The Ethics of Reading: A Traveler's Guide

85 THE ETHICS OF READING: A TRAVELER’S GUIDE Amelie Oksenberg Rorty Humanities and the History of Ideas Brandeis University zyxwvuts Virtually all we do involves reading. We read one another’s faces and gestures; we interpret - and are affected by - the architecture of buildings, the design of a classroom, the style of a haircut. We construe the meaning of the rituals of religious services and university commencements. Like all we do, reading requires a balance of fairness and critical evaluation, of tact and self-protection; and like all we do, reading reveals the self, its preoccupations, and obsessions. Self-protection and critical evaluation: reading is a serious and potentially dangerous activity. Whether we realize it or not, what we read affects what we become. We do well to be on guard, actively challenging the author. Tact and fairness: because in reading, we enter another person’s domain. As there arc rituals when we enter someone’s home, so too there are ritual observances in reading. Self-revelation: because the reader brings herself -her habits, attitudes, and mentality -to everything she does, centrally to her manner of reading, her interpretive frame. As we read, we too are read: and sometimes we discover ourselves by reflecting on the patterns of our interpretations andmisinterpretations. Like aperson, areading can be rude or pious; it can be abusive or tender; stingy or generous, literal or fanciful; naive or suspicious; religiously, politically, or sexually obsessed; relentlessly tenacious or readily distracted; sensitive, hypersensitive, or obtuse. We are changed by what we read, changed step by step as the work unfolds before us. Some authors are sensitive to the initial and initiating attitudes of their readers; others are unaware of such subtleties; yet others deliberately ignore them because they want to transcend particularity or because they don’t give a damn. Like the entrance of a house, the opening passage of a book sets the tone of action and reaction between the author-host and the reader-guest. It invites ease and informality; or it is demanding and formal, pressing the etiquette of ceremonial good manners. But the initial entry way is not identical for every guest reader, nor does it reliably reveal the whole house. Intimates and initiates may quickly find their way to the private quarters, to the kitchen and the study; others are always kept in the public rooms. As beginnings are manifestly modest or ornate, austere or grand, tense or insouciant, they direct the reader guest’s initial response to the host-author....and those, in turn, set dynamics of further interactions. So too with the opening of other kinds of spaces: if the opening of a work - the first few pages of a book, the first lines of a lyric, the first phrases of a sonata, or the first look of a painting- (deliberately or unintentionally] offends the reader, she will bring that attitude to the next pages, to the next development in a musical phrase, or to the flow of movement in a building. If she is lulled by an apparently playful opening, her defenses may be down. If she is keenly EDUCATIONAL THEORY / Winter 1997 / Volume 47 / Number 1 0 1997 Board of Trustees / University of Illinois zyx zyxw zyxwv zyxwvu 86 E D U C A T I O N A L T H E O R Y WINTER1997 1 VOLUME 4 7 1 NUMBER 1 alert to the rhetorical arts of writing/representation/definingspace, it may be more difficult for the author to manipulate her attitudes. Ironically, it make it more difficult for her to engage - to respond - to the craft of the work. In all we do, it matters - to our well-being and to that of our fellows -that we get things right, that we gauge the appropriate tone of action and response. As our activities vary, so do the measures of getting things right. Truthfulness-itself a kind of fairness that appropriately varies with context -affects the outcome of our hopes and projects. It is measured one way among friends, another in coinage, yet another in reporting the data of an experiment, and in an even more complex way, it marks eye-to-eye fairness in reading. But important as truthfulness is, there are also other measures of getting things right. In reading as elsewhere, there is playfulness and exuberance; there is damn-it-all-I-won’t-bow-to-claims-of-power-or-authorityi there is admiration and revulsion, suspicion and flight from danger. There is the brilliance of improvisation in a shared enterprise: sculpting the facade of a cathedral, performing a jazz quartet, constructing a curriculum. Some of you may think that bringing all these very different activities under the stricture of ”getting things right” so loosens the constraints on interpretation that they provide no guidance. Others may think that so enlarging the idea of “getting things right” is