The moment of reading

From the Washington Post:

“Not far from the walls of Enna, there is a deep pool,” begins Ovid’s version of the rape of Persephone. “While [Persephone] was playing in this glade, and gathering violets or radiant lilies, while with girlish fondness she filled the folds of her gown, and her basket, trying to outdo her companions in her picking, [Pluto], almost in a moment, saw her, prized her, took her: so swift as this, is love.” [Metamorphoses 5]

The Greek myth has been recounted for thousands of years in hundreds of languages, scores of countries and countless works of art. It’s considered a cultural touchstone for Western civilization: a parable about power, lust and grief. 

Now, however, it could be getting a treatment it’s never had before: a trigger warning. 

In an op-ed in the student newspaper, four Columbia University undergrads have called on the school to implement trigger warnings — alerts about potentially distressing material — even for classics like Greek mythology or Roman poetry.  More...

Regardless of cultural shifts and chance mutations of public sensibility, it remains necessary to read the text with attention, thought, and contextual awareness. Without this moment, the joys and discomforts of any work of literature might be matters of pleasure or pain, but do they offer human or historical truth or ethical imperatives? Without a reading, can there be "a treatment"?

Your brain on close reading

A professor studying Jane Austen is breaking new ground in our understanding of the differences between casual and close reading. The differences, neuroscientific experiments are showing, can be large and multidimensional:

Neuroscientists warned Phillips she wouldn't see many brain differences between the casual reading and intense reading. 

"Everyone told me to expect these really, really minute and subtle effects," she said. "Because everyone was going to be doing the same thing. Right? Reading Jane Austen. And they were just going to be doing it in two different ways."
Phillips said she mainly expected to see differences in parts of the brain that regulate attention because that was the main difference between casual and focused reading. 

But in a neuroscientific plot twist, Phillips said preliminary results showed otherwise: "What's been taking us by surprise in our early data analysis is how much the whole brain — global activations across a number of different regions — seems to be transforming and shifting between the pleasure and the close reading." 

Phillips found that close reading activated unexpected areas: parts of the brain that are involved in movement and touch. It was as though readers were physically placing themselves within the story as they analyzed it. 

Phillips' research fits into an interdisciplinary new field sometimes dubbed "literary neuroscience." Other researchers are examining poetry and rhythm in the brain, how metaphors excite sensory regions of the brain, and the neurological shifts between reading a complex text like Marcel Proust compared to reading the newspaper — all in hopes of giving a more complete picture of human cognition. More at NPR.

A practice of reading

Over the dozen or so years that our "classics group" has been meeting in Sarasota, we've evolved a practice that has worked well for grappling with major works up close.We don't really have a name for it, but it goes something like this:

1. We take turns reading aloud from a text. Often we have different translations. After a section of a text is read, anyone is welcome to comment. Things they notice about the wording, or the action, or the tone, or setting, or rhythm, or characterization. Or how this segment relates to something that has come before. Often the comments tend to focus the group's attention on details that might otherwise have been overlooked. Different perspectives come into play as different readers offer observations, ask questions, or suggest some interpretive approach.

 2. After we feel we've said as much as it occurs to us to say about a particular passage, we go on to the next. In most cases, we go through whatever we're reading from beginning to end without skipping a word. We have found it rewarding to do this.

 3. That sums up our "method." It has worked well, and has led to a few effects:

• Nearly always, the voice most often heard, the voice that one leaves the room having mostly attended to, is the voice of the poet.

• By beginning from what we are observing in the readings before us, attention tends to remain focused on the work rather than to be dispersed through association to topics far afield.

• Even when we do move from the particular to the general, we always find our way back to the text -- it leads the way.

• What we share, always and foremost, is the text we are reading. Secondary literature, the essays of critics of the text, might come into the discussion, but they neither govern nor shape discussions. The work and our attentive reading of it takes precedence over received ideas or overworked commonplaces of literary tradition.

The upshot has been that time and time again, we've gained a nuanced appreciation for authors whom we thought we "knew," but whom we were happily disabused of thinking we understood. Speaking just for myself, I know I've learned a tremendous amount from the bafflement that confronts me at every turn in texts that have fascinated readers for centuries. This phenomenon of bafflement is well delineated by Paul de Man here. Our literary exercises have left me with a richer sense of the complex talents, interrelationships, and imaginative powers of a wide range of authors.

