On Book: The Performance of Reading

Author(s): Christopher Grobe

Source: New Literary History, Vol. 47, No. 4 (AUTUMN 2016), pp. 567-589
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/44505265
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 On Book:
The Performance of Reading

Christopher Grobe

It is time to conceive of visual translations of liter-

ary works and oral performances of reading ex-

periences and not just more books about books.
- Andrew Piper, Dreaming in Books 1

Books and theater are different arts, and they

frame reality in different ways. This is the first
time I have ever felt those frames become one.
- Ben Brantley, reviewing Gatz2

reading.3 Alive to the book and dead to the world, I read with
When reading.3 an intensityan intensity
I was Aliveand young,
focus nowandunimaginable
to focus theto Ime.wasI remember
book now nearly and unimaginable dead impossible to the to world, to me. rouse I I remember read from with my
this fact, but little of the feeling. What was I heańng, seeing , and sensing
as I shut out the world? Now, decades later, on the far side of a literary
education, I feel no better equipped to answer this simple question -
and, really, why should I? We neither teach our students nor expect
ourselves to attend to reading's ghostly sensorium. "Interpretation,"
complains Susan Sontag in her essay against it, "takes the sensory ex-
perience . . . for granted, and proceeds from there."4 If this is true in
the case of, say, sculpture or theater - which at least put things palpably
before us - how much truer must it be of literature, with its obliquity
of reference? Singers, when they talk shop, don't just stick to questions
of musicality or style; they discuss their vocal production and the stout
column of breath that sustains it. We literary folks, meanwhile, mostly
leave unacknowledged the pillars of our art.
I first realized all this back in graduate school, when some students
and I invited Elaine Scarry to discuss her latest work, Dreaming by the
Book. In it, she wonders how books, though themselves "almost wholly
devoid of actual sensory content," create images in our minds that "do
acquire the vivacity of perceptual objects."5 She gives this phenomenon

New Literary History, 2016, 47: 567-589

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 568 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

a name, "perceptual mimesis": lit

exactly - but the way we might
ulties - our mind's eye, ear, an
authors don't settle for descri
pseudosensation. Discussing th
ourselves asking questions we'd
decades of our ever-more-con
off, as the best ones do, into
always tracked back to one decep
(however attenuated) attends your
This question was different, s
response critics. Foundational
reader" or of "the act of read
that our differences, though
similarities. This was right (in
assumption. But at the most b
as we read - we students were im
by the nearly unfathomable diff
sion a character's face? I thought eve
Later theories of reader-respo
groups of readers united by th
yet here we were, a graduate
interpretive community this sid
the sheer variety of our expe
was astonishing to us.8 Perhaps ,
remained untouched , untutored a
We would hardly be the firs
history in the West, people ha
lazy or laborious, corrupting or
been - both factions would agree
lies its promise and its peril. I
recalls the moment he first realized the freedom to be found in books.
There he sat, absorbed in an encyclopedia article about sex, when, out
of nowhere, his father appeared and sat nearby. For a moment, young
Alberto burned with fear and shame, but then it dawned on him: "no
one - not even my father . . . could enter my reading-space."9 Silent
reading, such stories suggest, is the very wellspring of our individuality.
It lifts us into a second "mirror stage" where, having long ago resigned
ourselves to being public objects, we rediscover our secret integrity as
private subjects.10 Of course books also challenge such integrity; they
invade and transform us. No matter: we refuse the contradiction. Cel-
ebrating the "thrill of readerly surrender," we still insist that reading

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 ON BOOK 569

"shor[es] up . .
self-forgetting
our reading-spa
Our reading is
because it remai
the surest sign o
"That is one of
"the creation o
occasion share
criticism?), but

II

This leaves historians of reading in a bit of a bind. How can we observe,

across history or even within ourselves, an "activity against which the
social defines itself," to quote Leah Price?13 And if we cannot observe it,
is a history of reading even possible? Such questions have obsessed liter-
ary critics of late, not because we are witnessing the "death" of reading
(my apologies to the writers of a thousand think-pieces) , but because
digital culture affords us new perspectives on it. In the age of the iPad,
we suddenly see the book - its material and social contours - and, having
seen it this way, we become aware of its impact upon us. We understand
how entangled our idea of reading is in the material form of books, but
also how detachable such "bookishness" might be from all that paper
and paste. "As we wheel into the untold future," muses Jonathan Freed-
man, "we carry with us structures of feeling and thought that have been
traditionally associated with the book."14 The question is only: what will
we do with them nowi

