Am I deep-reading or not?

Upon reading yet another impassioned argument for "deep reading," I began to wonder about the meaning of "deep reading" itself.

Enough has been said about the gradual erosion, over a period of time, of this intellectual skill. In his book, The Shallows, Nicholas Carr famously lamented the loss of his own ability to read deeply because of his addiction to easy skim-reading and gathering of needful information from the Internet.

Writer Anne Murphy Paul pits deep reading against superficial reading, or pragmatic and instrumental reading in which we merely decode words, or read with the end to be informed.

We know what deep reading isn't. Neither writer clarifies to my satisfaction, what precisely the activity of deep reading entails.

In other words, when I deep read a novel, what am I expected to do? Or, how can I tell that I am deep-reading a book.

Do I immerse myself in the details of what I read?

I am currently reading Zadie Smith's NZ. Smith's novel has details of characters and setting galore. Having deep read till chapter 5--and by deep read, I mean having read the book slowly, churning over the details of what I read in my mind--the map of the Willesden neighborhood in which the story mostly unfolds, has been imprinted on my mind with a near-HD precision.

I could say that this has come about as a result of an immersive experience, and the end-result is that I know the local culture of Willesden in the North West Part of London, and I also get a sense of contemporary Britain, because in Smith's writing the local always irradiates out into something larger.

But then I run into a particular character named Annie; Annie is the lone aristocrat in this novel. She lives, not in the ghetto of the council flats of Willesden, but in London's Soho. However, being the descendant of a minor royalty, she lives in a dilapidated multi storied house, the ground floors of which have been rented out to a brothel where whores serve moneyed clients. 

The real estate company that manages Annie's property wants her out and she won't sell; she particularly enjoys the view from her terrace of the Buckingham palace.

But Annie is a druggie, a sort of a junkie that lives subversively, on the "edges," as she says and is literally living among the ruins--her domestic space is a veritable junkyard.

Annie is an ex-lover of one of the novels' main characters, Felix. Felix is the son of Jamaican immigrants and was raised within the council culture; as lovers Felix and Annie lived on drugs, alcohol and in the moment, on the "edge." But of late Felix has contracted the middle-class dream of a stable family, a stable everything and that thing that horrifies Annie--property.

One day, Felix revisits Annie to tell her about his new life and to tell her that he has great expectations of himself and the woman he is living with. He only means to morally instruct Annie: by holding himself up as an example of a decent "British" citizen, marriageable and all, he means to inspire Annie to change. He asks her to settle down.

But Annie explodes in the face of Felix's moral instruction:

It's what people do these days, isn't it? When they can't think of anything else to do. No politics, no ideas, no balls. Get married. But I've transcended all that. Long time ago. eons ago. This idea that all your happiness lies in this other person. This idea of happiness! I'm on a different plane of consciousness, darling. I've got more balls than are dreamed of in your philosophy. I was engaged at 19, I was engaged at 23, I could be moldering in some Hampshire pile at this very moment, covering and recovering sofas with some Baron in perfect sexless harmony. That's what my people do. While your lot have a lot of babies they can't afford to take care of. I'm sure it's all perfectly delightful, but you can count me the fuck out. 

At this instance, another character from another British novels pops into my mind: Mrs. Havisham in Charles Dickens' Great Expectations. Annie is a rusty echo of Mrs. Havisham, who is the aristocrat that lives in the ruins of her mansion and has been rendered psychically immobile since the day she was abandoned at the wedding altar. Mrs. Havisham is the ghost of an already-receding British past, but she is also the symbol of a society gone morally bankrupt with a heavy-reliance on wealth to solve problems of morality. 

In Mrs. Havisham Dickens brought out the fraying fibres of 19th century British social fabric--the aristocracy, having fed off the land is rotting into irrelevance and the rising mercantile class is now feeding off of the rot. In Annie, we find a figure of dissent, not a mere symbol of the rot. Annie hates the life she sees growing around her and some distinctly off her. And she wants to be no part of it:

"Not everyone wants this conventional little life you're rowing your boat toward", she tells Felix. "I like my river of fire. And when it's time for me to go I fully intend to roll off my one-person dinghy into the flames and be consumed. I'm not afraid! I've never been afraid."

Mrs. Havisham was afraid. 

It's silly to think of a British novel without thinking of Empire providing a referential scaffolding on which the tradition of the English novel can stand. Least of all can one think of Zadie Smith outside of this tradition. So much of the fug of empire and the British novelistic tradition is built into Smith's oeuvre. In this context, it's safe to say that Annie is a 21st century Mrs. Havisham, ready to fling aside all pretension to have any significant say in the shaping of an emergent, non-insular Europe, where immigrants are a big part of the social, cultural and political landscape. In fact, in NW, the Felixes rise while the Annies sink.

All of Smith's novels thus far speak back and forth with other British novels from the past; she is said to have rewritten a bunch of them.

All my immersion into the details made available on the pages of NW wouldn't have got me this far in my understanding of the larger goals of the novel. I needed to have had come to the novel with this historical consciousness I have accrued over years of being steeped in the Western canon and studies of empire and power.

Simply put, I need to be a deeply read person, acculturated to the signs and cues of Western textual culture, to do a real deep-reading of whatever I am presently reading, which is more often than not a Western book in English.

I just spoke of the act and end result of deep reading a work of fiction; the novel, it's said, creates a cosmos that has to be understood by connecting it to preceding and larger cosmoses. 

The novel is a distinct genre. Perhaps, the other genres don't need a prior acculturation like the one I've mentioned above, and could be deep-read through sheer focus on what's on the page. No reverberations of literary memory need to be felt. 

I feel that Nicholas Carr's definition of the deep-reader comes closest to what I believe deep-reading entails, and why I also believe it's impossible to raise a generation of deep-readers in our time, the brain-altering effects of the Internet notwithstanding.

In a moment in The Shallows, Carr, quoting the playwright Richard Foreman, writes:

I come from a tradition of Western culture, in which the ideal (my ideal) was the complex, dense and “cathedral-like” structure of the highly educated and articulate personality—a man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West. [But now] I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self—evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the “instantly available.”

A deep-reader is not just one who reads with careful attention to details and enters through the gateway of verbal felicity created by the writer into the culture of which the writer speaks. A deep-reader is also one who carries within herself the "Western heritage" such that the immersive experience of reading is not simply an experience of seeing what's shown, but also of remembering having seeing them before in a different form.

It's not everyday that a reader comes along, reads Anthony Marra's A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, and call it a modern day War and Peace sans the peace, without having had an inkling of the Tolstoyan epic itself.