James Leggio
As students, probably most of you had a formative experience like this. You’ve been assigned a great novel, say Moby-Dick, and as you become immersed in the book, the material world seems to fall away and you’re in some other mental realm. You’re not even aware of your eyes scanning the printed lines or your hand turning the pages; you just trance out; and when you finally come out of it, hours later, the Pequod sunk, Ishmael floating alone on the waves, you realize that it’s the middle of the night, the clocktower down in the Quad is tolling two, your roommate is snoring, and the quotidian world comes rushing back at you. You’re emerging from a deep, immersive reading experience, carried along by the flow of the writing — a profound engagement with a complex text, one of the most richly rewarding intellectual experiences a culture has to offer.
These days, how is reading — the deep reading we bring to bear on great works of philosophy and literature and criticism — changed by the rise of the screen as the reading site of choice? With the broad acceptance of Kindles, Nooks, iPads, and smartphones, some are anxious that the way we physically and mentally read on these plastic screens is restless, distracted, and superficial, threatening the deep mental engagement with a sustained argument that serious readers prize.
So let’s look into what the experience of reading itself is like, line by line, and consider whether the transition from paper to screen is indeed something for devoted readers to worry about.
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If we want to know what reading is, we first need to remember what writing is. As we teachers of freshman composition used to say, “Writing is thinking.” It’s composing your scattered thoughts into a strictly linear sequence of connected sentences, one idea per sentence.
There are theories about what happens in immersive reading. When I was an English Lit. graduate student, reading Victorian poetry all day, I read a famous article by the French critic Georges Poulet titled “Phenomenology of Reading” (you can get it on J-STOR). He held that the defining characteristic of reading was its intersubjectivity; as the reader’s eyes scan the lines, he or she mentally reenacts the writer’s process of thinking. This is obviously true when you read a novel and adopt the narrator’s viewpoint. But it’s equally true, Poulet says, when you read criticism, and shadow the analytical mind at work.
So when you read, say, Leo Steinberg’s classic article on Jasper Johns and Target with Four Faces, you are not passive; you act out with him each stage of the thought process as he tries to work out why he finds the Johns so compelling. When you get to Steinberg’s key passage meditating on the target as something you stare at, while the four sculpted faces are blind, his cluster of paradoxical insights manifests itself in your mind, as if you’d somehow thought of them yourself. And for most of us, that mental reenactment of the author’s thinking is as close as we’re ever going to get to being really, really smart.
The generosity of writers lies in letting the reader re-experience their thought process. Immersing yourself in a book is like being inside the author’s head.
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Part of our job as editors and designers, the servants of reading, is to facilitate this intersubjective mental exchange — the kind of immersive experience in which another mind seems to think out its thoughts within your consciousness.
The conventions of good typesetting arose to minimize the distractions that deprive reading of its concentration and sense of inner flow. Features like proportional spacing, kerning pairs, sharply etched, instantly recognizable fonts, and comfortable line lengths are designed to keep distraction at bay, making reading so smooth and effortless that it’s largely an almost unconscious or autonomic activity, like walking.
This is where computer screens, whether dedicated reading devices or multi-tasking platforms, have, so far, often been found wanting. Their distorted letterforms, erratic spacing, vertiginous scrolling or fake “page” turning, and miserly text windows (offering a choice between sadly low-contrast e-ink or a too-bright LCD) can undermine the intimate communion of reader and writer and interrupt the flow of textual experience, snapping the thread and breaking the spell. But those are mere mechanical defects, which can be overcome in the next generation of devices. More worrisome is the potential for interruption when you read within a complex digital environment; when the device you’re reading on, or others nearby, may be clamoring for attention with emails, feeds, and alerts, tempting you away with abundant apps and an array of links to elsewhere.
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But hang on a minute. Maybe this way of thinking about the reader’s absorption in the text is somewhat beside the point. Because before anyone accuses the screen of upsetting the flow of continuous reading, there’s an important point to consider: There is an “inner conflict” inherent in the book’s own nature: inner interruptions already built into reading itself as an optical and mental activity. The cherished “flow” of book reading may not be precisely what we thought it was.
Let me catalogue the obstacles built into book reading that disrupt the flow.
