Chapter 1 To Read Is to Feel Lost

Metaphor, Text, and Meaningful Action

The introductory chapter is about metaphor, and here I’ve added text and meaningful action—similar objects, but on different scales. A text is likely the most familiar: it is longer than a sentence, has a fixed form, and is open to interpretation.7 A metaphor, as the last chapter hinted at, is a text “in miniature.”8 The category of meaningful action is the most abstract: it describes the actions people take that, within the context of the rules that structure social interaction, are imbued with meaning. In this respect, metaphor, text, and meaningful action are telescoping terms: although they are not identical, insights provided by one help us understand the others, but on different scales. (This effect is what I was referring to in the introductory chapter when I said that the exchange of messages takes the structure of a metaphor. In the concluding chapter, we’ll add another term—other people—when we ask what the paradoxical process of appropriation can reveal about our interactions with others.)

Let’s consider what the category of the text helps us see about metaphor (text on a micro-scale) and meaningful action (text on a macro-scale) (table 2). One of the defining features of a text is that its content makes propositional claims. In other words, it says, in varying degrees of complexity, that X is Y or A does B. But its content is fixed, and when readers encounter it, authors are not present to clarify their intention. Not only that, but the audience for a text is potentially limitless: it is available to anyone who can read it. In this way, texts are distanced from their authors, whose intention ceases to provide the scale by which “correct” interpretations are measured. In fact, a text’s unruly polysemy—the way it allows for competing plausible interpretations—renders authors’ intentions largely unknowable.9 To what, then, do their propositional claims refer? According to Ricoeur, because they can’t refer to a shared environment (their references are “non-ostensive,” to use his technical term),10 they make their own world. As abstract as this idea sounds, it’s a common enough experience, especially in fiction. Think of how J. K. Rowling creates the world of Harry Potter or J. R. R. Tolkien the world of Middle-earth. All texts make a world, and the reader’s task is to discern it.

Metaphors function in a similar way. They make propositional claims (“The sea is like wine”), and, once made, the comparison constitutes the metaphor. Its form is fixed. The author’s intention remains inaccessible, leaving readers—who could be anyone—to interpret a metaphor by exploring how its figurative meaning goes beyond its literal meaning.11 The same is true of meaningful action. The things people do are meaningful to the degree that other people interpret them. (You’ve interpreted actions any time you’ve tried to explain why someone did something.) An action’s content is fixed, so to speak, through a type of inscription: “We say that such-and-such event left its mark on its time,” explains Ricoeur: “We speak of marking events.”12 (Think of the way the attacks of September 11, 2001, marked world politics, or how they affected people’s individual and collective understandings of their relationships to strangers.) The actors, like the authors of a text, are not necessarily present to explain their intentions, which are open to interpretation by anyone observing the actions, either as they happen or, more likely, retrospectively. And as time passes, people interpret them in new contexts, outside the shared environment where they took place. They, too, make non-ostensive reference to a new world.13

Sources: Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, chaps. 3, 6, and 7, and Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, chaps. 4–8.

What we are beginning to see is that to understand a text is to enter into the world it creates through its propositional claims. Put another way, to read like you mean it is to explore the world made by a text. Ricoeur calls this appropriation, a term he uses to describe the work one undertakes “‘to make one’s own’ what was initially ‘alien’,” which “takes the place of the answer in the dialogical situation.”14 In that respect, it’s what has the potential to constitute written discourse as an event. But it is a paradoxical act because in order to explore a text’s new world, readers must give up the idea that their own world, by which I mean the sum total of their ideas about their identity and their relationships to others, is stable or complete. They exchange certainty in their own situation for something new and risky: the world of the text, if it is compelling enough, reconfigures their understanding of themselves.

In this way, appropriation acts as the counterpart to the distanciation across time and space that puts the author’s intention out of reach. Readers interpret a metaphor or text, or observers interpret an action, making an argument about what it means, but other people can interpret the same metaphor, text, or action differently. People must defend their interpretations against those of others, and as a result, their act of appropriation becomes “not so much a possession of the world around us as a dispossession of the certainty with which we might presume to understand” the world—or a text within it.15 In other words, in order to defend their interpretation, people must see it as others see it, stepping outside of themselves—distancing themselves from the world they take for granted—in order to see themselves as others do.16

But I’m getting ahead of myself. The experiences that accompany this process are as important as the process itself (they become a lens through which to observe our reading strategies), and I have said nothing about them yet. They will be the focus of the rest of this chapter and then the three chapters that follow. I’ve observed in my own experience of reading, not to mention that of my students, that one place where people often stop is at the beginning because they feel anxious about the disorientation a difficult text causes. They feel lost in the face of what I described in the introductory chapter as the “literal is not,” or the confounding nature of the text’s literal meaning, which leads to confusion because its component parts—the things it says—appear to contradict each other or what we think we know.

