Reading is so ingrained in us, and has become such a part of the landscape of our lives, that we often don't realize that reading has developed and evolved over time. We look at our own history of reading, and it seems to follow the same basic steps as our peers. As young children, someone shows us books, and reads to us, and we slowly begin to recognize letters and words on our own. It's hard to conceive of a time when the written word didn't exist, or when it wasn't readily accessible to all. I think Manguel does an excellent job, at least so far, of showing how reading has evolved, and how different things in different eras were important. Reading aloud, like in Augustine's time is now limited mostly to the young. Augustine and his contemporaries viewed reading silently as the anomaly. Memorization of texts also played an important role at one time, either in an effort to learn or in an attempt not to have the text taken from you. In my own life, I find that memorization actually impedes my reading process, as I concentrate on the actual words rather than what the words say.
I think my favorite part of the text is actually the quote by Kafka. "I think we ought to read only books that bite and sting us. ... A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.". Kafka seems to have focused on the idea that reading should connect to the reader. He left works unfinished ("The Castle") so that the reader will never stop the story. This is a perfect way to illustrate the idea that books are... alive, for lack of a better description. When reading, I so often insert my own ideas and experiences, and connect with characters with whom I would never think I had anything in common. I remember books not so much for the literal words of the text, but for the feelings they invoked in me.
I agree wholeheartedly that Kafka was definitely a great author in the way that forces readers to connect to his own writing. However, being a word hungry reader myself, I think that though he left certain works unfinished to supposedly never end a story for a reader, one must wonder if there might have been a difficulty to maybe hinder him from finishing the story, such as illness or a lack of connection to that particular work. Manguel leads us to believe that is something that was definitely done on purpose to connect readers further to material, but do you truly believe it? I'm not quite sure I do.
ReplyDeleteYour view on memorization is interesting. I suppose if memorization happens independent of meditation, the words do lose their value and meaning. I grew up in a Christian household where I was encouraged to memorize Bible verses, and now that I think about it, those which I pondered and applied to my life retained some sort of fire which those that I simply memorized word-for-word did not. I wonder what ancient Hebrew, Greek and Roman students would say about this topic, since so many of them memorized entire books. Did they really KNOW the text better than a student who simply read the words for story as opposed to committing them to memory? Or did they memorize the sounds and syllables and miss the message altogether?
ReplyDelete@beatnik: I guess there's no real way of knowing whether Kafka's unfinished works are a result of his wanting the reader to connect more, or if he simply was incapable of finishing. The unfinished works do remind me of Olive Ann Burns' Leaving Cold Sassy. It was a sequel to Cold Sassy Tree, which I read in like ninth grade. She died a few chapters into the sequel and it was seriously the most frustrating thing. Even though I knew that the book was unfinished, I read it anyway. Rather than inspiring me to create my own ending, it just annoyed me. Obviously, Burns had no real control over the dying aspect of her writing process, but the publishers definitely made the choice to publish a work that was nowhere near finished. Upon finishing the sequel, I remember wishing that they hadn't.
ReplyDelete@Tracey: My own background in church is what led to that view on memorization. In high school, one of the requirements for us to go on mission trips was a certain amount of verse recitation. I was so good at memorizing at the last minute that in my last two years, my choir leader assigned me a chapter to memorize, James 5 and Romans 14, I think. And even though I recruited them perfectly, I tried to recall them a little while ago and had absolutely no clue. When memorization is done for memorization's sake, rather than out of a sense of wanting to remember what you're reading because it means something to you, I think it's a wasted effort.