<i>The Performance of Reading: An Essay in the Philosophy of Literature</i>by kivy, peter

Peter Kivy's bold thesis in this very engaging and stimulating monograph is that literature in general—not just drama or even poetry but also the novel—should be viewed as a performance art, analogous to music, where the instances of works through which they are appreciated are performances enacted by readers. Reading itself, then, is a performing art. Kivy argues for a number of analogies between fictional narratives and musical scores. The literary text, he maintains, is not a token of the literary work but, like the musical score, a character in a notation for generating instances of the work. Tokens of the musical work are performances, and tokens of the novel are readings, construed as datable events. Furthermore, Kivy argues, silent readings of novels are analogous to performances of musical works “in the head” by score readers. Performances of literary works “in the head” can be seen as expressive “soundings” that, as in the case of “soundings” of musical works by score readers, embody an interpretation of the overall sense of the work. Given that the silent reading of a novel can be viewed as a performance, Kivy further maintains, this is how it should be viewed: literature in general, including the novel, is properly viewed as a performance art. Kivy adduces a number of different considerations in support of these striking claims. He draws our attention to the history of reception of literary works, offering informed speculations as to the overtly performative nature of such reception until relatively recently. The novel, he argues, initiated a widely shared practice of silent reading, but early theorists of the novel viewed silent reading as a kind of disguised performance. Joseph Addison, for example, held that readers imaginatively realize a dramatic presentation of the narrated events. Kivy, citing approvingly Edmund Burke's criticisms of this view, claims, instead, that readers enact, in the head, something very like the performance that Plato ascribed to Ion. Ion, Kivy argues, did two things. First, in reciting the texts of Homer, he “impersonated” Homer, the teller of the stories. This involved an expressive presentation of the narrative proper, and also of imitative parts of the story, such as direct speech rendered in the voices of the characters. Second, Ion's performance “embellished” Homer, which, Kivy speculates, involved not only commenting on the significance of the narrative but also assessing the plausibility and truth of its explicit or implicit propositional content. The silent reader, Kivy maintains, enacts her own “inner Ion,” expressively impersonating the storyteller, and critically commenting and reflecting on the content of the narrative. Such reflection takes place in the “gaps” that punctuate, and the “afterlife” that follows, the reading performance in the narrow sense. The gaps and afterlife are, he maintains, essential elements in literary experience and their critical dimension provides the literary cognitivist with an answer to the charge that the propositional contents of fictions are banal. However, Kivy stresses, the case for viewing silent reading as a performance of the literary work does not depend crucially upon the accuracy of his historical speculations. It depends, rather, upon the sense it makes of his reading experience, the phenomenology of which is described in often fascinating detail, and will, he believes, resonate with the literary experience of other readers. As should be clear, this book is a mine of intriguing speculations, ingenious argument, and stimulating suggestions, made even more attractive by Kivy's engaging style. There are, however, some questions that must be addressed if we are to be convinced by the overall thesis of the book. Consider first the claim that, in silently reading a novel, the reader can be seen as enacting an Ion‐like performance in her head. Ion, in reciting Homer, impersonated the storyteller, and we do the same “in our heads” when we silently read a novel, Kivy maintains (p. 59): “We hear stories in the head, the way Beethoven, when he read the scores of Handel, heard musical performances in the head” (p. 63). The “storyteller” we impersonate is the person held responsible for constructing the story—either the real author of the tale (Kivy's own preference) or a fictional or an implied author of some kind. Where novels have impersonal third‐person narrators—as, for example, in Graham Greene's The Heart of the Matter—the silent reader impersonates the author—here Greene—telling the story. What, however, of a novel with a first‐person narrator, such as David Copperfield? Given the Ion model, it seems that the reader impersonates Charles Dickens who is himself impersonating David Copperfield, since that is what the model takes a storyteller to do in telling a first‐person fictional narrative. In the case of direct quotation in such a fiction, the reader must presumably impersonate the author impersonating the narrator impersonating one of the characters (see, for example, the remarks [p. 60] on the epistolary novel, and [pp. 44–45] on Ion's imitation of both the narrative and imitative aspects of Homer's telling). But this strikes me, at least, as a somewhat baroque description of the phenomenology of reading. If silent readers do indeed expressively “sound” direct quotations in a fictional narrative in distinctive ways, it seems more intuitive to say that they impersonate the character himself, rather than enact the complex set of nested impersonations just sketched. The (real or assumed) author enters the picture only insofar as the reader takes account of how the former intends the character to be understood. Or, again, what of a novel with a deceived or deceiving first‐person narrator, such as Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire? Here, it seems, Kivy's claim must be that the reader impersonates Nabokov impersonating the deceived Dr. Kinbote. But, once the reader grasps that Kinbote is a deceived narrator, how would such a nested impersonation differ, as a “sounding,” from the reader's impersonating Kinbote himself in light of her understanding of Nabokov's narrative intentions? These matters need to be made clearer, I think. A more serious worry concerns Kivy's principal argument for taking the reading of literary fiction to be a performing art, namely, that it makes best sense of his reading experience, of which, as noted, he provides a rich account. But can this account bear the weight placed upon it in his overall argument? Indeed, this raises a more general question about the relationship between the descriptive and the normative elements in Kivy's book. At the very beginning of the book, he affirms that his thesis “is not a normative claim, about how we should read fictional works, but a descriptive claim, about how we, at least some of us, do read them” (pp. 1–2). But, in the final sections of the book, the question asked is a normative one—whether, given that we can view reading as a performing art, we should do so (p. 126). And this is surely the question that Kivy must address if he is to defend the claim that the novel is a performance art. For what makes music and drama performance arts is not merely that aficionados attend performances of plays and musical works, but that it is only