Slow Reading
by Hanna
Trinity College Library in Dublin, Ireland (via)
As the leaves of book pages unfold, so too foreign worlds unfold inside a reader’s mind. A reader can travel through space and time without leaving the comfort of his living room arm chair. New experiences, new insights, and new skills become available to the careful, critical reader. And this kind of experience is the basic method of studying human experience. This basic skill when engaged in academically, is called philology, which comes from a Greek word meaning a love of words. A more recent definition of philology, as given by Roman Jakobson, is “the art of reading slowly.”
Why do so few academics use the word “philology?” The politically engaged Columbia University scholar of literary criticism Edward Said wrote in his last book, wherein he advocates philology as a humanist method and develops the idea of a philology of politics, that philology is “about the least with-it, least sexy, and most unmodern of of any of the branches of learning associated with humanism.” And considering how the humanities, the study of human experience, are less “with-it” than the natural sciences, he might as well have been saying that it is the least sexy branch of study of any of the traditional academic subjects.
I would like to disagree. Certainly, in a world that seems to be speeding up more and more as information technology grows ubiquitous and profit is the holy grail of any endeavor, progress seems to lie with speed and productivity. But as society accelerates ever more, doesn’t it seem like we’re missing something important in daily life? Where does relaxation, nearness and care, or reflection fit in, or must it always be scheduled into an ever tighter growing schedule?
And what about all that we’ve missed in our frantic efforts to gather information from the data streams? Are we to simply dismiss any information older than what may be found in the Internet, either because it is now inaccessible or because we think we know so much more than people did before the Internet? The probability that we have missed something important is large indeed.
The Slow Movement has addressed some issues generated by this acceleration with Slow Food, Slow Parenting, Slow Travel, and so on. It is fashionable to take time in making food with care and to share it with family or to spend a week on an Italian farm instead of seeing all the capitals of Western Europe. The focus with the Slow Movement is on promoting reflection and interpersonal relationships, thus a focus on the present and its potential. Slow reading can have the same focus.
History is only valuable in the present, when a reader finds a small element of himself in the description of historic developments. As R.W. Emerson wrote in his essay “History,”
This [manifold] human mind wrote history and this must read it. The Sphinx must solve her own riddle. If the whole of history is in one man, it is all to be explained from individual experience. There is a relation between the hours of our life and the centuries of time. As the air I breathe is drawn from the great repositories of nature, as the light on my book is yielded by a star a hundred millions of miles distant, as the poise of my body depends on the equilibrium of centrifugal and centripetal forces, so the hours should be instructed by the ages, and the ages explained by the hours.
Thus by reading, by engaging with history, a reader fosters within himself a reflection that extends to greater depth, breadth, and revelation. The only truth to be found in the past is that which resonates in the present. In order to find that truth, however, the process of slow reading must be practiced. Of course, slow reading does not come easily, because finding history within oneself necessitates facing one’s own demons in the pages of history.
To be a successful philologist, one must develop the skill of careful critical inquiry. As while reading questions arise, one must find the answers by reading and rereading or by turning to consult the context. Engaging with the text of a book or a manuscript in this manner might then be likened to plying a craft. Fine craftsmanship produces beautiful things from common materials. So, too, fine philology produces beautiful ideas from common experiences. What could be more romantic—or sexy for that matter?
Cited:
Emerson, R.W. Essays, First Series. Philadelphia: David McKay, no date.
Jakobson quote from: Pollock, Sheldon. “Future Philology? The Fate of a Soft Science in a Hard World.” Critical Inquiry Summer 2009; 931-961. (via)
Said, Edward W. Humanism and Democratic Criticism. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.
[Update 13 Feb 2013: An earlier version of this post did not include the argument that Edward Said made regarding philology.]
Said was concerned with the typically 19th century ‘armchair anthropology’ attitude – the detached, unengaged, imposing gaze of the coloniser. The kind of gaze that leaves out “actual” experience – bodily experience in primis. Philology is an all-encompassing subject whose boundaries are difficult to mark (even for the so-called philologists). Jackobson’s famous quote comes from the perspective of the linguist, and one cannot disagree. However I believe critical enquiry does not come from comfortable armchairs, but from uncomfortable journeys among people and things you can touch, smell, see, hear. In my view learning cannot be comfortable.
