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It is difficult to write persuasively and intelligently about reading itself. Reading, like dreaming, is a subjective experience that leaves no imprint. As vivid and complex as a reading experience may be, as soon as it is over there is no solid evidence left behind that it ever happened. So to write about what it is like to read literature, or what happens in our minds while we read literature, requires that we write about something that has never had a physical form, and only ever existed as a singular, unreproducible event (no two reading experiences are identical). Texts and lives are material things whose reality can be attested to by multiple parties, whereas reading experiences are dreams we have had. It is no wonder that so much more has been written about literary texts and the lives of their authors than has been written about either the phenomenology or the psychology of reading literature (although the 1960s did spawn a movement of reader-response theory, made famous by Stanley Fish’s incomparable reading of Milton in Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost).
In A Psychoanalytic Perspective on Reading Literature: Reading the Reader, Merav Roth, training analyst and chair of the psychotherapy programme at the Sackler School of Medicine in Tel Aviv, Israel, has found an inspired way around the difficulty described above. Rather than focusing on her own affective responses to reading literature, she turns her attention to 18 works of literature in which characters read:
In each of these works the reading experiences of their literary heroes appear directly and indirectly, openly and covertly. It has to be emphasized that I will be exploring the reading experiences of the various characters in these literary works rather than analyzing my reading experience as the reader, though that aspect is not, of course, entirely absent. (1)
In choosing to examine the reading experiences of characters from literature, Roth is able to study textual remnants of readin