Warner’s description allows us to recognize that reading is never merely a cognitive experience, or, stated in more phenomenological terms, understanding is always gleaned from concrete existence, a lived response to objects in the world. Even before a reader makes sense of a book, she engages in what Heidegger calls “pre-understanding,” an intuitive apprehension made possible by one’s existence in time and space. By this reasoning, knowledge is not an act of isolated ideation but rather a dimension of being-in-the-world (Dasein), a situated response to interconnected objects and our own place among them.30 Knowledge is thus always subjective, insofar as it arises out of a particular lived experience: understanding is always someone’s understanding. At the same time, consciousness is never abstracted or ideal, but rather organized around and inspired by specific objects; or as Husserl might put it, consciousness is always consciousness of something.31 (Hence the mandate of phenomenology to focus on concrete phenomena, to return to “things in themselves.”) This dual emphasis on situated subjectivity and material objects (separable on the plane of analysis but always unified experientially) inspired later phenomenologists like Maurice Merleau-Ponty to focus on the body as the site of perception: “My body is the fabric into which all objects are woven, and it is, at least in relation to the perceived world, the general instrument of my ‘comprehension.’”32 Consciousness here is not reducible to Cartesian “cogito”; rather, it is a lived phenomenon of the body-subject, a consequence of one’s incarnate subjectivity and interactions with the life-world (Lebenswelt).
These claims concerning the embodied nature of consciousness have been developed further by cognitive scientists and linguists, who have demonstrated the links between thinking and the neural-skeletal system. The research of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, for example, has revealed that “reason is not a transcendent feature of the universe or of disembodied mind. Instead, it is shaped crucially by the peculiarities of our human bodies, by the remarkable details of the neural structure of our brains, and by the specifics of our everyday functioning in the world.” The authors give the example of “neural modeling,” which “can show in detail one aspect of what it means for the mind to be embodied: how particular configurations of neurons, operating according to principles of neural computation, compute what we experience as rational inferences.”33 Neuroscientists have reinforced these claims by demonstrating that the act of perceptual cognition serves to stimulate the frontal cortex—the part of the brain associated with planning and coordinating motor behaviors. For example, simply watching another person pick up a pen activates those regions of the brain associated with holding and grasping. Cognition, then, “involves not just the rule-based manipulation of abstract symbols, but also the reenactment of perceptual and motor experiences.”34
Even more relevant for my study have been data suggesting that reading produces similar changes in the brain. In multiple experiments, researchers have found that reading phrases describing object-directed actions (like kicking a ball) stimulates regions of the frontal cortex much in the same way accomplished by both observation and direct experience.35 In other words, reading evokes specific perceptual and motor responses that prepare the subject for interacting with concepts as if they were real objects in the world. This is the case when individuals are exposed to longer narratives, too. In a 2009 study, for example, a team of researchers measured brain activity in subjects reading a 1,500–word short story. They found that changes in a character’s spatial location (e.g., moving from one room to another) resulted in the stimulation of that part of the reader’s brain responsible for navigating spatial environments; changes in a character’s interactions with an object (e.g., picking up a candy) were associated with activation in precentral and parietal areas of the reader’s brain associated with grasping and hand movements.36 The implications of these experiments in embodied language comprehension are rich, for they suggest, first, that the reader experiences the actions of the text on a physiological level; and, second, that reading precipitates an emulated response such that author and reader are doubles of one another—converging through the shared identification each has with the protagonist. Communion in reading, then, is not just imagined, but a neurological reality.
Studies exposing both the sensual aspects of the book and the neurophysical qualities of cognition are necessary correctives to “a long tradition that imagines reading as a disembodied, intellectual, and frequently spiritual experience.”37 They encourage us to think in nondualistic terms about mind and body, and perhaps even about body and book. Here the work of Merleau-Ponty is especially relevant. In his last unfinished manuscript, The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty attempted to free his research from any vestige of Cartesian dualism by positing that body and world are necessarily interwoven and coextensive.38 His example of the “double sensation” (something initially explored in Phenomenology of Perception) demonstrates this idea. By “double sensation” Merleau-Ponty means the complex experience produced when one part of our body touches another. When the right hand touches the left, for example, it has the “double sensation” of being both the subject and the object of touch: “When I press my two hands together, it is not a matter of two sensations felt together as one perceives two objects placed side by side, but of an ambiguous set-up in which both hands can alternate the roles of touching and being touched.”39 Such a phenomenon demonstrates the reversibility of active and passive roles, the ability of subjects to slip into objects and vice versa. As Elizabeth Grosz glosses it, “the double sensation makes it clear … that the subject is implicated in its objects and its objects are at least partially constitutive of the subject.”40 This has important ramifications for reading, where identification with an author, character, or fellow reader may already inspire a sense of shared consciousness: To touch a book is also to be touched by that book, to feel the book touching back, and this sensation, in blurring the distinction between subject and object, necessarily destabilizes the boundaries of the discrete self.
Reading books, then, insofar as it involves a tactile dimension, can give rise to a sense of merged materiality with the book itself, an important corollary to the imagined somatic bonding with another that I am claiming reading also engenders. Indeed, in The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty writes of the mutual imbrication of the body’s “leaves” and those of the physical world, establishing a metaphor particularly appropriate for the material book.41 While all reading might engender this sense of physical cohabitation, the book seems particularly appropriate for this function: its bound heftiness and soft, hidden interior approximate the human condition, while its anthropomorphized qualities (spine, header, footnotes, etc.) create a plane for imagined bodily equivalence. Our engagement with the book, then, can involve identifications with the book as object, and not simply with its author or characters. The bodily correspondences and material interactions of reader and text blur the boundaries between the two, establishing a continuity between (in Mark Amsler’s words) “the skin of the page and the reading body.”42 This meeting of subject and object in the world of matter (or what Merleau-Ponty calls “flesh”43) creates an openended process of contact, overlap, and reversibility, such that the book becomes an object coextensive with the reader’s situated and experiential sense of self.
Indeed, to carry this point further, we might understand the book as part of the “body image” of the reader. First articulated by neuropsychologists in the early twentieth century, the term “body image” refers to the psychophysiological conception that we carry with us about our bodies. It is an image forged out of the subject’s mental and visceral