieve information from a defunct piece of hardware can testify, obsolescence is sometimes the price that we pay for technological innovation. This is not a risk that affects books. Although individual volumes may decay or be lost, any book that survives is capable of being read so long as there are readers who understand the language in which it is written. 24 Offset printing, which developed out of lithography, began to be used in newspaper and book publishing from the early twentieth century onwards, but many mass market books continued to be printed via letterpress techniques until the mid-twentieth century. The crucial innovation in offset printing is that images for reproduction are transferred onto a flexible sheet and from thence to the page; the flexibility of the sheet allows rollers to be used, which speeds up the printing process. However, although Gutenberg’s ‘letterpress’ has been superseded, we still refer back to his innovation when we describe print and electronic media as ‘the press’. 25 The force or otherwise of the indentation is another of the areas in which we get a sense of printed books as historically located objects. For example, books printed when paper restrictions were in place during the Second World War are easily recognisable because the thinness of the sheets makes it possible to feel and see the print on the other side of the page. Reading such books brings the circumstances of their production to mind in a way that is simply not possible with regard to digital texts. 26 With regard to the latter, many apps and websites use gaming techniques without necessarily being recognised as games in the formal sense. One example is the language-learning app Duolingo, where user comments provide subtleties omitted by the basic programme. And although the below-the-line culture on internet news sites is not always characterised by generosity and kindness, the groups that have formed around newspaper puzzles and crosswords are often a model of humour and humanity. 27 Three moments were crucial in raising awareness of how internet users could be manipulated by commercial and/­or political groups: first, the revelation that there had been substantial online interference in the UK’s 2016 referendum on leaving the EU; then, that comparable interference had occurred in relation to Donald Trump’s victory in the US Presidential election of the same year; and third, the discovery that Facebook had been allowing its user data to be harvested and sold on to groups who would use the information as the basis for targeted political ads. This history is still being written; for two (contrasting) interim reports, see McBridle 2018 and Sumpter 2018. 28 Or possibly walruses, which were said to provide the best ivory of all. An 1838 article on writing materials in The Saturday Magazine comments that for the purposes of ‘memorandum or note books’ elephant tusks from Africa

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were ‘better than those obtained from Asia, as being of a closer texture, and less likely to become yellow’. The ivory was processed in centres in England, France, China and India, where it was split into narrow leaves that were polished to produce ‘a beautiful surface for either the pen or the pencil’ (Anon 1839: 112). 29 The same article in The Saturday Magazine discusses the manufacture of slate tablets: ‘On account of the difficulty of access, the workmen take their provisions for a whole week, and sleep in temporary huts, on the summit of the mountain … The slate is conveyed down a zigzag path on sledges … when the slate is emptied at the bottom of the hill, the man carries the sledge on his shoulders up to the top’ (Anon 1839: 111). 30 Apple, Samsung, and Sony have been accused by Amnesty International of using cobalt mined by child labourers; cobalt is a component of the lithium-ion batteries used in smartphones and other rechargeable devices (Wakefield 2016).

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Envoi

Instead of a conventional summing-up, I want to finish this study by placing three cultural objects alongside each other so that I can ask what they might tell us about reading and its futures. The first is a poem, the second a work of literary theory, and the third a piece of visual and conceptual art. Although they date from the first quarter of the twenty-first century, each one speaks, simultaneously, to the past and the future. In ‘Confessions of a Reading Machine’ (2011), the Polish poet Wisława Szymborska talks in the voice of ‘Number Three Plus Four Divided by Seven’, an electronic device renowned for its ‘vast linguistic knowledge’ that can recognise and reconstruct ‘thousands of languages/­employed by extinct people’. The machine is so adept that it can ‘read lava/­and scan ashes’, providing full explanations on its screen. Even so, ‘certain words/­do cause me difficulty’­– ­notably ‘the states called “feelings”’ and the term ‘soul’ which it equates to a ‘kind of fog’. But the word ‘am’ gives me most trouble. It appears to be an ordinary function, conducted daily, but not collectively, in the present prehistoric tense, specifically, in the continuous, although as we know discontinued long ago. (Szymborska 2016: 419–20)

Speaking from a future in which the ‘I am’ of everyday existence has been ‘long discontinued’, Szymborska’s reading machine can parse the relics of human culture, but it cannot comprehend the subjectivities from which art and language spring. This blockage seems to spring from a more general confusion about the relationship between individuals and larger social