One thing we have insistently done with our bookishness since the
middle of the twentieth century is to perform it. By all rights, this should
be impossible - inappropriate, at best. How could this quintessential^ púvate
act go public ? Yet such "bookish performance" has thriven on the con-
temporary scene. From literary readings to docudrama, from reader's
theater to found-text performance, today's writers and performers
spend more time reading in public than their counterparts in almost
any other era. They speak every "he said" and "she said" in chamber
theater productions. They read at random from a pile of books in some
avant-garde performances.15 They stay "on book," holding binders or
booklets behind music stands and microphones. In short, they make an
act of their reading. As a performance historian, I see here a trend of
unusual power and range. Cutting right across the divisions that structure

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570 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

our performance histories - high

stream, theatrical and extrathea
hang together as a genre. What
literary content into dramatic f
for millennia.) Instead, they all
that contain them) to star in the
dramatize literature; they theatrìc
thought" inculcated by books.
As a literary critic, then, I see so
tremendous archive of ideas abou
tice. Aesthetic philosopher Peter K
. . . between the silent reading of
likes how this analogy shifts our a
tive genius of individuals who read
same concerto to revelatory effe
being able to compare two such r
a musical performance is in the
the head. Novels, however, were
of the head."17 First of all, it isn't
"meant" for performance - or, if
mattered. (Think Dickens, think
necessity, of reading a novel out
for it or not, the tradition of "boo
chive Kivy despairs of ever findin
direct or objective accounts of a
would add, than a critical essay i
more sensory texture than you're
finally thinkable what Sontag de
an "erotics" of reading.18 And, in
Sharon Marcus's recent call for b
want "willed, sustained proximity
what is present rather than priv
hardly do better than to attend
Say, though, that you reject th
tured "the structures of feeling
you worry that these performan
they attempt to display. You can
ary effect. In putting acts of read
in public, however tendentiously
of dammed-up thoughts from t
rapturous reflections, often as f
manifestos of our bookish ideolo

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 ON BOOK 571

III

Take, for instance, one of the simplest scenes of reading aloud: the
"formal" poetry reading.20 Essays on the subject skew polemical, with
a knack for inchoate cliché and a tendency toward moral outrage.
Manguei, as you might predict, distrusts them as intrusions upon his
cherished reading-space. Being read to, he says, "deprives the listener"
of "freedom"; it "condemns the ear to someone else's tongue."21 So, even
though he admits that he enjoys when authors read their own work,
he insists that each such reading "distorts the text, by improving (or
impoverishing) it with interpretation."22 DepHve, condemn , distort - such
language is common when the topic is readings, presumably because
they threaten the hopes we had pinned on silent reading. If reading
is ineffable, a secret source of the self, then we can only destroy it by
performing it out loud and in public.
Indeed, to hear some poets tell it, every aspect of performance is a
threat to the poem "itself." The venue might clash with the world of the
poem. The poet's voice might drown out the fainter sounds of our inner
ears. Meanwhile, our fellow spectators might corrupt our reactions with
their own. "When we read silently," says Donald Hall, ". . . our response
to the poem is our own: no communal laugh or sigh or in taken breath
controls" us.23 Even poets who value readings often think of them this
way: as the melodrama of poetry's narrow escape from the grubby grip
of the real. 'The myriad distractions that mitigate against the ideal,"
Peter Middleton suggests, "are stage villains ... in the drama of poetry's
tentative appearance."24 Poetry's job is not simply to conjure immaterial
worlds; it must palpably scrap its way past the things of this world.
Most poets, though, have no stomach for the fight. The poet's plea
therefore (widely heeded by poetry critics) is to disattend - especially,
for instance, to the reading's visible features. Poets "aren't doing any-
thing" with their visible selves, Charles Bernstein once insisted to me,
and he is hardly the first poet to shudder (or critic to shrug) at the idea
that we watch poetry readings while listening to them.25 Most modernist
poets seem nauseous at the thought. As William Carlos Williams once
complained, giving a reading can feel like pulling "back your foreskin
(if you have one) in public."26 And even as readings became a fact
of life for postwar poets, this unease persisted. Denise Levertov, who
pointedly calls these events, not readings, but "poetry listenings," once
recalled with horror her audiences' desire to look : "Many people were led
by the cult of personality that grew up around Dylan Thomas to think
of poetry as something you went to see being read. At a reading in New
York in which I participated along with five other poets, one member of

