Chapter 4 To Read Is to Be Free

Freedom Within Ever Widening Bounds

Sometimes metaphors become victims of their own success. They are compelling when they cause us to see the world in a new way, but if I am so moved by a metaphor that I repeat it to you, and you are so moved that you repeat it to your friend, and your friend is so moved that they repeat it, too, it loses its element of surprise. It becomes predictable and loses its value as a metaphor, in some cases even becoming lexicalized or turned into a word. Ricoeur, for instance, gives the example of testa in Latin, meaning “little pot,” which becomes tête or “head” in French.3 It’s easy enough to think of other examples. To name one, my students will tell you (if they’ve paid any attention at all) that broadcasting used to refer to a form of seed propagation where gardeners or farmers scattered seeds indiscriminately over their fields, a sense that is mostly lost to us now.4

But there’s value in reviving them: “the rejuvenation of all dead metaphors . . . allow[s] a new conceptual production to be grafted onto the metaphorical production itself.”5 That’s my plan here. I want to talk about texts as doors, but outside of the clichés you might find on a greeting card you’d give to someone graduating from university, with saccharine platitudes about the worlds onto which they open. I want to talk about those doors and those worlds, but I want to make the metaphor urgent—and meaningful—again.

Here goes: texts are like doors. As thresholds, both serve a double function. First, when doors are closed, they form part of the wall, blocking our path. We must stop; we cannot simply pass through. Unless we push against them as they are designed to be pushed against (we turn the handle, we slide the door along its grooves), they push back (figure 11). Texts function in a similar way, as we have seen in the preceding chapters. They, too, push back, an action I described as a form of negation. We read texts, especially hard ones, but cannot simply impose our will upon them. We are Ebenezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carol, to return to chapter 1, arguing in vain with the spirits who show us what we need to see. We grasp for whatever will hold us.

We flounder at other times, too. The last chapter described the euphoria we experience as we are driven to make sense of things we read. If negation is disorienting because we feel like we have nothing to grasp, euphoria is disorienting because we have too many things to grasp. For this reason, the resistance presented by doors—and texts—is valuable. We have something to grasp, but not so many things that we feel lost. Freedom, paradoxically, depends on structure.

Providing structure is the second function of doors. They form part of the architecture of a whole house, which we can explore by using them to pass from one room to the next. Texts function in a similar way. To explain what I mean, I first want to make an important distinction between the physical world and the symbolic worlds we construct for ourselves. The physical world consists in the objects, people, and places that surround us, which we cannot know directly, as our interaction with them is always mediated by our senses, but which we assume to exist independently of us or our perception. Symbolic worlds, on the other hand, are ones we construct from the meanings we make of the physical world. We interpret some things as causes, some as effects, and some as merely incidental, part of the backdrop that provides the context for the events in our lives. Symbolic worlds provide order that we can impose on the physical world; we navigate through them instinctively, usually without reflection, taking their apparent completeness for granted.6

Texts, like doors, provide structure—words arranged in a specific way, evoking ideas that, although open to interpretation, remain tethered to the words themselves. They create a new world to explore—Narnia or Star Trek or the world of Christmas that Scrooge discovers after his visits from the spirits. But we must open them as they are designed to be opened: just as a “push” door will not yield no matter how hard we pull, a text will not yield no matter how hard we try to force it to conform to our expectations. To enter through the door it provides, we must let go of our unreflexive certainty in what we think we know. We make the text’s world our own—we “appropriate” it, in Ricoeur’s term—by loosening our grip on our own symbolic world: “It is in allowing itself to be carried off towards the reference of the text that the ego divests itself of itself.”7

The freedom we experience consists in the removal of barriers, not a vertiginous untethering. It is not an absolute freedom. Instead, our symbolic worlds expand and, figuratively speaking, we have more room within which to move. Although we will never have infinite space, we can always expand those worlds further, as there are always more texts to read (or metaphors to discover or actions to interpret). Our freedom is one of movement within ever-expanding bounds.