But as I’ll show here, the feeling of being lost can become positive if we find ways to harness it. When we feel that what we’re reading is more than we can comprehend, we need to wander a bit to establish a new perspective (the focus of chapter 2). When we do, there’s a moment of excitement or euphoria, as what we’re reading gives us a new way to think about the world (chapter 3), although we must find ways not to let our euphoria get the better of us. We are still tethered to the text, whose form does not change, but we can find a new freedom in the space between it and the world it opens up (chapter 4).

Fear and Distanciation

Halfway through his book How to Do Things with Words, J. L. Austin makes a useful observation for our discussion here. He is trying—and failing, albeit deliberately—to use grammatical forms to devise a way to distinguish between sentences that merely say something and sentences that do the things they say, the way “I name this ship the Queen Elizabeth,” spoken by the right person in the right circumstances, officially christens a ship.17 His purpose is to challenge philosophers’ and linguists’ fundamental notions of how language works. He tries one way, which fails, then another way, which also fails, until he arrives at a point where, in a parenthetical aside, he admits, “I must explain again that we are floundering here. To feel the firm ground of prejudice slipping away is exhilarating, but it brings its revenges.”18 In these two sentences, he captures the tension between the fear we feel when we discover that what we thought we knew was actually a hindrance and the exhilaration we experience when we read something that causes us to see the world in new ways. In effect, he suggests a way to approach distanciation and its effects on readers obliquely, through the disorientation and fear we feel when we read difficult texts.

I suggested in the introductory chapter that some texts make us feel confused or angry when we read them. A more succinct way to say the same thing is that they negate us: they seem to tell us (or we take them as evidence) that we are not capable enough, not smart enough—not, not, not.19 Certain authors and fields are especially controversial in this respect. Over the course of the last two decades, there has been an acrimonious debate in particular about writing in the human sciences, a term I am using to designate both humanities and social sciences.20 In the mid-1990s, Dennis Dutton, editor of the journal Philosophy and Literature, sponsored the Bad Writing Contest to draw attention to what he saw as “the most egregious examples of awkward, jargon-clogged academic prose from all over the English-speaking world.”21 Poor writing, he thought, was really just a sign of sloppy thinking, and it was endemic to fields such as English, cultural studies, sociology, and anthropology that, in his view, tried to elevate trivial topics as part of a cynical ploy to increase enrolments in fields that students found old and stodgy. “No one denies the need for a specialized vocabulary in biochemistry or physics or in technical areas of the humanities like linguistics,” he wrote in a Wall Street Journal article about the contest. “But among literature professors who do what they now call ‘theory’—mostly inept philosophy applied to literature and culture—jargon has become the emperor’s clothing of choice” (figure 3).22 He made the idea of negation explicit: “If readers are baffled by a phrase like ‘disclosing the absentation of actuality’”—drawn from Paul Fry’s A Defense of Poetry—“they will imagine it’s due to their own ignorance.”23 In response to the sentence by Judith Butler that “won” the contest in 1999, he says, “This sentence beats readers into submission and instructs them that they are in the presence of a great and deep mind. Actual communication has nothing to do with it.”24