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 572 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

the audience was actually scannin

in fact, however, especially if the
not of the poet but of the poem."
prohibition on looking. When we d
tactfully prefer blind audio-recordin
but important for literary scholar
each recording not as a residue of
incomplete in itself, yet evocative of
of the poem. Sure, it has passed th
and social occasion, but it remains -
The obvious remedy for poets who
readings altogether. Instead, poet
of vocal styles and bodily stances k
ing "neutral colors," treating thei
poets speak in a "carefully neutral" w
"resolutely nonflamboyant." Poet
soothing promise - of protection f
from charges of showmanship, an
rible deed is done. But there's more than a writer's bashfulness at stake.
These strictures are designed to choke the theater out of the reading; it
is performance itself they are hoping to neutralize. Readings threaten to
turn "stagey," we are warned; they are prone to "performance excesses."30
( The horror!) A proper reading, by contrast, gives us "the poem itself."31
It doesn't substitute "actorly texture" for "the real sound of words"; it
doesn't let "'acting' take precedence over letting the words speak for
themselves," et cetera , ad nauseam .32
Such mantras ("the poem itself," "the real sound of words," "words
speak [ing] for themselves") - not to mention the cheap anti-theatrical
sentiment that sets them off - are so obviously polemical, so thin on any
positive content, that it's easy to shout "Amen!" or "Nonsense!" and be
done with it. But my ears perk up at such extravagant claims. You know
how to achieve a lossless conversion from pńnt to performance! What , I wonder,
does that look like, sound like, feel like?

IV

These were the same questions facing members of Elevator Repair

Service when they began rehearsing Gatz, their marathon staging of
The Great Gatsby, verbatim.33 The group's director John Collins framed
their initial problem thus: how to "put the book on stage and keep it
a book," or how to "make a live event out of the book without spoil-

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ON BOOK 573

ing its bookness

dramatizing the
the "neutral" po
thing from "neu
Gatsby - an act o
within a rather s
sort of financial
conservative clot
in gray and bei
context, Gatz m
absurd, liturgy
the novel first
parently broken
Fitzgerald's nov
the Scribner pa
he nonetheless se
hours or so. Slow
to contribute dia
business bric-a-
gives way entire
it all, plain Jam
Gatz toured th
years. Along th
though critics h
rarely agree as t
identifying wit
course we "liter
of their way nev
do they evoke Th
even to naturali
these two world
sometimes they
we're in an offi
several people -
So, is this "a dra
opines?37 For Ben
reader"; so, the a
and a reader's per
takes place in an
to read the enti
others are, at fi
ally "manages to

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 574 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

It's easy to laugh at such self-as

Gatz. "Nothing that literal occur
his review, "any more than it wou
who started to read aloud . . . [w
be told, it's a beast of a show to
offer this tortured and hedging
were, of observing how some im
were embodying [the] book."40
only offer an oblique explanatio
just asked to zone in or zone out
ing the way it interacts with ...
first, but then becomes all about
What Collins's summary does m
question behind critics' disagr
mental or a physical act - an int
lins encourages us not "to zone
not to presume (or to project on
reading as an absorptive task - but
have a whole lot of trouble resis
the New York Times.*2 It leaves yo
It's "mesmerizing" in the pages o
Sydney Morning Herald; it's "hy
Amsterdam.44 This is exactly what
insist. With Gatz s help, you surre
self. Meanwhile, you've never att
let the performance tell you so
those old chestnuts about readin

Gatz is hardly alone in exposing this habit of ours: we seem to want

every performance of reading to slide, without friction, back into silent
reading - which we understand only vaguely as an experience of dreamy
transport and self-forgetting. Consider literary critic turned art historian
Garrett Stewart, whose book The Look of Reading surveys a few millen-
nia of painted readers. In a chapter called "Reading Double," Stewart
stumbles onto a trove of bookish performance history - one that's been
hiding right under our noses all along. These double-portraits, which
art historians have understood as pictures of people reading silently in
company, Stewart sees instead as scenes of one person reading aloud to
another. But no sooner has he made this claim than he reduces these

