Toby Brothers, Salon Director, shares her experience
Once we have learned how to read – to translate marks on a page into meaning – our education systems tend to assume the job is done, and we may get little further help to refine our technique. We are rarely taught how to negotiate more difficult texts or how to move more deeply into them, most of us are left to figure this out for ourselves.
Many of the studies we offer in the Lit Salon are works that some readers will already have tried to read and failed, ending up frustrated by the challenge. When a work is difficult, how do you find your way in? So many of the works that we offer become increasingly valuable and enriching once you have battled through the first time – the vision and the complex architecture unfold in increasingly satisfying ways once you have grasped the work as a whole – but how is this possible when you don’t feel you understand the book? And how do you keep going when you don’t understand what you are reading?
My own approach to challenging reading is to think about it as developing a tool kit to draw from, but first you need to understand that what you are building is your mind. There are strategies and approaches that may help but, overall, you need to go through the struggle and discomfort of not understanding to develop a greater knowledge and a more elastic understanding of language and narrative form.
Often, what makes reading a particular work difficult is that we have embedded ideas of what narrative is: we expect to be introduced to characters, a setting, a narrative position, and if we don’t meet that at the threshold of a text we feel lost. Part of the process of learning how to read more complex works is to slow down, to allow yourself to be perplexed, recognising that this is where learning happens. And then break it down: what don’t you understand? If you have read several pages but you are unable to put it together towards meaning, go back. Can you take a sentence at a time? I am a huge advocate for annotating a text, writing in the margin helps tremendously to locate your struggle, to record your engagement with the literature: what does this sentence offer? And the next? Slowly, you will build a response, if there is a passage or a sentence that is incomprehensible, note it. Wrestle with it, but then move on, it may be that later material will illuminate backwards.
From an early age we are taught that if we don’t understand something we are not learning, whereas reading complex literature may actually require us to not understand. Our minds grow as we encounter the complexity and learning is happening at many levels.
As the Salon experience demonstrates, one of the most satisfying ways to move through a difficult text is to do so in the company of other curious readers: in sharing the struggle, different minds will find and share meaning and sense, together we weave a more complete understanding of the work. But this is not the only way: slow, careful and persistent reading – whether alone or in the company of others – will always reward the investment of time and mental energy.
