Poor Reading, Weak Theory: An Excerpt from “The Amateur”

To this day I pussyfoot along the stacks whenever I have to go to a library. I doubt I will ever be at ease in those institutions, just as I will never be at ease in restaurants, hotels, theatres, cinemas and all the other places which I never set foot in as a child. —Sindiwe […]

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To this day I pussyfoot along the stacks whenever I have to go to a library. I doubt I will ever be at ease in those institutions, just as I will never be at ease in restaurants, hotels, theatres, cinemas and all the other places which I never set foot in as a child.
—Sindiwe Magona, Forced to Grow (1997)

IS THERE SUCH a thing as the posture of reading? Is it merely a cosmetic act? Is it a deception when the posture is bereft of real textual engagement? When you look like you’re reading but in fact you’re not? I don’t mean those moments of lapsed concentration may befall a seasoned reader. I mean a situation where one cannot read but wishes to look like one can—and “appear” consequently immersed in a book that comes only through literate understanding in the traditional sense of the term. Is reading without such understanding an act of reading at all?

These strange thoughts come to my head as I read the opening pages of In Bed with the Word, a deeply evocative, short book on the relation between reading, spirituality, and the politics of culture by the Canadian writer and scholar Daniel Coleman. Coleman opens the book with an image from his past: a six-year-old boy skipping his second day in school to spend his morning in bed with a book. The child of white missionaries in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, the boy was Coleman’s older brother, John, and the setting of the scene was Bingham Academy, a boarding school for missionaries’ children in the city. The scene, which went on to become part of family lore, is all the more remarkable because John didn’t know how to read, which did nothing to prevent him skipping school (where, among other things, he was supposed to learn to read) to stare at length at the book with which he had decided to stay in bed.

“What are you doing in bed, Johnny?” asks a woman’s voice. “You should be in school with the other boys.”

“Oh,” says the tow-headed boy calmly. “I just thought I’d spend the day in bed with the Word.”

This illiterate, childish relation with reading can be properly understood only with the full set of attendant facts around it. Perhaps the most important among them is that the book was a “black, leather-bound King James Version of the Bible,” which invariably also takes us back to the fact that the boys’ parents are both missionaries trained in the evangelical Protestant tradition. A stretch of quiet time with the Bible and their notebooks along with a hot drink every morning was an unfailing habit with his parents, as long as Coleman remembers, and it was clear where little Johnny got the idea, and the desire for “the posture, the position, the place of being a reader.”

“The boy in bed with the Word,” Coleman writes, “presents in one picture pretty much everything I want to say in this book about spirituality and reading.” Coleman goes on to elaborate a sensitive and relevant book on the relationship between reading and spirituality in the context of contemporary popular, academic, and literary culture. My particular interest in this image, however, is that it illustrates what I call an illiterate relation to a book—and perhaps even to the act of reading. The illiteracy renders reading impossible and yet cannot prevent this relation from coming into being. No one can miss the privileges that closely surround and structure this illiteracy—the white missionary parents, the safe and potentially nourishing space of the missionary school, and the evident impact of the parents’ religious reading habits on the little boy. All of these nurturing influences shape a mimesis of the reading posture, but it is a posture that lacks the most crucial asset, that of literacy, only that which can enable the reality of reading.

The gesture of reading, but not a functional relation with books—or at least The Book, in this case, enabled here in the absence of literacy. Does this enabling happen in spite of this absence, or precisely because of it? That is the kind of inquiry into the child mind that is as important to ask as it is difficult to answer. To say that this is a relation with books, or even the gesture of reading, that has not received sufficient attention would be to state something counterintuitive, possibly nonsensical or outlandish. That is because of the obvious reason that it is not an act of reading in any conventional sense of the term, inasmuch as reading implies actual understanding of the material, no matter how partial, arbitrary, or subjective such an understanding may be. But the fact that books—or at least certain kinds of books—evoke relation to literacy beyond this conventional model is an important truth that accounts of reading need to acknowledge. If this be any act of reading, it is a reading driven by the poverty of literacy and experience even as that very poverty paradoxically deepens reverence for the book. The book here is a material object in its own right, not merely a repository of meaning inscribed by linguistic and semiotic signification, even if that signification has historically been a major precondition of its appeal. But a major precondition; not the only one. Even if this interpretative poverty is underwritten by familial and cultural privileges in this particular instance and is clearly a condition of childhood, this relation to reading—that of deeply affectionate illiteracy—is crucial for millions of people around the world, for whom the power of a particular kind of text eludes literacy and understanding even as it emphasizes the very bookishness of that text.

