Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 11 Number 1, April 2010
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Kivy, Peter. The Performance of Reading: An Essay in the Philosophy of Literature. Oxford: Blackwell, 2008. ISBN: 978-1-4051-8823-4. EUR £17.99 / €20.70 / US $31.95 (hc).
Reviewed by
University of Western Ontario
My review of Peter Kivy’s The Performance of Reading: An Essay in the Philosophy of Literature examines this text through the manner outlined in the book itself: as a ‘performance.’ This approach will immediately contradict one of the author’s statements in the book, specifically his assertion that, unlike literary texts, philosophical texts are not dependent upon their medium and thus the reading of for example Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, which is the example Kivy gives – or Kivy’s own text for that matter – is not a performance. However, setting aside this restriction on the applicability of his theory I believe strengthens rather than weakens the overall impact of the book’s thesis.
My reading of Kivy follows the two senses of ‘reading’ outlined near the beginning of the text. The first is “the kind of event we would describe as an act or an activity: it is an action performed by a reader” resulting in an “experience” (5). Here, we could say, it is the event of my reading of this book that results in not only a personal experience of reading the text qua analysis of a performed reading but also a performance of that act of performing. This bleeds into the second sense of ‘reading,’ which Kivy states with reference to reading a novel that it “is synonymous with an ‘interpretation’ of it” (5). Thus my reading of Kivy’s book will inevitably be a performance of my interpretation – in much the same way different people read and/or interpret novels such as Pride and Prejudice – that comes to form the basis of my experience of the text.
There is an interesting history to my experience that Kivy traces out from the performative nature of text being read out loud, as intimately connected with the dramatic oration and recitation of written material beginning in Ancient Greece, to the silent reading practices typical of modern and contemporary treatments of textual material. My own interest and research into the transition from illuminated manuscripts to the printing press compliments Kivy’s focus, particularly his connection between the extremely limited number of individuals who owned or could read books before mass printing and the necessity of having this material read to groups of people. The Bible is the penultimate example of this transition, in that before the printing press believers went to church to hear the word of God, but after the Bible became an accessible mass-produced volume – particularly in relation to Luther and the Counterreformation – the possibility of reading the word of God within one’s home or even to one’s self began to change the very fabric of religious belief. It is therefore ironic that the first recorded mention of silent reading, Kivy tells us, is found Saint Augustine’s Confessions where he talks about his reading of a book containing Paul’s Epistles (15). Yet, even as a silent gesture, Kivy argues that reading remains, like its Ancient roots, a performance.
This is where I believe the exclusion of philosophical texts can be seen as diverging from the overall argument of this book, which begins with the basic connection between the presentation of text and the experience of audience. Kivy goes out of his way to make the argument that “all texts whatever,” are performed within the Ancient Greek context; he tells us that it is “perfectly clear that Plato’s dialogues, as well as Aristotle’s works, were meant for ‘performance’” (16). If this is the case, and it is this historical contextualization of the experience of text that he uses to build his argument for reading as a performance, why exclude the philosophical? If engaging with Plato’s texts is a performative act, why is it that reading Kant is not? I believe Kivy is right in his specific thesis that silent reading is a performance, but the requirements he places on the kind of performance it could possibly be severely limits the reading of this monograph (46). These limitations emerge out of his insistence on tethering this thesis to a concept of ‘art’ that creates a hierarchy of ‘ready-performance’ – reminiscent of both Kantian and Hegelian conceptions of aesthetics – with literature on top as the most performative, because it is a work of art, and philosophy on the bottom as a virtual non-performance of reading that is most emphatically not a work of art. “It is because, in literary texts, and not philosophical texts, the medium ‘says’ something about the content, that it is realizable in a silent performance,” Kivy states, following with the bold claim that to “a philosophical text such as the Critique of Pure Reason the medium is irrelevant” (92). To claim that Kant’s manuscript, or any volume of philosophical writing, is not dependent upon the medium of the book is incredibly troubling to me, especially considering the fact that the primary thesis of Kivy’s text is admittedly philosophical.
Putting this distinction aside, moreover, initiates what is for me a much more compelling insight that Kivy’s study touches on, specifically the active reception of textual material in which readers are located not as passive recipients of the words on paper but as performers of the material they read. This I believe is the general argument he makes regarding literature; to read the novel Pride and Prejudice is a performative act of reading, and more specifically a personal performance of a work of art “in the head, mental story telling by ordinary readers” (65). Let us consider the mental story Kivy is telling us within his book – and not because “some philosophical texts are, as well, literary texts, which is to say, artworks” (93).
In fact, from a Nietzschean perspective one might claim that philosophical texts can neither be described as works of art nor as non-artworks, but, especially given the fact that the primary aesthetic discourse necessary to make such distinctions is based within philosophy, are beyond art and non-art categorizations. Such a reading would fit into the gaps in the reading experience that Kivy most notably depends upon for his argument. Gaps are performed first by the scribes who spaced out the words within texts, which lead to the more pronounced personal spacing necessary for the silent reading of books by individuals, finally emerging as the “gappy” experience that constitutes what Kivy terms an “afterlife” of reading (108-9). I would like to suggest that, as the reader of The Performance of Reading, I am meant to reason over the hypothesis that Kivy presents to me for acceptance or rejection – no different I believe than any work of literature – and it is in so doing that his thesis gains depth and breadth for me, lifting the words off the page and turning them into a performance through my reading.