Maryanne Wolf on the Death of (and Ways to Protect) Deep Reading

When journalist Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains appeared in 2010, I remember exchanging emails with Reggie H. and Lisa M. about it, reading numerous articles about it (including excerpts from the book) online, and eventually buying the book to dive fully into what he had to say. Overwhelmed at the time by my usual mountain of required reading it took me a while to get to it, but I did, and found his argument about the effects of the Internet on our brain and neural system quite persuasive. I even blogged a snippet from The Shallows at the end of that year. To quote Carr again:

The Net's cacophony of stimuli short-circuits both conscious and unconscious thought, preventing our minds from thinking either deeply or creatively. Our brains turn into simple signal-processing units, quickly shepherding information into consciousness and then back out again.

He was certainly on to something crucial about the various cognitive changed spurred by the US's increasing digital turn, and he wasn't alone in his assessment. Others like internet pioneer and guru Jaron Lanier took up related arguments about the effects not just of the net and our brains and nervous system, but the entire e-technological apparatus and its transformation of human sociality, economics, and our contemporary polity. Where Carr was alarmist--now proving to have been correct in his worries--Lanier was more measured, but in both cases, as with others who have written about the effects of the net, social media, etc., they were identifying the songs of more than one canary in the coal mine we're now deeply immersed in.

One very recent entry in this genre is Maryanne Wolf's Reader, Come Home (Harper Collins, 2018), which takes up some of the threads of her earlier books, Proust and the Squid (Harper Collins, 2011), and Tales of Literacy for the 21st Century (Oxford University Press, 2016), with a shift, as was the case with Carr, on online reading and its effects. Her earlier books explored the origins of human literacy and the challenges that our long human history of interacting with text faced as we moved into our current millennium, but now Wolf, Director of Center for Reading and Language Research at Tufts University, where she is Associate Professor of Child Development, and thus someone steeped in the current state of research on reading, is concerned with reading itself. As Laura Miller describes in her recent Slate review of the book, Wolf began to notice something about her own experience as a reader that I'd noted anecdotally with some of my students, beginning perhaps roughly 10 years ago and increasing among them to the point that I had to rethink my syllabus and approach to teaching: a waning ability to concentrate, and engage in sustained, "deep reading."

And it was not just my students: even for me, I have begun at times to feel a creeping distraction and impatience at any online text that was too long or complex ("tl;dr"), with a resulting desultory engagement in response. When it comes to expansive online texts, the feeling waxes. Skim, leap, surf: shift from one open page to another, one link to another, expect that the headline and the first few paragraphs will supply you with all you need to know. Earlier this year, as I had witnessed among my undergraduates, I even found myself struggling to get into novels, growing impatient after only a few pages, something I had never experienced befored. Wolf felt something similar, bemoaning her own inability to stick with a long, complex text, which is to say, a work not unlike a great deal of literature in a variety of genres written for hundreds of years. This was one of the central points Carr had broached back in 2010--as had Wolf, in turns out, in her 2011 Guardian essay "Will the speed of online thought deplete our analytic thought?", citing none other than Marshall McLuhan, who'd suggested that the medium was the "massage" and the message, that the technology would not only serve as a vessel but shape what it brought to us, and would shape our understanding of it.

In her new book, Wolf specifically recounts the experience of testing her capacity to "deep read" by returning to a novel she'd loved when she was younger, the very dense, multilayered Magister Ludi (The Glass Bead Game), German Nobel Laureate Hermann Hesse's 1943 futuristic magnum opus about a group of monk-like intellectuals who retire to a fictional European country known as Castalia, sequestered from most technology and economics, where they run a school for boys and engage in a complex, profoundly subtle form of play, the eponymous Glass Bead Game, that requires a lifetime of study and reflection to perfect. As she recounts, she tried repeatedly to begin it, but could not, yet it was not as if she could not read anything; online texts she sailed, or rather skimmed through. Hesse's novel, however, proved to be a tremendous struggle, and she temporarily set it aside. As an experiment, she set aside a period each day in which she would try again to read it, and, lo and behold, she began to find that after an extended period of struggle, she not only could get into Hesse's novel, but was carried away by it, her mind now in deep reading mode.

As note above, I have seen what Wolf is describing increasingly not just with my students and in my own recent reading habits, but with friends, one of whom admitted not to have read a novel by another writer in a while. The first person buys books of fiction and nonfiction, but when I ask if they have read them, the reply is, No. In terms of my own reading this spring and summer, I've had to force myself not to set the book aside after a few pages to check email or Twitter or look up something on Google, yet when I have stuck with the books. I get transported into the world of the work. This has been the case with novels and collections of short stories by Tayari Jones, Tommy Orange, Rachel Cusk, Uzodinma Iweala, Matthias Énard, Nafissa Thompson-Spires, Jamel Brinkley, Celeste Ng, and Beatriz Bracher, to name just a few of them, as well as various longer works I have blurbed or read for judging projects. I enjoyed every last one of them, but initially entering each was more difficult than it ever had been in the past.