His was not the only salvo. At the same time as Dutton was running the Bad Writing Contest, Alan Sokal, a physicist and mathematician, pulled off the biggest academic hoax in the last half century. Like Dutton, he thought that jargon-laden writing in the human sciences served to hide sloppy thinking, but he went still further, accusing the authors of such works of being more motivated by ideology than rigorous thought. To make his point, he submitted an article to Social Text, a journal that was a standard-bearer of the type of scholarship he wanted to challenge. Social Text published the article, called “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” in its spring-summer 1996 issue. In it, Sokal argued that gravity was merely a social construction, not something real that everyone experienced, an idea that he claimed advanced “progressive” political goals. After it was published, he revealed in another publication, Lingua Franca, that it was a hoax meant to answer the question, “Would a leading North American journal of cultural studies—whose editorial collective includes such luminaries as Fredric Jameson and Andrew Ross—publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors’ ideological preconceptions?”25 The answer was yes, he said, despite the fact that he wrote the article to be an “annotated bibliography of the charlatanism and nonsense purveyed by dozens of prominent French and American intellectuals.”26 The editors disputed his accusation that their criterion for acceptance was ideology rather than rigour, although they also described the article, in a form of a posteriori rationalization, as an apparently clumsy attempt by an author they perceived as well-meaning who was trying to think outside his normal framework.27 Their response had little effect on the ensuing debate, during which Sokal’s supporters did not hide their glee in revealing what they saw as the vapid pseudo-intellectualism of scholars beholden only to their “progressive” ideological dogma.28

Nor did the debate end with Sokal’s article. Indeed, two decades later, Helen Pluckrose, James A. Lindsay, and Peter Boghossian produced a series of articles to submit to a range of journals, their goal being to demonstrate that Sokal’s trick would still work.29 They cut with a sharper knife. Whereas Sokal later argued that he wanted, ultimately, to strengthen humanities research by encouraging scholars to abandon the “currently fashionable postmodernist/poststructuralist/social-constructivist discourse,”30 Pluckrose and her colleagues wanted to tear down whole fields of studies, such as cultural studies and women’s studies, that they (along with legions of conservative political commentators) derided as “grievance studies.”

Of course, Social Text had its defenders, as do the fields attacked by Sokal’s imitators two decades later. Stanley Fish, for instance, accused Sokal of acting in bad faith and misunderstanding his main philosophical target, the idea of socially constructed reality. Something can be socially constructed and real, he argued, and to see philosophers (and sociologists) of science—Sokal’s main institutional targets—as rivals was to miss the point that they were undertaking a very different type of enterprise. They were not doing science but trying to understand how science was done.31

Addressing the question of “bad” writing more directly, some scholars have argued that everyone uses jargon and that even what appear to be clear statements can be explained, interpreted, or otherwise rephrased.32 For that reason, taking sentences out of context, as the sponsors of the Bad Writing Contest did, is also an act of bad faith, one to which the critics of “bad” writing can be subjected, too.33 A humanities scholar who uses difficult language is “not pretending to be a journalist,” according to Joan Scott, and to attack such scholars for bad writing is nothing more than “a kind of anti-intellectualism that is everywhere in the culture, a demand for things they already agree with.”34

The “winners” of the Bad Writing Contest also addressed the theme of anti-intellectualism. Common sense, Judith Butler responded, is pernicious because it is entrenched in ordinary language, and it takes difficult language to express difficult ideas that break free of this trap.35 (Not coincidentally, she points out, scholars attacked for bad writing are also often those trying to challenge the common-sense status quo.) Difficult writing results from the process of working through complex ideas, as Edward Said explained with respect to another “winner,” Homi Bhabha, because writers are aware of how language and thought influence each other and how words always evoke more than authors intend.36 For this reason, difficult writing stands as a bulwark against the homogenizing tendencies of the university-turned-job-training-centre.37

The Bad Writing Contest and the Sokal hoax (and its imitators) are useful here as an illustration. I’m not interested in the twists and turns of the decades-long debate that they provoked, other than to say that to read through the many exchanges now is to witness a conversation—if that term applies at all—where the participants talk past each other while insisting that they understand each other perfectly well, thank you very much. Instead, these debates suggest three possible ways to understand the feeling that readers have when they encounter a text they don’t understand. The first two are forms of negation. Difficult texts (or metaphors or meaningful actions) seem first to negate them as readers: they are not smart enough to understand them. Dutton and Sokal, on the other hand, seem to negate entire fields: authors are hiding the fact that they have nothing to say. Finally, the defenders of “bad” writing offer an explanation that doesn’t take the form of a negation: authors are wrestling with the task of expressing complex ideas.

