Reading What’s Not There
Dear Reader,
Sometimes readers do a curious thing: they read more meaning into the text than is there. Now, I’m not talking about the sort of everyday misreading that developing readers do. And I’m not talking about a random off-day of reading.
The phenomenon that I’m highlighting is when skilled readers are reading a skilled writer and they observe a curiosity in the text, a line that just doesn’t quite seem to make sense. But instead of thinking that they, the alert readers, have observed a skilled writer in a moment of incoherence—a moment when the writer’s styling got ahead of their meaning—these skilled readers assume that they should imbue that writerly inanity with real meaning. That is, they read what’s not there instead of what’s plainly before their faces.
What I’m highlighting here isn’t the same as Stephen Booth’s insights into reading what’s there and what’s not there, wherein the reader doesn’t even notice when they have read something into the text that isn’t there. In the scenario I’m exploring, the reader does observe the oddity in the text and in full consciousness adds meaning to the text that literally isn’t there.
I admit that I had a specific author in mind when I first drafted this piece over a year ago: David Foster Wallace. I remember reading a line—I don’t recall which line anymore—that simply made no sense. It didn’t land. DFW was searching for an image, an effect, and just went for it. In the end, what it really was was a fancy pants word salad. The writer shot for an effect and missed. Bad poets do this regularly. Neophyte writers do this regularly.
When we’re in the hands of “great writers,” we never expect them to craft such an infelicity. And yet they can.
I was prompted to finish this piece when I stumbled upon “David Foster Wallace: Genius?” which examines one bit of DFW’s writing as follows:
The shapes don’t match; he lacks the gift of seeing resemblances in shapes, which is also the gift of visual metaphor, the gift of the poet. Wallace does not reward sensitivity to language, the careful lingering in words. In fact, he seems to make such sensitivity painful for the reader.
My experience with DFW isn’t precisely what that author explores throughout that piece, but it is a salient example of today’s topic.
Happy reading to you,
Kreigh