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A basic definition of reading might be: “Optically scanning a sequence of symbols.” Yet in some ways, the whole repetitive scanning activity in book reading is profoundly unnatural: it seems as if little in our species’ many millennia as hunter-gatherers could have prepared us for this mechanical ocular activity — back and forth, back and forth, like a farmer plowing a field. Because the thing being read doesn’t even move, your eyeballs do all the work, provide all the to-and-fro motion. The illusion of flow is created by your optic muscles’ toiling away at tedious, repetitious, back-and-forth calisthenics.
The inherent strangeness of this scanning activity can be better understood by considering the differences between poetry and continuous prose. Take these famous lines from Coleridge:
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
In poetry, the line breaks are specified by the writer and respected by the typesetter: Each line ending is a significant moment, reinforced by rhythm and often by rhyme: “Where Alph, the sacred river, ran / Through caverns measureless to man …” Or take a modern, more irregular poem, such as “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”:
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table …
Even here, you scan a whole line-unit of language. The eye always knows exactly where it’s going.
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
The world of prose, however, where you and I live, is obviously very different — and pretty mixed-up. The flow of prose is disrupted by the conflict between the sentence and the individual typeset line, two radically different schemes that interfere with each other: The grammatical full stop of the period can fall anywhere in the printed line, while, in turn, the line break can fall anywhere in the sentence. As a result, the vast majority of sentences will be interrupted by the eye’s end-of-line stopping and reverse scan, its move back to reacquire the “target,” the beginning of the next line.
Prose therefore always faces syntactical disruption. Look at this textbook sample sentence, as unfortunately interrupted by the line break:
The pickpocket stood before the black-robed judge
entered the courtroom to convene the jury.
The bad break invites you to misread the sentence, which you then have to go back and re-read to make sense of (it’s “before” in time, not “before” in space).
There’s an especially pernicious line break in this first sentence from a gallery wall text:
The artist Pablo Picasso died in 1973 leaving behind a body
of work in many mediums …
Reading prose across line breaks is a disjointed business. Prose becomes a field of strife between the organic logic of the sentence, which unfurls grammatically from subject to verb to object; and the arbitrary, mechanical logic of the rigidly printed line, which can only march in mindless lockstep from left margin to right margin, and then jamb itself back again to the left, like the carriage return on a prehistoric mechanical typewriter.
Still, the mind wants to follow the thread, and it’s resourceful. Part of learning to read is learning how to overcome these interruptions.
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Indeed when we read larger units, we actually make use of interruptions, add further interventions, as part of our personal strategies for absorbing a complex text. That is, we ourselves choose to interrupt our reading, by going back and re-reading puzzling passages; by skipping and skimming less interesting bits; by slowing down and savoring especially juicy pages; by glancing ahead to see where things are going; by flipping back to find where that unfamiliar name was first introduced; by stopping and comparing separate passages that seem to contradict each other; by returning to the table of contents; by consulting the index; and by many other stoppages within the optical and mental process of supposedly “continuous” straight-ahead reading.
We indulge in these sorts of interruptions in order to create coherence, to connect scattered bits of the text in ways that help us make sense of the line-by-line texture.
And so we keep crisscrossing through the prose, like a sailboat tacking against the wind.
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Overall, reading is thus a process of alternating immersion and interruption.
Interruption often actually helps us to read more easily. As an editor, I believe that many long paragraphs, in scholarly prose at least, would benefit from being divided in two, being interrupted by more paragraph breaks. Floridly over-inflated passages dissipate the reader’s attention, as in some of John Ruskin’s labyrinthine paragraphs, such as the daunting 643-word example from Modern Painters now on the screen. Even a supreme prose stylist like him might have benefitted from a bit more interruption. If, God forbid, I’d been Ruskin’s editor, I would have urged him to break things up a little: Without changing a single word, one could, after his logical arguments of the first 15 lines or so, break for a second paragraph, devoted to his conclusions; and then break for a third paragraph for his culminating illustrative anecdote.
Densely argued prose can also often be improved by breaking it into discrete sections, perhaps with a centered bullet or dingbat, in the manner of my college hero-critic, J. Hillis Miller, who made little dramas out of these hairpin sectional turns. This passage is from his chapter on William Carlos Williams, where Miller has spent pages building up to the key quotation, “Be mostly silent!” Yet as soon as he introduces that quote, he immediately rejects it — “ ‘Be mostly silent!’ How can that be?”— and goes off on a different tack. Breaking off like that is a legitimate form of argument.