Reading and spirituality have had a mutual relationship that is as historically deep as it is geographically and culturally expansive. That is an important part of Coleman’s subject in his book. But while he focuses on the real act of reading, and the consequent cultures of interpretation, hermeneutics, and self-awareness that have arisen from such acts, I’m most enthralled by what I would call an illiterate or imperfectly literate relation with reading. But perhaps I’m defining literacy too narrowly, in a constrictively instrumental sense of the term?

More expansive imaginations of literacy have been celebrated in recent times. “Literacy,” writes Nathan Snaza, “is primarily about affects and not conscious events of meaning making or representational constructions.” Snaza is following up here on his reading of a significant scene in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, where the illiterate slave Sethe is in the process of deriving meaning of the word “characteristics” based on her eavesdropping of the schoolteacher’s lessons and her own sensory encounter with objects. The development of Sethe’s “literacy,” if it can be called that, does not involve reading, though it involves unintended, vicarious instruction about text and language; in The Nation and Its Fragments, Partha Chatterjee has documented similar ways in which certain Indian women eavesdropped their way into literacy in the 19th century by listening at the door while the male members of their family received private instruction. What matters to me at the moment, however, is the affective aura around literacy that exists in spite of its actual absence, indeed, in some way, as inspired by its very absence. The absence of literacy creates an affective value around it—particularly around its material repository, books—that high-functional literacy cannot. Later in his book, Snaza writes about this affective aura shaped by the absence of a sustained legacy of literacy even as he embodies deep and sophisticated literacy himself:

I am always affected by books even when I am not reading them. As someone who grew up in a working-class home, it’s hard to separate the pleasures I experience with books from a decades-long attempt to rework my habitus, bodying myself into the forms of class privilege that enable flourishing in universities.

Why do I insist on pausing at the paradox of this awe or pleasure about books on the part of those deprived of literacy—or even at the somewhat different pleasure of one simply deprived of its family legacy? Part of it, no doubt, is to remark on the repressive ideological content of this pleasure, in the manner in which Louis Althusser had revealed education to be. The path to literacy, likewise, remains singular. “There is,” Snaza argues, “as any person who has moved through statist educational systems will know, a profound and disturbing pleasure that adheres in having read more, in having thought more about bigger ideas, bigger books, harder theories.” Using Sara Ahmed’s term, Snaza describes this kind of pleasure as “white manning,” because this path, after moving through the material and ideological structures of canon formation, offers the same pleasure as that which “interfaces with the work of maintaining male supremacist, white supremacist, Eurocentrist capture of educational potential.”

Forms of marginal consciousness have riven literary-critical study at least since the 1960s, when the radical recuperation of nonmainstream voices—in race, gender, class, sexuality, bodily ability and national-cultural origin, among other things—fundamentally altered the discipline’s worldview as practiced in the metropolitan West, both from a place of political activism as well as anti-foundational instincts in philosophy and linguistics. But as the historian Dipesh Chakrabarty reminded us in 2000, the inclusion of minority histories expands the archive and maybe even the canon, but this expansion can also happen without calling the discipline into a crisis—that is, without altering its fundamental epistemological mode. It is one thing to include Indigenous tribal voices in nationalist, anti-colonial history, but another thing altogether to let tribal religious beliefs disrupt the rationalist mode that forms the core of history as a modern discipline. Archival expansions, as such, do not naturally turn into epistemic alterations of the dominant paradigms of disciplines. Chakrabarty’s description of history partially describes literary studies as well. Not being tied to institutions—judicial, bureaucratic, and others—the way history tends to be, literature has greater freedoms, but the caveat about the gulf between archival and epistemological expansion holds equally true in methods of literary criticism.