So, you might say, Who cares if no one reads long or dense or long, dense works of fiction any more?  What happens if we lose the "cognitive patience" and focus that Wolf argues we may be losing? Hesse's writing and ways of thought may have reached their ends in terms of their possibility of connection--or, to put it more simply--relatability, with contemporary readers. (As someone with a propensity for for dense prose and serpentine syntax, this is not an idle concern.) Even if that's true, what Wolf--like Carr--shows, as prior studies have borne out, is that "deep reading," and the virtual engagement with narratives have powerful, beneficial cognitive effects. One is to foster a capacity for analysis, which texts by Hesse, or the authors I list above, or Marcel Proust, the subject of Wolf's first book, require. To put it another way, every complex work is a kind of detective story, leaving clues the reader must assemble to make sense of the work, even as we are relating it to and contextualizing it with what we already know. The second is a quite powerful feature of fiction writing in particular: empathy. When we enter the minds, perspectives, bodies, and experiences of others in fiction, we connect with them, even if briefly, and this shapes our own views in the wider world. It sounds like hocus-pocus, but it isn't. Literature's emotional power should never be underestimated. But the fact remains, even the simplest works of fiction--and nonfiction--are slow, or at least slower than tiled or laddering screens. You can skip a few sentences or flip a pages ahead but you've probably missed something important--that is, unless you're reading a book like Julio Cortázar's Hopscotch (Rayuela), where this is an integral feature of the novel.

Rather than categorically decrying digital reading, what Wolf suggests is that even if it is reshaping our brain and cognition, there is a way, particularly for those with children or teaching and working with them, to ensure that they learn and engage not only with screens, but with books, so that they don't lose the deep reading facility altogether. For adults, will power and a concerted effort to put digital devices away--and turn off TV screens--is probably the easier and best option. Cultivating this "bi-literate" brain is what Wolf is aiming for. How to do this will a challenge for the future, especially how many people cannot pull themselves away from their phones, especially younger ones. I tend to take a gentle approach with my students in terms of their in-class texting, urging them not to do so, but also recognizing that at times they may have a pressing issue they need to address. On the other hand, I also try to remind myself that I, like most people on this earth when I was in school from age 5 to roughly 32 or so, nearly a decade out of the classroom as part of that mix, made it through entire days without 1) ever picking up a telephone unless it was an emergency and 2) only talking about things on a screen, unless we were watching a video or TV program as part of our less, or doing something very specific on a computer required for class. How did we survive? I did, we did, and I place this thought in the forefront of my brain as I close my laptop, shut off my phone, and dive into another book--a novel, a collection of poetry, short stories or essays, a play. But I'll get to that as soon as I post and read a few Tweets, bookmark a YouTube video, watch a few Instagram stories, and look at one more article online....

Master Class on the Novella in Translation

Bolaño's Una novelita lumpen

At the beginning of September, the fall semester always looks endless to me, like a river whose mouth or delta lies beyond the horizon of the looming holidays. Once class begin, however, the weeks and months always race by more swiftly than I envision. By December, I find myself remarking how the term has slimmed down to final papers and exams, with the restorative winter break--that terminus--only weeks away. Even still, I always worry about overloading and wearing myself out, which I have come to realize is unavoidable. Beyond classes these days, there is everything else, which was always there, but even more so with each passing year.

I nevertheless had the idea that a mere month's worth of--four--classes on a free Wednesday alongside my usual teaching and advising load would not be unreasonable and a pleasant change of pace, and it turns out that it was. For four weeks from mid-October through the beginning of November, I taught a masterclass on the novella in translation to a small cadre of MFA students at Columbia University's School of the Arts, and once I properly figured out the commute, which required heading in the opposite direction from Newark, things ran quite smoothly.

Having not headed into Manhattan regularly during morning rush hour in 17 years, I was reminded that the PATH trains are usually reliable, if stuffed like a coffee vacuum pack, at that hour, and that the trip into the city is especially quick because it only requires a few stops to Christopher Street station, which once was my destination when I was a student at NYU (except when I taught in the East Village and in the winter, when I would take it further, to 9th Street) and again when I worked in SoHo in the late 1990s. From the Christopher St. PATH stop, I walked down the famous street, still mostly shuttered at 9 am, to the 1 Train at 7th Avenue, and then changed to the 2 to speed uptown, then back to the 1 to end up right outside Columbia's main gate on Broadway. Trips back to New Jersey (and usually the Rutgers campus for afternoon meetings) ran more leisurely in reverse.