By getting to know each text in some detail, we've begun to discover the ways in which each might owe a debt to its predecessors, or how one poet can challenge a whole set of authors whom he nonetheless draws upon for inspiration and technique. Consider with what care Dante has situated a vast array of authors in his Commedia, for example. From a slightly more elevated perspective, we've begun to discern the elements and bases of the two mighty trunks of the Western tradition -- the Greco-Roman and the Hebraic -- and have been amazed at the contemporaneity of the poetic voices we've heard, and their capacity to surprise, entertain, and enlighten.

I guess we've gotten used to the idea that the smartest, most interesting, wisest voice in the room almost invariably comes from the book before us, so we've learned something about how to listen, to interpret, and to relate to other voices we've come to know.

Call it close reading, slow reading, reading aloud, or just reading, it's a remarkable thing to have experienced, over and over, for so many years. May it long continue.

Cryptic Crossroads: Deucalion's Dilemma

Deucalion's speech to Pyrrha is remarkable for several reasons. In it one hears a note that will return at various moments in later centuries. The flood, reaching its maximum, has erased everything -- all life, and all landmarks, except the muddy peak of Parnassus.

when Deucalion saw its emptiness, and the deep silence of the desolate lands, he spoke to Pyrrha,

Ovid's concision here is remarkable -- in a few words, he conveys the isolation and uncertainty of human beings in a vast world which is now not merely empty, but deeply silent and contingent:

And even now there is no certain assurance of our lives; even yet do the clouds terrify my mind.

terrent etiam nunc nubila mentem.

The eternal silence of these infinite spaces fills me with dread, Pascal will say, echoed a few hundred years later in the "nothingness" of the Existentialists.

What Deucalion does is orient his whole being away from this vast unspeaking solitude and toward the only thing in it that offers the possibility of a familiar reflection, a response -- humanity itself.

It falls to Deucalion in his speech to find in Pyrrha the locus, or symmetric other of his own being:

Wife, cousin, sole surviving woman, joined to me by our shared race, our family origins,

The Latin underscores the symmetry of their yoke:

deinde torus iunxit, nunc ipsa pericula iungunt

then by the marriage bed, and now joined to me in danger,

The touchstones of what is familiar are, for him, this woman bound to him by genes and by marriage, by origins and race, by bed (one thinks of the bed of Odysseus and Penelope) and by shared experience, in this case, of danger. These are the elements of human bonds, the roots of our familiarity to one another. Into them is woven speech, the memory of shared history. It's in this that Deucalion locates, again with elegant parallel clauses, the reason and core of his being:

si te quoque pontus haberet,

te sequerer, coniunx, et me quoque pontus haberet.

if the sea had you,

I would follow you, and the sea would have me too

(Hear a trace of Milton's Adam , who gives up a world for Eve?)

These humans are unlike the animals, or the demi-gods that Zeus worried about when he said, in justifying his decision to exterminate the human race:

Mine are the demigods, the wild spirits, nymphs, fauns and satyrs, and sylvan deities of the hills. Since we have not yet thought them worth a place in heaven let us at least allow them to live in safety in the lands we have given them.

Ovid's polytheistic world is full of varied creatures who seem at home in it. They live, play, don't fall afoul of just laws, and deserve Zeus's protection from violent, godless brutes like Lycaon. Humans born of the blood of the giants failed to find a niche in which they could live in harmony with all else.

Deucalion here is at a fatal ontological crossroads. His father was Prometheus, but he can't "make" men by breathing upon their shapes as his father had done. Nor can he expect to find any giant's blood. He's at a loss how to proceed, but happens to be at the temple of his grandmother, Themis, at Delphi, the omphalos of the world. It's she who'll tell him how to make a new beginning of yet a third skein of humans, from the bones (ossa) of Earth. Strangely, Deucalion and Pyrrha -- so richly intertwined by blood and marriage bed and shared danger, so fully necessary to each other that neither would choose to remain in this vast world without the other -- neither make love nor gestate progeny. They reverently throw stones.

What we must note is, they only throw stones after construing the cryptic speech of the Oracle in a way that doesn't involve the literal bones of their literal mothers -- which would be a desecration. The continuation of the human race here rests upon an act of reading -- close reading -- that metamorphoses from the literally unspeakable into a figural divination of meaning.