Epiphanic Reading

Much can be written and indeed has been written about writing as a craft. The writer is no mere medium – no mere conduit for inspiration. As a craftsman, the writer must practise and refine the craft regardless of the presence or absence of any muse. Most writing is not a matter of soaring inspiration, but of a steady sawing and sanding at the workbench. In the poem “Digging,” Seamus Heaney compares the writing of poetry to the backbreaking work of digging. The poet claims labour as his inheritance. Perhaps it can be granted, but what about that seemingly more elementary, leisurely, act of reading?

Laborious reading

As a child reading often did feel like labour to me. I did not excel at reading. I was reluctant to do it and slow when I did. I had trouble sitting still and my attention span was poor – no social media had been invented yet on which to pass the blame either. It was hard work! But my limitations had their advantages, for my slow reading, combined with a taste for symbolism, made me aware of the textures of language, and the stores of meaning in individual words and phrases. It helped me acquire a sensitivity towards how something was said as much for – initially perhaps, more than for – what was said.

As I began undergraduate studies in literature at the University of Stellenbosch in South Africa, I found it difficult to finish the novels I was given to read. I admit that many a Victorian novel only saw me for a few chapters. But what I did read I read with great attention and with an awareness of what the author was doing with language. I began to see the vistas that a mere word or sentence could open out onto when issuing from the pen of a great writer. My capacity for reading expanded as a graduate student, and my years of slow reading surprisingly began to be an advantage to me. It turned out that how something is said has everything to do with what is being said.

Slow, attentive reading runs counter to the cultural currents of our age, one that places great emphasis on speed and efficiency – on finishing things as quickly as possible. It holds an instrumental view of texts as it does of so many things. Language is seen as a sort of husk that contains the information we are after. Once the information has been extracted, we can discard the superfluous exterior. The poetry lessons I received at school might be summed up with the question, “What was the poet trying to say?” – a question common to many a well-meaning English teacher, asked before an exposition of the meaning in “normal” language. Once paraphrased in comfortable and clear everyday language, the ambiguities and uncertainties of poetry can safely be done away with.

But the secret of savouring poetry is not to get at the meaning behind the poem, but to get at the meaning in the poem. The poet is not trying to say some one thing. Rather, the poet knows how to say more than she herself knows she is saying. Poets are masters at wielding words in a way that lets loose the myriad meanings that live within the poems, lines and words themselves. They are not the masters of language, commanding sentences to deliver a pre-determined and completely known set of messages, but co-conspirators in language’s stubborn resistance to being tamed – and meaning’s refusal to be contained. Poets set language free to carry us across the expanse of the unknown and into the bosom of mystery for the sake of disclosure, however provisional such disclosure might be.

When reading is not a mere matter of gaining information, when literature is encountered in all its physicality – for the texture and depth of its words – it has the potential to become eventful in a true sense.

Eventful reading

Behind all reading is the desire to know. But there are different forms of knowing, just as there are different forms of knowledge. Knowledge today is commonly thought of as an object; something to be accumulated and stored. Something that we can leave and return to at any time, like an exhibit at a history museum, or files on a hard drive.

There is a different way to think about knowledge. That is, knowledge as an event. Something that is bound to time and which arrives – it is not always already there like abstract knowledge. It happens. It is as an encounter. This form of knowing is alluded to very early on in the Bible. “Adam knew his wife” (Gen 4:1). This is a bodily form of knowing. And if we think about it, there are indeed many things that we know in ways that are not easily put into the language of classification and quantification, a knowing that cannot be separated from an event – a knowing which requires our participation. A novel is a world that we move within. It is a sensory place – all our senses are harnessed in the making of meaning which is the act of reading.

Eventful reading seeks encounter, not as someone with a dead object and not as a disembodied intelligence. Great literature represents a visitation by meaning, and as a visitor, a novel or a poem is a test of the hospitality of the one visited. This points towards something of what is contained in the Christian practice of Lectio Divina.