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structures. While the reading machine seeks ‘brotherly assistance’ from ‘my pal Two Fifths of Zero Fractured by Half’, it is not clear what this will yield, especially as the ‘button to Head Office smokes but won’t light up’ (Szymborska 2016: 420). It is as if the human relics that lend themselves to such well-organised scrutiny also contain an indefinable and irreducible quality that throws electronic efficiency into crisis. Although the reading machines are linked to each other, their pooled knowledge is not enough to reconstruct ‘prehistoric’ human identities, and they are especially baffled by the existence of a present tense that is not experienced ‘collectively’. Here, Szymborska’s wryly funny dystopia hints at a faultline that already exists in digital communications. A sense of connectedness is helpful if it allows us to reach beyond human solitariness towards a sense of community. But if connectedness is non-negotiable­– ­if we are always already linked to each other by electronic devices­– ­then what happens to the ‘I’ that has a ‘soul’ and that experiences its ‘feelings’ individually? If we are forced to be connected to each other, then ‘community’ becomes compulsory (and potentially oppressive), and we lose the sense of individuality that made us want to transcend our isolation in the first place. Worse, perhaps we will follow Number Three Plus Four Divided by Seven in failing to recognise human traits in other people, with the result that our own humanity becomes ‘prehistoric’. Szymborska’s take on digital culture is resolutely humanist: she fears a future in which technology has modified identity to the extent that language has become a defunct and confusing sign-system rather than a means of actual communication. Curiously, however, her scenario bears a strong resemblance to the critical practice recommended in Franco Moretti’s Distant Reading (2013), a revisionist literary history that seeks to replace ‘close reading’ with computational analysis. Moretti argues (with total justice) that received notions of the canon hinge on a minute number of texts, and that when we talk about a literary inheritance we are ignoring an immensely larger body of texts that it would be beyond the capacity of any single person to read. His answer is to bring computational analysis to bear onto whole categories of writing in order to reveal connections that a single human consciousness would miss. Meanwhile, on a micro-scale, he also homes in on single texts, analysing the mechanisms through which characters relate to each other in the course of a given play or novel. The results of these studies are expressed through curious graphics­– m ­ aps showing the frequency with which certain words are used, and flow charts in which themes or characters are linked by a dense network of vectors that are almost unintelligible to an untrained eye.

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In one sense Moretti is simply extending decades of preceding work on computer-based linguistic analysis, which­– w ­ ith varying degrees of success, from the 1960s onwards­– ­has transformed specialist tasks such as dating early modern manuscripts or attributing authorship to anonymous texts. Thanks to the internet and the widespread digitisation of period texts, these processes are now within the reach of non-academic users. The result is a kind of reading that did not previously exist. With a few keystrokes any reader can find specific passages or conduct stylistic tests on an author’s output. Moretti’s development of this is to use computer programmes to study specific aspects of the corpus of published books. Taking eighteenthcentury novels, for example, he studies the tendency of book titles to get shorter over time and asks what this tells us about their relation to audience and marketplace. By analysing over 7,000 titles he can make firmer extrapolations than would be the case if he were proceeding­– ­as literary history mostly does­– o ­ n impressionistic grounds. For some commentators, ‘distant reading’ is not really reading at all; it certainly bears little resemblance to the person-centred reading scenes that I analysed in the second chapter of this book. But this objection misses the point because Moretti’s strategies are not just ‘distant’ they are also ‘distancing’ in an almost Brechtian way. Most of us have been socialised to see the world through the lens of individual personhood, which means, with regard to reading, that we tend to take those texts as direct addresses to our own subjectivity. By repudiating the ideal of ‘close reading’ so forcefully, Moretti questions the notion that reading is always about an individual experience of a text, and he instead encourages the recognition that culture is produced and experienced collectively. The result is an unpicking of the very thing that powers Szymborska’s poem, namely Western culture’s faith in a symbiotic relationship between books, reading, and the ‘I’ of humanism. However, distant reading raises further issues, not all of which are addressed by Moretti. It is true that certain actions are more reliably conducted by machines because computers can make numerical tallies without being distracted by pleasure or the quest for meaning. But where, in these circumstances, does ‘reading’ lie, and who is doing it? Is it the machine that scans the digitised text, or the person who poses the research questions and considers the results? Neither the computer nor its user is working in unchallenged isolation, and the result could best be described as a hybrid form of reading in which humans and computers collaborate in a particular, highly specialised form of linguistic analysis. But it remains to be seen if these innovative techniques bring us any closer to the ‘what is found