Since we had only four weeks, so I assigned four novellas in translation:

• Roberto Bolaño's 2005 mini-masterpiece A Little Lumpen Novelita, the last work of fiction he published in his lifetime, which was translated by Natasha Wimmer and published by New Directions in 2016;
• Amélie Nothomb's 1993 novella Loving Sabotage, translated by Andrew Wilson and published by New Directions in 2003;
• Yoko Ogawa's The Diving Pool: Three Novellas, originally published as three separate works, in 1990 and 1991, and translated by Stephen Snyder and published by Picador in 2008;
• and Abdourahman A. Waberi's 2009 Passage of Tears, translated by David and Nicole Ball, and published by Seagull Books, 2011.

I had read all of these books before, the Waberi and Bolaño texts most recently, and the Nothomb not long after it appeared a little over a decade ago. I chose these texts with the aim of linguistic, aesthetic, and thematic diversity, among other goals, yet still ended up with two Francophone authors, writing from rather different perspectives, and three works in European languages. (Since I can read French and Spanish, though, I had a clearer sense of the translators' skills.) Of the four works, Bolaño's and Ogawa's were clearly labeled novelas (or "novelita"), while Nothomb's and Waberi's were issued as novels. All four are authors I admire, Bolaño especially so, and though I had taught his work before, I had never included fiction by any of the other authors, nor these four works, on my syllabi.

I'd chosen Waberi's text, I realized after the course had begun, in part as a provocation, because its length suggests that it might not fit the criteria. And what are they? I won't reprise the essay, based on a talk I gave last spring at Northwestern's annual spring Festival of Writing, that I revised and shared with my students to start the class, but some of the key characteristics I asked the students to think about were the novella's usually limited scope (more than a story, perhaps, but less than most novels) and concentrated effects, its unity of voice and plot, and its concision in narration. One of my students metaphorized, specifically apropos of Ogawa's work, the novella's narrative focus to a "tunnel." I thought this a brilliant insight, and thought it applied, in varying ways, to all four works. The students' assignments included in-class discussion and writing, response papers, and, as their final submission, a set of novella starters. Each student produced several that I hope they pursue, if not as novellas then, plumped out as novels.

They were to a person smart, engaged, and original in their thinking. I did not see any of their creative work, but nearly all were fiction writers, and I got a sense of what each of them was working on. It was a pleasure to experience thinking through the texts with them. Each novella offers different challenges in terms of how it works, and the class as a whole was more than up to the case, puzzling out as well other aspects of the texts. One of the students who read French was able to point out how much more ironic Nothomb's original was compared to the English (and how it riffed off a variety of works that Francophone readers would know, though Anglophones might not), while Waberi's French was a bit more formal in places, and less so in others.

Will they write a novella or novellas? I hope my proselytization was effective, though I did discuss, in the essay and the class, the US publishing industry's reluctance about the shorter long form. I also hope I might have sparked an interest in translation among some of them. I did leave the very brief course--like an "eyeblink," as one student put it--as encouraged as I always am when I finish a semester with my MFA (and other graduate, and undergraduate) students at Rutgers-Newark, about the future of American literature and writing. The hurdle, of course, is to get inventive, talented writers (of all ages and backgrounds) like these students and my Rutgers students and mentees, into print, and their work to readers. The sharp, gifted novella class cohort, I sincerely hope and trust, will be doing so before long.

The X-Ray of the Poem

(From desktop.freewallpaper4.me)

Back in 2001, in an email to poet Joel Dias-Porter via the Cave Canem listserve, I offered a way to analyze poems that I characterized as "x-raying." The poem originated with one email account that went defunct, was forwarded to another that became inoperative, and ultimately was lost, or so I thought, when my computer crashed in 2003. I tried searching for it on my extant Cave Canem listserv emails, but with no success. And so I thought I'd lost it.

As I'm wont to do, I did print out a copy of the email, but instead of filing it in a clearly labeled manila folder, it ended up at the bottom of a series of papers that I misplaced, and only just found today, as I was organizing my study for the umpteenth time, this burst of cleaning prompted by the canyons of folders and papers that had arisen, like Atlantis, from the seabed of my study's main rug after this past fall semester, the move home this summer, and a decade of commuting and haphazard filing. But none of this is of interest to J's Theater readers, I'm sure. Instead, I am going to post the brief essay, if it can be called that, with a few modifications.

I want to apologize in advance to poet friends who have asked me for a copy over the years, and especially to Joshua Marie Wilkinson, who was soliciting pieces on reading poetry a while back only to receive a (polite was my intent) demurral from me. For his anthology I tried to reconstruct "The X-Ray of the Poem," but that newer version sounded far too pedantic and pompous, perhaps the result of too many years in academe, whereas when I initially penned this, I was still mostly outside the door. The naïeveté of tone shines through every sentence. I also realized with a bit of adaptation it might be useful for reading other literary genres as well, and despite my lack of access to the text below, have employed a rudimentary, working form of it in some of my classes.

