Robert Scholes on Reading

Excerpts from Protocols of Reading (New Haven: Yale UP, 1989).

At the Amazon.com site you can examine this image on the the cover of his book as well as read the first four pages where Scholes discusses the famous LaTour painting of this young girl reading. He concludes his opening four pages by emphasizing that reading is an act of both research and imagination.

The serenity and specificity of this vision [of Mary and her mother, according to Scholes' reading of this painting] draw the reader of this painted text into an active process that involves a mixture of research and imagination. We actively seek contextual information and we also seek to enter the world of the painting and name the objects we have constructed from the clues upon the painted surface. Above all, our eyes are drawn to that book, gleaming so brightly in the center of the light. What book would be the major text for the instruction of the future Mother of God? We cannot read a word of it . . . . It is not a book for us, but only the sign of a book, as the people we "see" in the painting are only signs of that we read as people. We cannot enter the world of this or any other painting. The reader is always outside the text. This is one of the things that it means to be a reader--to be outside. The price of entry is the labor of production itself. To read rightly we must start to write ourselves. We shall have to add something to this text in order to read it. In the present case, we can name the book Mary reads only by accepting the responsibility for a reading that is "ours"--and this is precisely what we should do. Let us say she is reading a Bible. (5)

And then again later in his first chapter, he writes:

If my description of reading is correct, then it follows that we should read in a certain way. We should, in fact, read so as to get the most out of each experience of a reading. If a book or a story or any other text is like a little life, and if our reading actually uses up precious time in that other story we think of as our lives, then we should make the most of our reading just as we should make the most of our lives. Reading reminds us that every text ends with a blank page and that what we get from every text is precisely balanced by what we give. Our skill, our learning, and our commitment to the text will determine, for each of us, the kind of experience that text provides. Learning to read books--or pictures, or films--is not just a matter of acquiring information from texts, it is a matter of learning to read and write the texts of our lives. Reading, seen this way, is not merely an academic experience but a way of accepting the fact that our lives are of limited duration and that whatever satisfaction we may achieve in life must come through the strength of our engagement with what is around us. We do well to read our lives with the same intensity we develop from learning to read our texts. . . . (19)