The Tether of the Text

Thus doors and texts are characterized by contradictory forces: they stop us until we learn how to open them, and then they propel us into someplace new. The freedom they grant is meaningful because it also presents limits, even if those limits can always expand. For texts, as well as metaphors and meaningful actions (texts on smaller or larger scales), we experience this tension in the tethering effect that words or other signs have on us. In our interpretation, we can pull against the text, exploring it for new meaning, but the text pulls back. It justifies some readings but not others, and our task as readers is to demonstrate the congruence (or accuracy) and plenitude (or completeness) of our interpretation (see chapter 2).

Some checks on interpretation are contained within the text itself, but some, which we have set aside until now, are outside of it. Here we return to a broad distinction I made in the introductory chapter between a social scientific paradigm, where rigour is defined by reproducibility, and that of the humanities, where rigour is measured by persuasiveness. Although I might identify these paradigms as social science and humanities, the fundamental difference is that of their conception of rigour, so I will refer to them instead as the reproducibility and persuasiveness paradigms (see table 4).8 I argued that social scientific work was grounded in unacknowledged ways in metaphor but also, conversely, that interpretations of metaphor and other texts could be tested against social scientific research. I turn to that task here to evaluate my metaphors about reading.

To use the criteria of reproducibility to evaluate claims made within the persuasiveness paradigm, I turn to the idea of resemblance, which plays a role in both. Within the persuasiveness paradigm, resemblance is closely linked to probability. When Ricoeur argues that the most probable interpretation is the best, he is translating the Greek word εἰκός or eikōs, a form of the word meaning “to seem or appear” that also gives us icon in English. In French, he uses two words, both of which become probable in the English translations I am using. One is a cognate, probable, but the other is vraisemblable or “true-seeming,” related to the English word verisimilitude.9 The terms eikōs and vraisemblable reveal a dimension that probable hides, that of resemblance: an interpretation is persuasive when it presents the same image or content as that of the text.

With respect to the reproducibility paradigm, Karl Popper, in his influential treatise The Logic of Scientific Discovery, also emphasizes verisimilitude or “nearness to the truth.”10 Science, Popper says, should be testable, and to that end, scientists should be able to formulate hypotheses that are non-contradictory (that is, they cannot be true at the same time as their opposites) and that relate to the physical world (that is, they are not merely metaphysical or philosophical).11 Scientists can achieve a description that is “near to the truth” by transforming experience—the way they encounter the world—into method, with criteria for developing and testing hypotheses.

Historically, Popper’s approach challenged scientists’ certainty about their findings. Where before they had sought to verify hypotheses in a definitive way, Popper showed that verification was at best provisional. Any conclusion arrived at through the formulation and testing of hypotheses, he pointed out in a well-cited example, “may always turn out to be false: no matter how many instances of white swans we may have observed, this does not justify the conclusion that all swans are white.”12 A single black swan disproves the hypothesis. For Popper, the goal was no longer verifiability but falsifiability: statements could not be proven true, but they could be proven false, and the goal of empirical science was the accumulation of evidence over time, which suggested the accuracy (or verisimilitude) of the hypothesis being tested.

We can translate this philosophical approach into a concrete method (and eventually compare it to the hermeneutic approach we have been developing) by thinking about its implementation (figure 12). Whether we’re striving for reproducibility or persuasiveness, the first step is the same: we make observations. Something piques our interest, and we take a closer look. We choose tools that let us peer more carefully at those dimensions that interest us.

Social scientists, formulating and testing hypotheses in line with ideals of falsifiability, treat this stage as that of data gathering. For their tests to be reproducible, they need to minimize the impact of their role as data collectors, implementing methods that others can reproduce. For instance, researchers in the field of communication who treat media as stimuli that elicit measurable, predictable responses might work to generate random samples drawn from well defined groups of people. They would be explicit in how they gathered and measured people’s responses, so that other researchers—drawing samples from similar groups of people, administering the same test, and using the same measurement tools to describe people’s responses—would ideally arrive at similar conclusions, even if the individuals they chose were not the same.13 As I’ve indicated in the figure 12, this process is circular: the tools we use reveal new things about the object we’re investigating, which in turn raise new questions for which we must find new tools, and so on.

