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title: "Getting the Gist of Reading"
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    feature: header_reader.png
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Today, I read Andrew Elfenbein’s _The Gist of Reading_ (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018). By any account, this is a provocative and stimulating read that brings observations from cognitive psychology to bear on literary critical concerns. Predominantly concerned with nineteenth-century novels in his examples, Elfenbein nonetheless draws out a broad theoretical framework that I believe has far wider consequences. In examining the actual processes of how we _read_, Elfenbein wants to ‘get beyond the “implied reader” to describe how readers [actually] interact with literature’ (189).

What does this mean, in reality? In this brief write-up of my notes, I mostly focus on the early part of Elfenbein’s book, which gives the theoretical case studies for the (nonetheless empirically rooted) later parts of the work on hard, easy, and entertainment reading (among other areas such as influence). The first three chapters of Elfenbein’s work culminates with a startling -- even if actually obvious -- revelation for theories of close reading: that ‘readers remember’ only ‘a simplified version of what they read, which psychologists call a gist representation’. This is important ‘because it is so different from how reading is usually understood in literary scholarship, in which fidelity to the text is a paramount value’ (103). How, this seems to ask, can we justify our close reading methodologies?

Elfenbein splits reading into online and offline comprehension, which is not related to the digital or the internet, but rather to the time at which we process information. Online comprehension takes place as we read, while offline comprehension is a retrospective process. It is the distinction between ‘what readers do spontaneously versus what they do when facing experimental prompts having read material’ (83). One of the examples that Elfenbein gives is a fairly robust dissection of some of Stanley Fish’s reader-response work in ‘Literature in the Reader’. For Elfenbein, this type of work where a critic tries to infer how an idealised reader will respond to a text ‘is less what happens online than an offline fantasy of what would happen online if a reader had an infinite working memory capacity’ (86). In other words, there is a projection at work in much of this type of criticism of impossible reading conditions backwards into a supposed experiential moment. I was amused to learn that psychologists even have a term for this: ‘promiscuous inference generation’ (86).

But this is not how most readers actually read. They could not. Instead, they perform a kind of ‘good-enough processing’ (22). Elfenbein gives a good example of this where participants in an experiment read the following paragraph:

>There was a tourist flight traveling from Vienna to Barcelona. On the last leg of the journey, it developed engine trouble. Over the Pyrenees, the pilot started to lose control. The plane eventually crashed right on the border. Wreckage was equally strewn in France and Spain. The authorities were trying to decide where to bury the survivors (22).

Most people (59%) -- including me, when reading it today -- did not notice that it is improbable that the authorities would seek to bury the survivors. Instead, whether we like it or not, it seems that most readers read simply: 1. with goals; 2. for coherence; and 3. to explain (41). Coherence has a specific meaning for Elfenbein. It does not mean the unity of the work, but rather that we bring unifying principles to our reading experiences (43). For instance, it could be that disunity is the cohering concept around which a work -- say Pynchon’s _Gravity’s Rainbow_ -- coheres. Elfenbein gives the example of a reader who lacked the external contexts to properly understand a text, in some ways, but did manage to generate a coherent reading of the work through feminist frameworks with which she was familiar (57).

A continual strength of Elfenbein’s book is the way that it manages to bring its cognitive psychological readings back into the realm of literary studies. For instance, Elfenbein devotes a substantial portion of chapter one to ideas of consistency in the work. He shows that, in experimental test after experimental test, conflicting character information caused notable processing pauses in the reading process. An old character who can suddenly spring to the rescue of a young boy caused readers, every time, to pause (27–30). Why does this matter to literary studies? Well, as Elfebein puts it, often theories of the novel (particularly in older criticism) have focused on character development; the change in a character over the course of a book. However, as Elfenbein puts it, ‘[f]indings from psychology suggest that the more relevant question is not whether characters can change, but whether readers can’ (31). That is to ask: can readers actually accept changes in characters over novels, or does this prompt a collapse of mental congruence?

I also learned a lot about fact and fictionality from this work. I was startled to realize that, under experimental conditions, people presented with texts _that they were told contained fictional details_ found themselves overwriting facts that they had previously known with incorrect details from the fictional works (37). That is, people who knew that the Pacific Ocean was the largest nonetheless changed their answer to the Indian Ocean when quizzed after having read this detail in a text that they were told contained fictional details. Perhaps all that authorly research into detail _really_ does matter after all.

There were also several humorous details and broad points with which I agreed. I thought the phrasing on ‘For Young, reading is like bad sex, only better’ might have been snuck in to test whether I was really still paying more than ‘good-enough’ attention by this point (141)! Is this like mediocre sex? What I liked, though, was the book‘s closing shot at critical thinking as the preserve of the humanities. This liberal line has been trotted out time and time again and I just do not believe it is true, so it is good to see it reiterated here (citing Guillory, John, ‘Monuments and Documents: Panofsky on the Object of Study in the Humanities’, History of Humanities, 1.1 (2016), 9–30 <[https://doi.org/10.1086/684635](https://doi.org/10.1086/684635)>):

>_Critical thinking_ has become widespread as a term for what literary study is supposed to teach. But as John Guillory has noted, using it to defend humanistic study runs into trouble because doing so implies, wrongly, that other modes of inquiry like the sciences do not also promote critical thinking (216).

I agree with this often-lazy categorisation of what it is that literary studies teaches, even while also feeling that it appears as a sound sales strategy given that, as Elfenbein puts it, ‘we can’t sell a class on “Professor Y’s ingenuity”’ (136), which may be what we are actually teaching.

Finally, this book begins with an introduction that betrays its anxiety of interdisciplinarity. I understand that Elfenbein feels that there is hostility to cognitive or psychological intrusion into literary studies, but it genuine feels as though he may have gone too far overboard with the preemptive defense here. It didn’t really need this level of parrying before the foils were even drawn, although it makes for an interesting enough rationale for the work. But I think that Elfenbein's book is powerful enough to stand, hardly needing the fortress he erects to defend the interdisciplinary work.

Photo by [Road Trip with Raj on Unsplash](https://unsplash.com/photos/o4c2zoVhjSw)