Proust and the Squid: Book Review
Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, London: Icon 2008.
It is a great title! In the end, though, I decided the title applied — lightly — to just one of at least three distinct ideas examined in this book. First, and most prominent, is a gratifyingly clear account of recent neurophysiological research into the brain activity of individuals as they read, or perhaps more to the point, as they learn to read. The second is about contemporary people as they teach others to read, or remark on cases of people learning independently of any instruction. These are capsule human interest stories, heartwarming or heart breaking, by turns. Overall they suggest that as the years pass, more students are having various kinds of difficulty learning to read, and fewer are finding the experience of reading fully absorbing and pleasurable. By this point, Proust has emerged as something like the ideal reader — quick, skilled, absorbed, satisfied — the sort of reader that embodies what reading can be. The squid is Proust’s opposite number — equally perfect, communicating with consummate skill and joy, only in codes we don’t and perhaps can’t know, far beyond reading.
Although the title suggests it, then, Proust and the Squid isn’t a story about a transformation from one — familiar — sort of reading to another one in a distant future. In fact, to the extent it’s about a transformation at all, it’s about what happens to brains when their possessors learn to read. At the first, scientific level of the book, Wolf unhesitatingly describes brain development as evolution, defined, loosely, as an adaptation to new conditions; in the second, when she’s telling us about students learning to read, she suggests that what seems like a loss of intensity in students’ interest in reading represents a response to conditions of a digital environment: with telephone, Zoom, TV, radio, Tik Tok, reading is no longer so critical and other forces shape visual and acoustic perception. And so, although she never actually writes it, a reader of her book can be taken in by something like a sleight of hand: “evolution,” introduced plausibly enough as a kind of metaphor for the gradual, cumulative change that occurs in the brains of student readers, turns into “evolution” tout court. This, in turn, becomes a way to see something positive in the evidence that we’re not reading so much or so joyfully as we once did.
It doesn’t quite work.
“The Reading Brain” is an abstraction, a convenient marker of the scientific view, which requires a clearly defined subject and object. With this phrase, we readers become “subjects” who can observe a lot of objects — in this case, brains. But children learning to read — to jump to another “object” of the book — are not objects, and it’s almost impossible to think of them as “brains,” in the sense of neurophysiologist must. Their brains may be evolving, but they are not.
In his book Does Writing have a Future?” (1987), Vilém Flusser assures us that writing — or better, the form of human consciousness that is expressed and maintained in writing, is in terminal decline. He can sense a new form of consciousness emerging — mathematical as opposed to alphabetic, superficial as opposed to historical (deep) — but regrets that he is too old to adopt it, and will not live long enough to experience it. Like Wolf, he is a consummately bound up with writing, steeped in reading (and like her, he has enormous respect for the squid!). But in one short chapter called “Ways of Reading,” he projects a possible evolution of reading — actual evolution of the specie from earlier kinds of animals — as decoding, a skill in selecting, in making critical decisions. But the form of consciousness emerging now doesn’t need or want critical decisions. It becomes tiresome, irrelevant to have to make them.
Proust and the Squid is well-written, absorbing, informative in areas that will be unfamiliar to most readers. It is choppy, though — the layers are not very well-integrated. It consistently projects an unabashed love of reading, so strong as to instinctively offer a way to think past the possibility that we’ve built a world in which reading and writing are rapidly becoming obsolete.