Similarly, once we’ve gathered evidence, we can ask two questions about it (figure 13). What does it explain, and what do we know about it? The first question, which seems self-evident, works in conjunction with the second, which requires us to step back and observe our observations, so to speak. Researchers, regardless of their paradigm, make a habit of being skeptical about their evidence. It is always possible that some unforeseen factor has influenced what they see or think they see. If they’re running a survey, maybe people lied. If they’re doing a content analysis, maybe their database was missing something big (but because it was their primary database, they didn’t know that what it provided was incomplete). If they’re doing archival research, maybe there’s a miscategorized document squirrelled away somewhere that they can’t find.

So what do they do? They find ways to corroborate what they have found. If their goal is reproducibility, they ask whether they have used the appropriate analytical tools. As with the process of data gathering, they want to be sure that, as far as possible, they’ve eliminated any influence they might exert over the analysis. They take their observations, gathered carefully and with an explicit account of their assumptions, and apply tests to decide whether they support or refute the hypothesis. (If the results of the test do not falsify their hypothesis, then they strengthen it, but only ever provisionally.) Often such tests employ inferential statistics, for example, which allow researchers to describe the likelihood that a similar test, run under similar conditions, would produce similar results.14

Researchers also reflect on the experiment itself to be sure that it is appropriate and that they have run it properly. They check and recheck their protocols, their instruments, and their results, which they compare to those found by others in similar situations, to see whether their interpretations are consistent. This process, too, is recursive: as they reflect on their evidence, they revise what they think it explains, which in turn prompts them to seek new evidence, and so on. The question about what their evidence explains, in spite of its apparent straightforwardness, is linked to their reflection about their evidence in a relationship of mutual dependence.

Although the tools people use in pursuit of experimental reproducibility are diverse, they have blind spots, as critics working inside and outside the reproducibility paradigm have shown. Those working within it observe, for instance, that “generalizations, although perhaps statistically meaningful, have no applicability in the individual case.”15 That is, although a certain percentage of people might react in a given way to a stimulus, this fact is “at best incomplete evidence” that any given individual will react that way.16 Similarly, reproducible analytical tools, especially statistics, strip context from the situation researchers are analyzing, leaving them, as outsiders looking in, ill-equipped to explain the meaning that members of the group make of the phenomenon they are studying.17 Researchers from outside the reproducibility paradigm point out other shortcomings. In particular, in research about people, the tools of reproducibility tend to turn thinking, acting subjects into objects.18 If generalizations have limited applicability to individual cases, it’s because individual cases—that is, individual people—have the capacity for surprise. They can choose to act in unpredictable ways, although those ways might make more sense to researchers who grasp the context of a person’s actions.

Going further, the models that researchers use to explain the phenomena they observe are fundamentally metaphorical.19 Mary Hesse makes this point with respect to the natural sciences. To say that sound is a wave, for instance, is to compare two distinct things (sound and the movement of water), and, in so doing, one can simultaneously fall short in one’s explanation and go too far. What I mean is that a metaphor cannot exhaust the richness of the comparison: sound may have wave-like qualities, but those are not the only ones it has. At the same time, through the association that it creates between unlike things, metaphor changes our conception of each: the two things “are seen as more like each other; they seem to interact and adapt to one another, even to the point of invalidating their original literal descriptions if these are understood in the new, postmetaphoric sense.”20 In the case of sound, “a wave theory of sound makes sound seem more vibrant.”21 We produce meaning in the tension between the things being compared, meaning that is more slippery than scientific language strives to be.