Does this enable a possible return to the figure of the boy who wishes to spend the day in bed with the Word without possessing a literate relation to it? Is he, too, on the way to “white manning”—overdetermined by his race and gender? Or can we take away something from his posture, this day of refusal to acknowledge the lack of literacy as a barrier to his relation with the book? Coleman does not return to John anymore, or tell us how his life turned out; this is, therefore, no speculation of the future, but an attempt to read that moment in its own right. It is clear that religion holds a key to this inexplicable relation to books that lie beyond the conventional epistemology of humanist literacy. As Dipesh Chakrabarty, Ranajit Guha, and the subaltern historiographers have periodically reminded us, it is almost impossible to give an honest account of many marginalized social groups, and certainly impossible to articulate their stories, without attention to forms of religious consciousness. While this has been a sobering epiphany for Marxist historiography, it also requires a reading of a literary act—that of reading itself—to take into account the impoverishment of all power, privilege, agency, indeed, the entire subordination of one’s self that defines this particular relation to reading which eludes the literate, liberal, bourgeois relation to texts rendered in language.

Religious practice around the world has been characterized by a kind of faith that can be variously defined as preliterate, nonliterate, and postliterate. This reverence has thrived in equal measure in the presence or absence of literacy, often in perfect indifference to it. The Sikh devotion to the text of the Granth (literally meaning “book”) Sahib, and the custom of offering all human comfort to it, for instance, leaves a deeply figurative mark on the mind. What I want to take away from this is an alternative relationship to the culture of reading. When such “reading,” whether or not existent in the presence of literacy, is enabled by a submission of the need of intellectual control, or indeed of any kind of personal agency, it creates a peculiar loss of mastery that runs counter to all established conventions of reading. The loss of mastery, progress, or success as affirmative or celebratory conditions has been an important suggestion of critical theory in the recent years. (See, for instance, the association of queerness and failure in the work of Jack Halberstam and Heather Love.) When it comes to reading, for Nathan Snaza, this condition is “bewilderment,” which is the “particular affective state of disorientation” that opens up possibilities away from the inevitably humanist or human-centered direction education is traditionally expected to take. Seeking to expand literacy and its affect beyond human actors, Snaza recommends that “instead of orienting all of the educational movement toward Man, what we need today is an education that does not know where it is headed”—an education with no mastery over its direction.

A traditional humanist conception of education is synonymous with the development of intellectual and disciplinary mastery. But what, indeed, is the ethical and political significance of such mastery? In her book Unthinking Mastery, Julietta Singh has revealed the quiet complicities between colonial domination and other forms of mastery thought to be innocuous or even beneficial—including epistemological and intellectual ones. There is, as such, a moral connection between forms of mastery such as colonialism and enslavement on one hand, and on the other, with “forms of mastery that we often believe today to be harmless, worthwhile, even virtuous.” To master an instrument, an archive, or a language is usually imagined as laudable, and “yet as a pursuit,” Singh argues, “mastery invariably and relentlessly reaches toward the indiscriminate control over something—whether human or inhuman, animate or inanimate.” Mastery involves an inevitable submission of something. Inasmuch as mastery requires “a rupturing of the object being mastered”—since the object must be rendered weaker than the master—mastery becomes “a splitting of the object that is mastered from itself, a way of estranging the mastered object from its previous state of being.” Viewed this way, mastery ends up being a kind of exclusionary humanism, one driven by a decisive master-slave dialectic, where the emergence of a victorious human subject is contingent on the violence and domination it can inflict on subordinated modalities.