Dear Diego,
Thank you for the comment!
I agree with you absolutely that learning is tough. I hope I made it at least a little clear in my writing that learning is not a comfortable process, but I think that it’s not a matter of either going out in the field or reading a book at home. All academics need to do both and to keep pushing themselves in both past their own comfort zones. Certainly some will have strengths in one area over the other. If, for example, the field of study is a historical one, like my own field, experience in the field must be understood critically indeed, and the text must be the focus of learning.
It seems to me, though, and to Edward Said, as he wrote in his last book, and to Sheldon Pollock, whose article I highly recommend, that there are many problems in the ways in which the humanities are engaged in now. I think most academics in the humanities prefer to face “the uncomfortable” or the foreign in the field rather than in their own minds. It seems to me, that very often non-Japanese scholars in Japanese studies look to confirm the universality of non-Japanese cultural theories by looking at Japanese cultural phenomena. A recent call for papers in Warsaw, for example, had this written in the description:
“[T]his conference shall prove that the country of [the] Rising Sun and its inhabitants is still an interesting and inspiring field of research, where scholars from different scientific milieu can critically verify their convictions and knowledge acquired at Western Universities.”
Japan is a field suitable for confirming Western convictions and knowledge? Japan has nothing to say for itself? We won’t concern ourselves with the academic work or theoretical approaches produced in Japan?
Certainly philology is a large branch of study, because it may be applied to almost any other field of research, but it is not detached, unengaged, or have an imposing gaze, unless one only has images of old, self-important professors in tweed jackets professing in Greek and Latin—and even in that field there’s Nietzsche, who was far from stuffy like that. The philology I’m talking about, and that which Pollock calls for in his paper, is a philology based on three basic principles:
1. Work critically with a text and do not capitulate to what others have concluded about it.
2. Work as hard as possible to see things the way the text explains them and be ready to have your mind changed.
3. Be reflective of the fact that your own historicity shapes how you understand and how you interpret the text.
If an academic can do that and engage in the field and understand each experience in its own historical context, great developments will come to the humanities. Academics can’t just come out of the ivory tower and into the field to study unless they—or we—can bring the ivory tower with them. The goal being that the experience may inform the book-learning and the book-learning may inform the experience, but always with a full awareness of that mutual influence.
Oh dear this got long, but thank you for pushing me to be reflective!
Best,
Hanna
Dear Hanna,
on what basis do we claim that history is text-based? The recent Cambridge Companion tho Theatre History, to which I contributed, has quite a few chapters describing how “live” practices are a fundamental component of historical research, especially if we don’t consider history as something that belongs to the past, but as a continuous flow of knowledge that ought to be experienced ‘in the field’.
I like Pollock’s article but I wouldn’t say that ‘most academics in the humanities prefer to face “the uncomfortable” or the foreign in the field rather than in their own minds’. I think that most academics in the humanities experience a couple of foray into ‘the field’ only to quickly retreat to their ivory tower and keep writing about their fantasies. This is yet another generalisation, but it comes from my personal experience. This all the more applies to researchers of non-western cultures. This is the approach Said warns against.
I saw the Warsaw cfp – it did look a bit odd to me… I am 99% sure it is Polish translated into English.
Your last paragraph says it all – it is a matter of mutual influence. And we all have phases. I would imagine that your case after many years in Japan you need to retreat to a tranquil place where you can be ‘alone with your thoughts’ and elaborate. This is so very important and I am sure you are doing the best thing.
D.
Dear Diego,
My focus on text-based history is due to my interest in intellectual developments. Certainly, artifacts and traditional practices that have been transmitted to the present provide circumstantial information in my research, but language does contain more pertinent, central information in my work.
However, the primary reason I wrote this is because so few people seem to be actually engaged in philological work, because it requires such hard work to learn a language in its classical form—or dead languages, for that matter. But old texts do hold a lot of valuable information and can provide insight of a form that isn’t commonly discussed today.
Reading and working carefully with a text is not working with fantasies. . . unless you consider the past a fantasy, because we can never go there physically.
Also, I would hope that the Warsaw CFP says what it says. I can hardly reformulate the sentence to say anything different. If we want to second-guess every use of language, how will we be able to communicate?
Thanks, Diego, for your stimulating comments!
Best,
Hanna