through engagement with such performances that theatrical and musical works can be properly appreciated and evaluated. It is the role that performances by practitioners of the performing arts play in the appreciation and evaluation of works that makes theater and music performance arts. But if this is true, then descriptive facts about the phenomenology of our reading experiences, however insightful, cannot serve as the principal argument for viewing the reading of fictional literature as a performing art analogous to musical performance. Nor, I think, can the principle of parsimony, which is the other reason offered for viewing silent reading as a performing art. For parsimony comes into play only if, as Kivy claims, the reading of literary fiction can be viewed as a performing art bearing upon the appreciation and evaluation of literary works, and this, again, depends not upon the phenomenology of anyone's reading experience, but on the ways in which that phenomenology bears upon such appreciation and evaluation. Only if the sort of “performance” that Kivy characterizes bears upon the appreciation of a work of literary fiction in a manner analogous to the way in which a performance (public or “in the head”) of a musical work bears upon its appreciation can our ability to “perform” a literary work “in the head” support the conclusion that literature is properly viewed as a performance art and reading as the related performing art. Can Kivy meet this challenge? Recall, first, the distinction between the narrative and imitative elements in the Homeric storytelling that Ion impersonates. The imitative element includes the representation, by the storyteller, of the utterances of the characters. There may indeed be a role, in the proper appreciation of at least some literary fictions, for the reader's expressive sounding “in the head” of such utterances, for this may bear upon what is true of the characters in the story. But, to be accorded such a role, the sounding must contribute to understanding and appreciation of the fiction over and above the contribution made thereto by the interpretation of the characters upon which the expressive sounding is based. It must be in virtue of how the utterances sound when voiced “in the head” that some appreciation‐relevant fact about the literary work is made manifest to the receiver. Clearly there are cases where this is so—for example, the humorous dimensions of certain comic characters depend in this way upon how their utterances would sound. But in general it is unclear that this condition on artistic relevance will be satisfied. And, if we turn to the narrative elements in the storytelling, it is much more difficult to see how expressive “sounding” plays a part in the appreciation of the work, save where the sound of the words itself contributes to the work's appreciable properties—where literature performs certain more standardly poetic functions in virtue of the sounds of the text. Second, and related, it is not clear that expressive “soundings” of the narrative of a literary work mediate between interpretations of “how the work goes” and the appreciation of the work in a manner analogous to the musical cases to which Kivy draws our attention. The interpretation of a musical work, so Kivy argues, both lies behind and is manifested in its performance, and this applies as much to performances “in the head” by score readers as to public performances. Kivy maintains, surely correctly, that the reasonably sophisticated reader of literary fiction also constructs, as she reads, an interpretation that provides a way of making sense of the narrative as a whole. Furthermore, we can speak of better or worse readings depending upon the reader's interpretation. What is less clear is how the interpretation of the literary work, so conceived, is somehow manifest in the reading viewed as a “sounding”“in the head.” Crucially, it is through its implications for how the musical work sounds to the listener—including the score reader—that the performer's interpretation bears upon appreciation. But is a particular kind of “sounding”“in the head” of the narrative of a literary fiction equally a requirement for a proper appreciation of that fiction? If so, Kivy owes us an account of how this is so. Of course, all of these things are arguably crucial to our appreciation of poetry and of drama, which is why we do routinely “perform” such works, even to ourselves, when we seek to appreciate them, and why the ability to “sound” such works is one that is fostered in literary education. But these considerations seem much more peripheral to appreciation of the novel. This concern is augmented given that, as noted earlier, the reader is supposedly impersonating the sounding of the narrative by the storyteller. This must, I think, be taken in terms of the contentful intentions of the storyteller (author) rather than in terms of her actual or hypothetical “soundings.” For, as readers of literary fictions, we rarely have a clear sense of how the author would have sounded the narrative of the story, nor does this ignorance present an obstacle to appreciation of the novel. And it is surely likely that some great novelists were very bad readers of their own fictions. Rather, what matters for appreciation is that we grasp such things as the “tone” of the narrative—is it playful, ironic, earnest, and so forth? But this seems to bear directly on how we understand the fiction, rather than bearing only indirectly through the properties of a “sounding”—informed by such an interpretative grasp—of that narrative “in the head” of the silent reader. Finally, consider again the ontological status of the literary fiction. If, as Kivy assumes, literary texts are, like scores, notational characters for producing instances of works, and if the instances of literary works are “soundings,” usually “in the head” of readers, what are the works themselves? For Kivy, it seems, literary fictions like novels must be types of expressive sound sequences. But, as noted, whereas the sounding of a musical work is crucial to its appreciation, the sounding of a literary work seems to contribute to its appreciation in much more limited ways. What seems crucial to appreciation in the literary case is grasping a structure of meanings embodied in a linguistic medium, including both story meanings and thematic meanings. But, in order to grasp the work as a structure of meanings, the reader has to extract the relevant structure from the text before her, and this may require a complex range of activities, at least some of which—relating to direct quotation, for example—may be thought of as “soundings” of elements in the work. Related activities might include exercises of Gregory Currie's “secondary imagination” in order to grasp certain psychological truths in the story. So it may be important to think of silent readers as playing a role in “realizing” the work through their activity, which suggests that silent reading is in this respect more like score reading than like looking at a painting. Kivy's compelling presentation of the case for a performative element in literature may serve to awaken us to the significance of such aspects of literary experience, even if, as I have suggested, the case for viewing literature as a performance art requires further argument and elucidation.

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