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 ON BOOK 575

paintings to me
kind. These pair
gone in thought
ing - to "decode
serial cognition.
examine these o
right back into
Stewart owes th
and theorist who
art once did (an
the latter unders
audience. "Art d
Fried declared in
it by encouragin
covers in his boo
by painting scen
book. Painters m
Fried muses, "bo
the act of paint
the beholder bef
ing, and requiri
the producers a
absorbed into the art itself.
If this sounds a bit familiar, it's because these same theories lie behind
many polemics against poetry readings. Take Bernstein, whose rhetori-
cal debt to Fried is most outstanding.48 The neutral reading's lack of
"visual spectacle," he writes, helps us "overcome . . . the performance
context" and "defeat [its] theatricality." The payoff, once it does, is our
absorption into the poem: "listener [s] . . . enter into a concave acoustic
space," leaving the performance venue (and perhaps their own bodies)
behind.49 There's something "oceanic" (in Freud's egoistic sense) about
all of this liquefied subjectivity sloshing out of people's bodies and into
the hollows of poetry - and I confess I've never felt it at a reading, though
perhaps I've seen it on the faces of others.50
No: poetry readings of the sort defended by Bernstein (and the rest)
stage a fantasy of silent reading by authorial proxy. Instead of embrac-
ing poetry's publicity - the reading's most obvious achievement - they
insist they've achieved the contact of two privacies: ours and the poet's.
That's what's at stake when Hall says he has given us "the real sound of
words"; that's why, as an auditor, he finds others' reactions so threaten-
ing to his own. When "words speak for themselves," poet and auditor
are alone together. They meet in "the corridor between written words

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576 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

and the reader's perception," pol

Or perhaps, as Stewart has it, th
but, all the same, these two brai

VI

This is a powerful fantasy - one I

began this essay with a story of p
in books before my schooling br
there was another side to this tale
to tell: during those dog days of
on the stage. This meant masteri
a common audition ordeal. Basica
days in advance, but more often
script in hand, you must perfo
read it cold , hence the name, bu
reheated": no time for a long st
words bubble to life. If all goes we
favorite term of praise in the thea
to leap beyond words into actio
glued to the page. But you must
take direction," to quote the oth
two from the director, and you le
This practice instilled in me a n
yet more provisional than my "h
over, of course, to the rehearsal
book," script in hand, but it also
drama - and then other texts, too.
exactly, but what texts might pro
were. You can only answer this que
of their meaning. You had to ma
in a subjunctive mood.
I confess all of this because I've
collective silence on reading's inn
must rely on its author's experie
and, insofar as it fails to acknow
izing claims can become, instead,
whose Dreaming by the Book sud
second-greatest passion: gardenin
beings, appear to be the perfect
elaborating this claim over the c

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 ON BOOK 577

his part, frame

cal performan
"con espressione
the author of Wh
having a weirde
offered without
each of us, then
I think I experi
of weirdo in thi
and proceed fro
Yet, having ack
for theater's wa
onstrate the new
terpretation," sh
to theater and fi
Kowalski in A Str
man's The Silen
what they are; th
handle. "Those w
Sontag snips, "ar
on screen" - dit
theater and film
directly. But in l
just as volatile a
always highly tec
a clash of styles,
ning effects.) Pe
literature, but s

VII

This is literally true of Gatz, though you would hardly guess it from
reading the reviews it has left behind. Most critics quietly narrow their
focus to just one performer (Scott Shepherd, the narrator) and his
relationship with the novel (i.e., mounting absorption in it). To get
a baseline sense of Shepherd's presence onstage, picture this: amid a
mass of drunken bodies, he sits - hunched over, unresponsive to their
clamor. Instead, face buried in his book, he shouts Fitzgerald's descrip-
tion of how a crowd has engulfed him (Fig. 2). It's a thrilling image of
what reading feels like - or, at least, one kind of reading: the kind that
plants you deep within yourself, a centripetal anchor against fiction's

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578 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

Fig. 1. Detail from Peter Mendelsund's W

thus: "The reading imagination reveals o
out of us. (Our dispositions are strange

Fig. 2. As a party rages around him - an

motionless, absorbed. Gatz, by Elevator

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ON BOOK 579

pull, against th
other perform
own rapport w
them tangle to
For instance, w
render" to The
smirks at the b
of Jordan Bake
complies only s
hearted feint o
other times, sh
e.g., when she
"A celebrated t
sung in jazz, an
over the garden
the summer sky
these. These "sm
hold us here fo
Another critic,
the finger more
"the way that
. . . tried almos
reviews tend to
of Sokol, threa
positive reviews
nothing away f
sures usģ58 Soko
repurpose Midd
villain ... in th
Her performanc
literariness. It
novel. For Soko
to be resisted o
which we grate
to make of Sok
Every second s
fun) readerly d
tachment for l
applies her inso
queer behavior,
out of the role
campy) to me