Do these shortcomings disqualify the paradigm of reproducibility? Not at all. To understand why, let us think about how they complement the paradigm of persuasiveness, where we can apply the same strategies of observation, inquiry, and analysis (as, indeed, we have been doing throughout this book). With respect to observation and inquiry (what we can observe and what tools we need to take a closer look), we can ask whether a reader’s interpretation follows from the metaphor, text, or meaningful action—whether, in short, it meets the criteria of congruence and plenitude. With respect to analysis (what our evidence explains and what we know about our evidence), we can ask what links the interpreter to the text. Understanding this link is vitally important in research about speakers and the communities to which they belong, for instance, as some observers are better positioned to interpret people’s actions than others. To give myself as an example, I interpret my home country of the United States, or my home state of North Dakota, differently than my colleagues at the Canadian university where I teach because I have spent my life participating in the communities that reside there. My insight is not without its flaws, however, as I struggle to be objective, and my Canadian colleagues often see things that I miss because I am too close. Here, too, the questions implied in these strategies are recursive: as we make observations, choose and apply tools, and interpret our results, we must constantly return to prior stages, as our results point us to new places to make observations, beginning the circuit again.

Indeed, here is where the reproducibility and persuasiveness paradigms intersect. One source of observations we can use to make and validate interpretive guesses comes from the results of reproducible research.22 As we’ll see in the next section, for example, we can take research about how people read that has been generated within a paradigm of reproducibility and use it to evaluate my interpretive argument in this book. We cannot, however, take the results of reproducible research at face value any more than we can take my metaphors at face value. Instead, we must ask what we know about the evidence used by reproducible research. What does it reveal or hide? And because the questions about observation and analysis are recursive, the stages of observation and analysis are recursive, too (figure 14). We must perform each of these steps again and again, recognizing how the answers to questions at one stage shape the questions we ask in the next, in ways that continually sharpen our analysis.

We’re dealing here with a hermeneutic circle, a back-and-forth mode of interpretation that involves reading the parts of a text in the context of the whole and vice versa. Friedrich Schleiermacher, the eighteenth-century theologian I mentioned in chapter 2, describes a hermeneutic circle this way:

Complete knowledge always involves an apparent circle to which it belongs, that each part can be understood only out of the whole to which it belongs, and vice versa. Also, within each given text, its parts can only be understood in terms of the whole, and so the interpreter must gain an overview of the work by cursory reading before undertaking a more careful interpretation.23

What I’m suggesting here specifies the steps involved. It also shows how, by using different types of evidence to demonstrate the congruence and plenitude of our interpretation of a text, we come to a better understanding of the categories of congruence and plenitude themselves: they operate in dialogue with a variety of types of evidence, linked together in a recursive mode of inquiry.

Ricoeur gives us yet another way to think of this hermeneutic circle. For him, the back-and-forth motion is not between a text and its parts, but between the reader and the text: readers come to understand themselves by letting “the work and its world enlarge the horizon of understanding” they have of themselves.24 They relinquish the control they would exercise over the world as they understand it and, in return, a new world—that of the text—opens up.

Metacognition and Experimental Research About Reading

Let us consider a concrete example, that of research about how to read hard texts. This research is vast, so much so, in fact, that it would be an act of hubris to try to describe it exhaustively.25 Instead, I want to describe it in broad strokes before focusing on research about one specific approach teachers have used with students.

Much of this research focuses on metacognition, or the ways we think about thinking as we read. For instance, one way to help students learn to read difficult texts is reciprocal reading, involving teachers who discuss texts with students, “questioning, summarizing, clarifying, and predicting” what an author says.26 Another is the SOAR method, which involves selecting ideas from a text, organizing them, associating them (or drawing connections), and regulating one’s learning (or practising the skills one has acquired).27 I want to focus here on a method called SQ3R, a name that refers to its five components: survey, question, read, recite, and review. Developed by Francis Robinson in the 1940s, it is “the grandfather of study strategies.”28 Like those mentioned above, it focuses on metacognition, and its influence is difficult to overstate: even researchers who do not mention it specifically make similar recommendations, prompting students to formulate questions to guide their reading, to scan for cues before they begin to read, and to reflect on what they’ve read once they’re done.29 Researchers have also built on SQ3R, often by increasing the number of steps, resulting in methods such as SQ10R.30

