Slow Reading
When I was a graduate student in Slavic at Harvard, I had a friend I’d known through college who practiced the art of slow reading, as Professor Lunt called it, to the ultimate frenzy of delight. He announced that he was going to write his Ph.D. thesis on one poem, and only one, poem, of the Zhivago cycle in Pasternak’s acclaimed (and slandered by critics, and disavowed by its Nobel-prize-winning author) novel, Dr. Zhivago. Pasternak was a poet at heart, and a poet of the hard blue flame. His verses sparkled with interconnected resonances, echoes and re-echoes, trumpet blasts and Brahmsians rhapsodies. The music-and-color metaphors are apt for Pasternak, who loved music, studied philosophy at Marburg, and became a master of singing lines in a tradition of Russian poetry that has many masters, from Derzhavin to Brodsky.
Well, so what does this lead to, this Ph.D. dissertation on one and only one fifteen-line poem? My friend wrote a 180-page analysis of every perceptible and every imaginable level of understanding and interpretation a brief poetic utterance can have. Phonology and morphophonology, word-root play and design. Backwards, enantiomorphic structures, skewed semantic xeugmas. Mirror-play. As I remember the thesis, which I actually read in the Harvard achives some years after the fact, curious to know if it took shape the way he said it did — as I remember the thesis, there was little or no reference to the other poems in the cycle or to the body of Pasternak’s work. It was a self-contained exercise in finding the whole through living out all of the parts. It was an ultimate tour de force.
Was it interesting? Deeply so, it was strangely gripping, for a fellow linguist who loves literature as I do and as I did, to read. The idea came from Jakobson’s own penchant for slow reading of Old Russian and Old Church Slavonic texts not as though they were monuments of a lost Slavic dialect, but unique creations of literature. I think his passion for the weird (sic!) also infected my friend a little bit too. Jakobson’s favorite poet was Velemir Xlebnikov, a real off-the-wall crazy who invented заумь, a language “beyond mind,” and for his fascination with the disputed classic of twelve-century Russian literature, The Lay of Igor’s Campaign. Professor Lunt disapproved of this text and refused even to discuss its possible (in)authenticity and its place in the canon of Old Russian literature. This did not discourage my friend when he was a student at Harvard. When you have a supremely original genius for a professor — I mean Jakobson, not Lunt — you are unafraid to explore the trails he has blazed.
So while he was writing this opus I would ask how it was going. “Still reading it,” he would say, pythically. Two days later: “I found another X.” That meant a chiasma or cross-shaped interrelation of echoing parts. “I hadn’t found anything new for about a week. Then I found it. Very interesting.” I refrained from asking more general questions, like, e.g., “What are your conclusions?” He was too deep in the structure of the thing and too modest to make any great claims for himself. Instead of asking questions I would suggest conclusions to him, jokingly. “It is what it is.” “The meaning is no more or less than the thing itself.” He refused to be deterred, discouraged, or insulted by my jabs. He kept going, for about a year and a half, until it was finished. Then he said: “I could do the same thing for all the poems in this cycle. I have glanced at them. The depth is amazing.”
Is this crazy? Not at all. To memorize a work is to know it, the saying goes, and my friend went several dimensions beyond this, visualizing its patterns so deeply that he was, for a time, lost inside them, like Theseus in the labyrinth, so that he needed Ariadne’s thread to find his way out again. Emerging blinking into the sunlight is like emerging from a life-changing experience; nothing will ever be quite the same again.
What lessons did he learn? I don’t know, I didn’t dare ask. But I think, I surmise, if I had been he, I would have learned that it was worth it, every day and hour and minute of struggle and meditation — but that, somehow, I would never be able to repeat the experience. It would have been for me a unique journey, a once-in-a-lifetime shot.
As I reflect on reading my friend’s dissertation, it occurs to me that it wasn’t 180 pages at all. It was more like 90-100 pages. He pared it down, he cut and trimmed the work to the absolute minimum, like Flaubert touching up Madame Bovary and Goethe at eighty tinkering with Faust. This was maybe the most important part of the thesis itself, making the dross or the inessential disappear without harming the inner core. This always requires infinite care, the care of a loving artist. My friend kept on slicing and trimming, aiming at only the essence of what he had learned and found in those long months of slow reading. It was worth it.
gmc
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