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there’ of reading, not least because the resultant data is itself always open to reinterpretation.1 In many ways I am sympathetic to Moretti’s repudiation of dominant academic pieties about reading. This book has argued against the idea that there can be a single, representative notion of what a reader is and I, too, would like to problematise the quasi-universal ‘I’ of humanism. However, I have also been at pains to say that academic theorisations of reading bear little resemblance to the ways in which most people read outside of university literature departments. Although I do not believe in a universal human experience, I would not want to set that ‘I’ aside without acknowledging the cultural work that it does. The ‘I’ of humanism may be a fiction that encourages the mistaken belief that we can fully separate our subjectivities from those of other people, but it is a fiction that most of us nonetheless live by, including in our reading lives. Moretti provides new tools for describing textual structures but he does nothing to address the ‘why’ of reading; nor is he interested in how we, as subjects, inhabit those structures.2 In that regard, his approach is the opposite of mine. However, although I have focused insistently on how individuals experience reading, I have also argued that we cannot read in isolation from the historical factors: our understanding of ourselves, books, and reading is always partly conditioned by social and institutional structures. In a sense, therefore, Moretti and I are addressing the same shortcoming­– l­iterary history’s obsession with the individual­– ­although we respond to it in contrasting ways. Discovering that I have sympathy with both Moretti and Szymborska, even though their positions are so different, I find myself wanting to put a third object beside their texts. Commissioned by Ruskin College Oxford, the British Library, and the Bodleian Library to mark the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta, Cornelia Parker’s Magna Carta (An Embroidery) is a monumental tapestry (almost thirteen metres long) that depicts, not Magna Carta, but a screenshot of how the Wikipedia page for Magna Carta looked on 15 June 2014, the document’s 799th anniversary. Where Szymborska keeps faith in individual readers and writers, and where Moretti tries to sweep away the first-person singular in favour of an impersonal mode of analysis, Parker produces a multi-authored work that re-presents and comments upon a historical document that is itself multi-voiced. In doing so, she provides a possible model for how we might think about reading and texts in the twenty-first century. Following the confrontation between King John and his barons at Runnymede, multiple copies of Magna Carta were produced in 1215, only four of which survive; these differ in size and shape but ‘none is more

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authoritative than the others’ (Breay 2015: unpaginated).3 Over and above the surviving copies of the ‘great charter’, the idea of Magna Carta has become central to narratives about English law and history. Its reputation as a foundational text has spread internationally: it influenced both the Constitution of the USA and the Declaration of Independence, and its touch can also be felt on the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the 1950 European Convention on Human Rights (Chakrabarti 2015: unpaginated). However, in its original context the document was valid for a mere ten weeks: at King John’s instigation, Pope Innocent III annulled the charter because it undermined the feudal hierarchies from which the monarchy and the papacy both drew their power. After King John’s death, revised versions were issued in 1216, 1217, and 1225, and it was the latter­ – ­rather than the 1215 version signed so famously at Runnymede­– ­that was entered in the statute books in 1297. Only three clauses of the 1225 text remain part of British law, the most significant of them being one stating that ‘no free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions, or outlawed or exiled … nor will we proceed with force against him … except by the lawful judgement of his equals or by the law of the land. To no one will we sell, to no one deny or delay right or justice’ (Breay 2015: unpaginated). Although these are the words that have fed into subsequent assertions of universal rights, they applied, initially, to a tiny number of people. The barons who challenged King John may have forced an important recognition­– ­namely that the monarch was subject to law and could not imprison his aristocratic subjects without due process­– ­but these concessions made no difference to the mass of the English population who, as serfs, would not have been recognised as ‘free men’. Responding to this complex mixture of history and mythology, Cornelia Parker has created an object that is at once sculptural, textual, and virtual. Aside from her decision to re-present a Wikipedia page on Magna Carta rather than the document ‘itself’, Parker’s most striking conceptual move was to transform the text into an embroidery incorporating words and phrases stitched by over two hundred people; her collaborators consisted of public figures, the Embroiderers’ Guild, the Royal School of Needlework, and prisoners affiliated to Fine Cell Work, a ‘social enterprise that trains prisoners in paid, skilled, creative needlework’ so that they can ‘leave prison with the confidence and financial means to stop offending’ (Bonaventura 2015: unpaginated). Taken together, these choices enabled the creation of an art work that pays tribute to Magna Carta while also allowing the viewer to perceive the ironies that surround the document and its reputation. By using a Wikipedia page as her primary point of reference,

