Incompetent Reading

As a reader, I'm never learning so much as when I'm reading incompetently. I make a distinction between incompetent reading and thoughtless reading. The latter is something we do when we skim the headlines, pick information out of a travel guide, or even speed through a mystery novel. The former is reading we don't do well because we don't understand enough yet about what we're reading.

Most of us begin our serious adult reading as teenagers, and we all begin incompetently. When I was eighteen and read Moby-Dick, I had little idea of what I was reading and why I was reading it. When questioned by a teacher, I had great difficulty explaining why I was drawn to Ahab. I wanted my answer to sound sophisticated, though I had little idea of what "sophisticated" was. Perhaps I should have simply said that he was a powerful character, and then tried to explain the source of that power. In any case, part of learning to read well was finding the words to describe my response to what I was reading. As we gain knowledge of the literary tradition—its contexts, continuity, and breaks—as we learn about particular periods and authors, practice ways of thinking about literature and language, and master an analytical vocabulary, we become competent readers and speak with relative ease about some of the books that so troubled us in our youth. Yet, we were learning more when we were incompetent readers because we had everything to learn.

Incompetent reading does not end with youth. As I described in my previous article, I have very little experience with the English novel. I recently finished Jane Eyre, and I'm still puzzled about what I should make of it. I've moved on to Wuthering Heights, and although I'm about halfway through it, I'm already convinced I'm reading a masterpiece. Yet, I would be hard-pressed to say why. I'd like to think I could drum up some words that would sound more sophisticated than anything I could have said as a youth, but I would not really be saying very much. In Wuthering Heights, I sometimes sense that I'm in the presence of a large-scale Shakespearian tragedy; yet, before I say that, I really should understand better what I'm reading. Or maybe not. Here is Edmund Wilson on Wuthering Heights in the context of a piece on Jane Austen:

Whatever tone Jane Austen may sometimes take, what emerge and give the book its value are characters objectively seen, form and movement conceived aesthetically. It is this that sets Jane Austen apart from so many other women novelists—whether, like the author of Wuthering Heights or the author of Gone with the Wind, of the kind that make their power felt by a projection of their feminine day-dreams, or of the kind, from Evalina to Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, that amuse us by mimicking people.

If Edmund Wilson, after reading so much, still didn't understand what he was reading in Wuthering Heights, perhaps the rest of us should not feel so encumbered by our incompetence.

It's unhealthy to restrict our reading to material to which we feel oriented. We should regularly subject ourselves to the disorientation of reading something at odds with our sensibility and well beyond our understanding. It doesn't have to drive you to drink, though it may.

Henry sats in de bar & was odd,
off in the glass from the glass,
at odds wif de world & its god . . .

In a few years, I will have been reading for half a century. In Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, Maryanne Wolf ably describes how the brain develops efficient structures that enable us to think in sophisticated ways while we're reading. Yet, when we encounter text that is difficult, we revert to older structures—it's analogous to starting over again, though not exactly so. I imagine that the closest you can come to starting over again completely is to immerse yourself in a language wholly alien to you. Perhaps the next time my wife and I live overseas we should try a country with an inflected language and a graphic script. Do I really want to impose such an adventure on myself? To me, living in, say, China would be the linguistic equivalent of getting lost in the woods. The thought makes me panic. Yet, if old men need their adventures, then a teaching stint in Asia might be just what I need. My wife, now the more adventuresome of the two of us, will lead the way.

In the meantime, I'll settle for plunging ahead through Wuthering Heights. Like the first narrator, I fear getting lost in the deep, obliterating snows of the moors. It's a small fear—like the one of not getting back home every time we leave it. Maybe it's why I double-check the stove is off and the door locked before I head out on even the most routine trip. We can never know with certainty we'll be back.

We work in the dark. We do what we can. We give what we have. Our doubt is our passion. Our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.