Robinson diagnosed a number of problems students faced, the biggest of which was that they “tend to get lost in detail and so miss the forest for the trees.”31 What he meant was that they struggled to see the relationship of individual sentences, paragraphs, and sections to an author’s larger argument, a fact made clear in their “indiscriminate note-taking.”32 In the decades since, researchers have identified this problem again and again, remarking, for instance, on students’ “indiscriminate, almost random use of the yellow highlighter.”33 They have also diagnosed related challenges: students struggle to recognize the structure of an author’s argument, a problem that is both a cause and an effect of their failure to adapt their reading strategies to different types of texts and contexts.34 Ultimately, they are still working to acquire an advanced skill of interpretation where they can recognize ambiguity without having to resolve it. One thing that makes certain texts difficult is that authors explore ambiguity in ways with which students are unfamiliar. Throughout their years in primary and secondary school, they’ve learned to apply models such as the five-paragraph essay (intro—body paragraph—body paragraph—body paragraph—conclusion), with its strictly structured format (topic sentence—thesis statement—evidence—evidence—evidence).35 These models, when applied to difficult texts, work on the implicit assumption that the things students read have a meaning that can be pinned down. This is not an assumption that the authors of the texts share. Hence one point of disconnect between what professors want to teach and what students expect to learn.36

Another important disconnect relates to why professors and students read. Professors see reading outside of class as a way to focus on the application of ideas in class, or to work through the ambiguity authors incorporate into their texts and, in so doing, participate in the process of meaning-making. That idea—to explore a text in ways that allow readers to come to their own understanding of it—is foreign to most students, who often treat reading instrumentally. Through experience, they learn that they can earn the same grade by reading selectively, following professors’ cues about what is important by noticing what questions they ask on exams. If it’s possible to achieve a desired grade efficiently, and if readings lead to confusion (due to their ambiguity) rather than new insights, why bother expending the effort necessary to read them?37

Hence the value of the solutions Robinson proposed in the 1940s. The purpose of the SQ3R method was to give students tools to recognize the structure of authors’ arguments (in all their ambiguity) and to adapt their strategies as a result—in short, to come to see the relationship of a text’s individual parts to the whole of an author’s argument. The method is simple. First, students survey a text: they glance at headings, for instance, the way they might glance at a map to get the lay of the land. (A student reading this book might look at the headings I’ve used so far in this chapter: “Freedom Within Ever Widening Bounds,” “The Tether of the Text,” “Metacognition and Experimental Research About Reading,” and so on.) Second, they turn those headings into questions, so as to “arouse [their] curiosity and so increase comprehension.”38 (Why freedom within bounds? What “tether”? What is metacognition?) Third, they read the text with those questions in mind, looking for answers. Fourth, they recite those answers, or, to choose language that feels less dated, they re-express the ideas they’ve uncovered: they close the book and, in their own words, write down answers to the questions they’ve posed. Finally, having repeated this process for each section of the text, they review the notes they took at the recitation/re-expression stage.

Let us return to the question of evidence within the reproducibility paradigm. Robinson cites a series of psychological experiments examining students divided into a control group (who read texts normally) and an experimental group (who employed different parts of what would become the SQ3R method). When a group of second-year students was trained to skim headings before reading, for instance, they read 24 percent faster than those receiving no such training.39 The purpose of this experimental design was reproducibility: because the control and experimental groups shared similar sets of traits except for the one being tested, researchers attributed the differences they observed to the one experimental trait. In principle, this design would ensure that anyone running the same experiment would arrive at similar results. Although Robinson did not run these experiments himself, he used their results in both inductive and deductive ways. His approach was inductive when he gathered together the disparate results, each of which related to a part of the method he proposed, and synthesized them to arrive at SQ3R. His approach was deductive when he reorganized the findings into syllogisms, or logical if-then statements (if students skim headings, then they can read more efficiently), that then combined to build larger logical systems (if students can read more efficiently, then they can come to see how the parts of a text relate to the whole of an argument).

