Flowing locks
On first approach to a novel, Nabokov claimed, we are overwhelmed with too much information and fatigued by the effort of scanning the lines. Only later, on successive encounters with the text, will we begin to see and appreciate it as a whole, as we do with a painting. So, paradoxically, then, “there is no reading, only rereading.”
This attitude, I recently suggested in this space, amounts to an elitist agenda, an unhappy obsession with control, a desire to possess the text (with always the implication that there very few texts worth possessing) rather than accept the contingency of each reading moment by moment.
“Wrong!” a reader objects. “Isn’t it true,” he invites an analogy with music “that the first time we hear a new song we can’t really enjoy it? Only after two or three hearings will it really begin to give us pleasure.” He then adds this intriguing formulation:
When we perceive something new for the first time we cannot really perceive it because we lack the appropriate structure that allows us to perceive it. Our brain is like a lock maker that makes a lock whenever a key is deemed interesting enough. But when a key—for example, a new poem, or a new species of animal—is first met, there is no lock yet ready for such a key. Or to be precise, the key is not even a key since it does not open anything yet. It is a potential key. However, the encounter between the brain and this potential key triggers the making of a lock. The next time we meet or perceive the object/key it will open the lock prepared for it in the brain.
It’s an elaborate theory and in fact the reader turns out to be the philosopher and psychologist Riccardo Manzotti. Intriguing above all is the reversal of the usual key/lock analogy. The mind is not devising a key to decipher the text, it is disposing itself in such a way as to allow the text to become a key that unlocks sensation and “meaning” in the mind.
Is Manzotti right? And if so, what does it tell us about reading?
Certainly we have all had the experience he describes on first encounter with difficult texts, poetry in particular. My first reading of The Waste Land, in a high-school literature class at age sixteen, was hardly a reading at all. It would take many lessons and cribs and further readings before suddenly Eliot’s approach could begin to awaken recognition and appreciation, before “April is the cruellest month,” that is, genuinely reminded me how difficult life and change could be in contrast to hibernation. The mind had conjured a lock that allowed the poem to function as a key; it fitted into my mind and something turned and swung open.
Two reflections. This Waste Land lock also seemed well suited to or easily adapted for a range of other keys. My mind could now be opened by other modernist poems far more quickly. Eliot’s other poems, in particular, all activated the senses smoothly enough. And while one would never perhaps reach the point of satisfying all one’s curiosity for a new poem in a single reading, still the lock-making process was now infinitely faster, to the point that there would sometimes be a sense of déjà vu: Oh, it’s this sort of lock the key wants to open. Or even: Oh not this again, how disappointing! Which perhaps explained why poets now no longer wrote in this way and had moved on.
This prompts a second reflection. With a certain kind of reading the pleasure lies in the lock-making process, the progressive meshing of mind and text. Once we are familiar with the kind of experience the text opens up in our minds, we will be less excited. Or at least, the pleasure will be of a different kind, offering the reassurance of the known, or simply a happy reminder of that more strenuous lock-making period. Such a distinction might help us tackle the old chestnut of the difference between genre fiction and literary work. There is no continuing learning process with genre fiction. We know how to read a Maigret and would never dream of rereading one. It always prompts the same reactions. But with a literary novel, we would expect the pleasure of an effort of adjustment, of new vistas being opened in the mind.
So Nabokov was right perhaps, or at least for complex novels, which for him were probably the only ones he was interested in. We have to reread.