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Parker foregrounds questions of interpretation and debate: rather than reproducing the sort of seamless version of the past beloved of the heritage industry, Magna Carta (An Embroidery) acknowledges points of disagreement or uncertainty. And because Wikipedia entries are subject to ongoing revision, the artwork offers a text that does not claim to be absolute. On the contrary, it is conceived as a freezeframe of a single day­– i­ndeed it captures an image that was doomed to be superseded long before the resultant embroidery could be manufactured and put on display. Of course, it is in the nature of Wikipedia to absorb and accommodate new perspectives on the material that it annotates; as a result, the Wikipedia page on Magna Carta now contains a link to Magna Carta (An Embroidery). As well as showing how an artwork can alter or enrich perceptions of its own subject matter, this produces an affect akin to the book of hours discussed in chapter 2. In the latter case, we saw how Mary of Burgundy’s reading material allowed the book’s first owner to study herself in the act of reading; devotional manuals proliferate in the image, creating an impression similar to endlessly repeating reflections in a hall of mirrors. In Parker’s case, we have an art object that riffs on a digital text, and a digital text that now looks different as a result of Parker’s intervention. The Wikipedia page on Magna Carta directs readers to the Wikipedia page on Magna Carta (An Embroidery), and the page on Magna Carta (An Embroidery) directs readers to the page on Magna Carta. Meanwhile, both pages are open to revisions that will further change their individual contents and their connection to each other. Because of this changing interrelation, neither entity can be considered as fixed in time; the monumental embroidery remains in dialogue with an online resource which is itself haunted by questions of reliability.4 Although I have just referred to the ‘individual’ contents of a Wikipedia page, long entries such as the one on Magna Carta are the product of multiple hands. This was also the case for Magna Carta: particular copies may have been the work of a single scribe but there is no ‘original’ text from which others derive. Instead, all of the extant copies (and the lost ones, too) would have been written by a bank of skilled workers. Parker’s artwork is also a collaborative enterprise: it was embroidered by many different people and it reproduces a text written by numerous anonymous Wikipedia editors. Commenting on this correspondence between the medieval and the modern documents, Parker notes that the surviving copies of Magna Carta contain numerous abbreviations: for reasons of cost and space, words and phrases are condensed, and a scribal mark has been attached to indicate that an abbreviation has taken place. For Parker, these marks are analogous

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to hyperlinks in that ‘if you fleshed out what each abbreviation meant’ you would end up with ‘a much bigger document’. Unpacking the abbreviations on the 1215 text produces something ‘a bit like a Wikipedia page’ because, in Tim Marlow’s words, the annotations act as a ‘click-through’ to words that lie elsewhere (Parker 2015: unpaginated). Having traced an unlikely connection between a medieval parchment and a twenty-first-century webpage, Parker further complicates the correspondence by taking ‘the digital and making it into an analogue, handcrafted thing’ (Parker 2015: unpaginated). The resultant object challenges our view of history, and of materiality, because it partakes of both ancient and modern modes of representation. As Parker points out, websites such as Wikipedia mix words and images in a way that recalls illuminated manuscripts, and Magna Carta (An Embroidery) underlines this similarity by turning the Wikipedia page into something akin to the Bayeux Tapestry (another product of communal activity). But although Parker’s artwork is hand-embroidered it also made use of modern technology, notably by printing out a greatly enlarged cotton reproduction of the Wikipedia page to use as a template for the individual words and pictures embroidered by Parker’s collaborators. More than anything else, it is the notion of collective enterprise that speaks to me in Magna Carta (An Embroidery). Clearly, this collective aspect is expressed on the level of the work’s construction. But Parker’s emphasis on multiple authorship also makes a wider point about history, language, and identity. Unlike the dystopia of Szymborska’s poem, in which there is no longer any understanding of how individuals and groups might relate to each other, Parker offers a present in which one does not have to choose between the digital and the analogue: both remain, both are legitimate, and each can still speak to the other. This has specific relevance to the world of reading but Parker’s artwork makes an even more fundamental point, which is that culture is always a collective enterprise. In the first chapter of this book I quoted Adrienne Rich’s notion that because of language ‘we are all in this together’ (Rich 1987: 186); that is, our systems of communication are what make us human, and language, by definition, is a shared system. We may feel that we attach individual meanings to the texts that we love, and we may indeed experience those works as if they were speaking to us alone, but we can only encounter those texts through sign systems that are larger than our individual subjectivities. As if in recognition of this, Magna Carta (An Embroidery) is made up of fragments stitched together from a variety of hands working in isolation but with reference to a bigger template.