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580 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

setting her up for a fall, like t

why can't we appreciate what
Shepherd could not? Why not al
and suspicion might bring to
line, we seem to have decided t
the same stage (the same min
refreshing, in this light, to se
only in that doomed, double-qu
Jordan and Nick.
Against the earnest absorption
kol, Jim Fletcher (as Gatsby) of
Perfectly deadpan throughout
of actors who have tried and f
about his work - saying the w
perfect cipher. "What I am do
New Yorker , "is committing to
musical. It's temporal."59 Fletc
in our debates, nor does he sp
embodies, I think, the pleasur
With his patient simplicity, h
what Gatsby must symbolize a
An old director of mine liked
chalkboard. There are four poles
scene , he would say, drawing
might be Soap Opera and Wester
a mile underground. East and we
Film - everything sunny, then
was never to pick one of these
to ensure that we had four pr
see Gatz as beautiful chiaroscu
absorption. What's truly remark
shows us a collage of styles, a
list manner, it refuses to blend

VIII

Not every bookish performance gives us this varied a vision of reading,

but they all, whether they like it or not, embody reading as a dynamic,
tensile process. No one has made more conspicuous (and strange) this
blurry border between text and performance than Samuel Beckett. He
began his career writing novels and poems before switching, for the most

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 ON BOOK 581

part, to plays
be seen as a lon
Beckett quipp
text. I'm tryin
close to achiev
as the keynot
a play (or is it
share a table; one listens in silence while the other reads aloud. He reads
the tale of a lonely man, still haunted by the memory of love lost long
ago. Coincidences begin to pile up between the narration and the stage,
but, as in Gatz , the two never quite merge. We can't quite say, though we
may desperately want to, that Beckett shows us a man reading the sad
story of his own life to himself. When the story ends with the ominous
line, "Nothing is left to tell," the reader closes his book, and the two
figures lock eyes for the first time. Lights fade to black on this expres-
sionless gaze between doubles.61 A simple play - but as Francisco Frazão
observes in his essay on Gatz , no text stays simple once it has begun to
appear onstage: it "resists and causes friction."62 However static it may
be, it soon hums with electricity.
This is not, however, how Ohio Impromptu has generally been received.
Beckett's oeuvre "attracts interpreters like leeches," says Sontag, and this
play is no exception to the rule.63 One journal alone, Modern Drama ,
published five articles on this play in the first decade and a half after
its premiere. The very next year, Pierre As tier, who hosted the confer-
ence at Ohio State, published an interpretation par excellence of the play,
carefully cataloging its allusions, however faint, to Beckett's life and
works.64 Two other essays did Astier one better, focusing on the play's
"auto-critique" and its "reflexivity."65 The play interprets itself, you may be
surprised to learn. A fourth essay then takes up the issue of the play's
relation to its audience: how does it interpret its interpreters as they
interpret its self-interpreting complexity?66 What none of these critics
can say as they rush up the rungs of interpretation is the least of what
Sontag asks of them: "The function of criticism should be to show how it
is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means ."67
So, what, finally, are Ohio's erotics? I said the listener in Ohio Impromptu
was silent, and that's true, but Beckett does permit him one power. When
he knocks on the table, the reader must pause and repeat the last phrase,
and he can only resume his tale once the listener has knocked a second
time. It's a minimal form of resistance or friction, but it slowly builds up
a charge. Especially since - face covered, voice mute - the listening figure
is otherwise a cipher to us. You might, then, experience his knocks as a
precious revelation of character - our only hint of his desires. Or if, like

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582 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

