Better Read

As a full time student of literature, text is both my pleasure and suffering, my lifesource and anathema. I spend whole days laying the foundations for future debilitating back problems, staring ahead into a screen of many ordered characters, then glancing down periodically to gather visual information from a slate of dead tree that has already absorbed the sweat, snot, spit and dandruff of a thousand others before me. I follow the line of letters from left to right until there are no more letters, and I must inconveniently skip back to the extreme left again, moving down one row without dissolving the mental imprint of the previous one. I must maintain the process continuously and look up only when another sector of reality - such as the birth of my first child - competes for my cognitive resources. When my second child is born, it will be business as usual: what the next reader will take for dandruff will really be flecks of bloody placenta.

If I spend the day reading and claim this to be the day's major activity when I communicate it to my friend in the pub later that evening, s/he will most probably comprehend that statement and enquire no further. 'I did some reading' (for you would never be satisfied with the amount of reading that you had done) is a perfectly satisfactory contribution to the exchange of daily pleasantries, especially when the exchange is between people of academic inclinations (as it usually is round these parts). Everyone knows what you mean when you say you read. But as with most things so habitual, familiarity anaesthetises and domesticates the many-headed beast. Those people sitting across from me in the library seem to be participating in an analogous activity: they're also looking down at a book and following words with darting eyes. But how do I know they're running in true parallel? And - even in the slightly better-lit labyrinth of my own brain - why does the word 'read' come out to describe so many different interpretive operations? Textual metaphors have appropriated the world so thoroughly in my case that I can never stop reading. Do you read me?

I moaned in a previous post about my increasing drift towards and inevitable shipwreck on the reef of the textual. When I go to art galleries and museums I gravitate to the accompanying text - that would be the peritext, if we were talking text, which we're not, but it's all I've got - even before I bother looking at the work 'itself'. I need to read reviews of films before and after I see them in order to extract some method from their hostile over-visual madness. I lurch towards my laptop after every important football match to read a good journalistic assessment before I make up my own mind. In short, most encounters with reality I have are mediated by reading, and I am rarely not reading. This reading may not always be meaningful or taxing. But all up I think I spend more time deciphering text than I did five years ago, and then much more than five years before that. These reflections were in fact prompted by a rare moment of out-of-body self-awareness as I mentally stepped beyond my self to read it in context on the way home the other day. A friend had given me a book, and I had no bag to put it in for the fifteen minute cycle out of town. I kept it between my hand and the handlebars for as long as I needed to keep my eyes on the road, but as soon as I got to a quiet patch the temptation became overwhelming: I leant back on my seat, absolved my hands of their steering duties, and diverted them to opening the book instead. I read the book for several seconds until I realised I had become a cycling postcard image of the worst excesses of academia. But then I just wanted to get to the end of the paragraph...

Despite reading's status as extreme sport with its attendant hazards, I'm still here, still reading. And one of the things I've done some reading on lately is the reading technologies and practices of the ancient world. Ever since learning about the oral tradition of poetic composition lying behind the text of Our First Great Western Poet 'Homer', I've been a little knee-jerk suspicious of the modern bookworm's fetishisation of a once-upon-a-time-before-text. Any emphasis on the oral seemed to deprive me of every tool in my critical box of tricks: poetry designed for one-off hearing couldn't have been nearly as complex as poetry designed for unlimited re-reading. Oral performance seemed to restrict the field of literary criticism to the superficial and the obvious, and I wanted nothing to do with it. But now my reading about the oral phenomenon has (ironically) opened me up to a very basic jaw-drop at how different the experience of a 'text' would have been, even in the less textually laconic (compared to Homeric times) period of history I work on. The myth that Augustine was the first man to practise silent reading has now been comprehensively debunked, but the fact remains that the overwhelming majority of reading in the ancient world was done aloud. If you weren't reciting your latest poem to your mates and absorbing their feedback, you were poking your slave to read you a long classic into the early hours. Writing, too, was not our highly private intercourse between author and muse, but a process of dictation from commandeering master to faithfully transcribing slave. To transport yourself back to these foreign modes of literary production and consumption is nothing less violent than a mind-rape.