Singh opens up a sustainable strand of skepticism about epistemological mastery, paving the way for intellectual failure as redemptive, perhaps even indicative of a different ethics of knowledge. When such failure, indeed, the very absence of the attempt to succeed, confronts religious texts, it is impossible not to hear the echo of the encounter with otherness as imagined by Emmanuel Levinas, for whom the ultimate, unknowable Other is God. When Derek Attridge translated the Levinasian modality of otherness into an act of reading, as, for instance, in his rich and complex reading of the novels of J. M. Coetzee, he interpreted the experimental nature of the text, and of its consequent “difficulty,” as an ethical claim to otherness. Turning away from the question of the alienness or difficulty of texts, I would like to examine possibilities latent within the reader’s silence before the text, or the refusal to interpret, sometimes even to read, and all the hesitance, resistance, refusal, and failure that remain aligned to what Singh sees as the negation of mastery.

What does it actually mean to read against the epistemological goal of mastery—particularly in the face of power and domination that lays down specific structures of education and literacy? In an intriguing book, World Literature for the Wretched of the Earth, J. Daniel Elam has offered some illustration of this disavowal of mastery. He looks at British India, where Western authors, texts, and curricula inscribed models of authority and professional development, just the way reading and critique was, for many anti-colonial thinkers, also a path to resistance and emancipation. However, Elam’s provocative focus is on readers who read as a means of disavowing authority and expertise, and escape power and domination through such disavowal. His examples are the leader of the California-based anti-colonial Ghadar Party Lala Har Dayal, the political leader and social reformer B. R. Ambedkar, the celebrated champion of nonviolent resistance, M. K. Gandhi, and Bhagat Singh, the revolutionary nationalist executed by the British. “As an anticolonial practice,” Elam writes, describing the various reading cultures foregrounded by these figures, “reading could mark modes of refusal, nonproductivity, inconsequence, inexpertise, and nonauthority.” His radically utopian argument is that, “in direct contrast to the values of British liberalism, these recalcitrant ideals were perfect for envisioning a radical egalitarianism rooted in communal reading and collective textual criticism.”

Viewed this way, the values of “unrecognizability, indecipherability, unintelligibility, untraceability, and untranslatability” become ways of escaping and resisting colonial authority, including the Macaulayian prescription of the Brown mimic man. Emerging as a critique of colonial selfhood, such practices of readerly failures, according to Elam, pave the emergence of an “anonymous, interpenetrating, multitudinous collectivity.” One thinks of the collective, rather than individual identification in British working-class autobiographies noted by Regenia Gagnier, who offered the important caveat that “Cartesian subjectivity was not assumed by most working-class writers and as a consequence autobiography often meant something different from emplotted self-sufficiency.” But these self-frustrating modes of reading enacted as part of anti-colonial resistance do not just dissipate the emplotment of individualism; they also signal conceptions of worlds that are variously impossible or utopian. “Bhagat Singh’s ‘universal brotherhood’ demanded ‘chaos’ and assured death,” writes Elam, as evident in his reading habits and goals in prison in the face of a death sentence. Likewise, “Ambedkar’s ‘fellowship’ was produced by a commitment to shared suffering, which necessarily stalls abandoning the world as it is. Gandhi’s philosophies were rooted in perpetual failure and loss. The citizens of Har Dayal’s ‘World-State’ were the descendants of the present, but they inherited an impossible past.” For Elam, these impossibilities variously evoke the universal impossibility of larger collectivities such as that of comradeship as imagined by Frantz Fanon and world literature as imagined by Eric Auerbach. Does that mean that failure-shaped reading practices can only lead to anarchy, nihilism, and impossible utopias? Can acts of reading framed by failure—or conditioned by the impossibility of epistemological mastery—be generative in any sense of the term?

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This passage is excerpted from Saikat Majumdar’s forthcoming book The Amateur: Self-Making and the Humanities in the Postcolony, which will be available in the United States on July 11.

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