One of the challenges readers face is that although there are three possible reasons they don’t understand these texts, by virtue of the very fact they don’t understand them, they can’t even determine which of the possibilities is correct. (If they understood them, then they could tell whether authors had something to say or not, and whether, as a result, they were in fact smart enough to judge them for themselves.) They’re a bit like the hapless pilot whose flying machine has collapsed in figure 4: they’ve lost their points of reference, and they’re floundering, to return to Austin. They “feel the firm ground of prejudice slipping away,” which may be “exhilarating,” but more than anything, they are aware of “its revenges.”38

One possibility that these debates leave largely unexplored is that people can learn to read difficult texts. If they do, they can also learn how to evaluate them and then decide for themselves which of the three possibilities suggested by the debates is the most plausible. In that respect, the negation they experience is valuable because it is a symptom of a greater interpretive uneasiness they experience when faced with any text (or metaphor or meaningful action). It is a result of their distanciation from a text. They cannot say with certainty “This text means _____” because their claim can be challenged, no matter how they fill in the blank. Nor can they appeal to the author’s intention, which is lost to them. All they can do is appeal to—and defend—their own understanding, which is always coloured by a certain degree of doubt. I’ll say more about this doubt in chapters 3 and 4 when I talk about the paradox of appropriation, but for now, I’m counting on the fact that you, too, have had this experience of bewilderment or frustration, where it feels like you’re falling through the void.

Falling Through the Void

If you haven’t, then I’m counting on the fact that you can imagine the experience. Literature and popular culture can help. Stories abound of people falling through the void, and here I propose to examine two. The first, Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, is well known, while the second, an episode of Star Trek: Voyager called “Barge of the Dead,” will be best known among the science fiction-loving demographic that includes me. I could choose others, but these illustrate the experience I want to discuss in ways that help us see facets of reading that might not otherwise be clear.

What I’m proposing to do, in effect, is to interpret these stories in ways that differ from how others have responded to them but remain nonetheless grounded in their specific propositional claims and the worlds they open up.39 What makes this approach possible is the fact of distanciation, as described above. (I mean, what are the authors going to do—tell me I’m wrong?) In this way, I use these stories as metaphors for interpretation. They reveal something novel about the dialectic of distanciation and appropriation, although to say that readers before a text are like Ebenezer Scrooge before the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, or like B’Elanna Torres on the Klingon Barge of the Dead, doesn’t mean that readers can be reduced to either of those characters in their respective situations. Instead, these comparisons invite us to see the act of reading through different lenses, which reveal aspects of reading that were not as clear before. The tension linking the components of my metaphors arises from the fact that these stories are polysemic, always possessing potential new readings, and I am consequently obligated to justify my interpretation in light of your potential challenges. My justification is grounded in the idea that what we see in these relationships, if my metaphors are any good, might compel us to think about reading in a new way.

Conclusion: To Read Is to Feel Lost

“Come on,” you say, now that we’ve reached the end of the chapter. “That’s ridiculous. Dickens was writing about Christmas, and the writers for Voyager were just trying to attract viewers so the network could get a good price for ads. They’re just stories. Why are you reading into them?”

“Okay,” I say. “Let’s find the writers and ask them. Do you have their phone number?”

I admit—I’m being cheeky. Maybe you say that only in my imagination. Maybe you’ve bought my argument. I am no more capable of knowing your reaction than you are of contacting Charles Dickens. It’s this fact that authorizes my apparent flight of interpretive fancy.

But to be clear, I’m not claiming that my reading of these stories, or of the controversies about “bad” writing in the human sciences, is authoritative. When I’m interpreting texts (Dickens or Voyager here, the biblical books of Exodus and Numbers in chapter 2, Plato’s Phaedrus or Sappho’s Fragment 31 in chapter 3, and so on), I’m not asking “What does this mean?” Instead I’m asking, “What does this reveal about the experience of reading?” The texts I have chosen affect us at an emotional level, and it’s at that level that we come to know what it is to read like you mean it. It’s a different type of knowing—visceral rather than cerebral, but also leading inductively to an intellectual understanding of this process.

I also want to show that written discourse, like its spoken counterpart, can become an event. Although the content of metaphors, texts, and meaningful actions is fixed, something happens in my encounter with them. They bring about a change, and that change is fleeting, occurs in a specific place, and refers to a world I come to share with the text (even if I cannot point to that world in the same way I point to objects in my Ottawa basement, where I like to write). This is how appropriation, which we’ve only just begun to explore, becomes a turn taken in a conversation, made possible by our recognition of the ways we flounder and, consequently, give up control.

Before we explore appropriation further, however, we must first discuss the ways we find perspective when we’re falling through the void. That is the topic of the next chapter.