Reading

A cultural practice

Vincent Quinn

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781526136947
• eBook ISBN: 9781526136961
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Why do we read, and have we always read in the same way? Reading: A cultural practice uses a rich variety of literary and visual sources to explore how reading has changed, and continues to change, in response to new technologies and shifting social pressures. Drawing on medieval illustrations, classic fiction, the art and literature of the Bloomsbury Group, and contemporary e-culture, the book shows that there is no single, unchanging thing called 'reading'—instead, it is something that mutates over time. Throughout history, ways of reading, and theories of reading, have been shaped by religious and educational institutions. This continues to be true, but current approaches to reading are also conditioned by debates over digital culture and social media use. Reading: A cultural practice re-frames these contemporary preoccupations by offering a long view on how our notions of books and reading alter according to social and historical context.

1

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 compromised. Perhaps it, too, is part of her rest cure. Then one day – in one fraction of a second – she 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 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 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 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 language and food – Bidart sees himself ‘eating the ground of Western 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 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.

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 P...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Reading, incorporated
• 2 The time and place of reading
• 3 The common reader
• 4 Close reading, citizenship, and education
• 5 Loose reading: Jane Austen in a post-truth age
• 6 Reading and technology
• 7 Envoi
• Bibliography
• Index