In his consideration of Maryanne Wolf’s Proust and the Squid (Harper, 2007), Caleb Crain notes, “Taking the long view, it’s not the neglect of reading that has to be explained but the fact that we read at all” (The New Yorker, Dec. 24 & 31, 2007, 135). It took a lot of evolution before we developed such circuitry and skills as would allow reading to take place. In the history of Homo sapiens–approximately 150,000 years–writing in a strict sense (as Walter Ong defines it: a coded system of marks whereby the inscriber is able to determine the specific sounded words that the reader will generate from the text), along with the skill of reading (the ability to negotiate and make sense of writing), is a stunningly recent invention, dating from approximately 3500 BCE. The history of reading and writing is punctuated by quirky moments and characters, along with telling anecdotes. Most everyone knows the one involving St. Augustine. In his Confessions (Book 6, Chapter 3) he describes how Ambrose would sit for long periods reading silently. In Augustine’s day it was common to voice what one read, even when reading alone–a practice that would largely continue through the Medieval period and into the Renaissance–and Augustine found it so odd that someone would read silently this way, that he took many sentences conjecturing about why Ambrose would have done such a thing.
St. Augustine was a teacher of rhetoric, which in his day meant oratory. For centuries to come, literacy in Euro-American educational tradition would continue to be linked to the art of public speaking. As Ong notes, the old McGuffey Eclectic Readers were remedial texts whose purpose was to improve public speaking skills and elocution, though as they were revised from 1836 to 1920, they “moved more and more away from oratorical to silent reading” (An Ong Reader, Hampton Press, 2002, 467). I remember the day that Father Ong came into his Introduction to Graduate Study class (this was the fall of 1983) and announced that Seamus Heaney had just been named the new Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard University. He asked if anyone knew what the Boylston proefessor taught. No one did. The task of the Boylston professor today is to teach creative writing. The full name of the professorship calls attention, though, to the deep rootedness of our literary culture in oratory, public speaking. While the writing of the current Boylston professor, Jorie Graham, lends itself to reading before an audience, as Graham’s public reading style demonstrates very well, one need only examine her books to take note of how much her poetry–with its creative use of white space and experimentation with punctuation–is also written to be encountered visually on the page.
Among its many effects and uses, reading (and literacy generally) has enabled certain modes of exlcusion. Among his conjectures about why Ambrose read silently, Augustine wonders if he might be trying to preserve his few precious moments of privacy, for generally he was very busy and very open to anyone seeking his attention; were he to read aloud, he would merely invite questions, and therefore even more interruptions. But the exclusions of literacy have been even more widespread than the preservation of a moment to oneself. In her The Marketplace of Print (Cambridge, 1997), Alexandra Halasz recounts some of the resistance of the old-school clerics to the rise of print in the early modern period; print made widely avaialble to relatively untrained readers the texts that had once been the almost exclusive province of university-trained elites. One might think of the reaction of many university-trained professors today to the Internet. The usual word today is that there is too much inaccuracy on the Web, though appearance in print is hardly a guarantee; generally I do not send my students carrying out research to back issues of Weekly World News, even if this publication, now defunct, brought into print some of my favorite headlines (among them: Big Foot Boy Attends Local School, Doing Fine).
I remember when, as a child and just learning to read, I was hanging out with some of the other neighborhood kids, most of whom were a few years older than I. One of the little girls said to another little girl (who must have been wearing a loose-fitting top), “I can see your t-i-t.” Proud of my recently acquired literacy skills, I figured out what she had spelled, and announced the word, “Tit.” The little girl who had issued the warning said to me, “You have to sound it out, but we know what it means”–and turning to the other little girl she nodded and said, “Right?” They gave each other a knowing look indicating that what they shared in being able to “know” what a spelled-out word means rather than having to “sound it out” was far better and somehow sexier than seeing anyone’s t-i-t.
Given the historical uses of exclusion to which literacy has been put, it’s quite a marvel that our current educational system has achieved something approaching universal literacy, an extremely recent phenomenon. As Ong points out, it took some millennia to get the machinery up and running–from the use of tokens and various markings as counting devices through the varieties of pictographic and rebus systems to full alphabetic writing including vowels–that would allow such near-universal literacy. The reason that the technical definition of writing, referred to in the first paragraph above, is important is that it refers to a system able to determine the precise sounds coded by a given text. The decoding of a line of pictographic representation, where the possible figures to be decoded number in the thousands, requires a high level of expertise that can come only after years and years of education and practice. As difficult as it is to achieve functional literacy using alphabetic writing, it requires far less time and effort because the coding system is both more precise and simpler–in English using only twenty-six letters that many of us learn in childhood with a song (even if there remains some confusion as to the precise way to form the letter elemeno). As Caleb Crain points out in his New Yorker piece, this rather simple and flexible coding system frees up the brain to do other kinds of work during the act of reading. Once I’ve internalized the alphabet and can read with fluency rather than having to concentrate so much energy on the act of decoding, I can undertake various acts of analysis, synthesis, and interpretation as I read.
And reading continues to be put to astonishingly varied uses in astonishingly varied modes and settings. I suspect that one, though certainly not the only, valid way of understanding the recent spate of articles about reading in crisis has to do with a sense that our world is changing profoundly through the influence of recent communications technologies, and that like the Renaissance elites who felt threatened by print technology, we may not be fully aware of the forces feeding into how we sense the present moment. It seems to me that one symptom of this precarious sense of a shift is the positing of a golden age of readers that I suspect never was. As Leah Price puts it in her excellent essay, “You Are What You Read,” in today’s New York Times Book Review, “the ‘after’ in which Game Boys displace James Joyce presumes a ‘before’ that never existed.” In the course of her article, Price points out some curious characteristics of the recent N.E.A. reports on the decline of reading, for example that the 2004 report does not count the reading of nonfiction, nor does it count reading done for work or school. While the N.E.A.’s 2007 report allows nonfiction along with fiction, it continues to disqualify assigned reading, whether for work or school. As Price points out quite well, “It takes some gerrymandering to make a generation logging ever more years in school, and ever more hours on the BlackBerry, look like nonreaders.” We may not all be reading the classics, but then when did crowds of us humans ever spend our time in such a way? It was not until very recently that literacy became sufficiently widspread for many of us to read at all, whether we were reading Faulkner or Stark Young, the latest graffiti (which existed in the ancient world) or my friend’s BlackBerry message. One thing that I think would help us to understand our present moment better would be more circumstantial and detailed histories of reading. I know of some that have come out in recent years, but I suspect that we could benefit from more. If anyone reading this blog happens to be among the thousands working on advanced degrees in history, literature, or other humanities departments, you might consider writing a thesis or dissertation on the history of reading. A greater depth of knowledge about what it has meant to read and to be a reader could be most helpful to us now.