Peter Brooks, you feel plot as the

the pleasure principle, then you
man's last-ditch attempt to postpo
tell.) Or perhaps you simply fe
this narrative's ebbs and flows -
tidal pull and the reader's drag.
Ohio Impromptu , you will know,
As Gerald Rabkin has observed,
ers - the theatre artists . . . and
mediated reading."69 Ohio Impr
thesis into a brute sensation of
by the actors, and imposed on u
Gatz repeats this experiment
homage to Ohio Impromptu. M
indeed its entire bookish concei
Chapter VIII is performed, inste
ence.70 The passage is written, as
in the third person, and Sheph
Fletcher sits by (Fig. 3) . We hav
Fletcher plays, if indeed he play
(If you remember, he's distingu
of expressivity.) And yet, we ca
and feel in the text onto Fletcher
cheek or a tear? Do we finally kno
critic Alexis Soloski observes, "
between what we actually see an
once. It's an extraordinary doub
failing to unite."71 This, for me
book is a thing through which
also a world that we hold at arm
ish performance begins in the
readings mingle and clash - if it
of sensation gives way to a synest

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 ON BOOK 583

Fig. 3. In the style

Shepherd (Nick) re

ix

on book (adv. & adj.):

A. (adv.) With reference to a script; not from
memory.
"While going through a part on book, you
are not acting" (R. Cohen, Acting One).
B. (adj.) In predicative use: (of an actor)
reading from a script during rehearsal or
performance, not having memorized his or
her lines.

"If you are not yet fully in character (e.g.,

still on book) there is little point in deviat-
ing from current blocking" (J.B. Nicola,
Playing Audience) .72

Stick around for enough post-show discussions and you'll soon hear
the actor's least favorite question: how did you learn all those lines ? It's an
embarrassing question - not because you can't answer it, but because
learning your lines is the very least anyone ever expected of you. (You
might as well ask a literary critic, how did you read all those books f) After
all, according to the tenets of mainstream realist acting, the real work
doesn't even begin until you've laid the script aside - until, that is, you've

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 584 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

gotten "off book." Until then, t

in character"; indeed, "you are
must be memorized and enact
Since its earliest days, bookis
that staying "on book" detract
two pioneering modes of th
and chamber theater) are still
portmanteau, "cheater's theate
"on book" would be to dodge
lines. This anxiety lingers, eve
Repair Service. You can smell t
review that repeats the same dam
has actually memońzed The Gr
down cold long before the first p
joked, "we give Scott the oppos
can be off-book [in rehearsal]
performances come."73 This jok
ing "on book " in the first place
aide-mémoire (and, audience a
is), why do theatermakers kee
hand? First, I think, it foresta
kind the poets were railing again
spoil their readings. More than
in a state of becoming. Much
is an "adaptation" of The Great G
book in that office is like a creature thrown into a hostile environment.

It must adapt. Thought of this way, the book itself becomes an actor, a
scene partner for the performers who handle it. As Jane Tompkins has
argued, a "literary work is not so much an object ... as a unit of force
whose power is exerted upon the world."74 In bookish performance, it
is both things at once: object and force. Indeed its physical presence
onstage makes its force, its activity visible.
More than wormholes to a textual elsewhere, after all, books are al-
ways things to hand. "The relation a reader has to a book," Karin Littau
reminds us, "is also a relation between two bodies: one made of paper
and ink, the other flesh and blood."75 Bookish performance enacts this
relation over time, heeling the reader roughly to the book's commands.
In her essay, "Dances with Things," performance historian Robin Bern-
stein offers a name for objects like these. They are "scrip tive things,"
notable not just for their form or their content, but also for how they
prescribe (or proscribe) the actions of people who encounter them.
To experience a racist alphabet book as a scriptive thing, for instance

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 ON BOOK 585

(one of Bernst
sensory, even p
course, but you
wheels. "Like a
a performance
variations . . .
back into a the
as scripts - as t
from it - perf
In doing so, th
own relation to
commonplace
rich reading i
and repetition
discussions ch
starters, text
more importan
of parallel rea
Books are not
they are interf
tive world - li
view, like the
us. And finall
but as tactical
would be art -
tifying themse
Reading, in
book - perhaps
with loose thre
received in a
speaking, when
old ground - o
heals, the gro
will grow. If n
Now try again

Amherst College

notes

1 Andrew Piper, Dreaming in Books: The Making of the Bibliograph

Romantic Age (Chicago: Univ. Of Chicago Press, 2009), 241.