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Szymborska’s reading machines are baffled by ‘the states called “feelings”’ because although they can decode the formal sense of words, they are not plugged in to the larger networks of selfhood that make those linguistic systems meaningful. Conversely, Moretti’s ‘distant reading’ puts individual responses aside in order better to understand the literary codes from which meanings are constructed. For me, the value of Parker’s work is that it does not ask us to choose between the individual and the collective because its appearance acknowledges the relationship between these domains.5 But there is another reason why I am ending with Magna Carta (An Embroidery), namely its funniness. There is something comic about the work’s very conception. Partly it is the absurdity of taking a fluid electronic text and rendering it into an unwieldy tapestry. But the work is also characterised by in-jokes and puns, many of which turn on the questions of authority and ownership that I have discussed throughout this book. When dividing the text between her collaborators, Parker was governed by a sort of witty match-making. She asked Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia’s founder, to embroider the phrase ‘user’s manual’ while Jarvis Cocker, the lead singer of Pulp, was given the title of the group’s most famous song, ‘Common People’. However, the match-ups are also political. Paddy Hill, who was falsely imprisoned for sixteen years as a result of a corrupt police investigation into the Birmingham pub bombings of 1974, embroidered the word ‘Freeman’. Moazzam Begg, who was subject to extrajudicial detention in Guantánamo Bay, was given the phrase ‘held without charge’. In order to reflect Magna Carta’s status as a document that sought to establish baronial power, Parker drew members of the House of Lords into the project, but ‘to redress the historical imbalance and to remind us of where we are now’ she was particularly keen to involve baronesses, including Doreen Lawrence, who stitched ‘justice/­denial/­delay’ (Parker 2015: unpaginated). Over and above these individual plays-on-words, the form of Parker’s artwork is itself a kind of pun. By being, in a literal sense, an embroidery, it draws attention to the way that Magna Carta is, in a more conceptual sense, an ‘embroidered’ text subject to accretions and projections from groups and individuals invoking it for their own ends. For Parker, history­ – ­and the texts that circulate in history­– ­will always be in some sense ‘embroidered’, and she herself is part of this process. But rather than trying to fix a particular version of Magna Carta as the correct one, she allows her contribution to be seen as a moment within a set of ongoing, constantly shifting narratives in which ‘we all make our own little embellishments of the truth’ (Parker 2015: unpaginated). For me, this is an exemplary way of relating to history and to language, and one that academic criticism

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could learn from. In the course of writing this book I have found myself wondering, increasingly, if it would be possible to have a form of literary commentary based on play. The word ‘criticism’ might be a sticking point: it is not a term that has playful connotations. But the practice of working with texts would be transformed if we could find a way of being true to their cultural complexity and political meanings while also remaining open to the mischievousness of language. From my first chapter onwards, I have stressed the need to be aware of the position from which one reads a text, because that positionality will inevitably inform our experience of the writing. But I wonder if it would also be possible to develop a reading position that emphasises play? Culture cannot be separated from issues of power and control, but it is also a kind of game. And, like all games, it is one of the ways by which we reconcile ourselves to being in a world that has no intrinsic interest in our happiness. A new approach to reading could transform existing critical strategies and bring out lighter shades within the existing critical spectrum. At the very least, there ought to be a recognition that reading is about pleasure. That doesn’t mean it can’t be about other things, or that critical analysis is necessarily opposed to pleasure, for it doesn’t have to be. Rather, I would say that just as Emma Goldman wanted nothing to do with a revolution in which she couldn’t dance, I don’t want a critical practice in which I can’t enjoy supposedly trashy books, or one in which loose or wilful approaches to the classics are outlawed. Reading is much larger and more important than the world of academic criticism. We are made human by our capacity to hear and tell stories. That is what matters most. Notes 1 What is more, the ensuing data will remain open to competing interpretations, which is why computer-textual scholarship is such a fraught and competitive business, especially in relation to a figure such as Shakespeare where ‘new’ canonical texts mean new revenue streams for publishers. 2 The larger issues here­– ­and, in the end, this is why I find Moretti’s position limiting­– ­is that ‘distant reading’ is a wholly academic formation. Moretti’s subversion of existing critical narratives is useful to other university professionals but it leaves the urge to classify and categorise in place; and this sort of formal/­ generic analysis is, in my view, less interesting­– a­ nd less culturally important­– ­than the experience of non-academic readers. 3 Thirteen copies of the charter were known to have been issued but many more are likely to have been in circulation; it was publicly proclaimed throughout the kingdom in French, and possibly English, as well as in Latin.

