Reading is an art under threat. Humanities scholars, with our literary inclinations, have frequently perceived such a crisis. But now the digital world has shattered reading into a myriad flickering shards. And the book emerges as a precious sanctuary.
The book has always offered a separate, sacred, private space where a remarkably intimate conversation is kindled between writer and reader. Today, in a world assailed by distraction, it offers a rare refuge for heart, soul and mind. The book is an endangered artefact because, as a volume of bound paper cradled in one’s hands, it is free of advertising between paragraphs. It does not aim to keep you flitting across the surface; rather, it conspires to let you fall into imaginative depths. Reading promotes such a deep, uninterrupted immersion that it generates unique brain waves and proves profoundly relaxing and truly renewing.
Reading is a methodology of a different kind
The modern corporate university undervalues the book, and therefore reading. Performance measures are skewed towards counting peer-reviewed international journals. The local home audience, however large, can seem less important than a distant overseas one, however small. Clear, everyday language might be regarded as less scholarly than specialized jargon. Books seem suspiciously holistic and accessible; they tend to break down the barriers between popular and learned culture rather than reinforcing them. “Popular” and “paperback” can become disdainful words. The ethical and educational responsibilities that humanities scholars feel for the reading public can therefore work against them in the university system.
If reading itself is under threat, so is it also a declining research method. In the digital age, I’m finding that reading whole texts is becoming unusual among researchers. Search engines are both a boon and a trap. Our scientific and social science colleagues tend to atomise the text; they digitise it, search it, list it, count it, graph it, cherry-pick it, use it. This technical approach is highly ranked by universities; it’s also seen to be more “scientific” because it is measurable. The new and valuable insights it furnishes are often extracted without regard to the grain and flow of the text. If you mine a text for terms or factoids you can accidentally overlook context, sequence and relationships – the very engine of literature and history. And you might miss patterns within the prose of ordinary unremarkable words that hold other truths.
Reading is a methodology of a different kind, one that respects the flow and integrity of the whole text. You begin at the beginning and read it in the order the writer crafted, every word, and you continue until the end. And then you go back to the start and do it all over again. Sequence matters. Literary context matters. What is left out matters. These are the ways by which we judge the internal coherence of a text.
Of course, reading too can work against the grain of the account. But it does so while continuing to grapple with the wholeness of the oeuvre. Literary scholars practise this methodology all the time; it is (or was) so normal that it might go unremarked. Historians do it too, applying it to memoirs, narratives and testimony. But scientism and search engines have eroded the commitment to this humanities discipline.
The writing of Alice Duncan-Kemp
These thoughts have been prompted by a deep reading task I recently set myself. I have just completed a book called Alice’s dreaming about the writer Alice Duncan-Kemp (1901-88) who grew up on a remote pastoral station in the Channel Country of south-western Queensland with Mithaka carers and teachers. The Aboriginal people who looked after young Alice were workers on the cattle station, domestic staff and stockmen and women. They were survivors of the frontier war and its long aftermath of brutality, removal and incarceration. They identified Alice as a sympathetic and curious witness; she was given a special name bestowed at a solemn dawn ceremony and she accompanied her Mithaka friends on walkabouts and long mustering trips, camping under the great canopy of stars. She glimpsed an enchanted world of stories where every rock, plant and feature had meaning, and she wrote about it for the rest of her life.
The literal truth of Alice’s half-a-million published words has come to matter very much, for her testimony was drawn upon in the Mithaka Native Title determination of 2015 and underpins research, fieldwork and storytelling on Mithaka Country today. In assessing the credibility of Alice’s written work, reading has been my chief research method. I have deployed all the traditional tools and techniques of the historian: trawling for corroborative evidence, analysing comparative accounts, meticulously reconstructing context, reading against the grain of the sources, peering into the background of the action, seeking out living memories, walking and studying the land. But I’ve also been committed to a deep reading of the body of Alice’s work in its glorious and frustrating isolation – all of it – for internal consistency, for what it can reveal between the lines.
Reading Alice
A couple of years ago, even though I had already read all of Alice’s books, I set myself this task: I opened page one of her first book and proceeded slowly through her publications in the order she wrote them, and as I read, I recorded my notes and reflections in a series of handwritten notebooks. By working with page and pen by hand, I trusted that I was liberating an old-fashioned alchemy. It was a commitment to engage sensually and chronologically with the wholeness of the oeuvre. The books are not just evidence to be mined. They offer ethnography, ecology, oral history and memoir; they are also literature.
I think this performance of slow reading released connections I could never otherwise have discerned. And I was constantly surprised. The consistency and flow of the text emerged strongly and convincingly as a parallel form of evidence. The poetic truthfulness of Alice’s testimony was compelling and insistent. Insights gained through reading gave me the stamina to critique and corroborate the historical detail. The book that I wrote begins with stories shaped out of that deep reading.
Let me finish by recommending two brilliant performances of reading by Australian humanities scholars: the literary scholar Tony Hughes-d’Aeth and the historian Inga Clendinnen (1934-2016). Tony Hughes-d’Aeth’s book, Like Nothing on this Earth (2017), is an environmental and emotional history of the Western Australian wheatbelt through the eyes and voices of its writers. Through a sustained reading of many authors about one region, d’Aeth offers a local story that is also of grim global stature, depicting “an extinction event on a grand scale”. He presents a century of history as a sudden event, displacing human time into geological time yet retaining the magical intimacy of literature.
Inga Clendinnen’s performance of reading was called that: Reading the Holocaust (1998). It was her attempt to overcome the chilled inertia and bafflement she felt in the face of such horror. She argued that it was the craft of history – a discipline of steady, methodical scrutiny and deep reading, a kind of unflinching moral intelligence—that might enable us to hold these terrible things in our contemplation. In spite of her grim subject, Clendinnen’s prose conjured a confidential intimacy that stemmed from her pleasure in “the secret society of readers”. Reading was her joy, and it was also her research method.
