Reading Myself Elsewhere. A Few Notes on Reading Otherwise

Comparatismi 3 2018 ISSN 2531-7547 http://dx.doi.org/10.14672/20181485 Reading Myself Elsewhere. A Few Notes on Reading Otherwise Mattia Mossali Abstract • This essay investigates the emotional attachments we bring to a book: we will describe the identification processes that reading may involve, and how these processes affect the reader’s experience and identity. When it is authentic, the act of reading cannot be considered as a moment of mirroring, but it includes a more profound identification experience to the extent that reading becomes a sort of event, a gesture that at times may alter the reader’s perception of her identity since, through it, she can access the buried spaces of the unconscious. If it is true that every work demands an interpretation, at the same time the fruition of literary texts by readers is inextricably linked to their desire for personal knowledge. This is why reading is neither a cognitive nor a psychobiological experience, insofar as it involves a more complex and personal interpretative and intersubjective activity: reader and text become a sort of innovative enterprise through which connections are not only unmasked, but above all continuously created. For the purposes of the discussion and to illuminate better the point I want to make, I will implicate myself and my own personal experience as reader of Sylvia Plath. Keywords • Reading; Identification; Intersubjectivity; Emotions; Sylvia Plath Reading Myself Elsewhere. A Few Notes on Reading Otherwise Mattia Mossali 1. You Can’t Fight the Feeling Everything starts with a feeling that I experience again and again whenever I read certain novels or certain collections of poems. I am referring to the ability that some selected books have to transform the listening of someone else’s story into the listening of my own self. Of course, this does not happen every time, and definitely not with every text. Very often I scroll the pages quickly before realizing that I cannot recognize those words as my words. They simply do not fit me. But it also happens sometimes that I find myself embroiled in the text I am reading, as if it were an invitation to find in those pages something like myself. Evidently, these are special texts that call for different strategies, not easily explicable, also because most of the times the strategies they suggest are subjective. No feeling can be the same as another, or can arise as another. The reading experience is never the same as itself, and at the same time it is not easy to describe with a critical eye, insofar as it is accompanied by a sort of ineffability. This reminds me of what Virginia Woolf writes about reading in a 1925 essay: If to read a book as it should be read calls for the rarest qualities of imagination, insight, and judgment, you may perhaps conclude that literature is a very complex art and that it is unlikely that we shall be able, even after a lifetime of reading, to make any valuable contribution to its criticism. We must remain readers; we shall not put on the further glory that belongs to those rare beings who are also critics. (581) This is why, for the purposes of my discussion, I want to implicate myself and my own personal experience as reader, being aware that this is probably the only way to untangle the issue I want to investigate. Why do I feel that a text is right for me? And how do I know, as a reader, that the same text is telling me no lies? These are the questions I will try to answer throughout this essay. More precisely, I will discuss from a wider perspective the peculiar nature of the emotional attachments we bring to a book. I will describe in particular the identification processes that reading eventually involves, and how these processes may affect the reader’s experience, for better and for worse. 2. What Does It Mean to Read a Text? To illuminate better the point I want to make, it is worth rephrasing the preceding questions as follows: when I read, what do I look for in my readings? What do I expect from books? What kind of experience do I look for? Since the 1960s literary theory has been marked by a significant change of perspective, which finds its fulcrum in the investigation of the coalescence of text and reader. As is known, there is a conspicuous number of theories about how reading works, and though 96 3 2018 • Comparatismi most of them are in contradiction with each other, all agree on one point: they all recognize the act of reading as crucial.1 Quite recently, neuroscience research has demonstrated that, when we read about another person or look at another person in a picture, we are involved in what that person is feeling or simply doing thanks to the activation of specific neural systems. Those who love to read demonstrate a certain degree of “participatory response”:2 they take part in the life and events of the characters in the books “as if”—and this the key formula—they were entrapped in a sort of mutual reflectivity, a kinetic participation in the fictional scene. The neuroscientist Vittorio Gallese, to whom we owe the study of the so-called mirror neurons first discovered in the ventral premotor cortex of a macaque monkey and then also in the humans (Gallese et al., “Action Recognition in the Premotor Cortex”; Gallese, “The Manifold Nature of Interpersonal Relations”), has written extensively on the empathic and embodied experience in art viewing, concluding that this type of response plays a crucial role in our understanding of the work of art itself.3 In the specific case of reading, Gallese writes: When we read we not only entirely focus our attention on the literary work, but at the same time our stillness enables us to deploy fully our embodied simulation resources at the service of our immersive relationship with the narrated characters. This is why the FoB [Feeling of Body] generated by fiction is often more powerful than that triggered by our daily interactions with the world. Our pleasure in novel reading is thus likely also driven by this sense of safe intimacy with a world we not only imagine, but also literally embody. (Wojciehowski and Gallese) Very briefly, to understand or to attribute a specific meaning to what we read, it is necessary to draw upon our cognitive, emotional and bodily involvement. And it is precisely this embodied simulation that gives an empirical base to the role of empathy within the aesthetic experience. The empathic element in a text depends, on the one hand, on the “what” of the experience (that is, our response to the supposed explicit content of the work), and on the other hand on the “how” (that is, our response to the very traces the artist leaves behind). Gallese points out: “Thanks to the embodied simulation I have the ability to recognize in what I see something within which I ‘resonate’. . . . The meaning of others’ experiences is understood not by virtue of an explanation, but thanks to a direct understanding, so to speak, an understanding c (...truncated)