stultifying if not downright priggish. On the one hand, if truthfully reporting the results of crucial experiments is in the same domain as getting the right tone in a jazz improvisation, throw up your hands on the hope of “getting it right.” But on the other hand, if we are supposed to “get things right” in everything including the informal motions of village cricket and the etiquette of Little League baseball, say good-bye to joy and play and freedom. Instead of arguing the matter abstractly as a general issue, it is probably best to meet both discomforts -the discomfort of having too few or too demanding directives -by providing a Guide the Reader. zyxwvut zyxwv ADVICE ON READING 1. Look the work through as whole; try to sketch its form and structure. 2. Read the first section closely and attentively, to get the rhetorical tone of the work. Then throw yourself into reading it through- disappear into it, merge with it, absorb it -without standing back or asking questions. 3. Set the work aside for a bit. Let your first reading affect your perception, your ordinary activities. Try to see them through the lenses of your first reading. 4. For serious reading, start again from the beginning; read slowly, asking yourself what each section contributes to the structure of the whole. Take notes: keep one section for notes about what a given passage is doing or about what a phrase might mean. Keep a separate section for outlining the structure of the work as a whole. A third section should open a running dialogue with the author, ask hard questions, try to give his replies. You can also raise questions about poetry and fiction: “George Eliot, why are you so catty about your characters!” “Tom Eliot, what’s behind your AMELIE OKSENBERG RORTY is Professor of the History of Ideas at Brandeis University, Rabb 231 Waltham, MA 02254-9110. Her primary areas of scholarship are history of ethics and moral psychology. RORTY zy ETHICSOF READING 8 7 raiding Hindu hymns that you for sure don’tunderstand to illuminate life in London, 1920s?”Be an attorney for the defense as well as critic and judge: try to answer the questions you raise. THETACTOF ENTERING THE AUTHOR’S HOUSE zy 1. Identify the historical author. What was his education? What had he read? What was his early environment and experience? How did his perspective reflect - or bypass -his place in society? Who were his teachers, his intellectual ancestors, and kin? His (perceived)friends, competitors, and opposition? If they are not acknowledged, why not? Since there are usually multiple ancestors and allies, often pulling in different directions, how does he attempt to reconcile - or refuse to reconcile them? 2. Distinguish the historical author from the implied author-of-the-text, whose agenda may be very limited. What appearances are the historical and the implied author trying to project? If this is done deliberately, how does he indicate andattempt to control his appearance? What are the (hidden)hopes, fears, ambivalences of the historical and the implied author? 3. Who is the audience? The actual audience? The implied audience? All his contemporaries or only a select group? Perhaps only posterity? Since there are usually several audiences, how is the work designed to address each of them? What do the historical and the implied authors assume about the various kinds of readers? How do they want to affect them? How do they set about trying to do so? What tone does the author attempt to establish with the reader? (A tone of accusation? authority? intimacy? jocularity? companionship? innocent injury?) 4. What preoccupations or problems generated the work? What is the author doing? Deliberately or not? Shock? Fight? Seduce? Negotiate? Promise? Celebrate the past? Take revenge? Explore an unknown terrain? Close a dead-end? Exonerate, justify, explain? Create a tone, an atmosphere? Certainly several of these: how are they related? what takes precedence? 5. What is the overt (andwhat the latent)genre of the work? A dialogue? [Whoare the participants? Are their positions fairly represented? If not, how are they are being manipulated?)A eulogy or lyric? (Whoor what’s being celebrated?)An investigation? (What is to be discovered?)A prayer (To whom for what?J An article or an essay! A confession? [What seems to be omitted and why?)How are the parts of the work related to one another?How does the author conceive the relation between his genre and the flow and direction of his thought? How, if at all, does the rest of the author’s work bear on this one? Do not assume that the author’s work forms -or even attempts to form- a consistent system. If you are tracing the historical sequence of the author’s works, do not assume that they form a progressive, increasingly clearly articulated argument. 