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 586 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

2 Ben Brantley, "Borne Back Ceaseless

2010.
3 Thanks to four groups whose support of this work was essential to its completion: the
Mellon Foundation, who funded a faculty seminar at Amherst College on "Poetry/Perfor-
mance"; Marit MacArthur, Julia Bloch, and the members of the "Reading Aloud" seminar
at the Modernist Studies Association; Peter Elbow, Natalie Gerber, and the participants in
their symposium, "Rhythm and Intonation on the Page"; and John Paul Riquelme, Paige
Reynolds, and the members of the Mahindra Humanities Center's Modernism Seminar.
Each was an essential support through this essay's long, long gestation.
4 Susan Sontag, "Against Interpretation," in Against Interpretation: And Other Essays (New
York: Picador, 2001), 13.
5 Elaine Scarry, Dreaming by the Book (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 2001), 5.
6 Scarry, Dreaming by the Book , 6.
7 Stanley Fish, Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost (New York: St. Martin's Press,
1967); Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins Univ. Press, 1978).
8 Fish, Is There a Text in This Classi: The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1980).
9 Alberto Manguei, A History of Reading (New York: Penguin Books, 1996), 12.
10 Lacan would probably find Manguel's anecdote (and my notion of a "second" mirror
stage) a mere compensatory myth: the comforting delusion that, through reading, we
might escape the Law of the Father.
11 Garrett Stewart, The Look of Reading: Book, Painting Text (Chicago: Univ. Of Chicago
Press, 2006), 1, 97.
12 Piper, Book Was There: Reading in Electronic Times (Chicago: Univ. Of Chicago Press,
2012), X.
13 Leah Price, "Reader's Block: Trollope and the Book as Prop," in The Feeling of Reading:
Affective Experience 6 f Victorian Literature, ed. Rachel Ablow (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan
Press, 2010), 65.
14 Jonathan Freedman, "bookishNess: A Brief Introduction," in "Bookishness: The New
Fate of Reading in the Digital Age," ed. Freedman, Michigan Quarterly Review 48, no. 4
(2009).
15 Robert S. Breen, Chamber Theatre (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1978); L.S.D.
(. . . just the high points . . .), The Wooster Group, at The Performing Garage, New York,
1984. You can see videotaped excerpts of the relevant scene from L.S.D. online: https://
youtu.be/HGsSWI_538?t=lm49s.
16 Peter Kivy, The Performance of Reading: An Essay in the Philosophy of Literature (Maiden,
MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008) , xi.
17 Kivy, The Performance of Reading, 59.
18 Sontag, "Against Interpretation," 14.
19 Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, "Surface Reading: An Introduction, Representations
108, no. 1 (2009): 10, 11.
20 Following Frederick C. Stern, I use the word "formal" to denote that minimalist mode
of literary performance common at university and bookstore readings. Stern, 'The Formal
Poetry Reading," TDR' The Drama Review 35, no. 3 (1991): 74.
21 Manguei, A History of Reading, 123.
22 Manguei, A History of Reading, 250.
23 Donald Hall, 'The Poetry Reading: Public Performance / Private Art," American Scholar
54, no. 1 (1985): 72.
24 Peter Middle ton, Distant Reading: Performance, Readership, and Consumption in Contem-
porary Poetry (Tuscaloosa: Univ. of Alabama Press, 2005), 31.

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 ON BOOK 587

25 Charles Bernstein
Amherst, MA, June
26 Qtd. in Paul L. Ma
1990), 589.
27 Denise Levertov,
York: New Directio
28 Studies in this f
is the (disembodied
as their organizing te
(New York: Oxford U
of Poetry / The Poe
Voidng Amerìcan Poet
NY: Cornell Univ. Pr
Millay to the Circle
however, been recen
See: Christopher Gr
1959," PMLA 127, no.
Walt Whitman to H
Bodies on the Line: Pe
2014).
29 Wheeler, Voicing
Stares: Disabled Wom
motion: Disability a
Univ. of Michigan P
30 David Wojahn, "'
New England Review
ing," 72.
31 Levertov, "An Approach," 53.
32 Hall, "The Poetry Reading," 76; Bernstein, Close Listening, 11.
33 I am hardly the first to point out that Gatz theatricalizes reading's interiority. Besides
all the theater reviews, which I discuss below, Sara Jane Bailes also touches on this in a
chapter on ERS's oeuvre. Several of their productions, Bailes says, have "examine [d] the
ways in which theatre can translate the solitary intimacy and interiority of the literary
imagination . . . into a public theatre spectacle." Bailes, Performance Theatre and the Poetics
of Failure: Forced Entertainment, Goat Island, Elevator Repair Service (New York: Routledge,
2011), 150.
34 Fiona Mountford, 'The Great Gatsby Renaissance," Evening Standard, http://www.
standard.co.uk/goingout/theatre/the-great-gatsby-renaissance-7753086.html; John Collins,
"Director's Note: A History of ERS and The Great Gatsby, and Gatz," KunstenFestivalDesArts,
March 2006, http://archive.kfda.be/projects/projects/2006/gatz/more.
35 All nontextual details about Gatz are drawn from an archival video recording. See:
Elevator Repair Service, Gatz (DVD, 2010), Theatre on Film and Tape Archive, New York
Public Library for the Performing Arts.
36 Dusty Hoesly, "Elevator Repair Service - GATZ," Portland Institute for Contemporary Art,
September 7, 2007, http://pica.org/2007/09/17/elevator_repair_service_gatz/.
37 Charles McGrath, "Heard Any Good Books Lately, Zelda?" New York Times, September
28, 2010.
38 Ben Brantley, "A Novel 'Gatsby': Stamina Required," New York Times, February 5, 2010.
39 Kester Freriks, "She Only Loves Me," trans. Elevator Repair Service, NRC Handelsblad,
June 2, 2006, https://www.elevator.org/press_items/she-only-loves-me/.

