Caleb Smith reviews The Gist of Reading

Andrew Elfenbein. The Gist of Reading. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2018. 272 pp.

18 July 2018

How do we read now? If any question holds the center of academic literary studies in the twenty-first century, this is probably the one. Paranoid reading and reparative reading, symptomatic reading and surface reading, close reading and distant reading; we are invited to take sides in battles drawn along these lines. Debates about canon, about which books we choose to study, have given way to conversations about the phenomenology and ethics of our encounters with the objects we take up, whatever they might be. If you look into the several essays on method that have appeared in recent years, you’ll see that the question occasionally produces descriptions (sociologies of reception, for instance, and explorations of readers’ diminished capacity for deep attention), but you’ll also see—and you’ll see it soon—that it is more often answered with prescriptions; not accounts of how people read but norms for how they ought to. This is what happens when we call our work “reading” rather than interpretation, analysis, or critique. We foreground an unfolding relation between an attending subject and a textual object, and we stage that encounter as a test of the subject’s openness to and care for the object.

In The Gist of Reading, Andrew Elfenbein doesn’t look very closely into recent discussions of critical method. As he sees it, the urgent problem for our discipline is a crisis of relevance, where academics risk sacrificing the study of literature in their efforts to “engage current issues” (p. 216). “I am arguing for attention to methodology,” Elfenbein writes, “as an alternative either to endless close readings or to abandoning literary analysis” (p. 217). This formulation surprised me a little because, as I’ve been saying, I don’t think attention to methodology is really in short supply in our journals or at our conferences. The discussion of reading has gone on and on.

Still, we can learn some valuable things from Elfenbein’s book. This interdisciplinary study, combining the insights of cognitive scientists with a history of reading norms since the nineteenth century, invites us to rethink a concept so fundamental to our sense of what we do that much of its significance may be hiding in plain sight. We keep talking about reading, but Elfenbein doesn’t think it means what we think it means. Stepping outside literary studies into the field of psychology—and into the world at large, where people sit around reading such texts as cocktail menus, op-ed columns, and birthday cards—he sets out to explain how the mind works as it processes language for everyday, undisciplined use.

What literary scholars call reading is an act of attention. It is deliberate and self-conscious. But such a view of reading, Elfenbein argues, misses half the picture. A good deal of what goes on in reading, the laboratory scientists remind us, is “automatic,” a set of more or less mechanical functions playing out without direction or even notice, “with minimal conscious effort” (p. 19). Try glancing at a word or a small group of words without reading it, without comprehending it as a meaningful word or phrase. You are likely to find that the machinery has already done its work before you can put the brakes on.

To read longer and weirder texts, naturally, will take some deliberate effort, involving concentration and reflection; it will engage what Elfenbein calls “voluntary” or “controlled” processes. These processes, these aspects of the mind under the direction of the will, are sometimes discussed in literary studies—for instance, in reader response criticism. The study of the involuntary side of reading, meanwhile, has been left to the cognitive scientists.

When the automatic and controlled processes are working well together, readers come away from the text with a lasting sense of its meaning. We feel that we understand and remember the thing we read. But what, exactly, do we recollect? Almost no reader will keep in mind every word of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, all the line breaks in a poem by Emily Dickinson, or the sequencing of paragraphs in Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street. What we carry, instead, is a simplified mental representation of the text. We get the gist. This version of what we read is partly derived from the words on the page, but it is also our own construction. “It contains,” as Elfenbein says, “a reader’s background knowledge, inferences, emotional reactions, autobiographical links, evaluations, and much else.” I suppose the same might be true of many other kinds of experiences, too; memory is wayward, unfaithful, incomplete. Indeed, “what readers’ memories retain may have only the faintest relationship to what they read” (p. 103).

Professional critics would like to distinguish their specialized interpretive practices from everyday reading habits, but all readers (Elfenbein argues) read for the gist. He must be right, and his book makes a significant contribution to our ongoing conversation about reading. The genuinely interdisciplinary perspective taken here allows us to see what is peculiar—partial but also distinctive—about how our discipline thinks about reading. Even when we appear to be describing an object or narrating an experience, we are reaching for an ideal; although we do not always acknowledge the normative aspects of our accounts, they are prescriptions for better encounters between subjects and objects.

The first half of Elfenbein’s book is a kind of translation, for literary scholars, of insights from the cognitive science of reading. The second half is a brief history of “prescriptive reading,” showing how norms of serious reading took shape in nineteenth-century Britain and were eventually absorbed into US schools and colleges. Elfenbein has interesting things to say about Bible study guides, about Francis Bacon, and about how John Ruskin’s reading of George Eliot shaped the first attempts to standardize college admissions testing. Together, these pieces compose the story of a protracted “war against reading for the gist” (p. 114).

Who conducted this reactionary campaign? Intriguingly, Elfenbein argues that nineteenth-century norms of critical reading were formulated and deployed by elites as part of an effort to govern the appetites of the masses. Visions of an impending population explosion prompted a disciplinary project that would cultivate better reading habits in the interest of restraint: “grilling the working classes in rote catechisms was not enough, because doing so would not necessarily produce sobriety or prudence. The hope was, however, that educating them would lead them to understand their role in a larger economic system and, even more, to restrain their sexual urges to prevent that system from collapsing” (p. 118). In the story Elfenbein tells, literary education is a civilizing mission and a method of prophylaxis; the war against gist reading is a war against sex.

Elfenbein stages his book as an encounter between cognitive psychology and literary studies, but it also opens onto another perspective, that of a historicism informed by theories of money, erotics, and power. As a matter of fact, the story told in The Gist of Reading is not only an intervention in our conversation about postcritique; it is also good material for the hermeneutics of suspicion. That version of the story would be more dialectical than the one Elfenbein himself tells, and it would go something like this: under the direction of a modern, secular, and biopolitical governmentality, the reading subject takes shape as both a material object of knowledge to be understood (description) and an ethical agent of action to be directed (prescription). The science and the humanistic pedagogy of reading seem to be alienated from each other but, at a deeper level, they are working together, and their real business is the management of population—that is, of life itself.