One feature of the reproducibility paradigm, of course, is that within it, results are only ever provisional. In the years since Robinson proposed the SQ3R method, it has come under closer scrutiny. The first critique to which it is subject is conceptual: it simply “does not account for every reason why a student might struggle with comprehension of an expository text.”40 More concretely, despite its origins in empirical research, it has been subject to little verification as such, and there is little evidence to suggest that SQ3R is effective. On the contrary, “students who use SQ3R often achieve no higher than students who use their preferred methods,” possibly because SQ3R is “difficult for students to learn and apply.”41 Dharma Jairam and his co-authors account for these shortcomings by observing that Robinson developed SQ3R during a time when psychologists favoured “passive addition of information usually through rote learning activities like rehearsal.”42 SQ3R’s popularity, according to recent researchers, thus appears to derive more from its being “considered part of the strategy canon” than from its demonstrated efficacy.43

In other words, what we see with respect to the ways professors have used SQ3R over time to inculcate in-depth reading habits is an application of Popper’s experimental method in the social sciences. Robinson built on hypotheses that were verified, but always only provisionally. They remained—and remain—open to revision, and research in the intervening decades has drawn elements of SQ3R into question.

Intertwined Paradigms: Reproducibility ↔ Persuasiveness

If we take a step back, we see that the paths of inquiry that people follow within the persuasiveness paradigm intertwine with those of the reproducibility paradigm, and vice versa. Imagine a scholar (me, for instance) working within the persuasiveness paradigm who asks what they can observe about reading and then finds Robinson’s book or a critique of his SQ3R approach. These ideas give our scholar something new to observe, the effects of which cascade through their inquiry. What new tools should our scholar use? What does this evidence explain? What do they know about this evidence?

Consider table 5, which reworks the diagram of the hermeneutic circle we considered above. My approach in this book, which I situate within the persuasiveness paradigm, has shown that reading negates us before propelling us into a new world. If I turn to the reproducibility paradigm to look for new tools, I find the experiments Robinson cites or those that his critics conduct. There are clear points of convergence between our arguments. Narrowly speaking, SQ3R provides tools to formulate and validate guesses by re-expressing section headings as questions to guide the act of reading. Broadly speaking, SQ3R and other metacognitive approaches provide tools to relate the parts of the text to the whole of an author’s argument by prompting students to consider the mechanics of authors’ arguments. This, of course, is a hermeneutic circle.

Thus in the reproducibility paradigm I find evidence of dimensions of reading that I had not considered: people who read iteratively are more efficient and have better recall, an idea that supports my assertion that reading is a complex, iterative process consisting in a back-and-forth movement between the parts of a text and the whole of an argument. But, skeptic that I am, I also note the points of divergence, the most important of which relate to the instrumental terms that researchers use to define reading. Robinson, for instance, suggests that a student wants “any suggested method to help him (1) select what he is expected to know, (2) comprehend these ideas rapidly, (3) fix them in memory, and later (4) review efficiently for examinations.”44 Although he does not explicitly equate these abilities with reading, they are his focus when he talks about how students deal with a text. And it’s not just Robinson. This instrumental logic is manifest in the emphasis different institutions put on measuring discrete skills. To give one example, government policymakers encourage research focusing on the acquisition of “sophisticated content knowledge, study skills, and the ability to proficiently navigate various sources of information.”45 To give another, as I wrote in the introductory chapter, my university requires me to incorporate measurable learning objectives into my course syllabi, leading me to write things like, “By the end of the course, students will be able to (1) identify and explain conflicting ways people have answered questions about communication and (2) find and use evidence to answer questions about communication.”46

Consider what this approach blinds us to. We miss the driftlessness that comes from feeling lost, just as we miss the euphoria that comes from following our drive to find meaning in the world. These experiences are key to reading, if by reading we mean opening ourselves to the world revealed by a text. In this respect, the emphasis on proficient study skills comes at a tremendous cost. It makes us feel as if we are failing when we feel lost when the opposite is true: driftlessness is a necessary step because it puts us in a position to engage with the paradox of appropriation. For all its value, this experimental work turns people into objects rather than thinking subjects and misidentifies confusion as an obstacle to overcome, rather than as an important step in entering the world a text creates. With this in mind, I return to the first questions: what can I observe? With these new arguments in mind, what must I look for, and what tools do I need?