6. How does the author revise his ancestors’ and contemporaries’ questions, their vocabulary? How do these get changed in the course of the work? Is he aware of this change? How does he indicate or signal these changes? (If not, why not?)Whenever possible, compare several translations of the original texts. How do the terms and 88 E D U C A T I O N A L T H E O R Y zyxw zyx WINTER1997 / VOLUME 47 1 N U M ~ E 1R zyxwvut issues differ from our “ordinary understanding?” (Note that we sometimes only discover our own assumptions and presuppositions because we have been surprised by what we’ve read.) Be sensitive to the intellectual as well as the linguistic difficulties of translation: never assume that an expression has the same meaning or force as those in contemporary current use. Try to formulate these differences. 7. What do the historical and the implied authors think is too obvious to need saying? What do they assume or take for granted? How might the work have been changed if these views had been made explicit?What is implicitly conceded but not said?Why not? What is deliberately over-stated? To make what point? How can the author be misunderstood? What issues (questions,terms) remain systematically ambiguous? Is this deliberate? 8. What remains vague or incomplete, unresolved or ambivalent in the work? Is this deliberate? Do the historical and the implied author invite the reader to join him in remaining undecided? What questions does he bequeath his readers? 9 . Trace the history of interpretations of the work. Who used it for what purposes? What hidden evasions and implications were revealed? How and why do some interpretations appear to violate the work? How do they differ from improvisations of it? SELF-REVELATION AND SELF-UNDERSTANDING 1. With what expectations and assumptions did you approach the work? What attitudes did you have to the author, to his background and his projects? How do your attitudes differ from those the author is attempting to elicit?Was your interpretation affected by your attitudes, moods and situation?How might you have been projecting these on to the work? 2. What surprised, outraged, or puzzled you? What were the stages of your response to the work, and how did the details of the work control them? How did your initial reactions become confirmed or modified? 3. What did you learn and what do you wish you had not learned? How will it affect your view of the world? CRITICAL EVALUATION 1. How does the author want to affect his reader? Of what are we meant to be convinced? How are we meant to see the world differently? 2. Which of our views are challenged? Should we take the author‘s questions, issues, discoveries to heart? Should we believe what we been told? Should we be moved as the author intends?Is what the author claims true? Should we concede his assumptions? Is the work well-reasoned? To what beliefs, attitudes, and actions are we committed if we accept the author‘sviews? If the work makes no overt or direct truth claims, if it is a work of fiction or poetic insight, ask: What would it be like to live in the world described? With what characters or moods is the reader invited to identify? What kind of person would one become if one saw the world through the lenses of the world-of-the-book? What would become salient? What would one not notice? How would one treat one’s fellows? ETHICSOF READING 89 RORTY 3. Are the author’s techniques of persuasion consonant with his message? Independently of the content of the work, how should we be affected by the author‘s rhetorical strategies, as frank or indirect, authoritarian or manipulative, jocular or earnest, apparently artless or manifestly artful? Bearing in mind our deep seated tendencies to imitation, would we be wise to resist the author’s rhetorical modes? zyxwvu WHYBOTHERLEARNING TO READ WELL? We are late-comers in a long history of skilled readers and interpreters. And as is so often the case with late-comers to a highly sophisticated culture, we are in danger of no longer understanding -let alone sustaining- its crafts. Reflections on the history of formative and transformative readings - and their corrections- can help us avoid the tyranny of the past and the myopia of the present. We may be on the threshold of abrave new world; but we are also in danger of losing the disciplines of civility. This is not a plea for intellectual or political conservativism, for the preservation of tradition for its own sake, solely because it is tradition, or because our ancestors were wiser or more just than we can hope to be. Quite on the contrary: the difficult art of balancing fairness with self-protection, attentive respect with severity of judgment, seriousness with playfulness is the essence of an enlightened ethical life. It is a condition for a just and decent society. Learning to read well is on the way to learning to live well.