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4 Although Wikipedia’s user-generated content opens it to accusations of unreliability, this model also provides an alternative to the authoritarian versions of knowledge that I discussed at the start of the previous chapter; its pages are not ‘owned’ by a single person but can be edited by multiple hands. While this may produce anomalies and oddities, it also acknowledges that ‘meaning’ and ‘truth’ are open to ongoing renegotiation. It is also significant that, unlike the companies mentioned in the previous chapter, Wikipedia’s primary motivation is not financial. Its creator, Jimmy Wales, has often joked that he is the only web entrepreneur not to have made a fortune out of his innovation; in this regard, he resembles the web’s inventor, Tim Berners-Lee. For more on Wales and Wikipedia, see Lih 2009 and Tkacz 2015. 5 In this context, it is striking that Parker displayed Magna Carta (An Embroidery) in a way that enabled viewers to see the stitching and sutures on the underside of the tapestry as well as its readable upper surface; the work offers itself as a coherent entity while simultaneously acknowledging its fractures and the process by which it came into being.

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Index

Abraham, Nicolas 25n.5 Addison, Joseph 17–19, 26n.14 Adler, Mortimer J. 97 Allende, Isabel 6–7, 25n.6 Althusser, Louis 15 Altick, Richard D. 88n.2, 88n.3 Amazon 151, 169 Angelou, Maya 6 Apple 13, 151, 164, 183n.30 Aristotle 71, 180n.15 Armstrong, Isobel 121n.2 Armstrong, Nancy 149n.18 Arnold, Matthew 45, 54, 59n.17, 60n.26, 95, 106 Arvin, Newton 123n.13 Astell, Mary 71–2, 89n.10 Augustine, St 30–2 Austen, Jane 17, 24, 27–8, 52, 60n.25, 60n.27, 76, 127–48 Bacon, Francis 2–3, 89n.4 Bakhtin, Mikhail 144 Baldick, Chris 95, 123n.11 Balls, Ed 113 Balogh, Josef 57n.7 Barrell, John 121n.2 Barthes, Roland 24, 25n.6, 37, 159–61, 177, 178, 179n.8, 179n.9, 180n.10 Beckett, Samuel 12, 13, 25n.8 Beckinsale, Kate 127–8 Begg, Moazzam 191 Bennett, Alan 63, 72 Bennett, Arnold 122n.7

Bewick, Thomas 37, 99–104, 116, 117, 122n.9, 123n.10, 167 Bhabha, Homi 144 Bible, the 11, 15, 25n.9, 30, 46, 50, 53, 54, 89n.10 Bidard, Frank 4–6, 8, 25n.4 Binswanger, Ludwig 4, 25n.3 Bishop, Dorothy 158, 179n.6 Blackman, Marjorie 126n.29 Bloom, Harold 45, 46, 54–6, 60n.27, 61n.28, 82, 96 Blunkett, David 113 Bowlby, Rachel 90n.16 Boyle, Robert 65, 70, 76 Brillat-Savarin, Jean-Anthleme 25n.6 Brontë, Charlotte 24, 28, 33, 37, 99–105, 116–18, 125n.28 Brooks, Cleanth 106–7, 123n.12, 135, 137 Bunche, Ralph J. 123n.13 Burney, Frances 76, 167, 168, 174–6 Burnyeat, M. F. 31 Butler, Marilyn 74 Butler, R. A. 97 Cameron, David 124n.18 Cameron, Deborah 89n.16 Carey, John 90n.23 Castle, Terry 149n.9 Cavendish, Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle 68, 69, 76 Chartier, Roger 178n.2 Chaucer, Geoffrey 59n.18

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Cheyne, George 26n.14 Child, Lauren 126n.29 Chisholm, Kate 89n.14 Clairborne, Clara 88n.2 Clarke, Norma 89n.14 close reading 22, 23, 88, 92–9, 103–6, 108–13, 117, 121n.2, 129, 130, 135–7, 141, 142–4, 147, 148, 185, 186 Cocker, Jarvis 191 Collini, Stefan 88n.2 common reader 22, 23, 56, 57, 62–88, 88n.2, 91n.24 Cromwell, Oliver 62, 86 Crystal, David 180n.13 Culler, Jonathan 123n.16 Daly, Mary 53 De Man, Paul 123n.15, 123n.16 Derrida, Jacques 123n.15, 123n.16 Dickinson, Emily 9, 60n.27, 132 Dinesen, Isak 165, 166, 174 Donne, John 94 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor 34, 36, 38–40, 48, 59n.23, 154 Dryden, John 66, 89n.5 Dunne, Éamonn 123n.16 Duolingo 182n.26 Dürer, Albrecht 38–40, 56 Dusinberre, Juliet 88n.2 Eagleton, Terry 96, 97 Eliot, T. S. 45, 54, 61n.28, 83, 84, 90n.24, 106, 108, 123n.11, 161 Ellis, David 122n.6 Empson, William 103, 123n.11 Enzensberger, Hans Magnus 114–16, 120, 121 e-readers and e-reading 165, 170–2, 180n.14 Facebook 13, 151, 156, 164, 174, 177, 178n.1, 182n.27 Fadiman, Anne 88n.2 Felman, Shoshana 123n.16 Fenton, James 32 Ferrar, Nicholas 66, 76 Fielding, Henry 2, 3, 25n.11, 65, 153, 178n.3, 179n.10 Fish, Stanley 26n.16, 88n.3 Flint, Kate 88n.3