In a more explicit variation of the section break, one can break up the text with subheadings, like the stupefying subhead in Steinberg’s Johns piece that poses the question “What Is a Painting?” — a section that suddenly turns into a Socratic dialogue.
The works of some superb writer-critics are often firmly shaped by the mind-concentrating interruption of the well-judged paragraph break, section break, or other deliberate offense against smooth continuity.
These interruptions of the flow determine the course of the river.
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Interruptions can be good for us because, in the noblest possible sense of the word, reading is monotonous — the same eye movements over and over again. We get too used to it, or “habituated” to it, as cognitive scientists say. We habituate too easily to the steady drip, drip, drip of words; Homer nods; and we need an occasional eruption to shake us up.
Perhaps it’s not inappropriate to note here that much of the modernist enterprise, in art and literature, from Cubism to Ulysses, is bound up with notions of discontinuity and interruption. Writers like Joyce took the old, bloated connective tissue, the Victorian-novel transitions — soothing phrases like “And now let me tell you, dear reader, what happened next” — and simply cut them out, producing the characteristic modern jolt.
So, there is deep, continuous, immersive reading, and then there are interruptions — and the two are not necessarily inimical. Disruption can be an effective rhetorical strategy, not just a lapse. Modern thinking is used to interruptions; it thrives on them.
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So too, I would argue, does our reading of an art book, whose defining feature is that you stop reading, and interrupt yourself, to look at the pictures. The very interruptedness of that reading brings its own pleasures.
Of all the varieties of books, museum publications must surely be among the most disrupted. The experience of reading a catalogue is broken up by many other elements competing with the continuous prose. Those competing elements include elaborate footnotes that often constitute a running schizoid subtext of their own, quarreling with the main text; or detailed chronologies that give an alternative account of the artworks, in strict timeline form; or meticulous documentation of medium, support, dimensions, inscriptions, etc.; or donors; or provenance, sometimes with tantalizing, unexplained gaps; or exhibition histories, or publication references, or condition reports — all wrapped up in a graphic-design package that tries to make all this stuff look like a book, and not some insanely prodigal compendium of diverse information.
The most interruptive aspect of catalogues, however, is the pictures. To weave them into the narrative, you must manage a shift of focus in the flow of language. Balancing the tricky rhetorical turn from the text to the picture demands tactical skill. In his article, Steinberg handles this well, finding the right point in his minute examination of the painting to prompt you to look from text to image without undue interruption. In his hands, it’s not just interruption — it’s synergy.
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As we’ve seen in some other cases, what looks like interruption can turn into illumination. And so perhaps it is with reading on a device as well: some of the “distracting” interruptions people anxiously ascribe to screen reading may be akin to the useful interruptions that are already there within reading itself, built into it as an imaginative activity, and built into the art publication in particular.
The great talent of the computer screen lies not only in bringing together disparate information, but in the ability to manage, to coordinate, the riotous cascade of information tumbling about us. The screen can in fact act as a catalyst for new kinds of coherence. Over the remaining days of this conference I want to hear from digital developers about how reading on screen will find its own innovative ways of creatively, beneficially, interrupting a text with pictures — and audio and video.
That is to say, I want them to show us how the supposedly disruptive features of reading on a screen can instead become new ways of making connections. The ever-present hot links to other web places, or the jump to audio or video components, or indeed the very notion of the interactive — these have the charge in them to jolt the linear reader into unexpected realms of thought, thereby functioning much like the strategic interruptions that writers have always used. As publishers, we can learn to harness these digital resources and write them into complex new reading experiences that alternate textual immersion and multimedia interruption.
I said at the beginning that certain kinds of reading produce a wonderfully conjoined mentality shared by writer and reader. Today, we are looking at a dynamic digital interface where readers and writers increasingly interact, in ways that continue to evolve.
I want to read the next chapter.
(A paper presented at the session “How We Read” during the conference Print and the Digital Network, 14th National Museum Publishing Seminar, Washington, D.C., June 17–19, 2010)