(Over 60 diverse thinkers on how to get more from books)
Morrison was an African-American novelist and Nobel laureate.
Reading is a skill in the sense of knowing what words means or understanding a scholarly essay, but Morrison prefers the art (2006). The reader as an artist combines “willing acceptance coupled with intense inquiry” (ibid.). We only understand deeply when we simultaneously surrender, and remain attentive, to the author’s choices, so Morrison reads (ibid.):
slowly, digging for the hidden, questioning or relishing the choices the author made, eager to envision what is there, noticing what is not. In listening and in reading, it is when I surrender to the language, enter it, that I see clearly
In her own fiction, Morrison wanted the reader “to respond on the same plane an illiterate or preliterate reader would” (Morrison 2020, 265). She wanted to draw us out of coolly and distantly accepting data, so that we participated actively in “the nonnarrative, nonliterary experience of the text” (p. 264). This meant that she avoided revealing “an already established reality (literary or historical)” about which author and reader had prior agreement (p. 331). The reader, therefore, doesn’t participate in the text by interpreting it but by helping write it: creating this reality along with the author (p. 347). Morrison terms “invisible ink” the unwritten: “what lies under, between, outside the lines, hidden until the right reader discovers it” (p. 348). A book is not right for every reader, even readers who love it; a book is made for the reader “attuned to the invisible ink” (ibid.).
On this view, “the text is not always a quiet patient the reader brings to life” (ibid.). The author takes responsibility, too, by withdrawing metaphor and simile, writing leading sentences which “contain buried information that completes, invades, or manipulates the reading”, and deliberately leaving gaps which seduce the right reader to fill them—and thus, producing the text in its entirety and attesting to its living life (ibid.). In this way, “[t]he unwritten is as significant as the written” (ibid.). We may be annoyed by these strategies of manipulation if we’re not the right reader, while for others they represent “a gate partially open and begging for entrance” (p. 349). In this fashion Morrison forces the reader into helping her write: “it is the reader whom I summon in invisible ink, destabilizing the text and reorienting the reader” (pp. 349–350). Texts are neither stable nor complete, then; they depend on an active reader to notice the lacuna and continue writing the text (p. 350). Morrison describes the relationship between reading and writing in this way (Morrison 1994, xi):
Writing and reading are not all that distinct for a writer. Both exercises require being alert and ready for unaccountable beauty, for the intricateness or simple elegance of the writer’s imagination, for the world that imagination evokes. Both require being mindful of the places where imagination sabotages itself, locks its own gates, pollutes its vision. Writing and reading mean being aware of the writer’s notions of risk and safety, the serene achievement of, or sweaty fight for, meaning and response-ability.
The experience of attentive surrender that reading demands can be “profound, harrowing, beautiful; other times enraging, contemptible, unrewarding”, but is ultimately compelling (Morrison 2006). “I don’t need to the work; I want instead to”think” it”, Morrison explains, and she can then “do this again: read it and be there once more, anytime I like…[m]aking the work work while it makes me do the same” (ibid.). A reader can profit from a work they neither endorse nor enjoy.
To think the work we also need a critical consciousness. Morrison likens her realisation of this to having “been looking at a fishbowl…the glide and flick of the golden scales, the green tip, the bolt of white careening back from the gills; the castles at the bottom…and, suddenly I saw the bowl, the structure that transparently (and invisibly) permits the ordered life it contains to exist in the larger world” (Morrison 1994, 17). As a writer reading, she “came to realise the obvious: the subject of the dream is the dreamer” (ibid.). She found transparent the “self-evident ways that Americans choose to talk about themselves through and within a sometimes allegorical, sometimes metaphorical, but always choked representation of an Africanist presence” (ibid.). Not to see this explicit or implicit presence in American literature is actually difficult, requiring “a kind of wilful critical blindness” on the part of the reader (pp. 17–18, 45).
This “refusal of critical insight” has resulted from habit, manners, and political ideology, but assertion will not make the world un-racialised: “The act of enforcing racelessness in literary discourse is itself a racial act” (pp. 18, 45). The attempt to excise “the political from the life of the mind is a sacrifice that has proven costly” because “criticism that needs to insist that literature is not only “universal” but also “race-free” risks lobotomizing that literature, and diminishes both the art and the artist” (p. 12). We can’t ignore prejudice in literature or will it away; it is part of the work, and we should confront this.
There is a “willed scholarly indifference” to these topics, paralleling the many centuries of blindness to women and their lives in literature (p. 14). Non-academic readers and prominent critics in the United States “have never read, and are proud to say so, any African-American text”, and this refusal “repeats itself when they reread the traditional, established works of literature worthy of their attention” (p. 13). They fail to see “meaning in the thunderous, theatrical presence of black surrogacy—an informing, stabilizing, and disturbing element—in the literature they do study” (ibid.).
Literary criticism, in general, can diminish the reading experience. Morrison suggests that we can still enjoy Shakespeare so much because he didn’t have a literary critic (Morrison 2008, 88). Likewise, she “had the great good fortune” of reading Finnegans Wake without any critical assistance: “I don’t know if I read it right, but it was hilarious! I laughed constantly! I didn’t know what was going on for whole blocks but it didn’t matter because I wasn’t going to be graded on it” (ibid.). Full comprehension of a book is unnecessary for its enjoyment; if you don’t understand a book, reread it (p. 200). Ask: how can I inhabit the fictional world (ibid.)?
When we read, then, we should become simultaneously engaged in and watchful of what is being read (Morrison 1994, x). We can watch for the invisible ink, watch for where our prejudicial blindness distorts meaning, but also stop watching so we can become fully engaged in co-creating a world.