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Foster, Thomas C. 97 Foucault, Michel 131 Fraser, Antonia 89n.6 Freud, Sigmund 38–40, 45, 56, 99, 106, 140, 168 Gaiman, Neil 98, 99, 101–2, 122n.8 Genette, Gérard 76 Gilbert, Sandra 143 Gonzalez, Emma 149n.7 Goodreads 164 Google 13, 151, 177 Gosse, Edmund 81, 90n.20 Gove, Michael 124n.19, 126n.29 Grant, Duncan 34–6, 38–40, 44–9, 57n.9, 58n.10, 59n.20, 59n.23, 60n.23, 102, 154 Gray, Thomas 25n.10, 63, 65, 72–7, 79, 89n.12, 89n.13, 90n.17 Greenfield, Susan 156–60, 162, 173, 177, 178, 179n.5, 179n.6 Gualtieri, Elena 89n.11 Gubar, Susan 143 Gutenberg, Johannes 66, 172, 181n.19, 182n.24 Haggerty, George 89n.13 Halliwell, Kenneth 180n.16 Halperin, David 130, 135 Herbert, George 66 Hill, Paddy 191 Hobbes, Thomas 66 Howell, James 66, 76 Instagram 151 Iser, Wolfgang 26n.16, 178n.3 Jacobus, Mary 26n.16 James, Henry 123n.16, 130–2, 135, 136, 140 Johnson, Samuel 18–20, 23, 26n.13, 56, 62–5, 72–7, 80, 81, 83, 89n.12, 89n.14 Keane, Molly 6 Keen, Andrew 156 Kimball, Roger 132, 135, 139, 146 King, Martin Luther 55 Knox, B. M. W. 57n.7 Knox, Vicesimus 69 Koutsantoni, Katerina 88n.2 Krotoski, Aleks 178n.2

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Lacan, Jacques 123n.16, 180n.10 Lawrence, Doreen 191 Leavis, F. R. 64, 82–7, 90n.22, 93, 97, 98, 104, 155 Leavis, Q. D. 83–7, 88n.3, 90n.24, 93, 98 Lebeau, Vicky 181n.21 Lentricchia, Frank 123n.16 Light, Alison 88n.1 Locke, John 19, 21, 166, 171, 172, 174, 180n.15 Lorde, Audre 52–6 Lubbock, Percy 170, 171 McCormick, Kathleen 125n.24 MacCulloch, Diarmaid 32 McEwan, Ian 52 Mackenzie, Henry 36 MacKinnon, Catherine 141, 149n.13 Magna Carta 187–91 Marcus, Laura 90n.18 Marcus, Sharon 121n.2 Margaret of York 40, 46, 58n.14, 58n.15 Marlow, Tim 190 Marx and Marxism 44, 106–7, 109, 121n.2 Mary of Burgundy 40–8, 56, 58n.12, 58n.14, 58n.15, 189 Mason, William 25n.10 Masson, Jeffrey Mousaieff 140–2, 149n.13 Matthiessen, F. O. 123n.13 Maubray, John 69–71, 89n.6, 89n.7, 89n.8 May, Theresa 124n.18 Maynard, John 88n.3, 123n.11 Meek, Margaret 125n.22 Mercer, William 66, 76 Merlis, Mark 123n.13 Microsoft 13, 151, 164, 176 Millett, Kate 55 Milton, John 20, 54, 75, 139 Moon, Michael 130, 131, 135 Moretti, Franco 121n.2, 185–7, 191, 192n.2 Morpurgo, Michael 126n.29 Mulhern, Francis 86 Napper, Lawrence 90n.23 National Curriculum 23, 96, 110, 111, 114, 115, 118, 119, 125n.29, 143