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588 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

40 Michael Feingold, "Gafe Tries a No

13, 2010, http://www.villagevoice.com
fitzgerald/full/.
41 Collins and Scott Shepherd, "Elev
Bither, Walker Magazine, June 8, 2006,
repair-services-gatz .
42 Brantley, "Borne Back," 2.
43 Rebecca Mead, "Adaptation," The N
44 Debra Singer, "On the Ground: N
Blake, "Gatz Review," Sydney Mornin
news/entertainment/ arts/arts-revi
Weiss, "Baring the Heart, Soul of 'Gatsb
www.highbeam.com/doc/lNl-12486
Uur Geweldig Toneel," Het Parool, Jun
seven-hours-of-tremendous-theater/ .
45 Stewart, The Look of Reading, 238,
46 Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood:
1998), 164, 160.
47 Fried, Absorption and Theatricality:
and Los Angeles: Univ. of California
48 In "Artifice of Absorption," where
that, in his own poetry, he uses "op
more powerful / ('souped up') / absorp
Poetics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni
ments are on fullest display, however,
can imagine valuing," he writes, "is on
an audience to the artist is like the son
distracts but destroys." Bernstein, "On
(Evanston, IL: Northwestern Univ. Pr
49 Bernstein, "Introduction," in Close
50 Sigmund Freud, "Civilization and I
(New York: Norton, 1989), 723. This
religion, but which he likewise confess
51 Scarry, Dreaming by the Book, 46.
52 Kivy, The Performance of Reading,46
53 Kivy, The Performance of Reading, 1
54 Son tag, "Against Interpretation,"
55 Sontag, "Against Interpretation,"
56 Steven Leigh Morris, "Eight-Hour
Weekly, December 6, 2012, http://ww
act-nothing-to-hide-reviewed-2612272.
57 Alexander Nazaryan, "Why I walked
http://www.nydailynews.com/blogs/pa
58 Scott Brown, "A Spellbinding Six-H
vulture.com/201 0/10/ theater_review
59 Mead, "Adaptation," 49.
60 Deirdre Bair, Samuel Beckett: A Biog
1978), 513.
61 Samuel Beckett, "Ohio Impromptu,"
1984), 283-88. See also the film rendi

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ON BOOK 589

the set Becke DVD

a theatricalOhio Im
pull toward interp
62 Francisco Frazã
Nature Theater of
White (Dublin: Pr
63 Sontag, "Again
64 Pierre Astier,
Drama 25, no. 3 (1
65 Anna McMulla
no. 1 (1987): 23; H
and Ohio Improm
66 H. Porter Abbo
Art," Modern Dra
67 Sontag, "Again
68 For all the hars
criticism, she wou
terms, to construc
Intention in Narr
69 Gerald Rabkin,
Performing Arts J
70 F. Scott Fitzger
71 Alexis Soloski,
villagevoice. com/2
72 "On book, adv
view/Entry/26454
73 Collins and Sh
74 Jane P. Tompkin
more: Johns Hopk
75 Karin Littau, Th
2006), 2.
76 Robin Bernste
Race," Sodai Text
77 For a literary
to Re-read Novels:
3 (2016): 76-94.

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