spring from the pages into your arms.” For Whitman the tactile dimension of the book (experienced both through his own touch and the proleptically fantasized touch of his reader) creates the conditions through which self and other establish a mutual “hold” on one another. The material book is thus essential for the erotic communion between author and reader, even as it creates a bond between the two that is imagined as direct and unmediated (“This is no book”).26
This emphasis on the sensual aspect of reading is at odds with scholarship that insists on the book’s denuded materiality. Elaine Scarry, for example, claims that, unlike other aesthetic forms like painting, music or sculpture,
Verbal art, especially narrative, is almost bereft of any sensuous content. Its visual features … consist of monotonous small black marks on a white page. It has no acoustical features. Its tactile features are limited to the weight of its pages, their smooth surfaces, and their exquisitely thin edges. The attributes it has that are directly apprehensible by perception are, then, meager in number. More important, these attributes are utterly irrelevant, sometimes even antagonistic to the mental images that a poem or novel seeks to produce.27
Such an account denies the interactive dimensions of the book, the way it can engage a range of bodily modalities, particularly the tactile and proprioceptive, aspects stressed by book historians.28 Nineteenth-century writer Anna Warner, for example, describes her sister Susan lying in bed on Christmas Eve with a book-filled stocking: “she would fumble and feel and guess; spinning out the delightful mystery. What could these sharp corners be? … Searching further as the daylight came on; trying to read titles, imagining colours. Lying back then again in bed to muse and wonder.”29 Surely this description speaks to sensory satisfactions in book possession that exceed that of pure cognition and that may not, for all we know, be “antagonistic to the mental images that a poem or novel seeks to produce.” Indeed, Warner’s language attests to the impossibility of separating ideation from the body’s physical engagement and responses. Susan interacts with her books across a number of nondiscrete sensory and interpretive planes—feeling sharp corners, reading titles, lying back, imagining colors. Reading for her is a process of “spinning out the delightful mystery”—a mystery that includes the book’s content but also its unique materiality and unpredictable synesthetic effects.
Warner’s description allows us to recognize that reading is never merely a cognitive experience, or, stated in more phenomenological terms, understanding is always gleaned from concrete existence, a lived response to objects in the world. Even before a reader makes sense of a book, she engages in what Heidegger calls “pre-understanding,” an intuitive apprehension made possible by one’s existence in time and space. By this reasoning, knowledge is not an act of isolated ideation but rather a dimension of being-in-the-world (Dasein), a situated response to interconnected objects and our own place among them.30 Knowledge is thus always subjective, insofar as it arises out of a particular lived experience: understanding is always someone’s understanding. At the same time, consciousness is never abstracted or ideal, but rather organized around and inspired by specific objects; or as Husserl might put it, consciousness is always consciousness of something.31 (Hence the mandate of phenomenology to focus on concrete phenomena, to return to “things in themselves.”) This dual emphasis on situated subjectivity and material objects (separable on the plane of analysis but always unified experientially) inspired later phenomenologists like Maurice Merleau-Ponty to focus on the body as the site of perception: “My body is the fabric into which all objects are woven, and it is, at least in relation to the perceived world, the general instrument of my ‘comprehension.’”32 Consciousness here is not reducible to Cartesian “cogito”; rather, it is a lived phenomenon of the body-subject, a consequence of one’s incarnate subjectivity and interactions with the life-world (Lebenswelt).
These claims concerning the embodied nature of consciousness have been developed further by cognitive scientists and linguists, who have demonstrated the links between thinking and the neural-skeletal system. The research of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, for example, has revealed that “reason is not a transcendent feature of the universe or of disembodied mind. Instead, it is shaped crucially by the peculiarities of our human bodies, by the remarkable details of the neural structure of our brains, and by the specifics of our everyday functioning in the world.” The authors give the example of “neural modeling,” which “can show in detail one aspect of what it means for the mind to be embodied: how particular configurations of neurons, operating according to principles of neural computation, compute what we experience as rational inferences.”33 Neuroscientists have reinforced these claims by demonstrating that the act of perceptual cognition serves to stimulate the frontal cortex—the part of the brain associated with planning and coordinating motor behaviors. For example, simply watching another person pick up a pen activates those regions of the brain associated with holding and grasping. Cognition, then, “involves not just the rule-based manipulation of abstract symbols, but also the reenactment of perceptual and motor experiences.”34
Even more relevant for my study have been data suggesting that reading produces similar changes in the brain. In multiple experiments, researchers have found that reading phrases describing object-directed actions (like kicking a ball) stimulates regions of the frontal cortex much in the same way accomplished by both observation and direct experience.35 In other words, reading evokes specific perceptual and motor responses that prepare the subject for interacting with concepts as if they were real objects in the world. This is the case when individuals are exposed to longer narratives, too. In a 2009 study, for example, a team of researchers measured brain activity in subjects reading a 1,500–word short story. They found that changes in a character’s spatial location (e.g., moving from one room to another) resulted in the stimulation of that part of the reader’s brain responsible for navigating spatial environments; changes in a character’s interactions with an object (e.g., picking up a candy) were associated with activation in precentral and parietal areas of the reader’s brain associated with grasping and hand movements.36 The implications of these experiments in embodied language comprehension are rich, for they suggest, first, that the reader experiences the actions of the text on a physiological level; and, second, that reading precipitates an emulated response such that author and reader are doubles of one another—converging through the shared identification each has with the protagonist. Communion in reading, then, is not just imagined, but a neurological reality.
Studies exposing both the sensual aspects of the book and the neurophysical qualities of cognition are necessary correctives to “a long tradition that imagines reading as a disembodied, intellectual, and frequently spiritual experience.”37 They encourage us to think in nondualistic terms about mind and body, and perhaps even about body and book. Here the work of Merleau-Ponty is especially relevant. In his last unfinished manuscript, The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty attempted to free his research from any vestige of Cartesian dualism by positing that body and world are necessarily interwoven and coextensive.38 His example of the “double sensation” (something initially explored in Phenomenology of Perception) demonstrates this idea. By “double sensation” Merleau-Ponty means the complex experience produced when one part of our body touches another. When the right hand touches the left, for example, it has the “double sensation” of being both the subject and the object of touch: “When I press my two hands together, it is not a matter of two sensations felt together as one perceives two objects placed side by side, but of an ambiguous set-up in which both hands can alternate the roles of touching and being touched.”39 Such a phenomenon demonstrates the reversibility of active and passive roles, the ability of subjects to slip into objects and vice versa. As Elizabeth Grosz glosses it, “the double sensation makes it clear … that the subject is implicated in its objects and its objects are at least partially constitutive of the subject.”40 This has important ramifications for reading, where identification with an author, character, or fellow reader may already inspire a sense of shared consciousness: To touch a book is also to be touched by that book, to feel the book touching back, and this sensation, in blurring the distinction between