We can do the same exercise from the perspective of a researcher working within the reproducibility paradigm (table 6). Experimental research has shown that students acquire discrete skills through an iterative form of metacognition. But experimental researchers, like their hermeneutic counterparts, are aware of the things they cannot explain. If one such researcher turns to hermeneutics, they might find that their empirical approach is founded on metaphor: by instrumentalizing discrete skills, it defines reading in terms of something else, moving “from one realm to another, non-intersecting realm,”47 in much the same way as the communication researchers I wrote about in the introductory chapter. They might also find that metaphor is useful because it opens up new possibilities of interpretation to address dimensions of reading beyond the realm of experiment. At the same time, they would see a shortcoming in hermeneutic evidence, namely the impossibility of generalizing its conclusions, which must be defended through a mode of persuasion built on a qualitatively different warrant. Like our imagined hermeneutic scholar above, our hypothetical experimental researcher, taking this new tool into account, would return to the first questions they posed, asking, what can I observe? If I take metaphor seriously, what must I look for now, and what tools do I need?

In this way, the reproducibility and persuasiveness paradigms intertwine, each influencing the other at the point where scholars look for new evidence to build on their observations: things scholars observe within the one paradigm answer questions raised by scholars in the other. However, although they help fill each other’s gaps, they do not do so completely. The need for the back-and-forth movement points to the open-endedness of both, whether in the provisional nature of experimental research or in the new worlds opened by metaphors, texts, and meaningful actions.

Conclusion: Distanciation and Appropriation Beyond the Text

As we move toward the concluding chapter, a recap is in order. In the introductory chapter, I said that we would explore metaphor’s paradoxical is not/is structure, or the tension between the “literal is not”—metaphor’s literal meaning, which is accessible but not necessarily true—and the “metaphorical is”—its figurative meaning, which has truth that is not easily accessible. Then we explored four metaphors answering the question “What does it mean to read?” Chapters 1 and 2 were about the “literal is not.” If we are looking for literal meaning, difficult texts negate us: we read them at the risk of feeling confused and angry (chapter 1). And in so doing, they seem to withdraw our familiar points of reference (chapter 2). We grasp for something to hold on to. We flounder. We wander.

Chapters 3 and 4 were about the “metaphorical is.” When we let go of our expectations, whether because we are compelled by the text (or metaphor or meaningful action) we are trying to understand or because we choose to, we experience something like euphoria where we are pushed beyond ourselves (chapter 3). But that euphoria is the inverse of the negation we explored earlier: we lose our points of reference and risk coming untethered from the text itself. That tether has been the focus of this chapter: we are bound to the text, and as much as we pull against its literal impossibilities, the text pulls back. In the tension between the “literal is not” and the “metaphorical is,” we find a new space to explore. A world opens up that we can make our own precisely because we have let go—willingly or not—of the interpretive authority we thought we had. It is only by accepting that we might not know what we think we know that we can appropriate the world of the text.

Thus we have arrived here, where, as promised, I have held my metaphors up to scrutiny, my goal being to evaluate them from a perspective that I began by critiquing—a social scientific mode of inquiry modelled after the natural sciences—only to discover the degree to which it criss-crossed with my hermeneutic approach. We have identified a key oversight in the reproducibility paradigm, namely that it is built, ultimately, on metaphor. But that observation does not allow us now somehow to complete the reproducibility paradigm, as if metaphor were the missing piece we could plug into our puzzle and declare our project done. Instead, our observation of this shortcoming forces us to recognize metaphor’s fundamental unresolvability, apparent in its is not/is structure. And that recognition should cause us to look again at my metaphors for reading. They do not exhaust what it means to read. Far from it. There are always more metaphors to answer the question, “What does it mean to read?”

This inexhaustibility of metaphor, combined with the processes of distanciation and appropriation, leads us to the concluding chapter. There is a pleasure in reading—in becoming lost and finding our ways into new worlds—that we can find also in interactions with other people. We’ve explored meaning-bearing phenomena at the micro-, mezzo-, and macro-scales—metaphor, text, meaningful action—and now we go one step further. How do we “read” other people—how do we encounter them and listen to what they have to tell us—in all their complex ambiguity?