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Netflix 169 New Criticism 23, 93, 106–9, 123n.11, 123n.15, 123n.16, 129, 131 Norris, Christopher 123n.15, 123n.16 Obama, Barack 55, 61n.29 Office of Exam Qualifications and Exam Regulation (Ofqual) 112, 124n.21 Olsen, Tillie 55 Orton, Joe 180n.16 Parker, Cornelia 187–91, 193n.5 Parrinder, Patrick 123n.11 Paul, Lissa 125n.22 Percy, Bishop Thomas 16 Petrucci, Armando 150–7, 160, 163, 169, 171 Pettit, Alexander 88n.2 Plath, Sylvia 21, 22, 24, 26n.15, 52, 93, 171 Plato 71, 181n.18 Pope, Alexander 25n.11 Proust, Marcel 26n.16 psychoanalysis 22, 39, 106, 122n.2, 123n.16, 149n.13, 170, 180n.10 Pulp 88n.1, 191 Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA) 112, 124n.21 queer theory 129–31, 146 Quiller-Couch, Sir Arthur 93, 97 Quinn, Vincent 89n.13, 149n.6, 149n.9 Qur’an, the 50, 60n.24 Radcliffe, Ann 145 Raleigh, Sir Walter 91n.25, 93 Ransom, John Crowe 106, 123n.11 Read, Mr (pseudonym) 125n.23 Rego, Paula 102–4 Rich, Adrienne 7, 8, 24, 52, 56, 80, 190 Richards, I. A. 23, 90n.21, 93–9, 102–6, 113, 120, 122n.3, 122n.4, 123n.11, 128, 141, 164, 180n.11 Richardson, Samuel 28, 33, 57n.8 Riddell, Chris 126n.29 Rosen, Jonathan 160–2, 180n.11, 180n.12 Rosen, Michael 113, 126n.29 Rowling, J. K. 28 Russell, Gillian Isaacs 170, 181n.22

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Index

Said, Edward 137 Scholes, Robert 123n.11 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 129–48, 149n.11, 149n.13, 149n.16 Shakespeare, William 38, 46, 54, 60n.25, 114, 116, 117, 125n.24, 128, 130, 192n.1 Siegel, Lee 130–2, 135–43, 146, 147, 149n.13 silent reading 29–34, 49, 51, 57n.7 Sinfield, Alan 55, 56, 114, 115, 117, 125n.24, 149n.10 Skype 170 Snapchat 151 Sontag, Susan 105–10, 122n.2 Spark, Muriel 163, 165–6, 169, 174, 175 Spivak, Gayatri 75, 89n.15 Steele, Richard 18, 19 Steiner, George 60n.23, 63 Stephen, Sir Leslie 2, 80, 90n.24 Sterne, Laurence 153, 166, 167, 174, 178n.3, 179n.10 Stillman, Whit 127, 128 Strachey, James 38, 59n.22 Strachey, Lytton 47–9, 59n.20, 59n.21, 59n.23, 91n.26 Strachey, Marjorie 34–6, 38–40, 44, 46–9, 56, 59n.22, 59n.23, 102 Svenbro, Jesper 30 Szymborska, Wisława 184–7, 190, 191 Talmud, the 160, 161, 180n.12 Tanakh, the 11, 50 Tanner, Tony 142–8, 149n.14 Török, Maria 25n.5

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Trilling, Lionel 123n.13 Trump, Donald 127–9, 148n.1, 182n.27 Turner, Cheryl 88n.3 UNESCO 7, 8 Van Leer, David 139 Vickery, Amanda 89n.6 Virgin Mary 40, 42 Wales, Jimmy 191, 193n.4 Warner, Deborah 12 Warner, Marina 103 Warner, Michael 130, 135 Werth, Barry 123n.13 West, Ellen 4–7, 8, 25n.4 Wikipedia 156, 187–91, 193n.4 Willes, Margaret 88n.3 Williams, Raymond 31 Williams, William Carlos 92, 94, 96, 100, 102, 104, 108, 123n.14 Wimsatt, W. K. 45, 107, 108, 123n.12 Winterson, Jeanette 136 Wolf, Maryanne 178n.2 Wollstonecraft, Mary 65, 76 Woolf, Virginia 2–4, 7, 20, 23, 24, 28, 56, 59n.21, 59n.22, 60n.27, 62–4, 72–4, 76–88, 90n.16, 90n.17, 90n.19, 90n.20, 91n.25, 93, 155, 164 Yousafzai, Malala 8 YouTube 156, 165, 179n.9 Zambaco, Démétrius 133, 140–2, 149n.13

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