It is perhaps best for a creative writer to use after a few drafts, as opposed to before them--and to be set aside, as sometimes needs to happen, in the best interest of the poem.  For many writers, the more obviously linguistic elements are often intuitive. But it also can serve as a useful tool too to see what you're up to, if you want to look, and thus know.

At any rate, here it is. Please feel free to use it, but do give credit where due, if you do.

***

The X-Ray of the Poem

by John Keene

One way I've thought about critically reading and analyzing a poem is to x-ray it, which is to say, to peer deeply beyond its surface level into its depths, to find out what might be hidden there, by the poet, the poem or both. Perhaps given the current state of physics, rather than "x-ray," a term that would allow us to see everything and anything from the most outward appearances to the sub-sub-atomic level (Higgs bosons or pi-mesons or whatever they're called, as opposed to capturing x-rays) might be more appropriate. Or maybe a better metaphor from science is the assay, which is what occurs when blood is passed through a centrifuge, so that the various elements and substrates are separated out, without losing the basic fact that all these elements together constitute the blood itself. Or perhaps a geographic exercise, sampling a very long, thin section of rock or soil, and viewing each of these layers to see what they reveal. Something along these lines, at any rate.

This is structuralism to a certain degree, but I think it may be useful in terms of organizing one's reading and analysis. I also think that one ought read these various elements in concert with and against each other, to gain a fuller appreciation of the poem. Meaning is one thing, or many things, but appreciating what the poem is doing and can do rewards a more attentive reading.  Sometimes a poem may appear to be straightforward, as Robert Frost's or Lucille Clifton's often do, and they can be appreciated as they are, and yet when one looks more carefully, when one looks and listens, something more may come to the fore, since this is the gift of any good to great poem: it always contains more than it offers on first glance.

A very basic poetic x-ray (which would be non-hierarchical) might include looking at the:

•   Phonemic level (sounds, phonemes/words, the music created by these; why are certain vowels, sounds employed, how are they working in concert with each other, what do they seem to be doing in concert with each other);

•   Prosodic level (meter/beats, rhythms, whether there are measurable, regular feet, or other kinds of rhythms, is it free or blank verse, how does the prosody play from line to line, stanza to stanza, what does it evoke, invoke, suggest, convey)

•   Rhetorical level (types of rhetorical devices and figures of speech, such as anaphora, forms of repetition, ellipses, zeugma, used in the poem, and what are they doing, why are they present, how do they work, etc.)

•   Symbolic level (related to content and rhetoric--are there symbols, tropes, figures, imbedded in the words, in phrases, across lines and stanzas--can the poem be read on multiple symbolic registers and what are those?)

•   Stylistic level (what are the stylistics of the poem, its tone, its voices, is it consistent with the author's other works, does it echo or parallel the works of other authors, does it read as original, imitative, and if either or both, how?)

•   Formal level (is the poet writing in a fixed or standard form you recognize, such as a sonnet, a sestina, a roundel, a bop, or is it vers libre--is the poet employing any of these and if so, how? Why? What is the significance of this form?)

•   Genre level (to which poetic genre does the poem belong? Is it an elegy, for example? An ode? Is it a blues poem? What is the poet doing in terms of the genre? How is she writing within or against the genre, and what are the effects of her approach?)

•   Thematic level (content--what is the poem about, what is or are its statements, if you were to paraphrase what it's saying as opposed to how it's saying or doing it, what would or could you say?)

•   Ideological level (what is the poem's ideological stance, or is one discernible? If not, what does that say about its ideology? Does the poem comment on the conditions of its production? Its (author's) labor?)

•   Historical-Contextual level (when was the poem written? what do other poems from that period look like? how does this poem function in relation to other poems of its time? What is its relation to the historical traditions in which it is written, and its relation to the poetic, literary, cultural and other discourses of its time? Does it look to the past or point a way to the future, or stay mostly within its historical-temporal horizon?)

•   Holistic level (this entails reading the poem, especially aloud, and appreciating in toto, as an entire piece, even if its particulars get lost at first; reading the poem from start to finish, even a long poem, should always be the first and last step, so that its overall shape and contours, its totality, be grasped and appreciated for what it is)

One might quibble with any of these characterizations, refine or discard them, select only a few for a given analysis, or focus on only one, as the Russian structuralists did in terms of their reading of phonemes, or new historicists might in looking at the historical moment in which a poem is written, the various versions and drafts of poem, its author and the politics and society out of which it emerged. But the x-ray of the poem provides a starting poem for the beginning reader, as well as the more sophisticated one. Above all, they suggest the multiple pleasures, some involving work on the reader's part, which every poem can provide.

Copyright © John Keene, 2001, 2013.