Rereading

How many times are you likely to read a work of literature (a story, novel, play or poem) which you either enjoyed enormously or found very interesting in its style or form? Would you read it twice? three times? Would you reread it at different stages of your life? How often would you watch a film that you enjoyed in the same way? What makes a person seek out the experience (some might say the same experience while others might say a different experience) over again?

In an essay derived her forthcoming book, Nothing Remains the Same: Rereading and Remembering (HMCo, 2002), Wendy Lesser describes the act of rereading, later in her life, The Portrait of a Lady, a novel by Henry James:

Rereading it turned out to be an astonishing experience.

I had first read this novel as an undergraduate, and had gone through it again as a graduate student of English Literture. Both times I was too close in age to Isabel Archer to appreciate her properly, and both times I read largely for the plot. The fact that I already knew the plot the second time around did not deter me: At the age of 26, I still zoomed, suspense-driven, toward the final pages, as if only the ending counted.

But in your 40s the journey begins to matter more than the arrival, and it is only in this frame of mind that you can do justice to Henry James. . . . At 46, no longer in competition with Isabel, I could find her as charming as her author evidently did. Moreover, having had a life, with its own self-defined structure, I was more sympathetic with Isabel's wish to acquire one. As a young person, I only wanted her to marry the lord and get it over with. Now I understood that nothing ends with choices--there are always additional choices to be made, if one's life is to remain interesting.

. . . . The idea that a simple rereading could also be a new reading struck me with the force of a revelation. (Lesser, The Chronicle of Higher Education 19 April 2002 B7, B9)

Lesser goes on to discuss how rereading makes apparent to the reader how clearly reading is "personal":

You cannot reread a book from your youth without perceiving it as, among other things, a mirror. Wherever you look in that novel or poem or essay, you will find a little reflected face peering out at you--the face of your own youthful self, the original reader, the person you were when you first read the book. So the material that wells up out of this rereading feels very private, very specific to you. But as you engage in this rereading, you can sense that there are at least two readers, the older one and the younger one. You know there are two of you because you can feel them responding differently to the book. Differently, but not entirely differently: There is a core of experience shared by your two selves (perhaps there are even more than two, if you include all the people you were in the years between the two readings). (Lesser, The Chronicle of Higher Education Section: The Chronicle Review Page: B7 19 April 2002 )

You can certainly have a similar experience (though you may not be 46 years old) and may have had it already simply by rereading a favorite book you recall from your childhood. It has been suggested elsewhere in this web site that you investigate an early reading experience as a way to begin to assess your reading experiences. You might add to that suggested pleasure, the idea of rereading that early book and keeping a journal of what happens as you encounter what Lesser calls the "little reflected face peering out at you" from the book, your earlier self, reading.

Rereading is often recommended as a way to study and appreciate literature for class study. You might be wondering if you have to read everything assigned in your classes not just once but rather two or more times.

In fact, if you are engaged by a work, by its complexity or simplicity, by its sense, sympathy or soul, reading it a second time (or third or fourth) will be a pleasure.

Obviously, no one reads everything several times. Yet almost everyone who studies literature, and many who read literature for pleasure, will read many things not once but many times. What are they doing--exactly--when they read something twice, thrice or more times?

Anne Woodlief among others has explored this process of reading, rereading, exploring and has written about it. Here is a link to her and Marcel Cornis-Pope's Stages of Reading Literature as Aesthetic Experiencing.

Go to this site and examine its framed pages to understand what Woodlief shows us we can do when we read the first, second, and third times.

Notice that she suggests the "First Reading" is essentially our pleasureable reading when we read for enjoyment, making the world we inhabit as natural and seamless with our own as we can.

Notice that Woodlief defines key terms such as "naturalization" and "identification." Are those concepts clear to you? When you click on the Poetry, Fiction, Drama links at the top of the descriptions on her page, you will find good questions to ask for each type of literature in a first reading. I suggest you even print the lists of questions to serve as useful guidelines for consideration.

The subsequent Re-readings she says have different possible strategies or concerns; the second reading could be an imaginative process of "discovery" during which we fill "gaps" and solve problems. Of course, we do that during the first reading as well, but the second reading is usually focused more on these discoveries.

Eventually your subsequent readings (3rd, 4th, 5th?) move on to the more complex "Critical/Analytical" and "Context" questions of Exploration.

The implication is this: the more you read sensitively, and reread thoughtfully, the better you will understand the world of each work of literature. This understanding prepares you to share your understanding when you discuss and write and to appreciate how others think about it as well.

Rereading, as Woodlief describes it, is not the same as rereading to study a piece of literature for a test. In fact, Critical/Analytical reading bears little relationship to the sort of poring over your textbooks which you might do for test in a college class in history or economics. Instead, Critical/Analytical reading is essentially a form of mastery reading through which you free yourself from some of the mystifications of the work. That is why it is also often called a "resisting reading." After all, what is there to resist in reading if not the designs all art has on you. A critical/analytical reading discovers in a multitude of ways that literature always says, under its breath, "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain" who wants to impose the order of his world on you.

For a further and more theoretical discussion of the perceptions and premises for the work of Anne Woodlief and Cornis-Pope, consult this online essay: The Rereading/Rewriting Process: Theory and Collaborative, On-line Pedagogy Chapter in Intertexts: Reading Pedagogy in College Writing Classrooms, Marguerite Helmers, editor. To be published in 2002. Virginia Commonwealth University, Fall 2000 Accessed 21 May 2002 <http://www.vcu.edu/engweb/ReReadingTheorychapter.htm>

My suggestion is that you consciously prepare to reread something you enjoyed and keep a notebook or journal entering a kind of meta-commentary on what you notice the second time through. You might do this in a freewheeling way looking for the "little face" that Lesser mentions peering back at you or in a more orderly way, attempting to answer the staged questions of Woodlief and Cornis-Pope.

Go on to Marking and Annotating a Text