The technologies of reading and writing at least affect, at most dictate, how you do both; and if you want to travel down the Orwellian road no longer travelled by serious scientists, which I stick to from stubbornness and nostalgia - that language governs thought (cf. that misquoted Wittgenstein schtick about limits of language being coterminous with limits of world) - then these technologies must also affect the way you think. The other example of mind-rape when it comes to envisioning ancient reading - and the one that provokes the most incredulity at conversationally-struggling dinner parties - is the fact that ancient texts had almost no punctuation. Classical Greek practice was to write a pure stream of uninterrupted upper-case letters, no word breaks, no commas, no full stops. Justashitloadofletterswithoutend. The Romans, ever the schematisers, road-makers and landscapers, introduced word breaks for a good while - but then abandoned them around the time my poet Juvenal began writing. Needless to say the experience of hacking through this textual thicket - not to mention the cognitive skills required as machete - must have been insanely different. One of my favourite recent articles on classical literature performs selected thought experiments that show up the weird things resulting from a restoration of the 'neutral' text without punctuation. A basic effect is that, narratologically speaking, you often lose sight of precisely who is speaking: 'author', 'character', 'character-within-mouth-of-character' are all uncertainly assigned and jumbled in a cacophony of possibility. Modern punctuated editions of classical texts like to claim to stand on the shoulders of giants and present themselves as the cumulative summit of thousands of years hard scholarly (usually German) work, monuments dedicated to solving these very problems of clarity (attribution of speech among them). But clarification charges its price: readers are mollycoddled into smoother transactions of meaning, sat down in front of the textual television to be nicely entertained. Every edited text is a condescending lump of spoon-feeding constituted by other people's concealed - often bad - decisions. And that includes this one. Full stop.

Faux-snobbery aside, the thought of those forbiddingly neutral ancient texts chills me to the core. It also makes me wander into the politically sensitive territory of human 'progress' in literacy. We often use literacy rates as a sound index for the general population's level of education - and everyone knows how far the world has travelled in that regard, with a much greater proportion of literate souls alive today than ever before. But the embarrassing underbelly of this lurch forward is that reading itself has become much easier. And I ain't just talking punctuation either. The sprawling periodic sentences and complicated syntax of Ancient Greek and Latin required reader to store huge amounts of information; often it would take till the end of a several-line sentence to discover/clarify that sentence's grammatical structure. Non-linear syntax would have teamed up with non-existent punctuation to render reading a head-splitting process of decoding at sight. The number of people equipped to do it would have been closer to the number of people now capable of smashing out some Rachmaninov (or insert difficult composer of whom I am ignorant) at first glance. Which isn't to say that many humans couldn't do it if they applied themselves industriously. But it would demand an intimidating amount of time and discipline - perhaps about the same amount as was available to the average member of the Good and the Leisured class.

When I realised the magnitude of the feat that was ancient reading, I started thinking about how far my own reading practices and turns of interpretation are simply governed by my linguistic ineptitude. I'm not confessing impostor status here. I can read Latin after all these years. But the way I read it is slowly, laboriously, with constant side nod to dictionary and explanatory literature. Often my readerly struggles   force me into paying disproportionate attention to the visual and surface aspects of the text: I notice straightaway, for example, if a word is repeated within a poem, and I immediately start pressing on what this repetition could mean. If it doesn't appear to mean anything, I push as hard as possible to make it mean something; I lean against the text's wall and make constipated noise until the whole edifice threatens to crumble in a spectacularly fruitful cycle of demolition and creation. But sometimes this monomania for the minutiae of verbal echoes feels like a workshop of horrors. If I were reading an English poem, would I care that the word 'hair' was repeated in lines 23 and 96? Would it matter? Formalism, I fear, is oft the first refuge of mild incompetence.

The problem is, I'm sure it ain't just me. My particular area of study - Latin literature - has seen an explosion of interest in the concept of 'allusion' in recent days: the moment, that is, when one text refers to another, and what that particular interaction signifies. A lot of these allusions are precise and compact verbal echoes: groups of two or three words in close proximity, usually slightly modified in their new context. But I wonder if these snippets don't stand out against their backdrop of dead language much more through our surface-skim reading habits, latching as we do onto repeated verbal motifs and clinging to them for dear life; treating the text as a pretty painting which offers meaning through flashes of similarity and difference when placed against other pretty paintings in the vicinity. Obsession with allusion peaks just as the wave of critics with mediocre Latin begins to crash on the shore. Coincidence? Hopefully. Even I'm surprised at how old I'm sounding.

Just as oral modes of communication become the fetish of the nerdy written culture, so do the classicists of previous generations always seem sexier: more knowledgeable, more fluent, more at ease gliding through the text apace, chewing it up as if it were so much high level English. The idea must have a good quantity of myth to it. But there must also be some truth tucked away in those familiar folds of decline. When I look at a page of Latin nowadays - when I 'read' it - my brain must be doing something very different to what Augustus' was doing when he heard/read that passage of Virgil, and different still  to what an 18th century scholar's was doing when they marked up that ode of Horace with confident ink strokes. Just because we curled into ourselves from reading aloud to silent scanning doesn't necessarily mean we should be mute about the manifold modes of textual absorption we employ every day, particularly those involving dead and difficult languages. Think about it now; in one thousand years, what you've just done probably won't qualify as reading. Read it and weep.